The game should be more linear, maybe with branching paths, but no where near as dynamic as weighting game or fattening career.
That’s the advantage of 3d rendering, changing details in a render is far easier than changing details in 2d art you’ve drawn yourself for every painstaking detail.
I think a lot of people voting don’t realize that due to a lack of deduplication of labor the linear story is likely to be twice as long as any single playthrough of the more dynamic story.
Assuming a fixed amount of time you the developer have available to work on it.
Unless you’re able to create some sort of partial sprite system whereby outfits and facial expressions are separate image files that are layered in ren’py itself on the fly. I think that’s the only way you’ll be able to de-duplicate your efforts in 2d sufficiently to justify a more sandbox gameplay style.
Of course, if you are able to create such a system, that’d be great, and I’d change my vote.
@namad Yeah I was thinking about that. In how I can go about having all the girls do all these things while having to add it all in manually. I’m still relatively new to coding still and want to try and push my skills with this, but it might be too much atm. But what I was initial thinking is to have the story play out how it is now and then open it up to allow the player to make their own choices in which particular girls will happen to have a chance of being in a location. But I might need to get some outside help if I want to make this be possible with in the time frame of not this next update but the following. The game is still much in its infancy and still has a lot to go about it to make it a full fledged game let alone story. But thank you for your comment it really helps to get feed back on ideas.
I think this game could fit nicely into a more linear style with, but I see where the more dynamic story could fit considering you have all these choices on who to interact with and when. I personally think that best course of action is to have the linear story worked out first as to avoid scope bloat and stretching yourself too thin. Once that is done, you could go and add more dynamic choices to routes to make the game more open. To give an example, Coastalbunny does D.I.E.T like this. Of course I think that the players responses and actions should have consequences, but I don’t know if it should be like where you could completely miss out on certain characters by not doing certain things.
I think the thing that could be implemented from the more open VNs is the day system, which I know is one of the cruxes of that format(if I understand it correctly), but I feel like there could be something to where it doesn’t feel as…much? In a sense it still is contained, but allows a bit of freedom for players
@Purpledrink That is a good idea I mean that mostly what I had in mind was that to have the player go around the town and interact with each girl in a differing way. But I might just stick to the linear story for the time being and move later into a more dynamic open world later on in the the dev cycle.
I was sort of under the impression this was like. A route based dating sim type deal? With a focus on characters I feel that a linear structure is the best choice. I could see either working, really, but I think a more open ended structure could dilute the potential for strong character moments. This is ultimately just my opinion, I look forward to whichever type of structure you choose.
@Sixes That was my main focus at first and still is but I wanted to test my technical skills and see if it is possible to do something more open and dynamic. For now Im going to keep the game play the same but might change my mind after this update but who knows.
My best advice is to go super duper small scale first. I think that’s the best way to have this not go down the way forks did. Maybe just focus on one arc and making it the best it can be first before even thinking about the other girls.
The downfall of forks wasn’t about what the game tried to do, but how it was developed. I remember pointing out early on for example, that having the whole damn script in a single file was a recipe for inefficiency when it came to writing content. That, combined with getting art assets made before the script was finalized was a recipe for problems down the line.
Having more than one path does not make a game instantly become a life sim and attempting to balkanize VNs into niche genres and hyper-specific requirements is less about making a good game and more about individual tastes. If this change is what’s needed to keep the project interesting for the developer, I’m all for it.
A bit of a misconception; 3D renders take hours of processing per scene, cannot be separated from backgrounds without looking off and are much harder to edit in post than 2D images - which if done properly (as you acknowledge), use a base layer and separate layers for limbs, clothes and facial features. Those assets can then be mixed and matched for whatever desired effect; a properly-executed 2D spriteset will handily beat 3D renders in the long-term as more and more scenes get added.
Non-linearity isn’t so much a coding problem as being able to track and manage all the possible combinations of actions. Coding complexity only comes into play if that non-linearity also gets bundled in with having a sim-esque set of stats or properties.
@cheddar Thank you for the feedback, I do think the mext update I might work on the game being a bit more of a sim/open world-esque time game play and try and make it a bit more dynamic but this might take a bit longer than what I originally had in mind. But also the next update after this one is going to come out a bit later due to me and woomy working on a comic together so I will see what is most feasible for the long-term.
Thank you all for helping me help decide what direction I wanted to move the game towards.
@ButteredToast25 yeah I’m still in planing for what I want to make for the game but I do want the game to still be very story driven and to have the focus being on the characters and their development before anything else
So it seems from the poll really wants a more open dynamic world for the game so I guess that the next direction that I’ll will bring the game’s update (meaning the one after April 23rd) so it might take a bit of time to really plan that out but I will try and make it happen soon. Thank you all again for your support through this
If you’re a better writer and artist than coder, a linear story fits your skills better too. And you can always make the code slightly more complicated without committing to a massive overhaul of code.
I think your art and writing are pretty good, so yeah, why I voted linear.
Maybe try to create a set of two outfits with two facial expressions for one girl, where the facial expression, clothing, and body are three separate image files layered onto of each other in renpy on the fly. If this works, then feel free to go fully dynamic lifesim. If this ends up looking worse than the art already in the game, reconsider the dynamicness?
I think the linearity of forks would be ideal for feeling the weight of it all. Aka you have choices, they matter, but there’s really only like 3or4 main routes, so you’re not doing lifesim daily assignments of grindy tasks or whatnot. And not every girl appears in every scene or every location.
Forks isn’t totally linear, but compared to fattening career or weightgaming forks is linear.
Also yeah, 2art if done in a renpy image layer system kicks the butt of 3d art. It’s just that this project has no such partial 2d layering system as of yet.
@namad I’ll take this into consideration thank you and also I’m not the main artist lol my friend woomy is, she is wayyyyyy better than me but she also is acting as a writer as well working on Lilith’s and Ash’s stories but i might seek out help from other people to help with the code. I have a few people that have been helping me with coding but I might neee to hire another one to help me with some things.
Also I’m looking for a good musician to help me write some music for the game because i think the silence is a bit jaring atm lol.
Personally I would prefer a more linear experience since games with day cycles/slower paced games become grindy and boring very easily. Games with a lot of optional or RNG based contents just make me anxious for possibly missing stuff I’d like and since the amount of content centered around weight gain is so scarce (and personal taste descreses it further) I find very annoying this kind of design.
Especially since I play this kind of games in the short amount of free time I have, time where I would also like to play normal games or get in touch with friends, I simply can’t find the idea of a slow paced fetish game appealing. I’m still going to play games like Fattening Career, but if I could just skip to the spicy bits I would. “Do you want to play for 30 minutes to maybe see 1 new scene?” Eh.
I can tolerate or even enjoy slower games if between one scene and the other there’s other kind of content in between (like different kinds of customization and telegraphed/guided optional contents), content suited for the theme of an adult game. If a change in design only adds uncertainty and increases the amount of time between the good bits than maybe it wasn’t a good idea.
I would prefer having different choices with the option to engage or not in that particular piece of content. I really liked what was in the game so far and I will play it anyway even if it goes in a direction I don’t find very appealing since the content was 100% in my taste. I like more linear games or short replayable games with branching storylines instead of huge games bloated with stuff I don’t really find enjoyable or that just take too much time to complete.
@Horseless_Knight I can see that with the game having unnecessary amount of bloat in it to make it feel like it has a lot more content then it actually does. I mean for the moment I’m sticking to the game being more linear atm due to technical skill and wanting to get this next update out ASAP. But I will keep that in mind maybe take some elements from the weighting game and fattening career and more linear based VNs to try and make my game a bit of a mess of them all. Also still need to run this by with my Artist who is might need to tweak somethings to handle a game like those to aforementioned games. For not the next update will still have the old system in as the pervious update and the following update might change.
Gets me thinking, actually. Without defining what a ‘linear’ game is, how do say what is or isn’t? I would actually argue a completed forks would have met my personal definition of a non–linear VN. If it wasn’t a vn maybe the answer would be different but it meets the following;
At least several potential paths
Several meaningful choices per path
Most choices determine or alter the sequence of events
By contrast, DIET only meets one of those three criteria. It might be a low bar but again, further non-linearity generally means making a game That’s more than just a vn.
