discussion VN Ren'Py DAZ God Life [0.2.4b] [RavenThunder]

[DaddyDegen]

This was a very good game but I think its time to let it die or OP should hand it off to someone else who isn't bogged down with personal issues, vacations, brain fog etc.

 

[yoyomistro]

This was a very good game but I think its time to let it die or OP should hand it off to someone else who isn't bogged down with personal issues, vacations, brain fog etc.

I really don't get this impulse of wanting devs to hand their projects off to a rando to finish? They won't make anything close to what the dev had in mind unless they either have the script, or worked closely with the dev and are intimately familiar with the project. Look at Bad Bobby Saga. It's spawned a million shitty spinoffs. The one decent one has been rebooted like 3 times and isn't really even the same game. Just let games die and new projects take their place.

 

[stilllife]

Most of it is the cost/ramp time for a VN. No matter how creative you are, you're going to be limited by your hardware and your knowledge of the physics of rendering programs. That's where a large amount of the bottleneck lies for people who are actually creative, and the fact that you can't just write/draw/record what you want and have it instantaneously come to life can be difficult for some people to deal with. That's part of why you see people who have written hundreds or even thousands of pages of smut/literotica not hack it in the VN space.

Also some people can't script well. It's actually very easy compared to programming... I've debugged hundreds of VN releases just for my personal use, and submitted some fixes to devs or to forums. But for some reason, some people have a hard time with Ren'Py scripting despite how exhaustive the documentation for it is and how simple it is relative to other types of scripting programs. Also some people go way overboard and try to do actual Python programming when they only need the tools available with basic Ren'py scripts... if you know what you're doing, that's fine, but most of the time they hire some Russian college student or copy templates that they don't know how to adapt for their purposes and just end up with a buggy mess that they can't maintain.

The point being, it's a multidisciplinary endeavor, with high upfront costs (at least if you want to create high quality content) ramp-up time, and low potential to recoup the costs, especially if you're doing content that the payment processors are gonna crack down on and the SJWs are gonna come after. You truly have to be in it for the love of the game.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply (and to the other posters who replied). This really illuminates the problems well... I have always made (the things I make) because I felt compelled to do so, but I can see how feeling compelled to make AVNs as some people are, can lead down a painful journey because of the intense challenges involved. Also we (who enjoys games+ content) are all hated and persecuted in society, but the devs are actually under much more direct fire, as you say. Best of luck to RavenThunder whether you make any more chapters or not.

 

[rsxxxxx]

Android version has a password

 

[pgm_01]

Android version has a password

This should be just the apk, from another site

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[rsxxxxx]

It works now, thanks. Hard ask but can the minimum android version be changed from 13 to 11?

 

[helpfulsunglasses]

Sorry if this sounds unempathetic, but I've never understood the writer's block thing, as someone who's written literally hundreds of pages of fiction. I NEVER start writing any long form fiction work unless I have a full outline, with major and minor plot points fully resolved from beginning to end. Sometimes I'll add minor details here and there, or change the rhetorical style I assumed I was going to go with for a stretch of writing, but I would never put myself in the position where I have NO FUCKING CLUE where the story is going next. It's just a very strange thing to me...

Doing all that stuff you talked about is writing, though. The act of committing the final prose is the last step of writing, not the entirety of it. But more in line with your point, most people don't have any training in how to write so they don't know what they're supposed to be doing. So you see people stumbling update-by-update trying to figure out what happens next because nobody ever taught them about how to start with a rough outline and fill in the details until the plot is complete and only then start committing the script.

AVNs suffer from episodic releases as well, the idea that once something's done and released to the public it can't be changed and you have to just work around it awkwardly. When doing a novel (or a movie) you can re-arrange at will. AVN devs would be really stunned at how much movies change in the editing booth. Entire characters or plotlines vanish with barely a trace, scenes happen sooner or later to make the whole thing a coherent whole. So it's easy for an AVN dev to feel trapped by earlier mistakes and burn out because there's no good way to fix them. Doesn't help that the fanbase is rabid about any type of editing of things they've already seen... which makes it even harder to fix mistakes.

 

[yoyomistro]

Doing all that stuff you talked about is writing, though. The act of committing the final prose is the last step of writing, not the entirety of it. But more in line with your point, most people don't have any training in how to write so they don't know what they're supposed to be doing. So you see people stumbling update-by-update trying to figure out what happens next because nobody ever taught them about how to start with a rough outline and fill in the details until the plot is complete and only then start committing the script.

AVNs suffer from episodic releases as well, the idea that once something's done and released to the public it can't be changed and you have to just work around it awkwardly. When doing a novel (or a movie) you can re-arrange at will. AVN devs would be really stunned at how much movies change in the editing booth. Entire characters or plotlines vanish with barely a trace, scenes happen sooner or later to make the whole thing a coherent whole. So it's easy for an AVN dev to feel trapped by earlier mistakes and burn out because there's no good way to fix them. Doesn't help that the fanbase is rabid about any type of editing of things they've already seen... which makes it even harder to fix mistakes.

Yea. But most schools in the US teach you to do an outline before writing a paper 5 pages or more. In fact I usually had to submit one a few days before the paper was due to be graded separately, so I just wonder why most amateur writers aren't in the habit... Also plenty of devs go back and make changes. Most fans are understanding as long as it doesn't derail progress, or if the dev does it early or goes back and makes the changes toward the end of the VN/game. I know a few popular VNs that got reworked like 3 times at the beginning but eventually got the ball rolling.

 

[hsmeister]

Looks good! Will keep an eye on this one