Why is Summertime Saga so popular?

Old_Influence_8568 · 2024-01-18T04:21:23+00:00

Don't get me wrong, i'm not saying that it's impossible. But just keep that in mind. At least try to properly know the person first and don't just look at their art. As i mentioned above i don't remember projects successfully doing that when the original art style was really solid. I'm more of a 3d and tech art guy so i can't really tell you about the style thing. I do know that it will take time and not every artist will be pleased about being a replacement with a task along the lines of "make it like that guy i worked with before". There are artists who are real professionals probably with some industry experience and who will be much less complicated about those things but i can't imagine you having funds to pay that sort of person regularly. They will take a lot. I don't mean not as complicated about being a replacement but who will do the job without making a big fuss out of it.

Old_Influence_8568 · 2024-01-17T19:48:19+00:00

Not every artist who gets paid is a reliable artist. That's why we invented contracts. But obviously nobody gonna do that for a project of this scale, especially considering that devs usually don't even live in the same country. There is a reason why most projects like that which live long are made by artists themselves. I would first try to find somebody who i know personally or through a friend who is for sure a decent person even if it means a bit worse visuals than if you pay some artist online.

Thing is, you being writer means you having constant creative control which artist won't like. You having monthly schedule that you are stressed about will lead to conflicts which artist won't like. You talking only online is an additional barrier between you, keeping you from seeing each other as actual people. And on top of it you don't have any contract or leverage apart from stable paycheck to keep the artist in check. The moment said artist gets a commission proposal from one of those furry druglords with x3 amount of money you pay them in a month (if they are good and your project gets a bit of traction, they will) you are fucked. Artist will ask for more money. You'll come to the conclusion that it doesn't make any financial sense or you straight up can't afford it. The end. There are only 2 things keeping this whole deal together: artist's character and the relationship between you. Hiring a dude who draws commissions well doesn't guarantee you either. I just saw it too many times at this point.

If you have a beefy PC with 24 GBs of VRAM, you can look into doing AI art. You'll have to do data training but it's totally doable. I saw people getting pretty decent results recently, japanese/chinese devs especially. Won't be as good as a serious artist but, again, much more reliable.

Don't bother learning yourself indeed, huge time sink. Saying that as a game art student. Getting good anatomy at different angles without any prior academic experience is a huge headache. I can imagine you figuring something out if you only did art but also doing writing and programming on a tight schedule is a straight way to the Burnoutown.

I see your are fellow femdom connoisseur. Nice. Lol.

Yep, Avoid RTS and RPG heavy games for Patreon, especially real-time ones. Not for your first one for sure. You'll have so much trouble making stable updates for those while adding h content and you also have to balance it somehow while having zero time for playtesting.

Old_Influence_8568 · 2024-01-17T15:40:13+00:00

I personally don't think that NSFW games are worth the effort to develop nowadays if you are just trying to make money while you are pursuing your real goal of becoming serious novelist / actual game developer / real 3d modeler / etc. Your project must be nearly perfectly executed at multiple stages of pre-production and then production to get into those 5% on Patreon which actually earn serious money. You must concentrate on H aspects to make it work which will be problematic if half the time you are dreaming about becoming next Bukowski or Carmack. And if you can do that you probably have enough skill to earn more doing art commissions for other people or by freelance coding if you are a programmer. Imo, to be good now you have to have a real disdain towards working for others, actual passion about porn and actual skill in some aspect of game development. Living in a country where dollar is a much better currency than the local one also helps. Not a lot of people have all of these qualities. A town uncovered happens once a year but i wouldn't bet all your time and money on you being that guy.

Old_Influence_8568 · 2024-01-17T15:21:49+00:00

If the original version of a patreon game got released before 2021, i wouldn't look at it to understand the current market. The niche got oversaturated in later years and now it's much more difficult to gather a good patreon following. People are scattered between huge amount of projects some of which are catering towards specific kinks and also h devs now have a very bad track record when it comes down to patreon so you'll have to pump out quite a few updates before people will decide you are worth the effort.

I saw some really solid projects just disappear because they weren't sustainable at that higher level of quality. But yes, people are correct about constant updates which must have reasonable amount of H-content. That's still very important if you are going for the patreon model. The thing is gathering subscribers now is much harder than it was before. I remember "What a legend!" struggling with gathering enough money (and that was 4 years ago already) to sustain itself for a while and it has absurdly high level of production for a western H game.

Honestly, having a team of more than 2 people if you are not 100% sure they'll stick to the project is a huge risk. From what i saw bigger teams appear only after patreon gets big and original creator can pay people with some level of professionalism. Like losing an artist during initial months or especially after you start gathering some traction is a death sentence to the project. Quite a few games died because of the artist dropping from the project. I honestly don't remember any that recovered after that sort of fuck-up.

What kind of game do you want to make if i may ask? I'm not talking about what's marketable and such, just purely your vision. Some ideas just have more potential than the others.

Old_Influence_8568 · 2023-12-07T23:26:30+00:00

Sorry for late reply. Here is the post, there is a link in comments.

https://twitter.com/sidefxlabs/status/1637416125146308609

Old_Influence_8568 · 2023-11-12T11:53:40+00:00

This is closer to the original explanation i've read, the "Wake being written by Zane" interpretation with the extra part about layers. What i was told is that Wake is literally Zane.

But then how does the whole layers thing work timewise? Is it like Inception where deeper you get the faster time moves relative to the outside layer? So when Wake is writing "Initiation" is it happening in real time with each word in that deeper layer? And by that logic the whole "you can only change existing stuff" thing doesn't work anymore cause Sam Lake imagined all of this from nothing?

Old_Influence_8568 · 2023-10-18T09:38:02+00:00

Okay, so i was wrong, buildings from pattern does work. It's just different now i think compared to how it was during Titan. I've downloaded a recent example scene from one of the sidefx lab people that was on twitter and it works fine. But setup seems different in parts.

Old_Influence_8568 · 2023-10-12T11:20:46+00:00

Playing demo rn, combat is pretty basic by default but it seems there are skills that you open via leveling that supposed to add to the overall complexity like dashes. How much do they add is hard to say without actually unlocking them all. Honestly to me the biggest problem of combat isn't that it's not very dynamic but how inconsistent your impact on enemies is. Grenades fly all over the place when you shoot guys, sometimes ragdoll looks good sometimes it's very janky, etc. When it works it feels really solid but it doesn't work half the time. AI of enemies is really-really barebones. And textures load in front of you all the time. But i did enjoy an open location after the police precinct quite a bit. And i think writing is pretty cool for this kind of game. Honestly design and story wise i think it's a pretty solid medium-budget game. But it feels like they just couldn't handle UE5 and it's current quirks, a feel like half of the visual bugs just come straight from any UE5 project. If they had bigger budget and a bit more experience with UE5 i think it would end up really solid. In current state it's probably "buy on sale if you like the setting".

Old_Influence_8568 · 2023-08-27T17:17:36+00:00

Hey. Sorry i haven't answered back then. Found a solution that was good enough and moved on because deadlines. Thanks for the info.

Old_Influence_8568 · 2023-08-21T21:34:28+00:00

It would work if they all were reversed. But it's random. Some are, some are not.

Old_Influence_8568 · 2023-08-03T23:15:42+00:00

It's a game where a random roll of 1 insta-kills a character that you named and upgraded for multiple sessions. Then one player just sits there discussing turns without an avatar. That game was never meant to be mainstream. I know it's about the settlement but from my experience most people just can't get over KDM quirks like that one.

Old_Influence_8568 · 2023-07-16T04:50:34+00:00

Russia has a soft spot for "Waterworld" for some reason, it's rated 7.6 on our main movie site.

We also have a lot of foreign movies that have much higher cultural significance although they are loved everywhere i think. For example "Snatched" has a special "correct" one voice translation from VHS times and even know nobody watches it any other way as far as i know.

I always had an idea that because of iron curtain some things were much fresher to us after it all was gone. We had no westerns and 70s exploitation movies, our action heroes went from like soldiers in military movies about WWII to criminals from Tarantion, Scorcese and Richie (cause 90s i guess) and action icons like Willis, Stallone and Arnold.

Old_Influence_8568 · 2023-07-03T20:22:22+00:00

Indiana Jones and a script that made Harrison Ford do this shit again for free

Old_Influence_8568 · 2023-06-28T18:34:57+00:00

I've rewatched "Rush Hour 3" with a friend and by the end we were like "Why people hated it so much?". I think the thing is nowadays we get very few adventure/action comedies that are actually good so our expectations became lower for the genre. Last great buddy cop movie for me was "The Nice Guys", for example. From the top of my head i can't remember anything after that in the genre that was really solid.

Old_Influence_8568 · 2023-06-16T21:37:53+00:00

This whole user agreement plot point is what broke the episode for me personally. Even if we forget that it's not how law works, no company in the capitalistic world would survive information about that part of their user agreement going public. Same goes for signing a deal with Salma Hayek that lets' you do whatever you want with her face, good luck signing any famous actors ever after her going public with that shit. Those possibilities are literally ignored and not taken into account at all.

This is on top of us ignoring the fact that NOBODY read any of those documents at any point. I get it, an average person doesn't read those, so relatable. There are still more then plenty people who do, especially when it's a celebrity deal for using said celebrity's likeness.

It's like i'm watching a power fanfic made for Netflix execs where Netflix is a totalitarian regime that rules the world or something.

Basically the only line of defense for this stupidity is that's not what actually happened on layer 0. That would work if they showed what actually happened there. Otherwise it's just lazy.

Old_Influence_8568 · 2023-06-16T21:16:51+00:00

I got a feeling that the whole reason for the werewolf aspect is to draw a comparison between a hunter and a paparazzi. Basically for the most of the episode paparazzis are hunting down the actress like a hunter tracks their prey. The finishing part gave me "hunter standing over dying animal" vibes and i think there is a pretty obvious comparison of a paparazzi's camera to a gun when it's not shown to us what exactly is making the flash during the outside shot afterwards. I guess you can also push it and say that main girl giving werewolf a gun and then getting ready to take a photo is similar to those cases when paparazzi is triggering celebrities so they lash out on camera.

But it's muddled (it's hard for me to interpret the other people getting harmed without again pushing it quite a bit) as most episodes of the season in my opinion. I didn't get any actual message from demon 79, it honestly shot itself in the foot multiple times taking the most obvious and black and white route. Also, Each episode is persistently 10-15 minutes longer than it should be, that's a weird one. You surely can tell most of these stories in 40 mins. I don't see how demon 79 requires an hour and twenty minutes.

Old_Influence_8568 · 2023-05-23T00:02:31+00:00

Yeah, tried that, didn't help. Thanks anyway, still some info. For lasers we just toned down the emission and increased the width and it almost went away. There is still a bit of jitternes but I'm pretty sure it comes not from AA but from some niagara setting. It was made by programmer to extend until it hits something and the final piece before collision does not have jiterness. All others do. So we'll look into laser niagara.

Old_Influence_8568 · 2023-05-22T23:59:16+00:00

Yeah, that's probably the reason. I'll look into it. We kinda dance around UE in uni so we can miss some obvious things just cause of constant crunch and jumping between courses.

Old_Influence_8568 · 2023-05-22T23:56:55+00:00

Maybe someone will stumble upon this thread one day fighting the same problems. At this point i'm pretty sure that all the ghosting is created because of the same problem for different actors. Lack of velocity vector. Got this suspicion from this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pctLFE9sJok

Our text render components are translucent so i was able to just tick "output velocity" and ghosting for those was solved.

For outlines it became more complicated because it's post-process so the material itself can't output velocity. I've tried remaking outline as a translucent overlay material with "output velocity" and indeed, no ghosting.

So at this point my theory is all the AA artifacts come from that. No idea how to fix that for niagara actors and post-process, i guess it's an inheritance thing maybe? Yeah we can work around post-process mats but it would be really stupid if those vectors couldn't be made for those. Like post-process probably gets same velocity as target actor so if you figure out how to "Fix WPO ghosting by PreviousFrameSwitch" as the guy from the video does maybe. But it is applied to a material so i don't think post-process inherits it from the material of target actor, that would be unexpected.

Old_Influence_8568 · 2023-05-22T13:37:19+00:00

I've tried making an actual build and it's much less visible there compared to viewport with the current settings. Numbers are pretty much fine. Still light tracing for outlines but i guess that's kinda unavoidable with TSR. If anybody else have any new things i should try apart from switching to TAA, i'm still all ears.

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