BEW - Ongoing Dev Thread (DAZ Artists Still Wanted)

[rabbie]

If I do the ideal for my thoughts of the full game, it may take me 10 years of constant work to finish.

What a game it would be though

[Wolfschadowe]

If I do the ideal for my thoughts of the full game, it may take me 10 years of constant work to finish.

What a game it would be though

It would be the most awesome game nobody every played. heh.

Updated status on Page one:

Oct 18, 2013 Have two unique erotic scenes for the day 2 office fully storyboarded, at least through the success path, and made decent progress rendering them. My Daz content database puked on me and I embarassingly discovered I didn't have the right kind of backup. That has been rectifited and tested through a manual kick in the face to the Content Library. Resorting my content into custom categories is taking some time away from rendering. Damn you DAZ, and your lack of a render queue! Also, Damn you Poser, for not supporting Genesis characters in your render queue! Also, Damn you Luxus Render for taking forever to process your render queue! Still, I'm making decent progress on the renders. Still have to storyboard some of the failure paths through the erotic scenes, and also storyboard two more scenes that will share sections with one of the completed scenes. The office will have the first opportunity for actual sex in the game, although that could negatively impact things later, depending on decisions made at the bar the night before. Then the fun of working on Day 2 evening will start. I did get two animations done. They're a long way from the 2-3 frame manual stop motion animations I looped in the bar scene. The latest are 30 frame animations running anywhere from 10-30 frames per second, and they're starting to actually look halfway decent. They are still looped, because it would just take too much time to make significantly longer animations. Those 30 frame animations are taking about half a day or so to set up, and another half a day to render. End result, expect about the same number of animations in about the same places as they were in the bar scene, but much smoother and better quality.

Thanks for the interest and patience everyone!
Wolfschadowe

[Wolfschadowe]

Updated status on page one:

Oct 26, 2013 - Have all the bar start branches of the office scene completely storyboarded, including all the office erotic scenes. I'm about halfway done rendering the Emily corruption path, and about 10% through the others. The full corruption path through the office scene is 137 pages long. The standard bar start path through the office scene is 124 pages long, only 55 of which are shared with the corruption path (the first 55 of both paths) Add another 30-40 pages for bar path variations, and then yet another 60 or so for the strip club start path, and the full office scene will have close to 300 pages. I expect to have the office fully story-boarded by next weeks update, and also have two full paths fully rendered. All-in-all, progress is going well. Additionally, I have increased the number of save games from three, to 40, plus the quick-save of course. That should make some of my playtesters happy. Unfortunately there's no visual reference about what is in the save, or when it was saved, so some form of manual record keeping will probably be necessary. I'm not smart enough to adapt the system to display that information. I suspect, when all is said and done with the game, the completionists will probably want more than 40 savegames in order to earn the Grand Master achievement for completing every path and variant in the game.

Wolfschadowe

[MaxHammer]

I can just say... WOW....(not to be taken as a certain shortcut for a certain online game )
Testing it through over and over within breaks in between, it keeps being fun, I admit I am not at all a hardcore tester but this work is great, I almost don't see anything that Looks odd or does not work, that has not yet been discovered by others.

Keep it up, this will be hell of a game when finished

BR
Max

[Wolfschadowe]

Keep it up, this will be hell of a game when finished

Thanks Max! I appreciate the feedback and encouragement.

Wolfschadowe

[Wolfschadowe]

Questions for playtesters:

Has anyone earned all the achievements available in the game so far yet? If not, how many achievements have you earned?

If you haven't earned all achievements yet, can you let me know why? (for example: too difficult, lost interest, want to but not enough time, something else)

Finally, What are your general thoughts on the achievement system.

Thanks in advance for your input!

Wolfschadowe

[ExLibris]

I have to admit I haven't really been paying that much attention to the achievements, although that's perhaps a function of how I've been playing the game (ie. I have a different folder for each 'path', so I don't have to restart the game from scratch every time I want to try something different). Although I'm partly doing that for playtesting purposes, I suspect I'd do something similar if I was playing the game for fun since there simply aren't enough save game slots for a game of this size and complexity (especially if you ever want to go back and replay certain parts). Anyhow, as a result my achievements are spread across those multiple folders, so I don't know how many I've earned (especially as I've reset achievements a couple of times due to testing for bugs).

However, my subjective impression is that there are just too many achievements, especially for minor things (ie. the sub-achievements). It feels like they're less 'achievements' per se and more a means for the player to measure how much of the game they've seen. Which is fine, but less interesting to me. If you are dead set on tracking down all of the achievements it seems like it would be a *lot* of work, especially since there are only three savegame slots by default. I also find that the number of achievements also makes the achievements menu more difficult to navigate. I kind of get how it's supposed to work, but I still don't find it very intuitive.

Anyhow, that's just my $0.02. YMMV.

[Wolfschadowe]

Although I'm partly doing that for playtesting purposes, I suspect I'd do something similar if I was playing the game for fun since there simply aren't enough save game slots for a game of this size and complexity

I just uploaded files on the test site that will increase the total savegames to 40, plus the quicksave. Slots 1-3 and the qucksave are backwards compatible. That should help. It was going to release with the full office, but it's easy enough to get that out early.

However, my subjective impression is that there are just too many achievements, especially for minor things (ie. the sub-achievements). It feels like they're less 'achievements' per se and more a means for the player to measure how much of the game they've seen. Which is fine, but less interesting to me. If you are dead set on tracking down all of the achievements it seems like it would be a *lot* of work, especially since there are only three savegame slots by default. I also find that the number of achievements also makes the achievements menu more difficult to navigate. I kind of get how it's supposed to work, but I still don't find it very intuitive.

Thanks for the input. One reason the achievements may feel non-intuitive is because I haven't settled on a single mode for achievement reporting yet. From your input, I suspect you would recommend mode 4 for the overall game, where only the major achievements are reported, along with a percentage completion of each scene. The modes, and example scenes are in spoilers below. That brings the number of achievements per scene down significantly. One for finding all the endings, One for finding all the major activities, a progress achievement for completing the scene the first time, and then a couple special achievements as appropriate, depending on the size of the scene. Finally a mastery achievement for 100% completion of the scene. Completion is calculated by the number of Achievements and sub-achievements that are completed for the scene, but sub-achievements could easily be left invisible.

Achievement modes in spoiler, to conserve space for those not interested

Achievement Mode 1 (Office Scene) - Displays number of achievements, number of sub achievements, and percentage completion for the scene. Clicking into it for details scrolls through all the earned sub-achievements and earned achievements in order of Sub-Sub-Achieve.

Achievement Mode 2 (Diner Scene) - Display number of achievements, number of sub-achievements, and percentage completion for the scene. Clicking into it for details goes either to the earned achievement, and you can click in again to see sub-achievement details. If the achievement hasn't been earned yet, it goes straight to earned sub-achievements. This gives clues to things like how many un-found endings there are, and such.

Achievement Mode 3 (Bar Scene) - Display number of achievements, number of sub achievements. No percentage completion. Clicking into it for details only displays achievements. Sub-achievement details are hidden.

Achievement Mode 4 (Strip Club Scene) - Display number of achievements, and percentage completion. No number of sub-achievements. Clicking into it for details only displays earned achievements. Sub-achievement details are hidden.

Wolfschadowe

[Super]

Well, after working in my own and having my brain fart from trying to make an interactive story, I can safely say you are legally insane for trying something of this magnitude

[Wolfschadowe]

I can safely say you are legally insane for trying something of this magnitude

Hmm, I wonder if that means I can stop working and collect disability from now on. Then I could devote my full attention to BEW and finish qucker. :-D

Wolfschadowe

[Rikwar]

I can safely say you are legally insane for trying something of this magnitude

Hmm, I wonder if that means I can stop working and collect disability from now on. Then I could devote my full attention to BEW and finish qucker. :-D

Wolfschadowe

BEW syndrome

[Wolfschadowe]

Updated status post.

November 7, 2013 - Most of the last week has been spent rendering images. All the success paths, and most of the failure paths are storyboarded. I'm still working on the storyboard for a few of the fail-down, and fail-out paths. Fail-Down paths are ones that lead to less desirable or alternate endings. Fail out paths lead to ending the relationship with a girl, or ending the game. The game ends if no more relationships are available. To give an idea of the amount of time that goes into a game like this, consider that I target each render for each image to take about 30 minutes. I adjust the detail of the render engine to hit that target, so simple scenes may have higher detail while more complex scenes will have lower detail. Setting up the scene for each render takes anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes, depending on how different it is from the previous render. 5 minute set-ups are generally those where I am just changing expressions, making a gesture and adjusting "living" elements in the background. 30 minute set-ups are those where I'm changing the scene, lighting, and camera angle. Animations that I'm doing now are a different story. Those usually take about 2 hours to set up all 30 frames and render overnight. Usually they finish by noon the next day. Then when you factor in making the webpage, and writing and testing the game logic, each web page takes, in total, about an hour of effort. For the current scene, that comes out to about 300 hours of effort. Granted, sometimes I can work on web pages and story-boarding during actual render time so it cut's it down a bit. Consider that I have a job and family, so don't work on it full time, so I can put an average of 3 hours a day, at the most, into the game, meaning it takes roughly 100 days to make 300 web pages for the Day 2 office scene. Consider the game will have about 1600 web pages when I am done with this scene...well, enough said about that. My purpose of discussing the timings on this post is primarily so that others looking to make these games have a better idea of the effort that needs to go into them. I know when I started working on BEW, I had no idea that it would take this much effort. I naively thought I could finish the entire game by now. I laugh at that innocent self from way back in March. Thankfully, I'm still having a lot of fun working on the game.

BEW syndrome

Love it! I tried, Doctor said No.

Wolfschadowe

[karrek]

My mind boggles at how much work you're putting into this...

It definitely shows though.

[Wolfschadowe]

New update:

November 21st, 2013 Wow, I didn't realize it had been this long since an update. I apologize to the, approximately, three people who are still interested and following the game at this point. I have the office scene fully storyboarded and am just rendering all the images and building out web pages at this point. This was always going to be one of the largest, most complicated scenes of the game, and the evening date scenes will be equally complicated, but they won't be quite as big. They are the climax of the first act (pun intended.) I also reworked the achievement reporting system to standardize on mode four. That means that sub-achievements will not be visible or reported other than as a Percentage Completion for each scene. In addition to some overarching gamelong achievements, Each scene will have the following achievements:

1. Completed once (Opens the achievement reporting for that scene)
2. Achievement for finding all the endings
3. Achievement for finding all the major activities.
4. Achievement for 100% Mastery of the scene, including special achievements.
5+ Anywhere from 0-4 special achievements, depending on scene size.

Also, as I mentioned in my last update, the game is taking a lot longer than I expected. I naively thought that I'd be done with it by now, or at least almost done, and here I'm just about 80% done with the first act, let alone all three. Rather than waiting 2-3 more years for me to finish the entire game, I've decided to release the game by Act. I still plan to finish the entire game, but It was always designed so that each Act could stand on its own in case I got bored with it, which luckily hasn't happened yet! Act 2 & 3 will be savegame compatible with Act 1. In fact, when I'm done the games will likely release as first: Act 1, Second: Act 1-2, and Third: Act 1-3. I also plan to beg and plead with Tlaero or someone else in the know to help me figure out a code system so that those who lose their savegames between Act 1 and 2 will be able to enter a code to continue in Act 2 where they left off in Act 1. Each Act has a satisfying ending where the player can feel like they won the game, and Act's 1 & 2 both end on story cliffhangers as any good miniseries should.

Each Act will have from 2000-3000 webpages, by my estimate. The full series will likely approach 10,000 pages, so you hard-core completionists out there...beware!

Wolfschadowe

[ares]

And there's me who will wait until you finally get tired of all of it or until you release the full three acts (sigh).