- May 23, 2017
- 1,183
- 1,089
Ren'Py Time Loop Hunter [v0.69.00] [Hydrahenker]
- Thread starter Davidreiter
- Start date
- Nov 3, 2017
- 42
- 56
So Version 0.69.00 is only the current publically available, the patreon version is a few updates ahead (I think V 0.73.00?), so what they are referring to is that is has been fixed on a later version.
great seeing you're back, I hope nobody will force you to leave again this time.
When I usually write stuff like that, I try to sugarcoat it, saying that stuff is not that bad, framing it more as a suggestion than a complaint, but here I think it really is that bad. I'm referring to the whole design of the game. You know that every time you give a player a binary choice you multiply the amount of possible paths by 2, right? Don't you know how fast exponentials grow? How can you expect the player to guess a single correct way from all of that? I can not imagine anyone actually finishing it without a walkthrough or at least using hints, and if you start using them, the game just turns into a visual novel with extra steps and a lot of repetition, and that is when the hints don't mislead you.
Here is my experience: I got stuck with only two hints, the first one was to get the girl giving out flyers to like you more. I did what I thought was the correct choice and when that did not work I started to explore adjacent choices, again in vain. Finally I gave up and checked the walkthrough, and let me tell you it was a pain going through that, since the walkthrough had different things completed than I did. It turns out what I was doing wrong was saving the girl. How was I supposed to know that? Especially since she used to be very impressed by my heroism.
The second hint I could not figure out was that I should drug the sister. It did not occurred to me that the third option during car crash does not advance time.
When skimming the walkthrough, I also find out that if sisters friend steals the detonator you can ask her to train you in pick-pocketing. The thing is I already had her steal the detonator multiple times, and I did not have that option. I tried having her steal it the exact same way as in the pdf and only then the option appeared. Again, what is the point of only one seemingly arbitrary path being correct?
The thing is I actually played your game a few years ago, when the version number was almost half of what it is today. Back then I thought that the game had potential, that you, with time, will add alternative way of solving the problems, but now when I was reminded of your game, I played it almost as long as I did that time, until I had enough, that is I got fed up when I unlocked the third day. When I got there I thought the real sandbox opens here, but it turned out to just be the same repetition, the same linear experience.
I know it might be hard to do, so many years into development, but please ask players where do they usually get stuck, and add alternative solutions to those problems.
I apologize if I sound rude, but I genuinely want the game to get better.
Here is my experience: I got stuck with only two hints, the first one was to get the girl giving out flyers to like you more. I did what I thought was the correct choice and when that did not work I started to explore adjacent choices, again in vain. Finally I gave up and checked the walkthrough, and let me tell you it was a pain going through that, since the walkthrough had different things completed than I did. It turns out what I was doing wrong was saving the girl. How was I supposed to know that? Especially since she used to be very impressed by my heroism.
The second hint I could not figure out was that I should drug the sister. It did not occurred to me that the third option during car crash does not advance time.
When skimming the walkthrough, I also find out that if sisters friend steals the detonator you can ask her to train you in pick-pocketing. The thing is I already had her steal the detonator multiple times, and I did not have that option. I tried having her steal it the exact same way as in the pdf and only then the option appeared. Again, what is the point of only one seemingly arbitrary path being correct?
The thing is I actually played your game a few years ago, when the version number was almost half of what it is today. Back then I thought that the game had potential, that you, with time, will add alternative way of solving the problems, but now when I was reminded of your game, I played it almost as long as I did that time, until I had enough, that is I got fed up when I unlocked the third day. When I got there I thought the real sandbox opens here, but it turned out to just be the same repetition, the same linear experience.
I know it might be hard to do, so many years into development, but please ask players where do they usually get stuck, and add alternative solutions to those problems.
I apologize if I sound rude, but I genuinely want the game to get better.
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The pre-day 4 hump and the the day 6 hump are honestly the biggest hurdles in the game. After that, it seemed to get simpler for me, or maybe I just got used to it? Before that I'd get stuck. Of course, at a certain point I also got really good at using GREP to find variables in the scripts to find what conditions I needed to meet to trigger events... Honestly I'm not a good example of what to do flying blind, but it's doable I guess. I agree with you that it's way too easy to get stuck at certain parts though.
Learning regex just to watch porn sounds like something I would absolutely do, but this is supposed to be a video game, not an ARG. Most people do not even know what regex's are. I myself did not know what GREP is until I just googled it. This goes beyond filling a niche, and goes into just being inaccessible.
I guess I'll add an unsolicited suggestion to my previous post:
I think that when you meet the prerequisites for an option in general, but not in the current timeline, the options should still be there, but for example greyed out, and when you press it, it tells you what you are missing.
Example:
You know about Chlamydia, but in the current timeline you did not tell Cynthia about which girl will be chosen. I was in this situation, and when talking with the doctor, it did not occur to me, that the girls were not infected. It just did not connect in my brain. Then by coincidence I talked with her again when they were infected, and there was an option to warn her about it. I had no idea why that option suddenly appeared.
And even if I had realized that they were not infected, I had no way of knowing that there would be an option if they were. Don't expect people to just get eventually lucky, they'll sooner get bored.
While I'm at it HydraHenker, please fix your discord. Why do you have chat intertwined with the welcome messages?
Hello,
If you attach a save file and instructions to reproduce the error I can take a look.
There seems to be the same error when you go to a timeline? Maybe that Timeline in your save is corrupted.
Cheers!
This is not rude at all. You should see what other people DM me directly.
This is what I thought:
I hate VM games where you only click the mouse to advance the game. There are games that are labeled as sandbox but there are really VMs with one correct choice. There are also games with meaningful choices, you pick a choice and you are locked in that scenario until the end. So you replay the game and go the other way or create a save game prior to the choice and then return to it to see what would happen when you choose differently.
I wanted to create a game with some kind of gameplay mechanic where you can explore all the choices without locking yourself in a path.
So if you asked me, this game is like a point-and-click exploration porn game.
The game forces you to explore the options to advance by design. Maybe not the best game design choice but it's too late to change it. This means that if you have two options for a situation in most cases that doesn't mean you can overcome that situation in two different ways. You will choose one and hit a roadblock, you will choose the other and hit another roadblock, or maybe resolve it in a suboptimal way, but you will learn something that will open a third option to overcome the situation in a useful way for the context.
In the first 3 days of the game, there are a lot of 'memory checkpoints' that you need to hit to advance, but later I didn't expand those paths so they became meaningless. I made several clean-ups of optional memories before. I know I need to do one more but touching the demonstration event is a lot of work, so I've been putting that on hold.
I'm writing too much... In summary, The game is hard. I know that I put many helpers but it's still hard. There is room for improvement in simplifying the paths and improving the hint system but some parts of the game are locked in.
Cheers!
Hello,
Yeah, the day 3 and day 6 barriers are by design. It's a way to limit the exponential choices that would sprout and set a baseline of what the MC will know when reaching day 3. The same for Day 6.
From Day 7 forward the choices you made on the previous 6 days will funnel you into 4 different camps and your choices are limited to those places.
Cheers!
I get this all the time.
Over ambitious for a first game and over-complicated for a porn game.
Grey out the choices is a great idea. Unfortunately there is no automatic way to do it. You need to manually program the conditions. I did that in the WARP function. It's painful. I'll put this on my to review list.
The discord... Let's just say the game is not popular enough for me to be active on discord.
Cheers!
- Nov 24, 2017
- 8
- 8
I absolutely love this game and feel like the"butterfly effect" of all the different choices really give a the game a more puzzle like effect rather then a branching path VN, also the lewd scenes then feel slightly more rewarding when they pop up.
This right here is why "porn Games" struggle to evolve and grow.
This was unexpected and I agree with other posts, nice to see a good dev back! Good luck on your amazing game!
Since you don't mind I'll keep writing. I'll start with bugs and similar:
The button that takes you back one action, sometimes takes you back one time slot, even though the last action took multiple. Happened to me few times at the hospital, but I can not recall exact details. The one place I did took notice was when your sister forces you to the party. Theoretically the game takes away your choice but if you go to the party and then press back you can do something else.
I was confused once because MC started talking about stealing dress for the patient for no reason. She asked for it a moment later, so I guess there's an error in logic of what MC knows.
There ware few grammatical errors but tis is the only one I noted, you can ctrl+f it:"Finally you feel about to cum so you squeeze her tits" I think you missed "like you are" or something like that.
Now those are are only suggestions, but here what I would change:
I might be wrong about it, since the whole game is a such a mess and I might be misremembering, but when you are told to steal drugs, you can initially only steal them through the cop, and then only later you get an option to steal them in the morning. Why not unlock all those options at the same time? In fact, why not give the player option to steal them when there is no one around? I mean he knows the passcode.
In general I think you underestimate the creativity of players. I think options should get unlocked when player can reasonably think of them, and not when the demon makes a suggestion. Allow us to skip to solution if we know what it is, don't make us suffer through MC feeling his way blind.
The persuasion mini game is too hard, especially compared to other mini games. it is partly a my fault for getting stuck there, since there was something stuck at the back of my mind from playing all those years ago, that you said it was not meant to be winnable until you progressed further. It turned out that I remembered wrong, but I only found out by accidently discovering the skip mini games option in the settings. Anyway here is my suggestion: After player fails given mini game for the third time, give a new skip mini game option anyway. Also there is already an option that says "skip mini game(win)" an it is misleading, since it does not award you with the skill point, that also deepened my misunderstanding.
You should loosen some conditions and make the game more forgiving. I know it would make game shorter, but you would make the remaining playtime more fun. It really feels arbitrary why does stopping the car crash or not allows you to seduce the short girl for the after-party scene or yoga recommendation, or if you can interrogate the rioter girl or not.
I talked about alternate routes, so even if you do not want to touch the current state of the demonstration, you could make it so that going shoplifting together brings you close enough to recommendation, even if you did not stop the crash.
The game feels empty after clearing the first roadblock. When I first got there I expected "work in progress" messages left and right. This did not change. Populate the city, even if only with flavour scenes. When we unlock a location allow us to visit it on days before it becomes relevant. If player can not visit a location, give an explicit reason why. I'm sure you can write some scenes for the gym in the city. Those scenes do not even have to advance the story. You can write some disconnected short quests, just to farm fun points.
Also the main characters. When I first reached the 3rd day and beyond, I thought that the game will really open up, but you made a very convoluted and clever web of reasons why you can not do joust anything, it all felt just outside the arms reach.
The one thing that did not have such excuse, was the relationship with the car crash girl. Add some scenes please to her, again it does not have to advance the story, only feel like it does. Her case stands out in particular since on the first days you can interact with her on almost every time slot, and then it becomes so sparse, but you should add options for meeting other characters outside of when it matters as well.
As you said rewriting the demonstration would take a lot of time, but I think you should absolutely put it at the top of your to-do list. This is what a new player sees, and it an absolute TORTURE. At the very least loosen the conditions on certain outcomes like mentioned above.
I imagine you are so intimately familiar with your project, that everything about it seems obvious to you. but a new player does not have the same knowledge as you, the dev. It took me a whole IRL day to get over that 3rd in-game day. I think you will agree that is way too much time.
Sorry for making it so long. Am I wasting my breath? Should I write more, when something new comes to my mind?
The button that takes you back one action, sometimes takes you back one time slot, even though the last action took multiple. Happened to me few times at the hospital, but I can not recall exact details. The one place I did took notice was when your sister forces you to the party. Theoretically the game takes away your choice but if you go to the party and then press back you can do something else.
I was confused once because MC started talking about stealing dress for the patient for no reason. She asked for it a moment later, so I guess there's an error in logic of what MC knows.
There ware few grammatical errors but tis is the only one I noted, you can ctrl+f it:"Finally you feel about to cum so you squeeze her tits" I think you missed "like you are" or something like that.
Now those are are only suggestions, but here what I would change:
I might be wrong about it, since the whole game is a such a mess and I might be misremembering, but when you are told to steal drugs, you can initially only steal them through the cop, and then only later you get an option to steal them in the morning. Why not unlock all those options at the same time? In fact, why not give the player option to steal them when there is no one around? I mean he knows the passcode.
In general I think you underestimate the creativity of players. I think options should get unlocked when player can reasonably think of them, and not when the demon makes a suggestion. Allow us to skip to solution if we know what it is, don't make us suffer through MC feeling his way blind.
The persuasion mini game is too hard, especially compared to other mini games. it is partly a my fault for getting stuck there, since there was something stuck at the back of my mind from playing all those years ago, that you said it was not meant to be winnable until you progressed further. It turned out that I remembered wrong, but I only found out by accidently discovering the skip mini games option in the settings. Anyway here is my suggestion: After player fails given mini game for the third time, give a new skip mini game option anyway. Also there is already an option that says "skip mini game(win)" an it is misleading, since it does not award you with the skill point, that also deepened my misunderstanding.
You should loosen some conditions and make the game more forgiving. I know it would make game shorter, but you would make the remaining playtime more fun. It really feels arbitrary why does stopping the car crash or not allows you to seduce the short girl for the after-party scene or yoga recommendation, or if you can interrogate the rioter girl or not.
I talked about alternate routes, so even if you do not want to touch the current state of the demonstration, you could make it so that going shoplifting together brings you close enough to recommendation, even if you did not stop the crash.
The game feels empty after clearing the first roadblock. When I first got there I expected "work in progress" messages left and right. This did not change. Populate the city, even if only with flavour scenes. When we unlock a location allow us to visit it on days before it becomes relevant. If player can not visit a location, give an explicit reason why. I'm sure you can write some scenes for the gym in the city. Those scenes do not even have to advance the story. You can write some disconnected short quests, just to farm fun points.
Also the main characters. When I first reached the 3rd day and beyond, I thought that the game will really open up, but you made a very convoluted and clever web of reasons why you can not do joust anything, it all felt just outside the arms reach.
The one thing that did not have such excuse, was the relationship with the car crash girl. Add some scenes please to her, again it does not have to advance the story, only feel like it does. Her case stands out in particular since on the first days you can interact with her on almost every time slot, and then it becomes so sparse, but you should add options for meeting other characters outside of when it matters as well.
As you said rewriting the demonstration would take a lot of time, but I think you should absolutely put it at the top of your to-do list. This is what a new player sees, and it an absolute TORTURE. At the very least loosen the conditions on certain outcomes like mentioned above.
I imagine you are so intimately familiar with your project, that everything about it seems obvious to you. but a new player does not have the same knowledge as you, the dev. It took me a whole IRL day to get over that 3rd in-game day. I think you will agree that is way too much time.
Sorry for making it so long. Am I wasting my breath? Should I write more, when something new comes to my mind?
Actually I started using RegEx/GREP for Foot of the Mountains, which is slightly less complicated, but WAY more repetitive than this game. You'd have to guess how many times you'd have to repeat a scene, and repeat a specific choice in a scene to advance--it could be 3, or it could be 10, or you could have to do one choice 4 times and another six, or once choice twice, then another 4, then go back to the other 3... it was fucking stupid. This game is actually coherent at least. But yea that knowledge does help here. Not sure how many people are looking for this sort of gameplay in the current WEG/VN environment.
Thanks for the reply. Since you're around just wanted to say a couple things--I think the game is solid, but besides the fact that harem chuds will hate it by default, the main thing holding it back is the fact that in the time you've been making it, models/animations have gotten so much better that anyone new in the space is gonna pass on it just from looking at the images.
Not gonna pretend the puzzles aren't a barrier though, I personally put it down for a few years before finally finishing an update before the next public release with v69 this year. Also I know you probably don't care as much about what people who aren't paying you think, but if you've fixed issues/bugs that a lot of people are getting stuck on, you might want to consider accelerating a public release beyond your usual schedule, or rereleasing an old public version with the issue fixed so whatever the issue is doesn't leave a bad taste in people's mouth and you lose them forever. It's never been an issue for me, however, IDK how people are encountering unsolvable bugs. My main issue with the game is it hangs up when you use rollback and skip sometimes, not sure what's going on there... Also the game bugs out and eventually kicks you to the main menu at later events if you have the action menu turned off. I'm assuming it has to do with having no where for the return function to send you to the further you get in the game.
IDK if the return you get from this project gives you the resources to do it, but it would be great to see you invest in modernizing the visuals and animations; just for future releases, not like a whole rework or anything. Also if you'd create a SS page that would be great, as Patrn is on a real tear right now... they got Mr.C a few months ago, a lot of people who've flown under the radar for content they don't approve of have been getting picked off the last few weeks/months... Wish you all the best, this work occupies a really unique place in the adult content space.
Have you looked on the reviews? I have not seen a single "harem chud" in there. Yes there were a few complains about the graphics, but they were drown out by a single complaint: the game is grindy, unintuitive and unplayable without a walk-through.
I'll take a good game with bad graphics over the opposite, any day of the week, and I at least like to think that most other people do the same. Besides to redo graphics, it would not do to refresh only some scenes, that would make the game look inconsistent and that's worse than leaving it as it is. No, you would have to redo it all at once, and God knows how long that would take.
On the other hand, simplifying places where players get stuck can be done iteratively: fix a place where players get stuck, ask them where they have problems now, repeat. If you make the first two days polished enough, I think the players would be more forgiving when seeing the rest, they would assume that it's still work in progress.
After thinking about it some more, I think that instead of making them greyed out it would be better to put some icon next to such options. I think that making it grey might make it fell like it implies that you are not supposed to press it.
Since I mentioned icons, I think it would be nice to have something like the
That would take a lot of time to add, just like you said about the first suggestion, so I want to suggest a compromise: do it only partially, at the beginning only when and where you feel it could be useful, and then make it a toggle in the settings. Call it an experimental, incomplete feature. When you one day feel like it is complete, you can just put it directly in the game, without much work.
To go back to options being greyed out, I think it would be better, more intuitive, to grey out options where you checked and there is nothing interesting there for a given time slot. For example spying on showers, when you checked that they are empty. Would save players some time checking again just to be sure. Again, see the previous paragraph.
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Yea, most people won't like the puzzles and how convoluted they are, but my feedback is more based on the puzzles as currently constituted being an intergral part of the game. They're coherent for the most part, besides Hydra not being able to account for every single possible solution and code them in like you referenced in your initial post. But that's never the point of puzzle games, they tend to look for a Rube Goldberg solution to the problem, a bunch of pieces that fit together nicely, even if convolutedly, to solve a problem that could have probably been taken care of another simpler way.
I'm personally not great at puzzles, so I don't want to make recommendations as to how to make them better. Also I used rollbacks on the persuasion game to cheese it, so it's probably too difficult if you try to play legit for sure. So, given what I've stated, my feedback is going to be oriented around other aspects of the game.
Also, if you look at a game like Power Vacuum, they've improved the graphics year over year without redoing earlier versions, so it's not as jarring for most people as you might think. Granted, the initial version of that game came out in 2019, so the disparity is a bit less, but even with the disparity, I think it would be fine to update the graphics for new versions without redoing older content. I do like they idea of graying out some irrelevant lines of action, though.
Also I'd never encountered the word "clepsydra" before, TIL, thanks.
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Hello!
Several things are design choices.
Locations: In the beginning, I was going to leave all locations open once discovered. But then you fall into the 'sandbox' trap that you are visiting locations at different times in the hope of triggering an event. So then I make the location appear if there is something there to do in any of the timelines. You can see the shift comparing early locations with the latest locations
Events: In the beginning, I was going for different casual encounters, but then I shifted to meaningful encounters. That means that every event has to bring something to advance the story. If they don't advance the story then it will be a FUN point.
Some meaningless small events I changed them to Achievements
This helps me because I need to track everything you do for future interactions.
The game is closer to being finished so I won't be making major changes. I'll do some quality-of-life touches here and there. A clean up of memories that aren't useful and Ironing the bugs.
Speaking of bugs, the go-back on time slot was a quality-of-life addition later in the game. Initially, you could only go back to the beginning of the day. The thing is when there are events that take more than 1 time slot I have to put the logic to go back to whatever time slots that event consumed. So I can see that some might be missing in the logic.
Then you have the continuity bugs, I think those are self-explanatory but not easy to spot.
Finally grammar... I'm not English speaking native and this is a heavy dialog game. Sometimes you have the same scene but with 4 different dialogues because you reach it in different ways. So there are a lot.
Cheers!