VN Ren'Py The Spice Pirate [Development Thread]

[TakMycket]

The Antagonist of The Spice Pirate
The Spice Pirate​

Plot Overview
Centuries ago, a spice-hunting Kraken roamed the Spice Channels, consuming all the spice in it's path until the Sirens contained the Kraken's own spice in a tiny treasure box, forever lost to the seas. Legend has it, his mortal form still roams the seas under the pseudonym Captain Henricus along with his ruthless pirate crew.

You play as a twenty-year-old adventurer who becomes embroiled in Henricus's quest to return to his former glory after a request from your father. How the story unfolds depends on your choices... and the sacrifices you're willing to make.

A game of Liar's Dice​

MC
As the player, you'll have some agency over the general personality of the MC. Over time, as your choices compound, there will be slight dialogue changes in every scene that'll work towards characterising the MC based on your previous choices. However, at the start, this won't be too prevalent.

The MC having a laugh​

Love Interests
The Spice Pirate will only have 6 LIs and only 3 of them will appear in Chapter One. The rest will be introduced in later Chapters. While The Spice Pirate will have a fully developed plot, the main focus of this AVN will be the development of a romantic relationship between MC and a LI. Each LI will have their own ending.

The Spice Pirate will be a single LI AVN. However, do not be afraid to get to know each LI. You'll only have to start making the hard decisions in the later chapters... but if you do choose to be faithful to one LI from the very start the romance will be more wholesome.

Depending on which LI you choose, you may also choose to have intimate relationships with Side Girls while on their path. There will also be an "others" ending which will play like a harem and will include a few LIs and most Side Girls. Though I will warn you - there will be little romance on this path.

Blanche - One of the LIs you'll meet in Chapter One
​

Side Girls
As well as 6 LIs, there will also be a number of Side Girls (I've planned for 4 up to Chapter 3, but in later Chapters there will be more). All Side Girls will be an important part of the plot and all of them will be in multiple chapters throughout the AVN (as well as providing some sexual content). Some of them will also play important roles in the development arcs of some of the LIs. It's also important to note that not all Side Girls will throw themselves at the MC.

Selina - One of the Side Girls in Chapter One
​

Branching
There will be some major branching in The Spice Pirate. Each choice you make will impact future dialogue and future events. Even if you made a choice in Chapter One, that'll impact what the MC says in Chapter Nine. While the vast majority of scenes will occur no matter what choice you make, the details of these scenes will be changed quite a bit.

There will be no relationship points or personality points of any kind in The Spice Pirate. Instead, how each LI reacts to you and how the MC reacts will be a function of your previous choices. As an example, if you choose to be benevolent in one scene, a couple of scenes later the MC will act kinder. If you choose to trust a LI and allow her to help you, later on that LI will act more vulnerable towards you.

Due to the significance of each choice, they won't show up in quantity. As an example, in Chapter One there will only be 3 choices (unless something changes between now and the release). One of these choices has major implications on the plot. Another will majorly impact how a Side Girl will treat you in Chapter Two, while the final one is an important choice for a particular LI. I definitely do expect Chapter One to be by far the smallest Chapter in terms of choices... as later Chapters will more likely have 7 or so choices each.

There will be no "incorrect" choices. No matter what path you're on, you will not die.

A Particularly Significant Treasure Chest
​

Content
I have currently posed a total of 1214 renders for Chapter One (and about 70% have been rendered - each of them in 1440p). The final version of Chapter One will be expected to contain around 2000 renders. The amount of dialogue lines will be about 1400 for the final release. The reason for the large disparity between the number of renders and dialogue is because I'm a huge believer in "Show Don't Tell". The Spice Pirate won't contain any internal dialogue or descriptions of any kind - it'll be pure dialogue. If I want the reader to know a character is angry, there will be a close up of the character's face to show the reader that they're angry - rather than internal monologue.

During a conversation, there will also be a new render for every line of dialogue. Some of these renders will be slight adjustments to a character's face to give the allusion the character is speaking.

I aim for each Chapter to be between 1 to 2 hours long.

Blanche and her Dad at the Siren Stones​

Roadmap For The Future
I hope to have The Spice Pirate out sometime during (hopefully early) February. I've been posing 100 renders a day recently so I'm hoping to have Chapter One fully posed within the next 8 days. I'll then have to wait for all those renders to render, as well as do some post-production fixing and proofreading.

Beyond that, I ambitiously plan to release one chapter every 3-4 months.

I'll also be posting updates on this Development Thread as we get closer to Chapter One's release.

Princess Zelene - Another LI​

This AVN will always be free up until the Steam Release (if everything goes well), which will occur once the game's complete - so you won't have to worry about that for a couple of years. Once Chapter One is finished, I'll be posting links to download The Spice Pirate here on F95 Zone as well as Itch and Patreon.

Tags (as of Chapter One): 3DCG, Male Protagonist, Big Ass, Big Tits, Oral Sex, Fantasy, Romance, Vaginal Sex
Planned Tags: Pregnancy, Virgin

A Nice Romantic Moment​

To clarify, all tags will be OPTIONAL. There will be no NTR. The Male Domination is light Male Domination, and it'll never go beyond that point.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask them below - I'll try and respond in a timely manner.

 

[osanaiko]

Very ambitious! from a new account too...

Best of luck!

 

[TakMycket]

Progress Update:
For those who are interested...

Above I did say I plan to pose 100 renders a day... and so far I've been sticking to that goal remarkably well. However, I've decided to take a step back from posing. The reason for this is rather simple. At all times my computer is either doing one of two things, either posing in Daz or rendering in Daz. It doesn't matter how quickly I pose my renders because at the end of the day I still have to wait for those renders to render. Thus, I've decided to space things out a bit so instead of just sitting back and twiddling my thumbs for the last couple of weeks of development and waiting for the renders to finish rendering I'll actually have something to do. Will this impact the release date... no it will not. My goal is to do a minimum of 50 renders a day, and if I feel like posing more I will.

Speaking of the release date... I'm starting to project somewhere around the 15th February. I was hoping to get it out earlier but render time has risen over the past couple of scenes, so I'm projecting I'll finish rendering around the 7th. That then gives me a week to do post production, which will be including music as well as fixing up all the little things in each render such as hair clipping or slight eye adjustments. I can also confidently say every day I learn something new in Daz, and every day my renders are getting better and better. Here are a few renders I've developed since the last update:

Blanche's Parents around a Campfire


Zelene at the Campfire


Blanche and her Pa at the Siren Stones​

 

[TakMycket]

Progress Update 2:
The release date is looking like it'll creep forward by around a week. The main reason for this is because I've changed the resolution of the images from 1440p to 1080p. For comparison 1440p has about 1.78 times more pixels than 1080p and thus should be a major reduction in time. There are three reasons why I changed the resolution. The first was because I was talking to a couple of other AVN devs, who both heavily suggested I should use 1080p. The second was size. My AVN was reaching the 4GB mark with around 1300 renders so by reducing the size of each render to 1080p that now cuts the size back to around 2GB (meaning the final game will be around 3-4GB). The third reason is time - it's much shorter to render 1080p.

So I spent an entire day converting images to 1080p as well as all the renders in my render queue. I also had to start a new Ren'py project and redesign all the UI so it fits with the 1080p. Earlier today I also finally finished Scene 14. Here is a list of tasks I have to complete before I release the AVN:

1. Pose Scene 15 (Extremely Short Scene)
2. Pose Scene 16 (Extremely Long Scene)
3. Finish Posing the last 30 Renders of Scene 0
4. Pose alternative Route for Choice 1 (about 10 renders as Choice 1 doesn't impact this Chapter that much - will impact future Chapters though)
5. Finish Rendering Scene 3 (Long render times - about 80 left)
6. Finish Rendering Scene 14 (~8 minutes per render - 70 left)
7. Render Scene 15 (~30 renders - 6 minutes each based on previous experience)
8. Render Scene 16 (~400 renders - 10 minutes each based on previous experience)
9. Finish Rendering Scene 0 (~7 minutes per render with 100 remaining)
10. Change UI for choices (All other UI complete)
11. Add music to all scenes without music so far (about 1/4 has music)
12. Render fixing (hair-clipping, graininess, slight adjustments to DoF)
13. Proofreading and playtesting
14. Administrative Tasks (itch page, zone page, patreon etc)

I'm hoping to get all this done within the next fortnight - but we'll see how everything goes. Here is a preview image:

Blanche and Zelene having a conversation​

 

[osanaiko]

There's no way you should have 4gb for a first release. Even large VNs with more than 1000 images are only 1-2gb.

You aren't using uncompressed PNGs are you? It's typical to crush all the images to webp before release.
(Yes, there are a handful of devs who do provide "4K versions" as a reward for high-tier patrons, but that strategy is vanishingly rare and I presume unnecessary for a new game)

Also note that the very first thing that happens to a release is one of the compressors jumps on it and recompresses/rescales the images aggressively smaller, normally dropping the release size by another 2-4 times. And many many downloaders prefer the compressed version.

In my opinion, Image "quality" for a game is not about the resolution or fine details of a raw Daz render. Framing, lens and camera setup, and post processing to achieve the specific "look" for your style are far more important.

 

[TakMycket]

Yes - those numbers are using compressed PNGs. I was toying around with the idea of compressing those pngs into webp images and using them instead, but ultimately I decided to keep the png format to preserve quality over size as that's what I would prefer.

However, I want to accommodate my potential consumers so if that's something that many people prefer then I'll definitely look into that. I might even release an uncompressed version and a compressed version, depending on how much quality is lost during compression.

Thank you for your input

 

[TakMycket]

Release Announcement:
The release has come sooner than expected and I plan to release it on the 3rd of February at 09:30AM UTC 0. Unfortunately, one reason for this is I've removed the third choice from the game. The reason for this was branching would be an issue. While I do strive to give as much player choice as possible, development time is something that I'm constantly conscious of. Thus, I have decided to keep the major, game-altering choices to later Chapters more towards the end.

In terms of development speed, I've rendered pretty much every render I've posed. Right now, I'm alternating between posing the final seventy odd renders I have left to do while fixing hair clipping issues and such from my older renders. Between now and the 3rd, apart from posing those final renders I have to do heaps of playtesting to make sure everything flows as well as incorporating music and fixing up all those renders.

Here are a few preview images for everyone: