discussion VN Ren'Py DAZ You Only Live Once (Yolo) [v0.1.5] [NekoFairys]

[angband]

What's this trend of making stories about defective people? Why not make it about healthy people? Is this some kind of self-destruct program within the developer that makes itself known in this way? Stories should motivate people to strive for betterment, not call for self-destruction because life sucks.

The typical reason (and this one seems to be included) is that the MC gets to be a white knight and fix all the characters' problems just by being the Awesome Guy™ that he is.

Not necessarily. Stories with smols don't have to be creepy or dark to be good or authentic.

If I were actually talented enough to make stories, most of mine would be about things that could actually happen in real life, probably still involving some amazingly good fortune but not anything that would involve a real-life MC either ending up in jail or doing superhuman things. The target audience would mostly be people who weren't happy with how things ended up for themselves and want to imagine things turning out better than they did. It would likely be very boring by most people's standards and would require very bold disclaimers that this may not be the type of story you are looking for. But there are still ways to keep things interesting, even with loli/shota characters. There can be mild platonic flirting, but it should mostly be them flirting with the MC. Nudity is possible, especially in family situations, just limited to non-sexual situations like helping with baths or allowing them to be free spirits in the privacy of the home. Sadly, nothing like this will be coming from me, but it's fun to think about.

 

[RodriguezQueso]

I'm just downloading it now, but it looks very interesting.
I hope to see how the story unfolds.

 

[Lostandquiet73]

The typical reason (and this one seems to be included) is that the MC gets to be a white knight and fix all the characters' problems just by being the Awesome Guy™ that he is.

If I were actually talented enough to make stories, most of mine would be about things that could actually happen in real life, probably still involving some amazingly good fortune but not anything that would involve a real-life MC either ending up in jail or doing superhuman things. The target audience would mostly be people who weren't happy with how things ended up for themselves and want to imagine things turning out better than they did. It would likely be very boring by most people's standards and would require very bold disclaimers that this may not be the type of story you are looking for. But there are still ways to keep things interesting, even with loli/shota characters. There can be mild platonic flirting, but it should mostly be them flirting with the MC. Nudity is possible, especially in family situations, just limited to non-sexual situations like helping with baths or allowing them to be free spirits in the privacy of the home. Sadly, nothing like this will be coming from me, but it's fun to think about.

Those sound like interesting stories. However, if there is no sex in them it would hardly count as an AVN.
Personally, I'd do darker stories. Darker not in the sense of rape or abuse, but in the sense of what it means to struggle with desire in such scenarios. I have a story on hold called French Tutoring which is exactly about that: how much a person is willing to give up and sacrifice in order to be with someone he loves, even if that love crosses all cultural and legal boundaries. However, since I lack the skills to render or make models/animations, I can't make AVNs.

 

[zigster123]

Wasn't as much fun as I hoped. No girl stuff yet and the English is horrible. Hoping that the next update is gonna be better.

 

[Daisies]

Man, this dev has a lot of ongoing projects lol.

 

[Lurk-Shadow]

My working theory is that the smaller a fetish or kink, the lower the overall quality of the games catering to it. For two reasons- first, because most of any genre is crap (Sturgeon's Law) and with a very niche genre there just aren't enough games for there to be many gems amid the wave of crap. Compare incest- there are a metric crapton of very awful incest games, but the genre is popular enough that there's hundreds or thousands of games of incest games overall and thus quite a few very good ones. For every Desert Stalker there's 20 Bad Bobby clones that got abandoned before second update, but there's so many games overall that it's alright. Loli though? Tiny to begin with, if 19 of every 20 games suck you're left with very little.

Second reason is that when a genre is so small the people looking for it lower their standards. If you haven't eaten in a week you probably don't complain when someone hands you burnt oatmeal; same principle, if the game that just came out is the first new game catering to your fetish all year, you tend to praise the fact that it's there at all instead of being critical of its flaws. So the games in that genre don't get the same rigor of critique as other genres do, and devs can get away with a lower quality product and still maintain a playerbase. Which is what I see here, objectively speaking the writing here is very weak and yet it's fairly average for many of the loli games I see but it's getting pretty mild criticism here; I've seen e.g. college games with writing slightly better than this get roasted alive.

I don't think there's any good reason it has to be either or. You can have a slightly more plausible story without going full creepy, and you can have a higher quality story that keeps the same fetishes. Just in this one for instance:

• Don't have the blonde girl start grinding on MC literally minutes after meeting him. Why rush? Just write in extra time for her to get to know and become attracted to him.
• Don't make Thorben such a caricature.
• Write a less cringy "MC saves friend's stepdaughter" scene.
• Give the MC observable qualities to attract women instead of them all magically knowing he's wonderful after ten seconds of conversation.
• etc.

I don't think those are unreasonable or excessive improvements, and I don't think including them would clash with the harem or the loli elements or make the game unwritable.

You nailed it with all of that. The players are not at fault. The problem comes from the developer, who has low quality standards and didn't take the time to polish the story or the dialogue. You can make a good story without making it creepy or weird. There are cases where little girls have a crush on someone older, just like it happens with boys too. You can make the relationship develop slowly because she or he is inexperienced. Or, if the dev is interested in making a darker storyline and using something that actually happens all the time, they could make a grooming story arc where one of the girls is talking to some stranger on the internet and the MC finds out and helps her or something. There are tons of things they could do. Aside from that, like you said, the conversations are really bad. It looks like the dev used ChatGPT because I don't think normal people talk like the characters in most visual novels.

Just to be clear, because it looks like zesergeant misunderstood what I meant when I talked about making the story more realistic, I meant making the things that happen more realistic. Like you mentioned, don't make Thorben look like a caricature, don't make the women fall in love with the MC at first sight and send him naked pictures the same day they meet him, don't make him a perfect man who always says and does the right thing, and avoid cringy dialogue, like when he comforts the oldest daughter by saying that she is the most beautiful girl in the world and that she is perfect and not fat. All of that makes the game feel like it was written by a teenager. The game is so rushed that it looks like the way this dev will milk money from it is by adding more and more characters, because if the women are willing to have sex with the MC from day one, what will happen by day ten?

 

[zesergeant]

You nailed it with all of that. The players are not at fault. The problem comes from the developer, who has low quality standards and didn't take the time to polish the story or the dialogue. You can make a good story without making it creepy or weird. There are cases where little girls have a crush on someone older, just like it happens with boys too. You can make the relationship develop slowly because she or he is inexperienced. Or, if the dev is interested in making a darker storyline and using something that actually happens all the time, they could make a grooming story arc where one of the girls is talking to some stranger on the internet and the MC finds out and helps her or something. There are tons of things they could do. Aside from that, like you said, the conversations are really bad. It looks like the dev used ChatGPT because I don't think normal people talk like the characters in most visual novels.

Just to be clear, because it looks like zesergeant misunderstood what I meant when I talked about making the story more realistic, I meant making the things that happen more realistic. Like you mentioned, don't make Thorben look like a caricature, don't make the women fall in love with the MC at first sight and send him naked pictures the same day they meet him, don't make him a perfect man who always says and does the right thing, and avoid cringy dialogue, like when he comforts the oldest daughter by saying that she is the most beautiful girl in the world and that she is perfect and not fat. All of that makes the game feel like it was written by a teenager. The game is so rushed that it looks like the way this dev will milk money from it is by adding more and more characters, because if the women are willing to have sex with the MC from day one, what will happen by day ten?

Oh I think I understood, but I just kind of wanted to... show the bad part of making it "too realistic", if you know what I mean?

I don't mind sexy things happening quickly, with Elena at least, she can be a special case among the girls, for instance. First time she's comfortable around a man, sits on his lap, and feels the boner, don't know how to handle it, but cunny feels good, let's rub. She can be a bit overly sexual, because she feels things, and don't know what or why etc. That way you can have at least a quick loli LI without it going overboard fast.

The other girls would be better to take a more cautious/slow approach to. You can still have like pervy scenes, like him helping them bath as the 'new dad' or something, slow corruption while helping them wash, as that would be more believable. Or cuddling on the couch watching something, letting hands wander a bit, not explicit, but an "accidental" touch here or there.

I don't understand why devs are afraid of making actual chubby girls. Like they call Sophia fat, but she just looks like she has (unironically) a wider bone structure. There's no real fluff on her, and that confused me when everyone started calling her fat.
The only two I can think of - off of the top of my head - that does this right is My Dorm with Kate, and Whoremonger with Olivia. All the others mostly go to "wide bones" or "Jabba the Hutt's fatter sister".

I do agree that the dialogue could be better, and that everyone is moving too fast, basically. I would give Maria a pass here too, though. She's been stuck with the worst human being in the world for years, and now her White Knight Prince comes along to whisk her away to a better life. So she trades an asshole for a better man, and she goes overboard with her feelings because she's afraid to death of being alone.
The rest of the adult women should be a bit slower with the whole love angle, though, but sex? Sure, they've been alone for a long time, they know that sex feels good, so why not? Sex first, feelings build up after is fine.
But yeah, the whole "I love you" instantly, and such is a bit too much for me too. Maria once again gets a pass, because of the reasons mentioned, and you could look at it like she's saying the "right" things, or at least the things she THINKS the MC wants to hear, for him to stay with her - which could also explain why she would be open to Harem (rather share, than risk losing him).

Writing/story I'm OKEY with, but I do think the dialogue is the weakest point.