VN Ren'Py Where the Heart Is [S1 v2024-09-06 BETA] [CheekyGimp]

4.40 star(s) 330 Votes
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Walter Victor

Walter Victor

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Dec 27, 2017
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Boracle said:
Where you got the notion from that Elaine knows Dizzy and has met her? Could you explain please, cos i may have missed something? As far as i know she had no clue the dad had an affair until his death. I so hope it's not Lily, although i don't pursue her. So far she's portrait as this sweet, naive but good girl and It'll be just sad and bad if she turns out to be this viscous greedy bitch, trying to pursue father's money.
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This is from the father's voice on the tape in Episode 9:

And as for the two gold-diggers, if they knew I was worth that much, they probably would have killed me themselves! Although if Elaine had found out about the other gold-digger, she would have murdered me even if I was broke!

That does not necessarily prove that Elaine knew Dizzy, but to me it was a strong indication. But it might also mean that Elaine would have been homicidal just to find out that the father was cheating on her with anyone. Elaine is awfully upset after she discovers it, after his death.

Frankly, the father must have had an extremely low estimation of himself, if he believed (rightly or wrongly) that only a gold-digger would have sex with him.

I don't really care if it's Lily as long as I have a choice to forgive her! :D

As I noted before, the developer has given three strong clues as to Dizzy's identity. That means that two of them (and perhaps even all three) are red herrings meant to lead us to false conclusions. Eventually, I guess, we will discover the truth.
 
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Walter Victor

Walter Victor

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Skylaroo said:
This is definitely the truth. It went from once a month into once every 6 weeks but larger update into once a random timeline. I wonder how much of it is preventable and how much of it is just bad luck. I wonder if scaling back down a bit would improve the production or not. I worry if the production issue is caused by biting bigger and bigger and bigger than what they can chew.
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The bane of every developer is trying to cram too many paths into one game. There are limits to what can be accomplished in a game. I don't mind waiting, as the developers plow through these issues, as long as they are able to provide a satisfying finished project.
 
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Skylaroo

Skylaroo

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May 28, 2017
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Walter Victor said:
The bane of every developer is trying to cram too many paths into one game. There are limits to what can be accomplished in a game. I don't mind waiting, as the developers plow through these issues, as long as they are able to provide a satisfying finished project.
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I think my worry is that there's nobody that seems to be filling the editor role in this game development. So if the delay is caused by larger and larger update, there might be nobody who would tone it down to reach more reasonable size/time of update instead. This game already has the advantage of having no set limit. Cheeky mentioned 25 episodes, but honestly, it means nothing because each episode can be different size/length (unlike let's say a 30-minute TV show where each episode is a set 22-24 minutes long). So there is no need to cram everything into 25 episodes in this game. It doesn't matter whether it's episode 25 or episode 35 if they finished the production at the same time.

But on the flip side, this freedom could cause a lot of bloat content, and that's where an editor would fit right in. As much as I love this game from the very early beginning, I kind of feel like the last 3 or so updates have been really heavy. There's a lot of added dialogue that doesn't really add into the game as much that some part feels a bit of a slog to go through. Using the latest update, the date with Lily at the library is unnecessarily too long. As much as I love Lily as one of my favorites, there's around 25-30 dialogue choices in my one playthrough just for that library scene. And that's just the Lily part of the update. I feel like episode 1 and 2 combined might not even have a total of 30 dialogue choices. That's how large the game has become and that's why I'm worried that the game has become too big to reasonably develop. We need someone who can ask "How do we convey the same feel for the date with Lily with less than 25-30 dialogue choices?". Cutting out some dialogue choices sounds reasonable for one scene, and if you multiply that to many scenes in the game, then suddenly you're looking at a much leaner episode once the bloat is trimmed out.

As a player, waiting is fine. The worry is the developers getting burned out because the scope of their work has become unmanageable due to constant increase of the size.
 
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Boracle

Boracle

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Walter Victor said:
And as for the two gold-diggers, if they knew I was worth that much, they probably would have killed me themselves! Although if Elaine had found out about the other gold-digger, she would have murdered me even if I was broke!
Elaine would have been homicidal just to find out that the father was cheating on her with anyone. Elaine is awfully upset after she discovers it, after his death.
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This is exactly what it means - not the Elaine knew the girl, just that she would've kicked his ass just for cheating on her.
Anyway i can't wait to find out who is working with who. Because there are definitely some teams working in the game. Even the MC has teamed up with Jenna. Jolina, Zarah and Bella certainly have something to do with all of this one way or another. I just wonder if Bella is really helping the MC out of love or just helping her sister by gaining his trust. We know he had to leave the house by a certain date in order for some other clauses to kick in and it might be so that Bella brought him his stuff on purpose otherwise her sister's conditions wouldn't be met. Maybe Jolina, Elaine and Bella are working together... Intriguing stuff.
 
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acewinz

acewinz

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Oct 15, 2018
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Walter Victor said:
The bane of every developer is trying to cram too many paths into one game. There are limits to what can be accomplished in a game. I don't mind waiting, as the developers plow through these issues, as long as they are able to provide a satisfying finished project.
Click to expand...
Skylaroo said:
I think my worry is that there's nobody that seems to be filling the editor role in this game development. So if the delay is caused by larger and larger update, there might be nobody who would tone it down to reach more reasonable size/time of update instead. This game already has the advantage of having no set limit. Cheeky mentioned 25 episodes, but honestly, it means nothing because each episode can be different size/length (unlike let's say a 30-minute TV show where each episode is a set 22-24 minutes long). So there is no need to cram everything into 25 episodes in this game. It doesn't matter whether it's episode 25 or episode 35 if they finished the production at the same time.

But on the flip side, this freedom could cause a lot of bloat content, and that's where an editor would fit right in. As much as I love this game from the very early beginning, I kind of feel like the last 3 or so updates have been really heavy. There's a lot of added dialogue that doesn't really add into the game as much that some part feels a bit of a slog to go through. Using the latest update, the date with Lily at the library is unnecessarily too long. As much as I love Lily as one of my favorites, there's around 25-30 dialogue choices in my one playthrough just for that library scene. And that's just the Lily part of the update. I feel like episode 1 and 2 combined might not even have a total of 30 dialogue choices. That's how large the game has become and that's why I'm worried that the game has become too big to reasonably develop. We need someone who can ask "How do we convey the same feel for the date with Lily with less than 25-30 dialogue choices?". Cutting out some dialogue choices sounds reasonable for one scene, and if you multiply that to many scenes in the game, then suddenly you're looking at a much leaner episode once the bloat is trimmed out.

As a player, waiting is fine. The worry is the developers getting burned out because the scope of their work has become unmanageable due to constant increase of the size.
Click to expand...
Interesting to see what people think the problem is from an outside perspective. :) Well the good news from my pov is that while you guys are right that the game is a freaking bear because of all the branching and choices, we haven't really allowed that to slow down development. It really just makes me and Cheeky work harder with the writing/story development and keeping everything straight. This puts us in something of a league of our own with impactful choices/player interactivity though, which is what we want, but we have both have agreed we probably will cut back on the branching in our next game whenever that happens. As Cheeky has been saying the writing/story is generally on task but we can't deny there were definitely growing pains during EP17 with the new crew, all of us learning new things, updating our models (which is still ongoing), and world events both good and bad.

As for editing Cheeky handles the majority of that and it definitely can bog him down, but ironically the Lily scene Cheeky did entirely himself aside from the rendering. :) So it came out pretty much exactly how he wanted I figure. About the only director edits he wishes for Ep17 I can think of was the girl choice while waiting for Elaine, as it caused more confusion than he intended. lol We also could have went a bit lighter on the image count here and there, but that was my own personal growing pain. :)

EP18 isn't coming along as fast as we'd like (nothing comparable to EP17 so don't panic too much) but as usually if we don't make the progress we set for ourselves, our patreons get to skip a month of payment even though work does carry on.

Now with that dose of meh, there is some great news. There is a little Cheeky Jr. now! :D No doubt the apple of his daddy's eye and the bane of his nose when it comes time for changing.
 
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Walter Victor

Walter Victor

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acewinz said:
Interesting to see what people think the problem is from an outside perspective. :) Well the good news from my pov is that while you guys are right that the game is a freaking bear because of all the branching and choices, we haven't really allowed that to slow down development. It really just makes me and Cheeky work harder with the writing/story development and keeping everything straight. This puts us in something of a league of our own with impactful choices/player interactivity though, which is what we want, but we have both have agreed we probably will cut back on the branching in our next game whenever that happens. As Cheeky has been saying the writing/story is generally on task but we can't deny there were definitely growing pains during EP17 with the new crew, all of us learning new things, updating our models (which is still ongoing), and world events both good and bad.

As for editing Cheeky handles the majority of that and it definitely can bog him down, but ironically the Lily scene Cheeky did entirely himself. :) So it came out pretty much exactly how he wanted I figure. About the only director edits he wishes for Ep17 I can think of was the girl choice while waiting for Elaine, as it caused more confusion than he intended. lol We also could have went a bit lighter on the image count here and there, but that was my own personal growing pain. :)

EP18 isn't coming along as fast as we'd like (nothing comparable to EP17 so don't panic too much) but as usually if we don't make the progress we set for ourselves, our patreons get to skip a month of payment even though work does carry on.

Now with that dose of meh, there is some great news. There is a little Cheeky Jr. now! :D No doubt the apple of his daddy's eye and the bane of his nose when it comes time for changing.
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Very reassuring words to someone who doesn't care how long he has to wait for a quality product.

Thank you for your informative response.

Congratulations to Cheeky. I hope he can get some sleep. It won't be very easy to do that for awhile.
 
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Zoey Raven

Zoey Raven

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I decided to do a walkthrough for this game. Right now it is a harem walkthrough, but when paths start to split it will become an open guide at that point. Enjoy!

Edit: Updated to Episode 18 (There is a message on my patreon about why I will sadly not be updating this guide further. Thank you for understanding)

Note: There is a good chance I will have to make this a forced single path Walkthrough for the rest of the game due to the dev team confirming it will not be a harem ending, since that's how the WT is set up. I'll probably do the Katie Threesome path. We will have to wait and see. I'll do my best as you know.jiat giving a heads up.

You can find this and all my other content here:
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Or you can:
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Walter Victor

Walter Victor

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BirdmanBoss said:
I am hoping for a Jenna/Katie ending. That scene with them on the bed was so hot.
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There are several potential combinations that seem to be approaching in this game. Perhaps at some point the MC will have to make a final choice on one girl. But until then I am looking forward to a few MFFs, MFFFs ... MFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFs. :giggle:
 
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Boracle

Boracle

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Jun 3, 2017
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Dark_Wizz said:
I dont get it why people dont like jenna.... i mean personally shes my pick when it comes to the best girl....like shes smart, innocent but dangerous, and of course hot
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Well for me it's just that the "hot, shy girl coming our of her shell" card has been played too many times now (in almost every game; also movies). I've had a few GFs like Jenna and it just doesn't work for me any more. They have certain charm, but not much thrill in such relationship. Even when you set a foot wrong, they still are too humble to get angry and express their displeasement. Some men like that, but others (me included) prefer girls who can take care of themselves, could do well on their own and have that fire in them. I'm not talking about the needy-obsessive-insecure-psycho chicks of which there are many out there. Talking about those who have exactly the right amount of self-esteem, respect themselves, know what they want and are never afraid to step up for what they believe. These are rare. But even rarer are the brutal bitch-goddesses who don't hold back their language, but not because they're dull as a sap, because they're just above the things. Larger than life attitude. In men it's pretty common but for girl it's super-super-super rare.
 
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4.40 star(s) 330 Votes