VN Ren'Py California Bound: Yet another advice and feedback thread.

I've started creating a hybrid visual novel/RPG in RenPy called California Bound.
California Bound is the story of Emily who leaves home after graduating high school and travels to California to chase her dream of becoming a movie star. In this story, your decisions decide what fate is in store for Emily. Will she become a star or something else entirely?

While the overall arc tells the Emily's story with character building, moral arguments, and plot points found in a novel; the game play consists of mini role play elements as you help Emily find a place to live, get a job, make friends, and earn enough money to chase her dreams. While chance has a major effect on your actions, Emily's attributes and skills also greatly effect the outcome of her actions.

The story starts with Emily standing at the bus stop with no job, no place to stay, and $50 cash. Emily has to manage her hunger and exhaustion to avoid an early game bad ending.

Genre: BDSM, Corruption, Female Protagonist, Prostitution, Seduction

Gameplay

• Visual Novel story progression.
• RPG attributes and skills effect game play and available choices.
• Loaded with scene specific mini games to improve skills and discover special events.
• Powered by RenPy engine.
• HD (1080p) 3D rendered graphics and animated sequences.

Planned Features

• Multi-chapter plot arcs with a huge cast of characters.
• Stats, skills, and monetary system driving plot arcs forward.
• Hunger and exhaustion system driving you to seek accommodations and food.
• Dating System

My questions are:

• I was thinking of rendering each scene from the point of view of the active character. Normally this will be from Emily's viewpoint; however, some submissive scenes will be rendered from the dominant character's point of view. This will impact how nudity is shown as Emily has a limited view of herself. Thoughts on the immersion benefits or do you think 3rd person overview of the scene is better?
• The RPG aspect consists of scene specific mini games such as working as a waitress and serving customers. This means that the outcome is impacted by random chance and Emily's attributes more than what the play selects from the menu of choices. First, some choices are display or hidden based on the calculation where improving skills and attributes may make the choice more likely to be visible but not definite. second, the outcome of player choice isn't decide this that happens, calculations happen to determine the actual outcome. For example, the waitress mini game in the coffee shop has 8 base potential events with 7 potential customers. Each event is selected randomly with more positive events influenced by waitress skill, appearance, and charisma. The customers each have a relationship level that is impacted by entire interactions. These come together to decide the actual scripted event flow. Within each event the previous variables plus Emily's corruption and submission attributes determine what choices are available and the outcome. Continued replay can bring another skill, prostitution, into play opening up additional events and potentially adding more choices to the existing events. All of this is because the play will spend significant time each day redoing the same action to earn money. Thoughts?
• Animation... I know this is popular; however, I can't afford the hardware at the moment to make this realistically possible. A single 30 second scene will take me over 45 hours to render at HD. I did test rendering of sprite overlays and didn't like the look and feel. I can either animate the scenes with lower quality renders or hold off and add animation later. Do you think beta players would prefer to wait high quality HD animations or accept the immersive jarring between HD static scenes and low quality animations if they come earlier in the beta development?
• Choice. I've decided not to hold off on corrupting, submission, prostitution choices until later in the game. It's possible to be a moderately corrupted prostitute on the first day; however, this will impact long term choices later in the game. In the worst case, it's possible to become a submissive pet within the first week where the rendered point of view shifts to the dominant owner. At this point you passively watch what your owner decides to make you do with your own interactive choices being how you respond. I was going to have these paths be early bad end scenes; however, for reading feedback in other threads that show a dislike for bad endings, I've decided instead to have this become an extend mini game that pauses the visual novel element. The mini game consists of resisting enough to lower your submission attribute enough that escape menu choices become available.

Anyway, looking for feedback and advice in general about what can improve my game.

notsonoble said:

I have mixed feelings about switching from first person pov to third person pov. I get annoyed when VNs do it but sometimes its done well and I hardly notice. In my opinion, I would stick to third person but admittingly adding an extra person to render in the scene can take you longer to produce as a developer so keep that in mind.

Click to expand...

Yes, it's a hard decision to make. I tried switching between first and third and it was jarring. I either want to do all first person or all third person. I thought a compromise was to switch the first person character to the person who is actively making the decisions in the scene. This way its still shown from the point of view of the active character with dialog and rendering making it clear that the view is from the other's point of view.

So far, I've been able to keep first person via the use of reflections in objects such as mirrors, glass windows, etc. It's still too early to know if it will pan out. Has anyone seen other games that pulled off the first person view successfully?

suo_mynona said:

So far, I've been able to keep first person via the use of reflections in objects such as mirrors, glass windows, etc. It's still too early to know if it will pan out. Has anyone seen other games that pulled off the first person view successfully?

Click to expand...

Here is an example of trying to stay within first person view but still give glimpses of the main character via reflections. I like how this really puts you in the shoes of someone stripping down and showering in some seedy back room; however, it isn't the full eye catcher that a third person view of the same scene would have.

I've done a few scene renders for update 0.0.2 and I'm starting to like the first person look.

I've rigged each of my models with a camera in the right eye. This way I can switch between each actors view depending on the who is speaking the dialog.

Of course sex scenes are hard to find the right shot.


Still too early to know if will work but it's forcing me to think about the scene and how to pose for the render. It's forcing me to focus on the story versus the get together and fuck.

WeRLegion said:

So her advice is to stick to 1st person cause the difference between a good and a great game, is in which degree you are able to imagine being in your protagonists shoes. And most important: more story is WAYYY more important than animations.

Click to expand...

I've been exploring this concept for several reasons. The first is feedback I've received for the first person renders to date. While I want to take advice to help me tell a better story, I still want to tell the story I want to tell. There is a vocal group that wants to see Emily from the outside in. That could be a third person viewpoint; however, I feel that will take away from the story I want to tell. The second is that I've been struggling to tell the story from just Emily's viewpoint. There are too many important things happening that Emily isn't aware of that I feel will enrich the story to make the player aware of before Emily finds out. While a plot twist may be a surprise to Emily, I want decisions made by the player to be made knowing the impact. I hate games where the player feels the need to save at every choice just in case it ends up being a bad one. I've decided to address this in two ways. The first is introducing a red text choice where the plot will branch so the player knows that they only need to save at those points to see all paths. The second is to switch the points of view between characters so that I can give the player information that Emily isn't aware of.

So that's the reasoning why I've decided to not use an omniscient third person viewpoint in any of my scene renders. All renders will be from a first person viewpoint that changes depending on the dialog text viewpoint.

If you go to the main game thread, you can follow along with what I've been experimenting with.