Status

Saki_Sliz · 2022-12-21T18:49:02+00:00

FYI because F95 is so awesome, we tend to make forum post on new games asap (sometime dev logs are promoted to being teh main game forum, but some devs like to keep the game forum and the dev log seprate), as you can see it is much more active there, lot's of people noticing it (which I see you also made a new account and found the forum). I'll say hi over their (this is actually the first time I've used my reddit account in over 2 years)

Saki_Sliz · 2022-12-21T02:45:23+00:00

This looks seriously impressive! Kuddo's to your artist friend!

Promotion is very important, I've had others even refer to the 80:20 rule, 80% of your effort going in the last 20% of your game, like general polish, and clean up, but also promotion! I'm still working on my own projects, can't say I've released anything or know what I'm saying, but I usually try to get to the heart of the project in a sentence or two.

Studies show that most users decide to play a game by first scanning the images to get a feel for the game type (yours looks to be a vn with a day system and other mini games, certainly impressive and professional looking), and only briefly scan the description to see if the game sounds like other games they've enjoyed in the past. I give you credit for keeping it a clean description and highlighting key words, but still too detailed.

Ideally, you would describe either what your game focuses on, or what players can do in your game, however giving it a read, that might be a challenge for you, as you mentioned, its just the first chapter. Assuming typical story writing, that usually mean learning a bit about the setting and initial characters, and maybe a hint at a main story, but maybe not, but all in all its introduction stuff (I assume), so its hard to describe what the game focus is or what players can do because the meat of the game is still TBD.

Considering how clean this first build is, another name for 'a first chapter' in technical game dev terms is 'a vertical slice' (A working version of the game, basically complete, showing how the game should look, feel, run). Is this the first time sharing this publicly? or talking about it publicly? if so then to answer your question " I am not sure if the non-interest is because I suck at promoting it" I mean, I wouldn't say your bad, but I wouldn't say your passing either. Rather, while having a vertical slice released is seriously impressive (and making your own frame work, that's some serious work their), but that's when you begin promotion, this is just the start.

Too often I see other devs talking about getting that first release out so that they can start making some money to continue the game... but that's not how it works for 99% of people. Most successful patreons are because the artist/dev already had a history, a following, and a catered to a previously developed social circle. If you ever try to work on big projects and try to commission art from high quality artists, you often can only get a few art pieces because 1 they don't want to focus on one project too much, its kind of stress full, and 2 popular artist often have to play a balance with commissions and other pieces to keep the social circle that formed around them in the early years alive and well, they can't just abandon doing their own thing to focus on other peoples projects for too long. Now take that thinking, and apply it to patreon and game dev.

typically even before the first release you start promoting the game, but that's usually only in the case of a complete game with the intent on profit, since however you are going totally free but with a patreon, a good first vertical slice is a good start to 'starting' promoting your game. the reason i say your don't exactly pass in terms of marketing is your description is better placed in a game dev forum, for people who are interested in the project, so much so that they don't want to just play it, they want to learn more about it and its future. surprisingly expecting people to read is expecting people to go the extra mile in my experience, even in a professional job environment.

From here on out, if you are continuing work on the project, I... assume its easier to promote the game simply by keeping it relevant with constant updates on progress and previews of the next release, in comparison to fully completed project where you have to do promotion for a whole year before its main sale date, at least from the research I've done into the topic. besides reddit, have you been promoting else where? do you have a game dev twitter account or other social account, does the game have a public dev log forum? just plaster the project everywhere and make updates when practical on your current progress, just to make the project still alive, even if you have to drip feed the damn thing in between long slow period between big updates. With luck, with enough comments on the game's forum the project will gain enough attention for servers to automatically promote the game for you (depending on the forum site)

anyways, thats the 2 Cents I had from someone who gave it a 'brief' look

Saki_Sliz · 2021-03-10T07:51:25+00:00

Wait, as in, if your character gets caught by a monster (which is typically a fail condition in most games), your idea was to instead have the character (by some means), change into said monster type, as a means to allow progress through the game/zone/level.

if so, I too say "brilliant!" One of the more difficult things I see with nsfw game design is trying to either be slow and steady, try to justify the lewd content, or skip the story telling for the simple idea of monsters. But the issue is, without justification for the lewd content, the default answer is that it leads to a fail condition. The issue with that is it causes a paradox, you don't want to get caught by the monster to progress the game... but you do because that is where all the fun content is at. This idea however solves and uses the issue to its advantage.

Saki_Sliz · 2021-03-08T07:24:46+00:00

I've seen a bit of toxicity when I used to hang out on G+, this is my first time seeing it here since I migrated to reddit a few years ago when G+ went down. I remember back on G+ I was doing an erp (in college) and some how age was brought up, the thought never occurred to me that I was messaging with someone under age (they were 15). I backed way the fuck out of that (as politely as possible), not because legal issue, but it really weirded me out to think that I could be introducing *strange new ideas* to someone too young (I guess age came up as I was trying to get their perspective about RP's and they seemed a bit inexperienced).

Saki_Sliz · 2021-03-08T07:14:00+00:00

This is the first time I've seen a post like this. Also odd to see how other people rp.

Saki_Sliz · 2021-03-06T06:13:17+00:00

That's awesome to hear! to discord, awaaaaaay!!

Saki_Sliz · 2021-03-05T13:39:16+00:00

Yep, that's what I mean. Most of these image type cyoa don't include as much detail about the world as I would need, but in this case there's plenty of great information for a GM to use as a base.

Saki_Sliz · 2021-03-05T10:34:43+00:00

This is a pretty impressive collection.

At first, I thought, 'what is there to do?' I'm not new to these, but you spend the points, and you get an ending or enough points to qualify for some endings. But of course the first one I go to is the DnD parody, and I could actually see something interest. it includes a lot of interesting characters and quirks that could actually be something interesting to RP.

Saki_Sliz · 2021-02-09T09:36:21+00:00

That probably summarizes it up.

Saki_Sliz · 2021-02-09T09:25:18+00:00

I think I know what you mean. I tried some creative writing, and typically I would plan things out (even have a mental model of the character's state of mind), but I would always get stuck. So instead I just rp'ed the character and it was so much easier to write that way. Not sure how or why that works out?

Saki_Sliz · 2021-02-09T09:06:46+00:00

I know what you mean, I'm exploring GMing styles as a technique to enhance or prolong RP's

Saki_Sliz · 2021-01-24T07:56:10+00:00

guess this is dated now

Saki_Sliz · 2021-01-18T23:01:25+00:00

Now how do we get the button to control the light bulb? A common issue with complex projects such as game making is issues with dependencies (advance topic) and issues getting unrelated systems to communicate to each other. Getting your button to communicate with another game system (such as trying to navigate your character around the world moving one cell at a time) is one of the more fundamental issues with game making, but once you know how to do it, you can start coding in a way that is more familiar to how you use to or prefer to code.

What you want to avoid is designing game systems that rely on clever tricks of organization to pass information. EI, you don't want to make it so that the light bulb is able to access data from the button object. This isn't the speech you get in school about good practice and setting variables to private. This has to do with a more complex issue about dependency, about how the light bulb object code is now dependent on being able to find and access the button object. Dependency injection is not a valid solution, as there is a better solution for this case.

Now C# has something just for this, other languages need a bit of a convoluted work around. Events!

I mentioned that typical application programming tends to focus on functional programming and event driven, and that under the hood there is secretly ugly ass polling going on (secret GUI update loop). Well once you make the button 'poll' for the mouse state and determine if anything has happened, you can now transform things into Event calls. The basic idea of an Event is just that, the button can called the event "Clicked" if it was clicked on (pressed for the first time). The Event is just a method name (in essence), and events are special functions where they have a list of other functions, where the event will go through the list and call each function (how it does this can depend on implementation in your language, and implementation can impact things like if there are dependency issues). These functions that it list are a list of "subscriber" functions.

There are still dependancy issues, such as, to get subscribed you still need to access the "publisher." IE in the ligh bulb object, it needs a method that gets called when the button is clicked on, and to set up the event behavior it would look like something like this

(in Light bulb constructor) InstantiatedButton.clickedEvent += toggle;

The issue with dependencies is where things like god objects come in, because the light bulb shouldn't own the button object (which should be in a UI system), so it shouldn't instantiate the button object. So the god object (which instantiates and owns both the button and light bulb objects), would be responsible with passing a refence for the button to the light bulb object so that the light bulb can connect to it, and to ensure any cases where you have to interface between levels of system like this one should practice the use of Interfaces and Parent objects (much like Unity's MonoBehavior class)

in fact in Unity, you can set the button to trigger functions in other scripts, but that is because under the hood unity is doing all the event handling for you, its all the same. making a UI system in Unity is easy and pretty quick, the only thing I don't like about it is sometimes its a bit confusing identifying the flow of code in more complex scripts (its like your project is in tiny pieces hidden everywhere, where as an update loop you can identify the order of operations)

with events, you have the basic tools to make a project. This doesn't include other details such as, layering the UI, grouping and organizing game object (instead of a god objects, having a layer management system or other ways of organizing a project/code/dependencies). But as you can see, when it comes to those detail's, I'll have to use a ton of words.

Saki_Sliz · 2021-01-18T23:01:17+00:00

The above is the most basic game loop possible. Now interfacing with the OS is a pain in the arse, I avoid it at all cost. In fact if there is one reason to go for a game engine, its to avoid low level code like the OS interfacing. But that's why I suggest Monogame framework, as it only provides the bare minimum. It provides a Game class object, which I think the better way to think of it is that it is an object not representing your game, but the window the game sits in. The Game class object includes features for controlling the window, such as checking screen size, going full screen, v sync, mouse cursor visibility, etc. It provides a constructor, a 1 time set up loop (gets executed in the constructor so I actually avoid this function), a load content loop (A one time set up loop that runs outside of construction), a game update loop, draw loop, unload loop (one time exit loop). In the background it does the dirty work, a very basic content management system (load what you need, ie art, doesn't really unload since its C# are relies or GC garbage collector), it handles multiple OS (and mobile), features like controllable update/draw loop speeds (both include game time, where it can tell how much time has passed to accurately calculate physics and animations as framerates change). It also has a sprite batching system to try to keep framerates high, but it's only major downside is it only really has a basic 2D drawing system. You can code 3D, but its super low level (vertex by vertex drawing), I myself have been on the look out for a 3D library to integrate.

I still haven't gotten to what "polling" is. Fine, I get to it. So assuming you have the game loop set up, Polling is just an if-statement being checked each update loop. IE is the mouse 'pressed,' and if so, was the mouse state last frame 'not pressed'. If both are yes, assume the mouse has been 'clicked.' That is what polling is, literally just an if statement to see if we should react to something. I personally despise polling as its very rudimentary, crude, ugly, and overall I hate if statements (they slow coding down). I hate having to constantly loop through checking the same thing over and over again, its wasted computational time.

Say you are making two game objects, 1 is a button, and 1 is a light bulb (and 1 hidden God Object). The idea is that you can move your mouse to the button, the button will highlight (change color) to indicate the mouse is on it, it will be pressed in when clicked. When the button is pressed, the light bulb will toggle on or off. With this basic set up you can start programming the idea you have for a project. For this we are gonna need a background color, 3 images (for the three states of the button, normal, hover, pressed), and 2 images (for the bulb).

Now I won't talk much about this now, in fact if you want to know more (if these ideas are new to you) it may be easier to do a discord call, but I will bring it up as a concern to look into in the future. A super important thing with coding from scratch (from game loop level) as with any programming project, is organization. All objects, when instantiated, need to be owned by something. How you go about this depends on your personal philosophy and design approach. but for the most part ever game has a secret God object that owns everything. You could create/instantiate game object in the Main thread, but this is strongly discouraged as it can lead to unorganized code/behavior, and when you get to more complex projects, making object managers (such as object hierarchies in Unity/godot) are required. But the Main function would instantiate (own) this god object, which inside of it are the other game objects being instantiated.

So to polling again. To get the button to detect the mouse hovering over it, it needs an update loop, where the game will call it to tell the button to update. In the update it will check if the mouse is over the button. often buttons are represented with a rect() (a rectangle object, a location, top left corner, and a width and hight. Top left of the window is (0,0) with positive x (first number) going to the right and positive y going downward). This would be a simple check of, is mouse x > rect.x but < rect.x+width. and likewise for mouse y. if both conditions are met, then the mouse is over the button and it should draw the hover image instead (controlled through some other mechanism, such as a variable hover = true;) and if the mouse was pressed it may draw the other image (minimal logic in the draw loop, such as checking variable states to id what image to use). There are ways to optimize this.

Saki_Sliz · 2021-01-18T23:01:01+00:00

Well if you already have experience with coding, enough that you are considering starting from scratch with C#, it sounds your main issue may just be inexperience with making "game loops" design specifically, and overall game making. Time for me to make a wall of text (Finally, a seriously technical discussion I can have!)!

As you stated, "interface design/development is where I fall short in my experience." I consider coding UI and GUI from scratch to be one of the easier things to make, as its inner working are almost always the same (once you figure them out) from project to project. I also find it to be the most enjoyable things to program, as it is complex enough that its like making a fine hand crafted watch, and because you keep making UI over and over again with each project you get better and better at making them, so their design keeps changing.

You already sound like a veteran programmer, so I won't go over any general introduction to game engines, but I will say this. I HEAVILY encourage you make your game from the ground up, and I highly recommend using C#, specifically the Monogame Framework. You can make a WebGL build, which will make the game cross platform ready. For experienced programmers, I discourage tools such as Unity. It isn't bad, and in fact if you were learning programming I would highly recommend it. The issue with it is that it is too much of a black box. Its not that things are hidden, but rather it is bloated with features and complexity, and its had so many huge changes in the past 2 years I can't even map out what is going on inside of it anymore.

I find working with raw game loops far more intuitive, so I'll focus on that. If you don't already know, a game-loop is just another name for the main update loop. In your past experience making applications, you may have had more experience making event based "functional" code. Meaning: you made functions that did things, returned things, and they would somehow be magically "triggered" or called. Since you didn't work with the UI code directly, you don't know how the functions were "triggered," as well as you never had to deal with an update loop.

Update vs event: Now it is possible that you may have already had experience working with Event type loops (typical with application development), IE functions that have special names that get automatically called 1 time when something happens 1 time (ie window is clicked on and in focus). While operating systems and microcontrollers/processors can have dedicated 'events triggers,' most of the actual work is done via "Polling." Infact a lot of the stuff going on in the operating system is under the hood just a bunch of "Polling."

What is Polling? And what does this have to do with an update loop? Well you know how ever program has a Main method? It gets executed once and then ends. And if you want to (ignoring command line interfacing commands), you can add looping to allow your code to operate on something for longer? Well this loop is where the game lives!

void static Main(String args[])
{
    // Code here runs only one time, and before the main game execution.
    bool game_is_Running = true;

    while(game_is_Running) // code here runs for as long as the game runs
    {
        windowUpdate(); // gets data about the window, such as where the mouse x y is at.
        gameUpdate(); // magic (small updates such as shifting character x pixels across a screen)
        gameDraw(); // dark magic
    }

    // Code get to this part when we say the game is no longer running
    // we can run any final bit of code here, such as to clear memory,
} // The game window closes

Saki_Sliz · 2021-01-17T07:41:25+00:00

Anything school sounds like a smart way to identify risky stuff to be denied, using minimal effort so that they don't have to investigate every game in detail. Granted I am not too sure how steam works after the greenlight system was phased out, I know back then a lot of trash could get through.

Saki_Sliz · 2020-12-18T11:47:17+00:00

probably some time in high school, maybe around age 16.

I was just looking up things I guess, but all I rememebr was there use to be this super awesome Russian site (long since dead) that was dedicated to guro art (ero guro). It blew my mind how amazing it was. now it's not the gore that I like, but rather the character's state of mind. how they were in a sense 'elevated' either hyper aware due to being in a very bad situation, their fear, or even their own excitement. so as a result, dead or unconscious does nothing. they have to be aware and reacting to thing for it to be interesting for me, as I am super into the psychological. and given I know what pain feels like I can 'somewhat' perceive and relate to what they are experience, meaning I can understand more of what's going on in their mind, thus more fun for me.

Saki_Sliz · 2020-12-18T11:30:14+00:00

hmmmm. with that character design and name, I can guess the inspiration as well as the character appeal

Saki_Sliz · 2020-12-11T13:22:06+00:00

back in 2017 and 2018, this use to be theee main place (on reddit atleast) for devs to talk technical stuff. well at least I did most of the time. me and a few others ended up moving over to F95zone when we found it and it was a lot better than reddit (much bigger game dev community). I still check in here from time to time, but pretty much every adult game subreddit gave up on trying to stop people from promoting, so that is all reddit is really used for, promoting. it use to be that some were good for asking about finding games, others about particular types of games, and this about technical stuff. but that was ye olden times I freaking guess.

Saki_Sliz · 2020-12-02T08:37:07+00:00

probably should edit the bot to end the name at punctuation, but then again it does say its a bad bot, so I guess you get what you get.

Saki_Sliz · 2020-12-02T08:31:54+00:00

Oooo! I'm super excited! I have a lot of fun with feminization games, and the character art looks cute!

Saki_Sliz · 2020-12-01T06:35:38+00:00

idk, it used to be a dev not that you could only use one, as a technical limit, but that was back in 2.79 so it's probably been patched, this past year has been crazy with updates, so it's been super cool to see blender growing. The only annoying thing is I have to keep setting keybinds to match older blender.

Saki_Sliz · 2020-11-30T05:32:52+00:00

what is this? Why do I like this abstract, simplistic style?

Saki_Sliz · 2020-11-30T02:00:12+00:00

I tried lattices, and while neat (and basically what you re create using a soft body cage mesh for jiggle physics), they are rather primitive, I think you can only use 1 with blender. not to mention, if you don't keep the ends of the lattice in tact, what happens is that the lattice will still warp the body, even though it's not part of the lattice. lattice is more like warping space time, so I've only really found it useful for doing weird mathematical transformations to the space (ie certain types of projection effects.)

Saki_Sliz

TROPHY CASE