BEW - Ongoing Dev Thread (DAZ Artists Still Wanted)

[Wolfschadowe]

My last reply was only an opinion!! But the most important things is : 1) did you know where all the options go? 2) did you got the idea to make them go to the finish? if you think yes, so the game is not too big, if one of the two is no, remove it & use it in an expansion when the idea will pop up in your mind.

For example, split the possibilities in two, use the other half for a second meeting!!

Anyway, with all i see about your demo, if you keep the quality to the same level, the game will be good. I will wait just to see the result!!

Hi Francois. Thanks for the great advice! I appreciate the input and the confidence.

I knew your statement was opinion, it was just a good segue for me to give more information about the game.

Sounds like Act II could be a bit simpler to develop than Act I while Act III will be an absolute nightmare. Is that correct?

Yeah, that's pretty close. The nightmare days are Days 2 and 6. That's one of the reasons that the office scene is taking so long to complete, (Plus it's also the time when great games come out. Damn you Assasin's Creed IV, Batman Arkham Origins, X Rebirth!) The night scenes for day are really a lot shorter than the office scene as well, primarily because they are more linear. Part of the challenge is matching the right date with the current path. Get it right, and it's a good date. Get it wrong and things could end either mediocre, or as a disaster if multiple dates were accidentally made with different girls for the same place.

Can't wait for the next playtesting update.

I can't wait to get it out the door! It's still several weeks away though. The last half of the office scene is almost like 3 separate scenes, some with minor branches. Holidays, along with requisite family time, aren't helping much either, but I'm still making daily progress.

Cool, looking forward to Act 1.

Thanks Sephira! I hope you enjoy it when it's ready.

Wolfschadowe

[sylakone2]

Yeah, that's pretty close. The nightmare days are Days 2 and 6. That's one of the reasons that the office scene is taking so long to complete, (Plus it's also the time when great games come out. Damn you Assasin's Creed IV, Batman Arkham Origins, X Rebirth!) The night scenes for day are really a lot shorter than the office scene as well, primarily because they are more linear. Part of the challenge is matching the right date with the current path. Get it right, and it's a good date. Get it wrong and things could end either mediocre, or as a disaster if multiple dates were accidentally made with different girls for the same place.

Lol I know what you mean I have wasted lots of time on X-rebirth just wish they would fix it.

Looking forward to Act 1

Cheers

Sy

[Wolfschadowe]

Update:

December 13th, 2013 - The holidays have been interfering with my availability, but I'm still making progress on BEW. A little slower than I'd like, but not bad altogether. Like my last update, the storyboard is completed, and most of the game logic for the scene is completed as well as adding in the Achievements to the scene. I am just waiting on the rendering to complete to finish up the pages. I have the second half of the office scene about 3/4 of the way done rendering. I'm hoping to make good progress this week since I should be working from the home office and family obligations are minimal until next week's holiday interferes again. I've also got much of one of the dates storyboarded as well for day 2 evening. The office scene concentrates mainly on Emily, as well as one of the dates. The other dates focus primarily on Natalie and Faith. Thank you everyone for your patience!

Lol I know what you mean I have wasted lots of time on X-rebirth just wish they would fix it.

Yeah, I had high hopes for the 1.19 patch to rebirth, but it's still not quite there yet. There's a pile of full trade ships just sitting around by a nearby station rather than providing mats for my station build. Oh well, they'll get it fixed eventually, they always do.

Wolfschadowe.

[MaxHammer]

Hehe, what do I do now...wait for the further fixes on X-rebirth or your next test, Wolfshadowe ;-)
Both are to be good, I trust the X-makers and also you, as you made a great job so far, even if it needs loads of patience, take your time to proceed the thorough good way you did so far.

Max

[Wolfschadowe]

Hehe, what do I do now...wait for the further fixes on X-rebirth or your next test, Wolfshadowe ;-)
Both are to be good, I trust the X-makers and also you, as you made a great job so far, even if it needs loads of patience, take your time to proceed the thorough good way you did so far.

Well....X-rebirth 1.20 just dropped....

Speaking of BEW, while waiting on a render I tallied up some stats from my Visio storyboard for anyone who is curious:

Web pages planned by scene (so far)
Day 1, Office - 36
Day 1, Bar - 359
Day 1, Strip Club - 466
Day 1, Diner - 105
Day 2, Coffee - 54
Day 2, Office - 563 (In storyboard, not all are created yet.)

My sanity:
Low

Wolfschadowe

[sylakone2]

Lol Yeah I have been Playing on patch 1.20 since last week I am in the beta for the patches.

If I finally sat down and looked at everything I have to do for Uni Dreams my figures would be getting quite hi although I have not done much on it for quite a while.

Anyway I will get it done eventually the problem is I keep getting other ideas for other games I want to do lol.

Cheers

Sy

[Super]

... Just one of your scenes is going to be as big, if not bigger, than my entire game.

I dunno how to feel about this

[Wolfschadowe]

Anyway I will get it done eventually the problem is I keep getting other ideas for other games I want to do lol.

I keep getting ideas for more scenes, more love interests, more storylines and story points, etc... Unfortunately, I have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise I won't get the game done. I appease myself by putting them in "expansion packs" for when the main game is done. Sometimes, though, It's nice to take a short break and work on a side project here and there. Keeps things fresh.

... Just one of your scenes is going to be as big, if not bigger, than my entire game.

I dunno how to feel about this

I say, feel good about it! If I were to start over, I'd make a series of shorter, smaller games where each game was about the length of one of my scenes.

I don't regret my decision to make a huge game like BEW. I'm still having a lot of fun working on it. I am a little worried that most people won't have the patience to finish it, or to play it enough to see more than a quarter of the game, but if one person plays it thoroughly and gets the "Game Master" achievement, I'll be happy. I think the normal sized games, which I think are around 500 pages total, probably have a bigger appeal overall.

On a different topic, I pulled a dumbass maneuver and lost a little over a weeks worth of work on my storyboard. When I re-installed my O/S on my laptop a couple months ago, I forgot to enable autosave in Visio, which is where I write my storyboard. Then, Visio crashed last night, and I hadn't saved since last week! All the backups in the world don't help unless you actually save the file! Unlike Word or Excel, Visio does not have auto-recover capabilities either. I will need new paint in this room because my words scorched the walls when I discovered how long it had been since I saved.

Oh well. Autosave is now enabled and I'm rebuilding the storyboard parts that were lost. It probably won't delay anything since rendering is the current bottleneck.

Wolfschadowe

[j95]

Hello Wolfschadowe,

I keep eagerly checking your thread for updates, it is a hard balance between hoping to see it as soon as possible, but knowing that it is better to wait for it to be as perfect as possible, I am sure that you feel the same.

I am especially looking forward to your next public release of the next part of BEW, could you give me an idea when it is going to be released, please ?

Will my turn as a playtester, which I am also especially looking forward to, come before the next public release or after, please ?

I understand completely about the extreme frustration having to reload Windows/losing your files, because it happened to me as well, I lost half my files but luckily had an external hard drive which kept the other half, plus e-mails and forum posts stored on the Internet.

I have the latest Kaspersky Pure anti-virus software (which I heard was the best protection, it is certainly the most expensive as far as I know), but this was the worst malware attack of all, it blocked me from entering Windows, so I could not reload or repair key system files and had no choice but to reload Windows.

I can almost guarantee that you will receive posts from all forum members after the next public release of the next part, I am sure they watch your updates like me.

Thank you very much.

Justin

j95

[Wolfschadowe]

I am looking forward to your next public release of BEW, could you give me an idea when it is going to be released, please ?

Hi Justin! I don't know when the next public release will be. I've stopped trying to estimate it. Originally I thought the entire game would be done by now, and I'm not even done with the first act yet. That's why I decided to release the game in acts, otherwise it would probably be another year or two. I am hoping the next public release will be before summer, which will be the first Act, or the first game of the trilogy.

Will my turn as a playtester come before the next public release or after, please ?

Definitely before the next public release. You are in playtest group 5, which is the last playtest group. That means you will come in about the time that Act 1 is completed to help make sure that it's ready for public release, and you will automatically be transferred into the Act 2 & 3 playtests from the beginning. You can find playtest group 5 on the Roadmap post, which is the second post on the page. That can give you an idea of how close your group is to the invite.

Wolfschadowe.

[Wolfschadowe]

Updated status from the front page:

January 6th, 2013 - Happy New Year everyone! The holidays really interfered with working on BEW. I didn't get much done over the last couple of weeks. One of the office scene branches felt forced going into the erotic section, so I reworked that while other things were rendering, and essentially rewrote the branch. I haven't made the images for it yet, so the impact was low, and it really wasn't a lot of work anyway, but the overall flow of that branch is much better and I'm a lot happier with it. Overall though, not a whole lot to talk about for this update, although I'm getting back into the groove now. Next week will be my 1 year anniversary for doing any type of 3D art at all. Today, I am still learning things about digital art and using the software. It's interesting to see how much my art skill has progressed, over the last year, but there's still a long way to go before I would consider myself good at it.

Wolfschadowe

[Wolfschadowe]

Continued from the Adventure Creater thread at http://www.the-new-lagoon.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=2076&start=495 to avoid hijacking that thread

Would it be possible to limit them to the range 0-51? If you did that, it would be easy for us to encode one character per variable. That's still a 250 character string, but better than a 750 one. Bit packing the achievements is easy too.

Still, I think you've got too much state to effectively make a string for your users to cut and paste. Is there anything you can do to reduce it? From one game to the next do you really need every detail about the previous game? Realistically, couldn't you have a variable saying which NPC you're making progress with and how well the player did? Even Mass Effect didn't carry over all that much state from one game to the next.

And, if you're going to have 3 games, make 3 separate sets of achievements that don't carry over. It's really rare for you to need to have played game N-1 to get an achievement in N. I know you're thinking of this as one game told in 3 acts, but you really should think of them as standalone sequels.

Tlaero

I've been thinking about this a lot, trying to figure out what needs to carry over and what doesn't.

Regarding the achievement carryover, I'm undecided on whether to carry them over to act 2, or make each act independent. I'm not personally a huge fan of achievements myself, but am including them primarily for those who are. One of my friends, for example, is so motivated by achievements that his wife finally got him to help out around the house by giving him achievements that translate to gold stars on a board. Vacuum = achievment, do the dishes = achievement. After so many "achievements" he gets beer money and a night out. What's funny, is that it works on him. I think her idea is both brilliant, and maybe a little sad. heh.

I just returned from a business trip that took the second half of last week, so I've had time to think about different strategies for minimizing what needs to transfer between acts. Mass Effect is a good example since that is also a game where things that occur in the first game have significant effects in the second and third. My difficulty is coming from distilling what is really needed from Act 1, and what isn't. Ultimately the intent is for all three acts to meld together in a seamless experience that can be played from start to finish, but thinking about them as standalone sequels is helping. Keeley 1 and 2 melded together very well, and they originated as standalone games, after all.

Back on BEW, there are some achievements that are specific to the acts, and others that span all three acts. I could strip the overarching achievements out and just limit achievements to each act, but much of that undermines the overall achievement design I created. I definitely need more thought on this topic, although if it's easy to bitpack them then it may be moot. Still more thought is needed here on my part.

Regarding the actual game variables, it's probably not realistic to limit them to values less than 51, many of them, yes, but not the relationship values. On the other hand, the more I think about it, the fewer variables I can think of that will be needed to transfer between Acts. Each love interest really has a maximum of 3 variables that need to transfer, but really, only 4 of the interests are active at the end of Act 1. Basically those variables are the visible relationship, hidden relationship and status. Using Emily as an example, those variables would be a calculation of ehappy - eangry, earoused - ethreat, and brade. That could give a result like 62, 49, 14. Although, it may be possible to reset the relationship and just take the status to carry forward and start all the new calculations at 0 for each love interest when it comes to the relationship value. That means just the relationship status (brade in the example) needs to carry for each of the four active love-interests between Acts 1 and 2. That number could be less than 51, since there are less than 51 status possibilities at that point, or any point really.

There are some downsides to resetting the relationship values for the overall game though. One of those is that it lessens the impact of decisions made earlier in the overall story.

Act 2 concentrates primarily on two love interests, with one or more of the original three coming into the picture during the last third of Act 2. Essentially, Act 1 has 3 romanceable love interests, and the 4th is present but not romanceable. Act 2 has numbers 4 & 5 as romanceable as well as whoever the player succeeded with in the first act, if any. Finally, Act 3 reconciles the results of Acts 1 and 2, to conclude the story.

Wolfschadowe

[Wolfschadowe]

Status update from the first page:

January 20th, 2014 - Made good progress in rendering over the past couple of weeks. All three major branches are fully rendered, including the erotic scenes. There are two minor erotic branches to finish up on the render, and also the alternate path to render. It looks like the Day 2 office scene will have close to 600 pages when it's done, although only about 200-250 will be accessible for each playthrough, depending on the path. One of the reasons this is so big is that it's one of two Emily Relationship payoff scenes. For those who are on an Emily relationship path, this is effectively the end of that main branch of the relationship for Act 1. There's still some stuff that can be done in the evening, of course, including losing her as a possible love interest in Acts 2 & 3, or cementing the relationship more solidly. Most of the evening for Day 2 concentrates on Faith and Natalie though. Overall, I hope to finish up rendering for the scene within the next week or two.

Rendering is the primary bottleneck at this point, but on the plus side I've got some techniques down that have reduced the rendering time per image from 20 minutes to somewhere between 5-10, with the same level of quality. This is primarily due to lighting techniques. Unfortunately some of my playing with the lighting is evident in the Office scene, so it gets a little goofy here and there. Hopefully it won't detract from the game too much, but I'd rather get the game out then re-render scenes over and over again until the lighting is perfect. One of the main goals of making BEW was to learn these digital art techniques, and hopefully the game will evidence my growing skill as it progresses. The worst images will be the first images, i hope.

I've been travelling on business over the last week, so that slowed me down a bit, but I also have a head start on storyboarding the next few scenes, so some extra time now is saving me some time later. I have the home transition scene storyboarded, as well as a start on a small supporting scene on one of the corruption paths. Both of those scenes are only about 10-30 pages, so very small in BEW land. heh. Next on the storyboard schedule is to start filling out the Bar scene for day two with Faith...or Emily and Faith, as the case may be. I've broken the scene storyboards into multiple Visio files to make it easier to storyboard on one and render to a second without having to scroll back and forth a lot. That's it for this update! Thanks everyone for your patience!

[hrmf]

Thinking about the bit-packing thing a little more, outside of the framework of Tlaero's game creator your game state is essentially a flat JSON object, which is to say a key-value mapping. The state consists of two items: firstly the URL of the page the player is presently looking at, and secondly the set of variables representing the choices they've made in their playthrough up to now. It might look roughly like this (I'm making the variable names up out of thin air based on other html games I've seen, like Chaotic's or whatever):

Code: Select all

var state = {
  "page": "bar45.html",
  "variables": {
    "emily_like": 3,
    "emily_lust": 2,
    "emily_angry": 1,
    "bought_camera": 1,
    "bought_bikini": 0
  }
};


In between Act I and Act II or III you know what page the user will start on, so you don't necessarily have to deal with the "page" part and you can just focus on the set of values in the "variables" object.

So the question is basically how you can serialize a pretty simple key-value map from strings to keys and persist it from one browser session to another. The idea of boiling it down to a simple string that the user can type into a form somewhere is somewhat appealing, Shark has done that for a bunch of his games and it works ok, and that approach is also used with some of Goblinboy's AIF games if I recall correctly. You could probably research how URL-shortening sites like bit.ly work and come up with a reasonable algorithm.

Really, though, there's no reason to make a user write down a seven-letter (or however many) string of characters just to store and retrieve state. The end user already has a computer and it's pretty good at storing state. You could use something like HTML5 LocalStorage to persist it in their browser - like, you can just take the whole "state" object from above and store it, and then load it back up when the user clicks a button.

Also, if you wanted to, it wouldn't be too hard to generalize the persistence mechanism out to a save-game system with multiple save states, so that you might have something a little more like this:

Code: Select all

var all_saved_games = {
  "My saved game": {
    "page": "bar45.html",
    "variables": {
      "emily_like": 3,
      "emily_lust": 2,
      "emily_angry": 1,
      "bought_camera": 1,
      "bought_bikini": 0
    }
  },
  "Another saved game": {
    "page": "pool3.html",
    "variables": {
      "emily_like": 0,
      "emily_lust": 2,
      "emily_angry": 0,
      "bought_camera": 0,
      "bought_bikini": 0
    }
  }
};


Again, I don't see any particular need to encode this stuff into a string. Just have a button somewhere, and when the user clicks it, take the current state of the game, construct an object like the above, and persist it to storage.

You do lose something this way in that the user can't move from one browser to another and get back to where they were by just typing in a string. There might also be complications with incognito mode, I'm not sure. And you'd probably have to get Tlaero to write some stuff into the Adventure Creator toolkit to support this, but I don't think it would be technically very difficult to do. (Tlaero, I know it's a lot easier to say that than to actually implement it, sorry if this seems like I'm signing you up for a bunch of work!)

Beyond that there's also a game design element, to wit that you don't necessarily want the user to be able to save and reload at any arbitrary page in your game. I see that as a non-technical question and don't have a particular opinion on it other than that I trust your aesthetic judgement a great deal from the stuff you've released to date. But I also don't see any particular technical need to limit the amount of variables you use in your game - personally I'd go completely nuts trying to keep track of them all, but from all your posts on BEW so far it's pretty clear that you are well on the way to becoming completely nuts anyways, to all of our benefits.

[Wolfschadowe]

Hi hrmf!

Thanks for all the great information and examples.

Beyond that there's also a game design element, to wit that you don't necessarily want the user to be able to save and reload at any arbitrary page in your game.

I'm already using a save state function to effectively save and reload a game. That used to be done using a cookie, but Tlaero's tool recently changed that functionality to localstorage. I think that savegame functionality in a game like BEW is going to be vital, primarily because of it's size. For example, the full game of Chaotics Rachel 1.2, is about 700 pages, which is about the same size as one of the larger scenes in BEW. Right now, according to my outline, BEW will have 3312 pages in Act I, although that number will change up or down. In this case, being able to save, run down a path a dozen pages, and restore back to try something else is beneficial, in my opinion anyway. It will save time on replay number 12 when someone is looking for a new ending they haven't seen yet without having to restart from scratch.

Here's my thought process about generating a string:

Where localstorage fails my requirements is where it comes down to persistence. First, per my understanding, the size and storage of localstorage is limited by domain (localhost in this case). Let's assume there is six months between Act I and Act II....Ok, more realistically a year or so, based on Act I. During that time, I can assume more games will be played from the localhost domain that use localstorage which is FIFO meaning BEW save states may be overwritten over time, or the computer will fail, or localstorage will be cleared along with the browsing history of playboy & brazzers, or...whatever.

I don't know how many hours of playtime there will be in Act I, but there will be around 15 endings that will carry over to Act II. I haven't actually played BEW yet, heh. Maybe one of the playtesters can chip in with an estimate of playtime available. For completionists that want to find every ending and achievement, that could be upwards of 20 hours if they take the time to enjoy each unique story. When Act II comes out, it will actually come as a contiguous seamless game with Act I. New players can start with Act I and play straight through to the end of Act II, and the same when Act III comes out.

I am looking for a failsafe method for those who played Act I to death to use so that they don't have to replay it in order to continue their games into Act II, assuming that they have lost their save-state information in localstorage. I don't want to do a checkbox style system like SITA does in the Arieaneb series either, that is just outside of my cheaty threshold. I can already envision a forum thread listing ending codes, if the game is popular enough, which is fine because there's a little effort involved in that for those who will want to go that route.

So essentially, once Act II comes out, there will be three options to play it.

1. Play Act I and continue seamlessly to Act II content
2. Load an Act I savegame, and continue seamlessly to Act II, the cliffhanger ending page for Act I will have a reminder to save the game in one of the save slots.
3. Enter your ending code from Act I and continue seamlessly from the Act I ending page to Act II. Again, I'd like to have an option of the ending page of Act I to generate a failsafe code.

But I also don't see any particular technical need to limit the amount of variables you use in your game - personally I'd go completely nuts trying to keep track of them all, but from all your posts on BEW so far it's pretty clear that you are well on the way to becoming completely nuts anyways, to all of our benefits.

Yeah, I've definitely gone nuts over this: The full spectrum, walnuts, peanuts, cashews, tennis balls, pecans, and hazelnuts. But...I'm still having fun with it.

Wolfschadowe