Ren'Py The Null Hypothesis [v0.7b] [Ron Chon]

[Poker_king70]

I'm a psyche major. I had direct input over Jean's non-kink anxiety as I very much understand her senioritus

It makes sense - Null is serving as a cognitive behavioral therapist for Jean.

 

[JustCallMeSteve]

I got to thinking, because of what Cyclop's blasts are, would null's nullification really work against them? Though i suppose this depends on whether the source of the blasts is a result of Scott's mutant ability or if his real ability is just having his eyes connected to the source or something, my understanding of his abilities is limited and probably skewed though.

I'm a psyche major. I had direct input over Jean's non-kink anxiety as I very much understand her senioritus

Anytime I see/hear someone end a word with itis(or something that looks/sounds like it), my mind automatically goes "Inflammation of the (Insert word here), makes absolutely no sense."

 

[ShinyBoots1993]

It makes sense - Null is serving as a cognitive behavioral therapist for Jean.

I'm actually not responsible for that. I just helped the depiction of her anxiety. I left everything else to the writers because I specifically didn't want it to seem like Null was genuinely her behavioral therapist.

Anytime I see/hear someone end a word with itis(or something that looks/sounds like it), my mind automatically goes "Inflammation of the (Insert word here), makes absolutely no sense."

Yeah I'm with you on that one. Senioritus isn't a real thing. It's just a joke name a bunch of seniors came up with to describe their increased stress as they get closer to graduating... and man am I chronic.

 

[Poker_king70]

I'm actually not responsible for that. I just helped the depiction of her anxiety. I left everything else to the writers because I specifically didn't want it to seem like Null was genuinely her behavioral therapist.

It would be interest to see (i.e., I ain't volunteering) how many of these games feature, deliberately or not, legitimate psychological techniques to get laid.

 

[RandomNumber]

While the ideas you propose are hilarious and I wanna add Apocalypse suddenly crumbling to dust the second he is touched to that list, remember that for that Null needs to actually get close enough to them, hard to nullify Magneto when you can't get close without a manhole cover hitting you from the sides at 40 mph.

Also we have seen what happens if you suddenly take away Chambers power, it was not pretty.

Apocalypse also uses Celestial technology, though. Is he just wearing that armor or is it bonded to his body?

 

[burrito107]

Got an exception during a sex scene with Rogue. Running 0.3c1 with no mods, and haven't changed anything via the console. I searched this thread, but didn't see anything that looked similar. Still a great game

Spoiler: error message

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[Disco Hammered and Chill?]

Seriously buggy, but really hopeful you can sort this one out. There is a lot of love in this game!!

 

[drifter139]

I got to thinking, because of what Cyclop's blasts are, would null's nullification really work against them?

I think it mostly depends on where Null is in this example. if he's at a distance greater than lets say 10 feet, I don't think it would work because it might be the same as if firing from a laser based gun. if Null is closer to Cyclops at lets say less than 10 feet, he could probably move fast enough to close the distance keeping Cyclops power temporarily nullified

 

[Spoonish]

The optional quest " Do some "training" at the mall " with Laura still does not start

This

 

[sleepingkirby]

sleepingkirby, hope you don't mind if I double post it here, just to give a little more feedback

Not at all. I always welcome good, constructive conversations.

 

[falafelswoop]

Here's an idea for the map UI. Navigation is not as efficient as it could be. There are hotkeys, but not for every location. But I was thinking, a good majority of the time you're going to a place because an exclamation-mark-event or some other character is there. When this happens, we have the convenient X-Tracker on the map screen to tell us where it is. So for example it might have a list item that says "Grounds" followed by the icons for Jean and Laura - well, what if you could click the word "Grounds" and it takes you to the Grounds?

With this you would simplify a lot of location changes to just two clicks. Even when you're not going to a location because of the characters there, you are often at least going to a location where characters happen to be. Overall I think it would be much less map switching and more going directly where you wanna go, with no downside I can think of.

But can it block a 50cal round?

If there are clues in canon to this, I don't know them. But if it's possible to do it by shaping metal and applying magnetism, while still accomplishing the main purpose of blocking telepathy, then it probably can. Magneto seems to have vast resources.

Anytime I see/hear someone end a word with itis(or something that looks/sounds like it), my mind automatically goes "Inflammation of the (Insert word here), makes absolutely no sense."

To be fair, it was spelled "senioritus" in the post you quoted, which suggests an etymology more like that of "tinnitus".

 

[Dummy Thicc]

I know some people on the forums have posted work arounds that increase stability.

Can you direct me to said forums or forum posts? I cannot find any here so far, and while I also really love the game so far, having to go through a 3 minute long "meanwhile on earth 69" screen when it crashes every 5 minutes is making it unplayable.

 

[fake.name.again]

We kinda just assumed people would put two and two together as the systems are not THAT complex or hard to understand. The characters give explicit instructions and Nightcrawler breaks the 4th wall more than once. I genuinely attribute half of the complaints to a complete lack of patience and willingness to read. This is indeed a game, not a skinner box where you press a button and get the sex.

Don't get me wrong, the game is absolutely playable and even fun to play in general. Since most of everything that can be considered gameplay is in relationship/sex sandbox. This is where you make your moves, your choices, where you get rewards, where you explore, where your progression is: the core gameplay loop, practically by definition. And you are adding story to the whole mix, which is great, but here is some discussion on how well these two parts are integrated, how they inform each other.

Spoiler: A bit of tangent about Gameplay Loops, Skinner Boxes, Wikipedia, Compulsion

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However, that isn't me telling everyone to shut up. We are and will continue to add feedback such as more tool tips and more UI notifications but eventually we're gonna cross the line from being intuitive into stupid proofing territory.

I get what you mean, and you are right. It is the whole From Software vs Ubisoft approach. The thing is I would consider RLE (hope mentioning it is OK for you) to be more intuitive (mostly), even if it has fewer explanations, less of a "step by step" guide in the form of quest-log. So it guides you less, encouraging your own goal setting. But the big difference is, your action have clear reactions. You can more or less directly observe what your choices do. As you can in THN in some cases, but in others you are not engaging clear game mechanics, just some vague story concept.
Borrowing Game Theory language, if I don't understand my moves, and I don't know payoffs, it is difficult for me to formulate strategy as a player. Without moves and payoffs, it is difficult to even consider it a game.

Edit: We do have over a dozen beta testers so if they don't have problems with the instruction then we don't know there's a problem until you guys tell us. This is part of why I attribute it to lack of patience for a lot of people. Note that I'm not accusing you of this. Just stating in general.

Well, I haven't encountered many bugs, there were problems with phone text not scrolling, which was quite annoying, but it is fixed already. So I would affirm, the game seems well tested. But I will posit a possibility, that tester, who probably seen several iterations of the game already, are probably well attuned to what you are trying to do. Or I am a dummy, and/or just haven't read carefully enough. It is, as saying goes, sometimes better be silent and be considered fool, than speak and leave no doubt, but so far I seem to be doubling down

I haven't said it in awhile so it's on me for not mentioning it recently but chapter 1 is more just to establish the setting.

As I've said before, to you, future chapters will have more noticeable changes than just characters commenting on your behavior.

So far I have always chosen determined, IIRC, so I hope it will not bite me in the ass.

I know I can be sassy and a little overly direct. Though I do read EVERY comment in this thread. All of them, and pass along the general consensus to the dev team regularly.

So what you are saying is (am I Cathy Newman now?): you are not boring There was a time that I really tried to be as mellow and unoffensive as I could and considered it a virtue, but here is great value in being a bit provocative. If you do it just right, you can make people think. Too much and they will become defensive/reactive. Too little, and as I said: booooring. Of course, being provocative gets you nowhere, if you have nothing to say. And you will never "get" how much is enough if you can't listen, but it is a different conversation.

Not at all. I always welcome good, constructive conversations.

So if you don't mind I'm moving our conversation here, as it makes more sense for me
(just as a reference, we started our conversation in RLE thread, so that's what I'm answering)

TNH has an idea and a plot, but not a good primary gameplay loop.

I could be wrong, but I feel like there's so little player interaction at that point that it's not really a game. If there's something telling you every answer or guiding you every step of the way, what's the player doing besides clicking the thing the game tell you to click? (Not a rhetorical question. Honestly asking to see if I missed something or to develop the idea further.)

Which, again, if the gameplay loop is about the relationships, why is are the relationship points based off of the story and not the other way around? This tells me that the primary gameplay loop is the story, not the relationship.

IMO the main loop, next to a setting, Is what both games have most in common. You can progress your relationships in similar fashion. With added story bitts, that (ideally) build on it and around it. And one other major difference on development side is that Oni have a strategy of adding girl one by one in somewhat complete fashion, TNH on the other hand has 3 girls in parallel and none is complete.
But as I've written above in the story department, I would agree that it might not look like a game for example from Game Theory perspective. Story itself does not have its own loop.

That's a good question. Because if this was a visual novel, all those would be good things. Very good things. But, to my knowledge, none of those contribute to it as a game. If they were to contextualize it to the game, it should progress/be brought up/be given with game progress. i.e. during the primary gameplay loop of relationship/sex. Again, I'm not saying these are bad things. But they don't contribute to the game as a game. They contribute to the story that gameplay happens to be in. Which is why they seem so antagonistic to gameplay.

This. To a degree, they are antagonistic. So it is not an easy task to harmonize them. It is possible, that's what great RPGs do, which I see a one (or maybe the) most complex narrative structures in our culture.

This is how Oni "anticipates" your goals. He doesn't. He established a good/fun primary gameplay loop and then built things up from it and around it. You want to fuck the girl. You do things to get to that goal. All the other stuff around it is giving you a variation on that and/or helping with that.

And he puts friction points, obstacles that you need to overcome, building both anticipation and sense of agency. He can actually suggest goals to you, even by at the beginning saying you can't do it. For example, girls leaving your cum when they go in public wasn't something I thought of before playing RLE. But game suggested it to me, and I thought "kinky! I like It! I want it!".

I have A LOT of experience and have talked about this type of stuff A LOT with, often seasoned professionals, since I was very young.

That's really cool. I'm from a moderate sized city in Poland, so not much of such opportunities here. Especially when I was younger and there was no YouTube, or even easy Internet access.
There was a time that I was actively trying to find some resources about how you're supposed to build stories, or even express why you find some good and other bad. Even tried Literary Theory Yale courses (on YT), but it was mostly waste of time, full of post-modern philosophy nonsense (and I'm one of the freaks that actually like philosophy). But you can find some very interesting things these days. I'll just mention Brandon Sanderson university lectures on writing. And, as much it feels weird to mention him on a porn related forum, Jordan Peterson is the psychologist (/philosopher) that is treating stories the most seriously.

 

[Buttholder]

It makes sense - Null is serving as a cognitive behavioral therapist for Jean.

I'm actually not responsible for that. I just helped the depiction of her anxiety. I left everything else to the writers because I specifically didn't want it to seem like Null was genuinely her behavioral therapist.

I have a lot of experience with CBT (no, not that kind) as well as other types of therapy as well, so, while not intentional, I imagine some of that's probably bleeding in from my side as well

 

[sleepingkirby]

So if you don't mind I'm moving our conversation here, as it makes more sense for me
(just as a reference, we started our conversation in RLE thread, so that's what I'm answering)

Not at all. Just a note that I won't be going into as much detail because I just spent a day making the SLDR's cheat injector for RLE for the Prime mod and that took more time than I'd liked. So I want to spend more time working on my side project.

IMO the main loop, next to a setting, Is what both games have most in common. You can progress your relationships in similar fashion. With added story bitts, that (ideally) build on it and around it. And one other major difference on development side is that Oni have a strategy of adding girl one by one in somewhat complete fashion, TNH on the other hand has 3 girls in parallel and none is complete.

Agreed. This is part of what I meant when I said it's not focused.

But as I've written above in the story department, I would agree that it might not look like a game for example from Game Theory perspective. Story itself does not have its own loop.

Correct. Because a story is a story. A game is a game. One is passive while the other is active. I can see they want to tell a story. Which, cool, good on them. But a story isn't a game. And, as such, a story, being passive, can't have a game play loop.

This. To a degree, they are antagonistic. So it is not an easy task to harmonize them. It is possible, that's what great RPGs do, which I see a one (or maybe the) most complex narrative structures in our culture.

Agreed. But this is a well traveled path. From the movie Memento to Suzumiya Haruhi to Live-A-Live to Earthbound/Mother. Each have their complex narrative structures. It's not easy, but it's also not hard if you have a good idea of what you want to do. i.e. a good focus.

And he puts friction points, obstacles that you need to overcome, building both anticipation and sense of agency. He can actually suggest goals to you, even by at the beginning saying you can't do it. For example, girls leaving your cum when they go in public wasn't something I thought of before playing RLE. But game suggested it to me, and I thought "kinky! I like It! I want it!".

Right. But notice how that still is built around the primary gameplay loop.

That's really cool. I'm from a moderate sized city in Poland, so not much of such opportunities here. Especially when I was younger and there was no YouTube, or even easy Internet access.
There was a time that I was actively trying to find some resources about how you're supposed to build stories, or even express why you find some good and other bad. Even tried Literary Theory Yale courses (on YT), but it was mostly waste of time, full of post-modern philosophy nonsense (and I'm one of the freaks that actually like philosophy). But you can find some very interesting things these days. I'll just mention Brandon Sanderson university lectures on writing. And, as much it feels weird to mention him on a porn related forum, Jordan Peterson is the psychologist (/philosopher) that is treating stories the most seriously.

It's my view that just because it's porn, doesn't mean its less artistic. There are cultures that, prior to colonization and/or globalization, that saw, what we considered porn, to be just as foundational to literature as romances or comedies or tragedies. It's just that sex, much like fart jokes, can be easily exploited for an instant reaction. But also like fart jokes, it can easily be overused. Like, in the US, nudity is considered taboo and scandalous. But when you've taken a ton of figure drawing classes, a nude body invoke less a reaction than seeing that same person dressed in lingerie. (Speaking from experience. My favorite thing to draw was the human figure. There are days for me, when seeing someone nude is not that much different than seeing them dressed.)
Also, I would re-examine those "philosophy nonsense" if I were you. The problem with art and literary theory is that, for some reason, they all have a grain of truth but are almost, always, especially by academics, expressed really, REALLY badly. Again, going back to my personal experience, a lot of the scripts that I was reading when I was young pulled from A LOT of literary theory. And, again, this is for a cartoon (granted, a cartoon for adults that's renounced for it's writing...). But every one of those theories were proven correct. They (the writers of the show) got the emotional reactions they were looking for. This show has won Emmy's, multiple, as a result. Often, the deeper you get into writing stories or making art, you'll begin to uncover for yourself these exact same theories as many before you, as I have and many after us will. And, sometimes, despite academia's best efforts, there's no substitute for practical, personal experience. Sometimes, you can only truly learn these theories once you have gone through the gauntlet yourself.
I actually wrote something tangentially addressing this in another thread.
https://f95zone.to/threads/is-anyone-else-tired-of-sexy-women-in-games.135705/#post-12779353
Particularly about an art theory I know everyone rolls their eyes at (even I did at some point), the "Everything's beautiful" or "There's beauty in everything."
But also, Jordan Peterson? The guy that thinks ethnic studies (remainder, I'm Asian. Taiwanese to be exact) should be abolished? That guy that would say to my face that I'm less of a person than he is because he has awesome genes despite him literally having an autoimmune disease (a genetic disease, mind you)? The guy that thought an all beef diet was a good idea, despite what doctors said to him, and natural even though most of the population of humanity in history didn't have persistent and reliable access to cow meat? The guy that thought China was setting up milking machines for men because he saw it on a Chinese porn and didn't realize it was porn? That Jordan Peterson?
You'll have to excuse me if I don't listen to the guy that thinks the recorded history of my culture is somehow less authoritative than second hand stories passed down by a bunch of people and then edited and compiled into a book by a committee and then mistranslated again and again that he thinks is holy.

 

[\\_Tremolo_//]

 

[King_In_Yellow]

View attachment 3419571

 

[ShinyBoots1993]

Here's an idea for the map UI. Navigation is not as efficient as it could be. There are hotkeys, but not for every location. But I was thinking, a good majority of the time you're going to a place because an exclamation-mark-event or some other character is there. When this happens, we have the convenient X-Tracker on the map screen to tell us where it is. So for example it might have a list item that says "Grounds" followed by the icons for Jean and Laura - well, what if you could click the word "Grounds" and it takes you to the Grounds?

This is fair and concise. I'll pass it over to the dev team.

If there are clues in canon to this, I don't know them. But if it's possible to do it by shaping metal and applying magnetism, while still accomplishing the main purpose of blocking telepathy, then it probably can. Magneto seems to have vast resources.

You know what? Fair. I'll mention this if discussion of it comes up.

Can you direct me to said forums or forum posts?

I wish I could my dude. We're 268 pages in. I can ask the discord users if they have the know how because some of our beta testers are android users.

So I would say all good (engaging) games are in a sense Skinner boxes, just more complex ones

Yes but several on this website, and no offense to RLE, are not the complex ones.

The thing is I would consider RLE (hope mentioning it is OK for you)

More than okay. We just have 3 unofficial rules of conduct. Not accusing you of breaking them, just establishing them.

1. We don't bash either game. You don't need to tear down one queen to raise another.

2. We're not "RLE with better art."

3. We know the game isn't as pure of a sandbox as RLE. That is intentional. We have no plans on making the game more like RLE.

to be more intuitive (mostly), even if it has fewer explanations, less of a "step by step" guide in the form of quest-log.

The thing about this is that RLE doesn't have quests or longform narrative. It's an open sandbox that has girls airdropped into it as development goes on. There are small introductions and the occasional event, such as the Halloween one, but for the most part it's just a sex simulator.

This is not me saying RLE is bad. I say this because if people want a primarily sex based experience, then they should play RLE instead of TNH.

That, again, is not me telling people to shut up and not provide their opinion or thoughts. We, the dev team, just acknowledge that our game isn't going to meet the needs or desires of everyone and if people would have more fun with RLE, then we rather them do that than not have fun with TNH.

Borrowing Game Theory language, if I don't understand my moves, and I don't know payoffs, it is difficult for me to formulate strategy as a player. Without moves and payoffs, it is difficult to even consider it a game.

This is a very good point and I'll make sure to use this metaphor when I talk with the devs.

However, and I'm sorry if I sound like a broken record, TNH is still in early beta and much of it is incomplete. When I say this, it's to assure people that yes, we know some things don't feel finished or don't work great. The reason is because people forget that we've barely started and expect things to be feature complete when RLE has had like... 9? years to flesh itself out.

Or I am a dummy, and/or just haven't read carefully enough. It is, as saying goes, sometimes better be silent and be considered fool, than speak and leave no doubt, but so far I seem to be doubling down

No you're fair in this assessment. Our beta testers have most likely figured out the system and don't think to mention potential improvement in this aspect since from their time working with it, they don't consider it an issue.

So far I have always chosen determined, IIRC, so I hope it will not bite me in the ass.

I'm not allowed to spoil but let's just say that constantly choosing the "boyscout option" may have people call you a boyscout.

Oni have a strategy of adding girl one by one in somewhat complete fashion, TNH on the other hand has 3 girls in parallel and none is complete.

This is not an attack on Oni but this statement is simply incorrect. Oni frequently airdrops girls with limited, and I believe in Storm's case NO, sexual interactions(The irony is not lost on me). When we launched our first alpha, you could go through the story, romance, and then fuck all three of our girls to completion.

Us adding more events to the girls isn't us completing something that was incomplete. It was us acting on requests and fleshing them out by adding a more engaging method of getting stats than simply "grinding."

One point that could be argued is that we have yet to add cowgirl and footjobs. We did cut that for time as we did have to make multiple delays due to real life complications. Though those are being added in the next big art update.

While I know I said our game is incomplete up above, we made 100% sure that the girls themselves were complete. Everything we add to them now is just continuation or additional content. Which is, again not to bash Oni, more than what the girls in his game currently have.

(no, not that kind)

Don't you fuckin' lie (I joke)





Okay I want to add this last bit because it's important that this be known. When I bring up Oni, it is not to negatively critique his work or to bash on RLE. It's simply that the games are different and I have to be firm in reminding people that we're not the same game and that our development cycles are different. People to this day still refer to us as "RLE but with better art."

Key differences.

RLE is a open sandbox trainer game that focuses on dominating girls.

TNH is a narrative focused dating simulator with sandbox elements that focuses on monogynous or polyamorous relationships.
(Despite us trying to have the trainer tag removed more than once, F95's staff continues to add it despite us not being a trainer game)

Both games can and should exist simultaneously.

 

[ShinyBoots1993]

View attachment 3419644

This is the kind of solidarity I like to see.

 

[Mutation8888]

So I would say all good (engaging) games are in a sense Skinner boxes, just more complex ones

Wait till you read up on intermittent reinforcement (Vegas style positive reinforcement). That is far more insidious and difficult to break out of.. basically sets people up for addictive behaviors.