We have a bit of conversation about TNH in RLE thread with
sleepingkirby, hope you don't mind if I double post it here, just to give a little more feedback
If the game was more communicative about how far you can get in things, like relationships, sex, etc. I would have less a problem with tying relationship progress with story progress. A lot of the limits, etc. are not intuitive for me.
Yes! It is a work in progress, but I would say establishing a design language that players can understand how to interact with seems quite foundational. Especially about how they set and communicate boundaries: setting up players for goals they cannot achieve will understandably lead to frustration. They give you a list of goals but put you in the sandbox, forgetting, a little bit, that you will start to generate your own goals in this situation, some of which are easy to anticipate (especially in porn game). I think this is what RLE is doing so well: Oni seems to anticipate your goals, and put enough of a journey on the micro-plots, that you to a degree feel like you are making your own story. Magic of sandbox. Well, you can of course postpone gratification, make it adventure, encourage experimentation and discovery, but it needs a decent feedback loop (information).
I do agree with you in your review in that there are certain aspects of it that fills what RLE lacks. But it does feel unfocused.
The GUI being unintuitive, the story choices giving only an illusion of choice.
Hmm, focus. Tell me what you think about this: story itself, with the help of quest-log, that to a degree gives focus and even built-in walkthrough for sandbox itself. It is even in a sense in conflict with it (pure sandbox), limiting your free-play and self-expression.
Buuuut... Should we focus on the story? Can we? Is there enough of it? The real meat and potatoes of the game, the main gameplay loop, is still purely relationship/sex focused. So it is an interesting question what exactly is/are the functions of the story here? Is it only here to give a little bit of background and flavour? Let you use power in very limited circumstances? One thing it was doing so far is measuring/progressing passage of time and by extension advancing you to new stages of your relationships. So contextualization and framing? Interestingly enough, none of the girls so far was introduced in story events. There were no big changes in circumstances, major changing of status quo so far either. Mostly bridging iterative, progressively more open sandbox sections.
I'm wondering if the reverse relation should have been better. Rather than requiring chapter 3 to increase relationship, requiring a certain relationship level before being able to continue the storyline.
To a degree, it is like that already. One of the conditions (quests) to progress from one season to another is a total number of relationship points, IIRC.
I feel like The Null Hypothesis is what happens when no one tells the creator that this idea is number 1, 2 and 3. And, as much as I hate to say it, solutions that look for a problem, if it doesn't learn to pivot (correctly) or have a HUGE backing (i.e. too big to fail), often slowly get bloated and fail.
What I have seen in TNH thread so far looks like they are really open to feedback. I think they have some good ideas. I'm hopeful, they will be able to build something compelling. Games on this forum have unusual development, by mostly inexperienced but passionate people. If Bioware, Blizzard or Arcane can really go completely off the rails... As we've seen... It is a small miracle we have so many interesting games in this genre.
A lot of learning to become a programmer isn't just learning to write code, but to understand and find the essence abstract human concepts.
Not a programmer myself, but understanding of stories - of narrative arts - is kinda passion of mine. I can do a lot of philosophizing and psychologizing about it given opportunity, and conversation with you so far put me in very analytical mood
Which brings me back to why I'm so lenient on Oni's code. [...] I know people keep complaining "He's making so much money, the code should be better." But I can tell you, first hand, what he's done is pretty impressive. Because, again, how many google products have died during RLE's existence? And they had more money AND people behind it.
Even thinking about making my own game makes me often appreciate people that make these games a lot. In my opinion, there is a lot of quite unfair criticism and accusations. In large part because money is involved.
