/evn/- Focus on work, not boobs

Man, I hope alienworks learns from their mistakes with HB and step it the fuck up for the reignition project. If they can't even code a kinetic novel competently, it makes me wonder how they'll tackle a multi-route one.

how many writers from HB are working on it, I wonder.
HRP demo was bottom of the barrel too (though it was a long time ago t b h, they've probably rewritten it).

Exogenesis.

>Diabeetus
Well, I don't think anyone would be too happy to hear that they have a lasting sickness user. I just hope that they reach their deadline properly, I saw the comments on their KS and people are getting worried.

I agree. You could probably get away with around 10 or so options like USD, Euro, etc. There's two reasons I didn't do that: first, I don't want to have to deal with figuring out which options to include / not include. Secondly, I just like the idea of people being able look for others locally. Maybe that's better served with a "location" option, but it doesn't hurt having more options when they're easy to search.

In general I like to think in terms of how I want VNs and the associated communities to be, not how they currently are. There's probably not many VN devs who use these currencies even locally. But I want there to be, and including an option helps to meet them halfway (or at least part-way) for when they appear.

>Making a yuri game
>See that this year's filled with it
Dang. Well, this is fun.

Do what I'm doing and release it next year.

Even better, never release it at all!

I might release the demo around October/November.

You can still stand out. Try having a plot.

Is there anything more retarded than no-name devs touting their own horns? Don't they realize if you come off as an ass and hype yourself up so much, people are going to look at your work through a fucking microscope and destroy it to pieces if you can't live up to the hype (protip: you won't)?

hint: you'll never stop being a no-name dev if you don't blow your horn

>Having a plot
Is that implying that most of the yuri this year didn't have one? I was under the impression that SV was plot heavy.

better hint: just like make game already so you don't have to be an internet clown "muh gaym is totally gonna revolutionize the genre guise, it will be like totally awesome and THE BEST"

>I was under the impression that SV was plot heavy.
haha no.
I mean, technically Starlight Vega has at least the vestiges of a plot and isn't all about school life. However, it's not very deep or involved, and doesn't really make sense (there's still a great deal of argument about whether the separate routes are supposed to be in the same universe or not, because the basic storyline doesn't add up) I would definitely not call it plot _heavy_

I'm still not sure whether A Little Lily Princess counts as a nakige or not. It's got the light-hearted first act followed by a second act where everything goes to hell, but it doesn't have the romance in the middle, the romances happen during the second act.

make game without hyping yourself up first
game is released and no one cares
you disappear into the sea

Ara ara~ You're not interested in an old snake like me, are you?

nowhere near enough scales

>diabeetus
You also have to keep in mind that diabetes does fuck you up mentally at times. When you have hypos - which happen a lot more when you're still figuring out your insulin dosage and stuff - your sugar levels go really low and end up making you paranoid and a lot of other stuff. A friend of mine ended up at the hospital because his sugar levels got too low as he didn't calculate the right units.

not enough solid snake

Not enough scales and definition senpai.

Noted. I'll see what I can do while it's still in sketch form and all. Thanks, guys! I'm not an expert on lamia designs so I guess getting the right directions/references to give to the artist was a bit of a challenge.

advertising does not equal self-congratulatory hype
if you can't advertise your game without some stupid premise that it clearly won't fulfill and value judgements, you're a bit thick

Highway Blossoms is selling copies.
Top selling game in the Visual Novel tag right now
The more we bitch about it the more we cement that it's more important and more relevant to the scene than all the other VNs that have come out lately

But didn't that nurse yuri evn pop out of nowhere with almost no to little marketing? Maybe it's about the quality after all.

>nurse yuri evn
Do you mean the nurse yuri JVN which was a very well-known title in /u/ circles, whose _translation_ was announced with very little lead-up, confusing everyone, and was then subsequently delayed and has not yet been released, making it impossible to know anything at all about how it will perform in the market?

You're not considering the fact the tag goes by what's popular in the week, and it's obvious a new release is going to be selling more than games that were there this whole time. If there were more not-completely-shit releases this week, there'd be competition.

You're also not considering refunds. Selling on Steam is just half the battle and kinetic VNs have it harder.

>and it's obvious a new release is going to be selling more than games that were there this whole time.

It isn't, actually.

I know the 'top sellers' tag is weighted by the current week (and for that matter, current hour)'s results, and is somewhat subject to bizarre algorithms. On the other hand, I keep an eye on new releases. Any new EVN release should at least be in the top ten for a few days after launch, or it REALLY tanked. They don't all stay at the top of the category, though. The game is at least doing better than many in sales.

I have no data on KN refund rates so I can't speak to that.

I'll be looking out for it, fellow yuri user.

>They don't all stay at the top of the category, though. The game is at least doing better than many in sales.
No evidence of that yet.

I just stated the evidence? A lot of new release EVNs are on top for a single day after release at best, or not at all. Many are only in the top ten, not category topping at all.

If it were getting awful reviews you might think the initial sales will then flatline but the reviews are positive except for one guy who had a single bug and therefore ragequit

For perspective, it's rating higher than the new chapter of Higurashi in the 'top sellers' category, and has FAR more reviews than Kyoto Colorful Days or One Small Fire At A Time which have both been out longer.

It's obvious that it's doing better than many games on launch. That doesn't make it a hit, there's no evidence of THAT yet, but "better than many" is clear.

...

>people think this is funny

What is wrong with her neck.

Context, please?

Try tracking achievements. It's not long of a game, so if there's a drop off, then it means that people stopped playing and likely refunded it. Some of the achievements were a bugged though, so some didn't unlock until after I beat the game and checked the guest art gallery.

People got sick of Higurashi's slow as crap release schedule and are waiting for the first 8 chapters to come out before buying it. The other 2 vns you mentioned look like shit.

Looks like Highway Blossoms just put out a second patch that broke peoples save again. That makes it the third time when you take into account that the H patch broke them too.

okay so I'm not an expert with Ren'Py, but surely there's a way to not break saves when updating games

I've ran into frustrating issues before with new iterations of my project breaking previous saves, but I'm wondering if there's a way to prevent that from happening, when adding new variables and stuff, or is it just inevitable?

I opted into the Sakura Dungeon beta and my saves from before work just fine. It should usually be fine unless it was programmed in such a way that didn't factor in potential patches.

why do their saves keep breaking? i never had this problem when updating my game.

the H patch didn't break the saves, they just thought it would

only if you do it really carefully, but you pretty much have to coordinate with pytom really closely and it's not very feasible sadly

renpy rewrites some stuff internally when you change things, leading to breakage in the referenced dialogue nodes and the like in the save files

that is, coordinate if you don't know the exact conditions under which the engine rewrites node labels

I don't know how renpy manages saves internally, but for a KN you should be able to circumvent new var problems by checking if said var exists (and assigning it a default value if not) prior to checking its value.

>coordinate if you don't know the exact conditions under which the engine rewrites node labels

Care to share what you know? You seem to understand it.

>The latest HB patch broke achievements

Keep trying, guys. One of these days your game will be working as intended.

wow that's just incompetent

don't know the exact conditions either, but the gist of it is that Ren'Py assigns a textual label to every single statement in your .rpy file, for instance:

a "This sure is a bad game."
b "Then why are you playing it?"

will yield two "nodes" (stuff the engine actually can do stuff with, as opposed to just a bunch of text in the script) after parsing, and both will have their own label

now, this label generation is somewhat finicky, and one big cause of broken saves is changing the script around that much that the label names get changed too. since save games refer to your current location by the node label, it would either jump to an incorrect node in the script or just error out because it can't find the node label. this can also influence rollback, if you deleted three dialogue statements from the script, it thinks it can rollback for whatever (let's say N) nodes, but now that there's actually 3 less nodes preceding the starting point, the engine will freak out when it has reached the beginning while it thinks there are still nodes left

tl;dr Ren'Py's savegaming is a big fat mess and it's a shame

disclaimer, this is what i understood from messing with it a few years back, it might've changed and is definitely not the only cause of breaking save games

I got them all before they broke them, but not all of them were working as intended then either. Maybe they tried to fix the issue and broke them entirely.

Huh. So as long as you don't change the actual node content, saves won't break? But as soon as you add/remove nodes/dialogue lines Ren'py is fucked?

Seems fucking volatile.

meme mode unlocks after you complete the game once
its only there to artificially add replay value and extend playtime imo

i'm not entirely privy on how the node label generation works, it might take content into account as well. obviously it also depends on how much you fuck around and where in the script the save game you're trying to load is located.

but yes, it's incredibly volatile. one possible solution would be to tell the engine every time you're building a release for distribution and it would generate label transition code or something.

It could also be to get Lets Players to pick the game up. Most probably wouldn't touch it with how serious the second half is.

Gotcha. Thanks for insight senpai.

I do not understand how or why some people are breaking their saves when they update. We update our games all the fucking time and the saves don't break. It certainly doesn't require having PyTom hold our hands.

for more first-hand information, saving is pretty much dumping the RollbackLog object here to a file: github.com/renpy/renpy/blob/970efedd9ca650bb5b90ac405d2c4e851c50374e/renpy/python.py

although i found Ren'Py code incredibly annoying to read if you don't understand the context of pretty much everything around it and the terminology it tends to use

renpy.org/doc/html/translation.html#translate-statement
you can see the node labels i was mentioning in the example translation code here, the start_* names. this is because Ren'Py's translation system basically just does a full node replacement with new (translated) contents. it needs to know which node to replace, which is what the labels are used for here too.

Generally no? Usually if you load a save and things have changed, the game will back up a little ways. In most cases, smoothly.

You'll break it if you delete labels it was relying on, but that should be obvious. And if you add variables and then try to check them in save games that didn't have those variables set in the first place, then again that will screw up.

>but that should be obvious
it really isn't that obvious if you don't know how rollback works internally. for a user, labels are just that, labels, nothing for the engine to rely on internally in some magic ways

Urgh, I haven't even dived in Ren'py internals so this may take a while to understand. Can we poke PyTom to explain some of the general stuff?

>Usually if you load a save and things have changed, the game will back up a little ways. In most cases, smoothly.
this is correct though, and i forgot to mention it. the issue of course occurs when it can't. it won't straight out crash when not finding what it's supposed to, since it has a full historical log (sorta) at its disposal, but there's only a limit to what it can do

Tumblr art EVNs. Y/N?

Didn't the Rising Angels game have a slightly similar issue with people unable to load saves at the episode points and they fixed it? Do Sekai devs just not talk to each other?

Would you want to talk to a sekai dev?

so, art EVNs?

sekai is more of a publishing house, so no surprise there

You know, a scene select sure would be convenient to have, considering all these broken saves...

One thread is enough.

Why would Sekai Project provide any actual help to the developers whose money they're siphoning off?

To be fair he does have a point, in that if they're not competent enough to keep their saves from breaking it WOULD be handy for both players and developers to easily jump to different points in the story.

For that matter better internal chunking and scene breaks might make their saves break less.

...

Is Ren'Py, really the only way to do VNs? Or at least, the most stable one? I heard that Ren'Py can work with Unity, soon. But how soon?

I don't know much about coding but the Unity thing is kinda important in my game and despite considering Ren'Py at first, I feel forced to use the Unity VN Toolkit instead.

Ren'Py isn't great, but all alternatives are a lot worse, so yeah
the Unity thing is just something writing a Ren'Py script parser for it, which probably won't be remotely fully compatible because all the Python stuff it does

atm renpy is the way to go, unless you need live2d and a ton of animation effects. also it's not known if sekai project will let the renpy->unity engine available to the public.

You can always write your own VN framework on top of another engine, bruh.

Of course it's not the only way to do VNs. It's just more flexible than any 'easier' method and therefore the most useful tool to convince clueless flailing newbies to learn to use.

Many clueless flailing newbies will insist that it is too hard because it involves typing very simple words of code, and therefore demand to be allowed to use Novelty or TyranoBuilder instead, even though they are objectively shitter.

However, if what you want to use is Unity, learn to use Unity. Don't wait around for someone to make you a spoonfeed weak porting tool that will still make much of your code break and have to be done over again.

seriously just learn to program and stop trying to find a toolkit that will do everything for you

Why would they do this? Why would anyone do this?

do what?
have a male character?
have a sign with a snake on it?

Starry skies trigger me too.

Theory: Calling the wrong name during sex is more likely than calling the right one.

...

just condition yourself to use the name of the current US president or something

You don't love your waifu enough, user.

oh, i do
that's why i'm desperately envisioning her even though she's not here

>Live2D and AE
Well, fuck me. I guess I'll just have to ask my programmers then. I was really trying to avoid having to use them at all, not until we got funded at least. A lot of them insist that it's okay if they do this for free, but I want to see to it that they're properly compensated for the trouble. This kinda speeds up the entire thing though, I hope that they'd be alright with it. If I'm to release a demo I'll have to hand over the assets as soon as possible to them.

I'm doing most of the creative parts and I already got my hands full. If this is what I gotta do then, here goes.

Other than the fact that I'm already shouldering a lot of the assets in the game (Live 2D, BG, story and other animation), I can't code for shit. All the coding I learned in school went out the window because I haven't practiced it in years. Learning to do it now will be counter productive. I'd rather have someone who knows their shit and help out in the codes/scripts so I could focus on the art and story.

perspective on these screenshots really fucks with me, if he's standing further in the back, why is his sprite cut off at the exact same place as the girls'? Or maybe they're ayyliens and just have huge heads.

Next step is tulpamancy. Schizophrenia is a small price for happiness.

>tulpamancy
what is this rabbit hole i am staring down

Autonomous imaginary waifus that could go yandere if rubbed the wrong way, apparently.

>rubbing your waifu the wrong way ever
look at this pleb who can't into foreplay with anime girls

But imagine the disaster if you tried to summon your waifu and ended up with some other crazy anime girl instead. Stuck in your head. Threatening you every time you looked away.