- May 13, 2018
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Ren'Py The Null Hypothesis [v0.7b] [Ron Chon]
- Thread starter ronchonbon
- Start date
- Dec 27, 2019
- 28
- 18
Is this game a harem game? I think that I read somewhere early on in the development cycle for the game that it wasn't a harem game, so I went in expecting it wouldn't be.
But it certainly feels like a harem game. All the girls are throwing themselves at the player character like a harem game, and while you can respond by saying you don't want things to change relationship wise when they want to escalate - you can't respond by saying "I'm already in a relationship." like I'd expect if this wasn't a harem game. The other characters also don't really seem to recognize the relationship with any other character, either.
But it certainly feels like a harem game. All the girls are throwing themselves at the player character like a harem game, and while you can respond by saying you don't want things to change relationship wise when they want to escalate - you can't respond by saying "I'm already in a relationship." like I'd expect if this wasn't a harem game. The other characters also don't really seem to recognize the relationship with any other character, either.
- Jul 11, 2020
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Is there a possibility or is it planned to let the girls keep their clothes or boots on during the sex scenes?
This game is really good, great job.
This game is really good, great job.
Don't be afraid to pursue your vision for the game, when you need to listen to input from people's listen because no one is perfect and when you think you don't need to listen and you don't need to worry because too many input also can make a game become bad in many game. Good luck on the development team and stay healthy and don't think too much and push yourself to much on development so you don't get sickUnofficially? I think the current game as it is fits more of the dating sim genre. Not sandbox or visual novel.
Which I wouldn't complain if we did brand it that way.
But usual reminder that we are still in an EARLY beta stage. A lot of people complaining about certain features not being fleshed out are... correct... because it's an early beta and the game isn't complete. So I'm not going to argue against "complaints" about things being unfinished.
We'll be updating things as they get done... as expected of game development... So yeah.
Please don't throw shade. It's not the kind of community we want to foster.
Not really. Ron's already set the base in a very modular fashion.
I mean it's not. Oni's game is still in development and as you and other people have noted, for better or for worse, the gameplay loop and presentation is no where near the same.
I don't know who told you that. I vaguely recall mentioning that it was more of a polyamory game but that was me arguing semantics. By video game definitions it's definitely a harem game.
This has been a point of contention... All I'll say is that I wouldn't be opposed to having that be a dialogue choice but I don't have the power to make it one.
Early beta. We'll be adding more of this as development continues.
Considering the use of live 2D and how we'd have to pay the artists for every single clothing piece this would be quite an undertaking. We'd need to have a much higher budget.
It's not a no and everyone on the dev team would prefer we did do this but we don't have the money for it, yet, and it would take a looooong ass time waiting for the new art and then having to program the clothing in in an insane amount of combinations.
Plus we'd have to do it for every girl.
Right now our focus is on situational clothed sex. Examples I'm pulling out of my ass and are not on the to do list?
Christmas party and the girls are wearing a sexy dress. You sneak behind the big ass tree and lift the skirt.
You're at the beach and hid behind a rock before pulling the bottom part of their bikini aside.
You're in the Savage Land and Rogue is wearing her Savage Land outfit and you pull the bottoms down to her knees.
Stuff like that.
From what the dev team has told me, nothing is too taxing. It's just time consuming. We eventually do get our workload finished and then we look into side projects as we wait for the art to come in.
Monsieur Boots, would you kindly answer my question?
Why there is no "Load" button in the main menu, only "Continue"? Could be inconvenient when you have more than one concurrent playthrough going on.
Why there is no "Load" button in the main menu, only "Continue"? Could be inconvenient when you have more than one concurrent playthrough going on.
Only because you were so nice about it~
Does the continue not take you to the load menu? I thought it did.
If not, I can pass it onto the devs.
No, it passes you into the latest auto save.Only because you were so nice about it~
Does the continue not take you to the load menu? I thought it did.
If not, I can pass it onto the devs.
That button loads most recent save. I can go to load menu after that, of course, but that is extra steps.Does the continue not take you to the load menu? I thought it did.
Brought it to the attention of the devs... Not sure why we didn't already have it. Must have just slipped our minds.
Can you please add an extra load button for those that want it? I really like just clicking continue to jump back to where I left off last time.
I honestly thought it was a design choice since the save/load option is hidden deep in preferences. Because the save and load button are not preferences. I thought they wanted to discourage us from doing manual save and loads. Especially since the game autosaves on exit.
BTW, this is what fake.name.again was talking about when he said:
The interface looks clean and sharp, but often times, it's not communicating to us how it's to be used/want to be used. In this case, we didn't even know if it was a bug to be reported. Understanding GUI isn't about learning it, though sometimes that does need to be case depending on the program. It's about conveying how it should be used. GUI stands for "graphical user interface". It's a graphical interface for the user. Meaning, graphically, it should convey how to, for a user, to interface with the program. And while I understand that blinking cursors underneath text is stylistic and cool looking, the blinking cursor tells us that that's an input prompt waiting on input. But when we try to type into it, we find that it's not. So now the player needs to relearn what common conventions/expectations for GUI should be just for your game and then throw that away once they're out of the game.
Sorry, didn't mean for it to go that long. But basically, it's not that:
But that the language of the design is telling us things that, often, is not the case. Like I'm not an expert. I can do frontend and have some art background, but design is a totally different beast that I'm not an expert on. Adequate, but not an expert. But things like going into "twitter"(humhum) to see the stats of one of the girls is like saying "I wonder which year of college my friend is in. Better check her twitter account profile."
And this isn't to say that the GUI is bad and horrible and needs to be revamped right now or the game will die, but just saying that the criticism of not having a clear design language is valid.
Also, I'm late to the party but:
Is how he(she? they? not sure on the gender) said it rude and self-entitled? Yes. Did he/she/they use personal attack fallacy and authoritative fallacy when voicing the point? Yes. But he/she/they have a valid point. You know I'm making a cheat injector for this game (it's done btw. Linux and windows version. Having someone, the person that wanted it, test it out before I post it here.) to reduce the grind. That should convey that the grind is maybe a little too long. If people are willing to, multiple times (as I'm not the first to do this), crack open the game, reverse engineer it to reduce the grind, maybe the grind is too long. If people are skipping dialogue text all the time, maybe the text is a little too much (or not spaced correctly or paced correctly, etc.)
Ultimately, this is you guy's game. Do I think that if you don't address EggplantEnjoyer's every whims (or even mine or fake-name-again's) you'd be "shooting yourselves in the foot" as that person said? No. If you guys want to make the game where you romance the girl just so have her tie you down and shit in your mouth, that's your freedom. But even in the rudest complaints, there's usually a grain of truth. And a good way to measure that is the old adage. One is a data point, two is a statistic. I.e. if multiple, unrelated people are complaining about the same things, there might be something there.
Sorry, didn't mean to for this to turn into a whole thing. I just wanted explain/elaborate somethings. Feel free to take my explanation/advice or discard it. I'm not a cop.
Have a good day. I'm going back into my hole of programming.
We are seeking to improve upon what we have.
Again, we are in early beta stages.
Not saying that specifically to you, just anyone reading through this.
Technically not a bug. More of an oversight. No one complained during testing and this is the first time someone brought it up.
We appreciate the feedback because we can't improve without it.
And yes, but as you can see some people tend to express their opinion in an entitled and often antagonistic fashion. Not just with our game.
We're early in the process and have time and space to improve upon things.
A counter here is that we have just as many, if not more, people not complaining about grind or certain aspects of the writing.
Not including those who have come to defense, or the several reviews praising our pacing and writing, we have a public discord that has hundreds of members that gives me data.
I host regular polls and write down common opinions I see here on F95 and people claiming the game is outright bad because of reasons like Null is push over or the game is too grindy are so few in comparison that it's actually noteworthy compared to the abundance of people who seem to be fine with things.
TL;DR People happy with current grind and story greatly outnumber people complaining.
You're good. We welcome civil discussion.
Same to you my dude.
Absolutely. I'm trilingual myself and English, in general, is a pretty antagonistic language. It's so hard to write anything in English without making it sound antagonistic. There are days where I'd write something like "What did you have for lunch?" and then go "Did that sound too harsh? Will they take it the wrong way?" Anyways, what I wrote isn't a criticism and definitely not a criticism of you, just some information/clarification. Just a "Hey, there might be a legit problem here. Did you mean to do this?"
But not complaining about something is not an approval of something. Like, let's say you run a restaurant. In a day, there are 7 people that complained that the bread tasted off. The rest, let's say 140 customers, didn't complain about the bread. Would the proper action be ignoring the 7 people because 140 didn't complain or would the proper action be checking to see which bread they eat and see if there was something wrong with it? Did the 7 unrelated people eat sourdough without realizing it or did the 140 customers think all you served was sourdough? There's also a pretty famous episode of Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares where a restaurant owner goes "We've never received complaints about our food. All our 'give us your opinion cards' says our food is great." And Gordon Ramsey goes "Of course! (exclamation because he was yelling) No one will go through the trouble of filling out a card just to complain! They'd just leave and not eat here again!" (Again, I'm not yelling. Gordon was in the episode). Sometimes, you need to listen to the nay sayers to know what's really going on. Or, the people that fans don't realize that something was wrong (again, like us thinking that having no load menu was on purpose). When I worked tech support, this was often a thing. We'll always get, everyday, a few "Your servers are down" complaints when it's not really down. But we never ignored them because, just because something isn't down for us, doesn't mean the undersea cable isn't cut for Puerto Rico or the routes from our border gateway router wasn't typoed or the firewall wasn't misconfigured.
But, again, this is ultimately you guy's game. If this is your intent/it's on purpose, then by all means. A good response to EggplantEnjoyer in this case might be, "We've heard this complaint before and, after considering it, we decided to keep it in place because it's the game we want to make. If you don't like it, this probably isn't the game for you."
Just trying to give some helpful advice because you seem like a nice dude.
- May 10, 2023
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To follow on from what kirby said, I think you guys are doing a great job, but a lot of the design language from the game just doesn't make sense. I think this quote from Shiny illustrates to me, more than anything I've seen from anyone on the dev team, why the game is aesthetically unfocused and confusing. "Keep going" buttons are ubiquitous in porn games. So much so, that most players would know what to do when seeing a "Keep going" button next to a "Continue" button. Despite "keep going" and "continue" being synonyms for each other in vernacular English, they have distinct and recognisable (almost opposite) meanings in adult game design. This quote is a pretty conspicuous example of this kind of thing, but this unfamiliarity with adult game design language specifically and UX and game design theory in general pops up over and over again when making suggestions or critiquing feature implementation. Responses to these kinds of questions give the impression that a lot of UI desicions are based on "someone on the dev team thought this would be really cool" rather than any UX principles. It makes engaging with the community difficult because that also seems to be the primary metric by which it's decided whether to change poor UI design. The most prominent and recent example being the complaints about the blinking cursor in the menu being confusing being repeatedly shut down with some version of "someone on the dev team thought it would be really cool, so it's staying."
With so much of the team having a background in psychology, it makes the lack of interest in or knowledge of UX principles a lot more disappointing. I think the game will probably end up being good either way, but the pushback that's sometimes shown when someone points out some way in which the game violates some well known UX or game design principle can be pretty frustrating. It would be nice if they could get someone on the team who was familiar with UX or game design theory. A lot of the perceptions of clickiness and grindiness are UI problems rather than gameplay problems, imo
My cheat injector was successfully tested. So here it is for anyone that wants to use it. The thread I have for it doesn't seem to be approved yet so I'll put it up there once it is.
It's based off of SLDR's RLE cheat injector so big shout outs to him.
You apply it by downloading it into the game folder. So:
TheNullHypothesis-0.3c1-pc/TheNullHypothesis-0.3c1-pc/game/
Once there, you can double click the .bat file to run it (or however you'd like to run it on the linux side). You'll know it's applied correctly when you start up the game and the "new", "continue", etc. title screen has a "Cheat Enabled" at the top center.
For a girl's love/trust to be modified, go into the phone and go into humhum. If you click on one of the girl's icon (the spiked collar for Rogue, for example), you'll see her trust and love. Click on the numbers (which is now a button) to increase it by 100 per click.
For the Player, the inventory will show how much cash you have. That number is a button. Click to add 50000 per click.
In skills, same thing for ability points (next to level). The EXP bar there is draggable now to increase your exp for that level.
During sex, you can click on your stamina to reset it to your max. The desire bars for you and the girl are also draggable.
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It's based off of SLDR's RLE cheat injector so big shout outs to him.
You apply it by downloading it into the game folder. So:
TheNullHypothesis-0.3c1-pc/TheNullHypothesis-0.3c1-pc/game/
Once there, you can double click the .bat file to run it (or however you'd like to run it on the linux side). You'll know it's applied correctly when you start up the game and the "new", "continue", etc. title screen has a "Cheat Enabled" at the top center.
For a girl's love/trust to be modified, go into the phone and go into humhum. If you click on one of the girl's icon (the spiked collar for Rogue, for example), you'll see her trust and love. Click on the numbers (which is now a button) to increase it by 100 per click.
For the Player, the inventory will show how much cash you have. That number is a button. Click to add 50000 per click.
In skills, same thing for ability points (next to level). The EXP bar there is draggable now to increase your exp for that level.
During sex, you can click on your stamina to reset it to your max. The desire bars for you and the girl are also draggable.
Thank man. Hope you keep updating this in the future when you have time. Stay healthyMy cheat injector was successfully tested. So here it is for anyone that wants to use it. The thread I have for it doesn't seem to be approved yet so I'll put it up there once it is.
windows
linux
It's based off of SLDR's RLE cheat injector so big shout outs to him.
You apply it by downloading it into the game folder. So:
TheNullHypothesis-0.3c1-pc/TheNullHypothesis-0.3c1-pc/game/
Once there, you can double click the .bat file to run it (or however you'd like to run it on the linux side). You'll know it's applied correctly when you start up the game and the "new", "continue", etc. title screen has a "Cheat Enabled" at the top center.
For a girl's love/trust to be modified, go into the phone and go into humhum. If you click on one of the girl's icon (the spiked collar for Rogue, for example), you'll see her trust and love. Click on the numbers (which is now a button) to increase it by 100 per click.
For the Player, the inventory will show how much cash you have. That number is a button. Click to add 50000 per click.
In skills, same thing for ability points (next to level). The EXP bar there is draggable now to increase your exp for that level.
During sex, you can click on your stamina to reset it to your max. The desire bars for you and the girl are also draggable.
Thanks. I'll try my best. But like it's inspiration, it should need very little maintenance.