I’m deliberately avoiding playing any fetish games until my own is finished, so haven’t played the new demo of Forks yet. But I did play the original demo and loved it. As for this being better or not, I don’t think there’s any question that it will be. More writers/coders = better coding and better story. Plus, of course, hand drawn graphics blow rendered images away, IMO.
But, as @namad rightly says, they are two different games, and given how little there is out there, I’m sure both games can co-exist quite happily
Ya know, that’d be a pretty fun community easter egg, if some of the girls from Forks made a little cameo appearance in Weighting Game, and vice versa. No need for a real impact in the story, if any at all, just a tiny background cameo for the players to notice.
I really like that idea! However, given the totally different graphical styles of the two games, it’d probably look a bit weird, especially for people who hadn’t played both games.
More than enough room, I think the demand far out weighs the supply for high quality games in this genre. It’s why so many people eagerly await updates in either.
And here I am just trying to get my game done . @tiggertoo 's done a fantastic job, living the developer’s dream and making a great game while doing it! While I think easter eggs could be fun, I’d feel a lot better if I had more done first!
Hi, everyone! Hope you all had the best day you could yesterday, I wanted to post a quick update of where things are at.
Toro is still on break, but we’ve got a few more Aria previews banked up on the Patreon, and the final two Forks characters are on the docket once he gets back. My job permitting, I’ll transition on January 4th to 3 Forks days and 3 Aria days per week, with a rest day too. I’ve gotten awful writer’s block with Forks sometimes, so hopefully switching back and forth will help keep me fresh and productive!
Ars and e are on break as well. Thankfully, they’ve left me a great foundation to build off of!
I’ve spent my free time banging my head to improve the Forks intro without completely redoing it, and I just haven’t found a solution I like better . For better or worse, the current intro gives the information and context that I want it to give, gaps included. I have removed some fluff from an early scene, which will hopefully add some important foreshadowing for a certain character. Otherwise, the intro is largely intact.
I’ve written five intros now, and I’m afraid I just don’t yet have the drive to try it again. I gave it a couple of weeks, but now I’d rather focus on new content, and I’m sure you all would too!
@FallenKing107 Thanks for the writeup, I’m glad you enjoyed it! I’ll see if I can respond to a few of your points and ideas:
I intentionally labelled unknown/characters without portraits as generally as possible. We’re seeing the game from Alex’s POV, and she can be a withdrawn person. She ends up looking past a lot of people and not paying attention to their names/actions, not because she thinks she’s better than them, but because she’s reluctant to initiate that connection. Her “best friend” had to all but force her to socialize with someone, anyone!
We don’t currently plan for an area map, as we purposefully made the “world” small. It largely takes place at Red Glen, with a few off-campus places and the “off-map” Alex’s home. For the most part, there’s a college campus near a small town, and that’s as far as we wanted to take it. If the game took place over a wider and more diverse area (as Aria does), then we would include a world map (and will, with Aria).
For the most part, I want Alex’s pre-Caketime and college life to be separate from the present. It’s in her past, and there were some major things she didn’t like about how things were. I don’t currently plan to show you Alex’s earlier life, but if I do, it won’t be until she’s comfortable sharing it too.
When two textboxes appear, they are meant to be read in either order. They represent the characters speaking at the same time, and so there is no “right” order to read them.
Thanks for the bug reports, too! The phone scroll bug unfortunately can’t be fixed right now, but that misplaced ringtone was new! Everything else has already been fixed and will be included with the next update
Nice to see you typing an update once again during the holiday period but still… Five Intros?!, and here’s me thinking this will be smooth sailing from here on out once you got the art and CGs sorted…
Although i am curious who has been or what has been the hardest thing to write about so far i would suspect Rea due to her make friends by Lying alot approach or Grace with her Artistic way of speaking.
Haha, I should explain. I’ve written five different intros for different drafts of Forks, with the current intro seen in this demo being the fifth. The other four have never been released, and the one I had been working on over the last two weeks was the “sixth”, but it never made it far.
I’d planned to go right into new content after release, but several people pointed out honest issues with the intro, and so I decided to try and address them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do so in a way I was satisfied with, and while the intro is now slightly different, I decided to go back to writing new content. That should hopefully be smooth sailing, it’s already planned out!
For me, the hardest thing to write has been the entire demo. It serves as an introduction, a foundation for what the rest of the game builds on. I tried to balance it such that players only know so much, with lots of info still to be filled in on the routes themselves. I’m not sure how right I got it in the end, but I’m confident players at least have the knowledge I wanted them to.
As far as the characters themselves go, they all pretty much speak for themselves now. It’s why conversations are so dominant, and why I plan to keep it that way!
Thank you for responding to my ideas. I’m just glad that my ideas had been considered/or already had a plan before hand to do something else. I’m right now checking out the other routes i haven’t done yet to see if there is any flaws or glitches. As always good luck.
Yeah, the introduction to a story is often the most important part of one, and the hardest to write. I’ve already written and scrapped an opening for my game, so I understand the trouble.
Don’t worry about it for now. Take some time off from it and write other stuff. I hope that you’re able to go back to it though. Just pick at it steadily over time. It should improve as you go at it. You don’t have to be like me and keep re-writing the intro until it’s right before moving on. Sometimes getting everything out in the open before going back and fixing it the best idea. Writing can often be a very iterative process as you further develop what you want the story to be and what works within that story.
Probably best to ask this question to me in DMs, since it’s a bit off topic. I don’t mind getting DMs about it.
None the less, it’s a continuation of the Gain Jam project I worked on. I haven’t made a post to projects yet 'cause I’m not quite ready to show anything else off about it. Though, I have made some posts in the site discord about work I’m doing with it.
If you want to look at the Gain Jam project, it was called Adventurer Feeding Project. I’d link the thread, but I can’t atm.
Is it possible to obtain the paths of Outsider and Soulcrusher. I’ve played a bunch of different choices and have-not gotten anything different than Dreamchrusher and one of the three begginning stories for the girls.
Also I’ve been trying to unlock the other music. I don’t know if it’s in the other paths I couldn’t figure out. To name the songs I can’t seem to find.Promenade, Don’t Spill the Beans, Musturd Dreams, New Beginnings.Also there are two Reflections in the Extras.
I think your rendered images are amazing and beautiful! Not sure that I agree that hand-drawn graphics are actually better. Different, but both are special. So I hope both will continue to exist as they are.
You tease! Like where this is going and can’t wait for the next stage of release.
There was a weird temporal/story glitch the first time Alex’s mother calls her. I was in a web convo with Ryan and suddenly the plot seemed to drop and go off on a tangent, plus I swear time skipped.
There are myriad minor spelling/grammar errors throughout, but I suspect you know about them already/others have already made mention.
When will Aria have a forum thread? I wanna start hearing people speculate about that.
Also I remember a while ago someone (Actually it was @e123bForks: A Weight Gain Visual Novel (NEW DEMO RELEASE 12/13/20!) ) was asking what some of the best and most professional or advanced visual novels had as features… and I realized… I forgot a game, because it’s so far more advanced than any other visual novel that I don’t even consider it a visual novel… but given the mystical fantasy theme of Aria I was reminded of it.
Academagia.
It’s a bit like harry potter but good, it’s not a sex game at all whatsoever. It has like 100s of tracked skills and I dunno 80 unique characters and 100s of possible actions that makeup 100s of unique story vinettes, but it also has a time management system similar to say persona4. It’s probably impossible to code something like Academagia in ren’py. That’s why I didn’t even think of it at first, but it is definitely a VN in my opinion.
Everyone who likes fantasy/magic/school/VN’s should probably have played academagia at some point in their life. It’s also on sale this week for half off.
Only warnings a) It’s a very old game and it’s kinda janky in terms of UI design b) It’s actually a quite hard game you might have to replay many times or use walkthroughs in order to see some/much of the content which will end up locked behind skill checks you can’t pass because you didn’t play optimally enough.
As you can see from the image, it’s much more NOVEL than it is visual, but well, it has many unique features and a gigantic quantity of words in it. So, I dunno, maybe someone who wants a fantasy VN might like it, and maybe e123b might draw some small inspiration from it’s quite unique nature.
Hey, all! It’s New Year’s Eve, which means this nightmare is over, and a new one begins
Not too much to report, other than I’m typing up new scenes right now, with the goal of the next release having the first post-demo content. After this new set of scenes comes Stage 4 Alex! Everyone else is still on break, but I’ve had plenty to do!
@namad Whether or not I can directly advertise Aria here is a good question! You see, while Aria has WG (and a couple of characters that specialize in it), it is not the narrative focus. You can miss the content entirely if you’re not looking for it. If you think Forks is light on core feedist things, Aria’s even lighter. That said, it will be there, and we plan to make is a valid route with several little sequences (3-4 steps).
Thanks for the game recommendation too! There’s a few things in there we’ll be making use of, but hopefully without making it daunting or janky.
@Belldash Yes, I plan to eventually add a “harem” option. If you’ve played the demo, you can probably guess who it’ll have to do with
. 
. For better or worse, the current intro gives the information and context that I want it to give, gaps included. I have removed some fluff from an early scene, which will hopefully add some important foreshadowing for a certain character. Otherwise, the intro is largely intact.
