BEW - Ongoing Dev Thread (DAZ Artists Still Wanted)

[Wolfschadowe]

I sense a new update soon...

Soon...

I'm hoping to announce a new artist with the update, so I'm holding off to the end of the week with my fingers crossed.

Wolfschadowe

[Wolfschadowe]

The last few weeks have been working on finishing up version 0.3.5 to release to Testers, and also getting some work done on version 0.4.0. That scene is about 25% done, and 0.3.5 is about 85% done, but that last 15% should go pretty quick. It’s likely that 0.3.5 will be out to playtesters by the end of the week, if everything goes well. Then it will be time to put the throttle down on version 0.4.0, which is one of the most complex scenes of the game.

Both Kexter and Tlaero have joined the dev team, ok, created the dev team since previously it was just me. They’ve both been a great help! Kexter has rewritten the back-end of the game, cleaning up code and also tweaked the front-end style a bit. He reworked the savegame system and also fixed and reworked the achievements system. Now it sports pop-up notifications similar to what you’d see on your x-box or pc games, shows unearned achievements with hints and earned achievement status.

Tlaero, on the other hand, wrote the entire 122 page campus scene in less than a week. WOW! It was a great help and we are making the standard editing and tweaking passes of the writing while I finish rendering a few pages that were added for continuity and flow. I expect that with all this help, things will go faster!

The biggest challenge going into version 0.4.0 is modeling the complexity of the game. It’s like herding cats. For example, I spent 2 or 3 days storyboarding a branch in the bar scene that I realized wasn’t needed because the scenario was impossible to achieve. My current MS Excel models don’t cover those types of scenarios and I’m currently looking for modeling software that can help with the planning. So far, the decent ones I’ve looked at are Chat Mapper, and articy:draft. When articy:draft gets its modeling functionality out with their version 2.4, it looks like it may be the best option for me, even if it’s a little pricy. Chat Mapper comes close, but doesn’t quite fit the bill. It is a close second, and much cheaper if articy:draft totally hoses the modeling tools. If anyone out there knows of similar software that can validate dialog path logic, doing things like scanning for inaccessible branches, route modeling, etc, let me know!

I’m still looking for a couple of DAZ artists to join the team. Rendering is really the bottleneck, with storyboarding being a close second. One promising candidate started the test, but he got caught up with work and hasn’t had a chance to finish it yet. There hasn’t been much interest in the artist position, and I can understand why. It really is a lot of work to create the images, and that’s even before getting to the computing time it takes to render one, and for a volunteer project... Well, frankly, I don't expect much interest in putting in that much work.

Speaking of rendering images, here’s a couple more teasers.

Meeting Azumi at the Strip Club on Wednesday:

Chatting with Azumi in the campus quad on Thursday evening:

Note: Azumi, similar to Jasmine, is one of several characters I cut as a romanceable character in the interest of FINISHING THE DAMN GAME. She has been downgraded to a supporting character included where her story intersects with the current romanceable characters, but once the full game is done if there is demand for expansions, I will add her back as a love interest along with the cut portions of her storyline.

Thank you all for your patience and ongoing support!

Wolfschadowe

[MaxHammer]

Hi All

I can just say wow, more and more looking forward to the whole (besides of some testing ;-) )

Great work and now a great Team on it!

Thanks Folks

Max

[karrek]

Woo, really looking forward to the next version.

[Pok23]

[Chappers]

Keep it up Wolfschadowe!

Good to hear you have some additional people on board to assist with your monumental game!

Some experienced folks there!

Eagerly awaiting future updates.

[Wolfschadowe]

That is too funny! I love it. The next test release is done. I'm just doing some cleanup and getting the build ready. Probably a minimum of two hours away from the time of this post, but probably not more than 4 hours away. You can rest the F5 finger for a couple hours at least.

I can just say wow, more and more looking forward to the whole (besides of some testing ;-) )
Great work and now a great Team on it!

Thanks Max!

Woo, really looking forward to the next version.

If you can find the new scene. It's only accessible on the Natalie Corruption path.

Keep it up Wolfschadowe!

Good to hear you have some additional people on board to assist with your monumental game!

Some experienced folks there!

Eagerly awaiting future updates.

Thanks Chappers! It's always good to hear that people are still interested in the game, especially when it's taking so long to build.

For anyone wondering why it's taking so darn long..well it's because I'm apparently insane. I ran the numbers today and it looks like Act 1 will come out to about 4000 pages of branching story. The full game will be close to 11,000 pages. Looking a little more deeply at Act 1, and it's 4000 pages, I haven't actually counted, but I'd estimate that a single playthrough will touch an average of about 750 pages, roughly half of which are common to the major branch (ie club side or bar side). That means, playing the game once you will see 750 pages of the overall story. Play it twice, and take a completely different route, like going to the club instead of the bar, and you will probably see 400-500 new pages for a total of say 1200 pages. A third playthrough of one of the major routes may pick up another 250 new pages for 1450, again for another 250 for 1800, and now you probably will start seeing more duplicate content, maybe only picking up an average of 150-200 new pages a playthrough, and that's just Act 1. There is a bit of diminishing returns as you go on through branching playthroughs where you're seeing more and more of the same content to pick up minor branches, but you can already see the vast amount of replayability. The game is huge, not necessarily because of the overall length, but because of the sheer number of ways to get through the day.

Using just the publicly released content as an example, the Public Demo has over 400 story pages (not counting things like the main menu, save/load, etc..) If we subtract out the pure repetition of the intro, and the home transition between the office and the bar, that leaves 397 story pages. For the sake of math, let's put that at 400 branching pages. A single playthrough will touch an average of 150 pages from start to finish, (I counted) leaving 250 unseen pages. If we consider half of those as common path pages that we see on nearly every playthrough, that means 75 common and 75 unique pages, roughly. So a second playthrough will pick up as many as 75 new pages bringing the total pages seen to 225 out of 400. A third playthrough may pick up an additional 50 pages taking you to 275 out of 400. A fourth, maybe to 325. A fifth, let's say 375, leaving small minor branches here and there to pick up over a dozen or so playthroughs for completionists. But without going into that detail, lets say 5 playthroughs for the Bar scene, at the minimum, to see all the major storylines through the scene.

Assume similar stats for the Strip Club and you will see a minimum of 10 playthroughs total, just to see the major content for day 1 alone. Add another 3 or additional playthroughs to see all of the Day 2 office scene including branches from the previous 10, and we haven't even started on the effects of Day 2 bar and Strip Club, and other paths... Well, you get the idea. When All 3 Acts are available and feeding into each other, a single playthrough will touch about 2500 of the 11,000 pages. But those are just estimates, who knows what the true final result will be.

And...right about now, those new developers that signed up to help with the game are saying to themselves..."Oh fuck, what did I just get myself into."

Wolfschadowe

[Wolfschadowe]

Playtesters.

Playtest v.0.3.5 is now available on the BEW Development site. See the Discussion Forum on that site for more information.

Thanks for all of your help!

Wolfschadowe

[Wolfschadowe]

For today’s status update I’m going to change it up a bit and talk about the failure mechanic of the game. One of my biggest gripes in many of these types of games, and indeed, in most types of games, is the insta-fail mechanic if you don’t get everything just right. Even most games with multiple paths will simply do a score check and if you aren't up to snuff, the girls says “Sorry loser, you’re on your own,” and the game ends. Now ultimately, that is the case with all games. It’s not much of a game if you can’t fail, and BEW does indeed have some insta-fail conditions, but hopefully those will feel about right when they do, and won’t be much of a surprise. Let’s call these “hard failures.”

A bulk of the failure conditions in BEW are “soft failures.” A soft failure is when the current path or relationship ends, but the game can still continue. Many times, multiple paths and relationships can be running at the same time, so failing one won’t end the game.

So, what do I mean by paths and relationships?

A relationship is the main character’s status with one of the women. Using the demo as an example, the demo has two love interest characters, Emily and Faith. In the full game, each will have about six unique paths, or storylines, each with a different ending.

Paths

The paths are sorted into three categories: Elite, Standard, Alternate. Those categories have their own level of difficulty in addition to the standard game difficulty. So the hardest parts of the game are Elite paths on Hard difficulty. Essentially, trying to play an Elite path on Medium difficulty is about the same as a Standard path on Hard difficulty. This means that the full game will have about 10 elite paths, 10 Standard paths and 10 alternate paths, each with unique endings.

Elite paths are for the hardcore, completionist players, and are required to unlock the special Mastery achievements that grant access to bonus content. Usually, failing a check on an Elite path will simply reduce the player to a standard path, or an Alternate path. Alternate paths are the lowest level paths and anytime the player is on one, they are at high risk to losing their current relationship status. For example, failing a check on an Emily Alternate path will end the relationship with Emily. It is sometimes possible to promote back to a main path later if the player is careful. If no relationships are possible with any woman, then the game will end. There are also some specific criteria for advancing to Act 2, that if they aren't met, there will be a negative ending to Act 1.

The most difficult paths are corruption paths. Corruption paths are Elite paths similar to the Perfect paths, but part of the goal is to take a woman to the extreme limit of her character, finding those hidden, deep aspects that they themselves may not be aware of early in the game. In this context, corruption doesn't mean making them bad, just that it is a catalyst to significant change. These are kind of high-risk, high-reward paths and usually failing a check on a corruption path results in an immediate end to the relationship, or occasionally the game, without the chance to demote to a standard path like the Perfect paths do. Standard paths often have multiple routes to the same endings, and generally fail down to Alternate paths. The alternate paths generally will lead to ho-hum endings, and often playing on Easy difficulty will end up here.

Also, it’s possible to go through Act 1 successfully without achieving any romance conditions with the 3 Act 1 women, thus “saving” yourself for the Act 2 women.

Playtesting update: I have determined that the next group of 5 playtesters will come on with the release of 0.4.0, which is the next release. The final group of 5 playtesters will onboard with 0.6.0.

Game Build Status: Current work is on version 0.4.0, which is a big scene for the Bar on day 2. Also, the game has been updated to use AC5 as the “engine” meaning it will be touch compatible for all you tablet users! (and smartphone for brave souls). Once we have a couple more areas of the back end as “feature complete” we’ll recompile the current demo in touch compatible format, with the new achievement system and also a short bonus scene that will unlock for anyone who completes the Demo Mastery achievement. Look for that in the next few weeks, although I don’t have a firm ETA on it due to the upcoming holidays.

As always, thank you all for your continued interest, support and patience!

Wolfschadowe

[crossy]

Hey wolf,

I tried applying the latest patch and its made everything go all screwy. Main menu doesn't function and most pictures aren't being displayed.

Wasn't sure if I should log a ticket on the playtester forum or not.

On a side note, I am messing about with a program to generate flow charts, with the possible (way way way in the ) future integration with adventure creater for visual representation of a game and/or debugging.

Will let you know if anything comes of it

[Wolfschadowe]

Hi Crossy,

Check your install, in fact, delete your previous version completely and/or run the game from a fresh folder. I think you need the original 0.3.5 and the latest patch. There were a lot of changes in the backend and there may be some cross corruption if you just overwrote the old version. I haven't heard of any problems from other testers.

If that doesn't work, post to the test forum and/or create a bug in the tracker.

Looking forward to hear about the flowchart generator, especially if it has statechart functionality.

Wolfschadowe

[crossy]

hmmm, sorry for continuing to post here but I am having some troubles

1) The bug tracking page wont let me add a report. It keeps telling me to provide a value in the "build" feild, and there is no such feild....

2) I did some playing around with the patch and determined that mac does something unexpected when merging folders (mac's who'd own one right )
Basically it actually replaces the folder with the new one, instead of merging like windows does, news to me.
After sorting this out and actually applying the patch I still had some issues though .

3) Actual problems I am having
The new menu system doesn't seem to work with safari and or fire fox on the Mac.
On Safari
-- Clicking the start game screen directly opens up a picture of the coffee shop, there is garbled text at the top and there is no menu buttons (I know what it should look like after viewing it in chrome). Its impossible to click any menu buttons at this point.
Firefox also appears to have issues
-- I couldn't even get out of the push to start screen, and even when i did it was still buggy

I apologies if you intended people to test only in chrome, but its a little sad as I have all my saved games in safari

[crossy]

O, as for the flow chart generator. I am not sure about state chart functionality but I don't see why not as it should be easy enough in code.

At this point what I am aim for is for it to create all the boxes with all of the appropriate transitions. But I am a realist, it aint going to look pretty and will require some post processing to arrange the boxes and lines.

I really need to get a hold of the Adventure creator and see what files it has/creates to see how I can tie it in. But for the moment I am still just drawing boxes and lines

[crossy]

Ok so update.

Works fine on firefox (I just had a super old version), but still no love with safari even running version 8.

Hopefully they fix their shit, I want my saved games back

[kexter]

Don't worry crossy, you'll get your saves back - I'm working on Safari support as we speak. The development version is already playable on Safari 5.1 (the latest I could get for Windows). Will PM you if a patch is available.