tlaero wrote:Hey Lydia,
I just played Earth Girls Are... for the first time. (I played v0.05)
The writing is considerably better than what I've seen in most of the erotic games out there. You've spent a lot of time on your plot and characters, and it really shows. There's some real story here, the characters have histories and apparent motivations, and they come across as different people. And the dialog, especially with Julia, is great. Nice work!
Tlaero played my game and likes the writing? This news makes my month. Wait. I must be dreaming or am I being punked? It's wonderful to hear from you.
I've received some negative feedback on my writing on previous versions of Earth Girls Are... and have worked hard to address them. So I'm very encouraged to hear that you do like the writing. Julia is the MC's bf and has a secret love for him. So I feel it is important to show the player their relationship. I'm glad that the relationship comes across well. I received some comments on V0.04 that Julia didn't seem to have a relationship with the MC and that she was rather bitchy for deserting the MC for Chet. Never mind the little thing about Julia being under mind control at the time. So I did add text to various scenes with Julia to address these comments.
It can be a bit hard to follow, but I'm hopeful that it's one of those kinds of things where, as the reader learns more, it all falls into place and makes sense. From what I've seen of your writing, I have more faith in your ability to pull that off than most people.
(It's very cool to be able to have a "second order" discussion about the writing with you. This feels like we're discussing calculus where with most people I need to explain addition.)
Thank you for the kind words! I hope I didn't make the intro too confusing. I wanted to create a sense of mystery with the girls and give the player some points to wonder about. For example, that Lincy has come from far away(foreign currency) and seems to be running from something. She's old fashion(doesn't have a cell phone). And the phone booth has become something of a life line to her to a foreign boy named Shends. The MC overhears Nicci talking to herself about filling in someone else's shoes who should be there. And the day 2 scene with Nicci where she tells the MC she is studying medicine. But the saber scene with Nicci shows that she is devoted to Art.
So I do plan to show players the stories of each of the girls to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle if you will.
I feel that, if there's any substantive feedback to give, it's "Show me, don't tell me." There are a number of places where you have the PC describe what happens in parentheticals rather than showing the actual scene. For instance, when you go to the gym and the women are playing tennis, rather than have the PC tell us that one of them is talking trash, or maybe flirting, show us the actual dialog and let us draw those conclusions. I can tell from the dialog with Julia that your skill is up to the task. It's more work, but worth it.
Great point and example. I made a game called Dartmoth Manor that received feedback that there was too much text and it made it more like a novel than a game. So I'm probably overly cautious to try and not include too much writing. Having Abby trash talk and flirt with Charlie would make the scene much better.
The artwork is good, especially for your first foray into this. Yeah, you'll get better with practice, but I'll leave that discussion to other people. It seems that you're already getting help there anyway.
Thanks. I've been fortunate enough to get a lot of help from wonderful people such as Max, Ehlanna, a game maker from another forum, etc. I'm pleased with several of my latest renders such as the foreign exchange students in V0.05. I still spend a bunch of time reading articles and watching vids to get better.
One thing I want to call out, though, is that I'm happy you made the women realistic looking. I didn't see any gravity defying, beachball-sized breasts anywhere in the game. THANK YOU. Yeah, we're in a genre dominated by male consumers, and apparently they like that kind of thing. But I strongly prefer people who look like ... well, people. Great work there.
I don't find huge breasts to be a good look either. I chose models who I feel have cute faces. I have run into a ton of troubles using older models skin tone due to a change in Iray.
If there's one place I'd focus your practice and learning on above the other things, visually, it would be on facial expressions. The more subtle and not "stock DAZ face poses" the better.
Great point. I've had a lot of trouble finding expressions that I think look good on the models. I've noticed that the models in the sample images on various sites tend to not show much expression. And I've discovered that several of my models mouths tend to deform when I use standard expression poses. I need to practice more to develop a better idea for what makes a good expression. Please let me know if you have any suggestions.
Mechanically, I wonder if it would help to have some kind of visual effect to let us know when the PC is dreaming. In some of my games, Mortze put a blurred edge around the outside of the image to indicate the start of a dream or a flashback. In others he used kind of a photo effect that looked like writing around a negative. Then again, you may be blurring the line between reality on purpose. If that's what you're going for, I hesitate to tell you to change it. I followed it all in the end, but I'm a writer who is more motivated by story than visuals. I'm not sure what other people will think. One spot I'm thinking about in particular was the calculus class when the PC kissed the cheerleader. Would it help to have some sort of consistent visual indication that he's fallen asleep and is dreaming? Or, does the fact that he wakes up make it obvious after the fact? Similarly with the times when Julia is standing in her blue uniform in your room, but then is suddenly in orange and sitting on your bed. The orange is a flashback. Should you add a visual indicator to make that clear, or is it clear enough that she just appeared in a different outfit, so it must be a flashback? I'm not sure. You might think about it, though.
I'm also more of a writer than a visual person. But I do follow your points. It would be good to have a visual way to help tell players that a scene is a dream. I need to learn techniques such as the blur you mention. I did have the angel/devil portion of the Calc scene. I had the wings with a blue and an orange background for Julia & Britney to show it was a dream. But the classroom background is part of the Britney portion, so I'll need to see if I can learn some techniques in Daz to show a dream sequence.
One thing I didn't like was the "fade away" animation when images changed. It kind of reads (visually) to me like the early days of the web where all the pages wiggled and blinked and played midi files. Just because you CAN do fades doesn't mean you SHOULD. I'm pretty sure there was a two frame blow job animation near the end where you faded between the frames. That looked REALLY weird.
Renpy does have a variety of effects available. Would you find a different transitional effect to be a better look? Or are you suggesting that I not include a transition?
I'm also a little worried that you've taken a HUGE bite for your first foray into games. So many characters, so many days, etc. You run the risk of getting better and having the start of the game look considerably different than the end. It's not a bad idea to do a few smaller, experimental games that you can finish, call done, and move on to make better ones. Not that I'm suggesting you stop! But if you wanted to do a short story or two or three (in this universe or elsewhere) to experiment and practice, you could then use that skill on Earth Girls.
Thanks for your concern. I imagine the early bits of Earth Girls will look different as I continue to learn along the way. Smaller projects would be a good way to work up to a larger game. Sadly, I tend to go with the grand projects. My Dartmoth Manor game has over 30 endings. But it was with a different game engine and has photos instead of renders. I hope that I'm able to grow along the way in making Earth Girls and that players will be pleased to see the improvements. I might be tempted to go back and fix old bits, but then I'd never finish my game. I feel very grateful to the wonderful people who continue to support my stories and hope to be able to share my vision of Earth Girls with them.
Last bit of advice. Please look into jpg compression of your images. The game has just started, it has 241 images, and it's already 700M. If you went to quality level 8 (80%) on your jpegs, they would go to a tenth the size without any human noticeable reduction in quality. The PNGs are also enormous. You might consider combining them into their backgrounds and saving the whole thing as a JPG. I'll bet you'd find that the total size would decrease a ton.
Someone did create a compressed version of my release on another site. The file size was much smaller but I haven't looked at the images to see the quality. I still need to look into image compression as I don't know much about it. The site did mention several compression software but I have no idea which one might be the best option for me to try.
To put it into perspective, my last major game, Saving Cloe, has 1766 images, and the total download size is 147M. Not quite apples to apples, since the images in that one were 1000x500, but compression is a good thing. I have a tool you can use to try compressing your files and seeing how they look.
I would appreciate your suggestion of the compression software that you like. Are there certain things I should look for in the compressed image to determine if I compressed the image too much?
All together, this is a really promising start. Keep up the great work!
Tlaero
Thank you again for your feedback, advice, and encouragement.