VN Ren'Py Broken Victory [v0.1] [ShlongWrangler]

[shlongwrangler]

Overview:

Welcome to my game.

The year is 2021 1945, the world is in shambles, and Maria Akrapovic returns from the war against the Germans as a highly decorated fighter pilot. She joins the staff of nurses at a mental ward for war veterans, only to find that the war may be over, but her personal fight for survival is not.

Facing a mixture of envy and distrust in a fragile micro cosmos she realizes immediately that her old life means nothing in her new one, and that she has to work her way up and work around obstacles aplenty.

You have the option to play things in a variety of ways, and you will be faced with choices you would rather have avoided, to make it through the days - and nights. You will be exposed to people who may as well be inmates themselves, and inmates who seem like they have their head in the right place.

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Thread Updated: 2021-09-10
Release Date: 2021-09-10
Developer: ShlongWrangler

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Version: 0.1
OS: PC LINUX MAC
Language: English
Length: The game contains 345 dialogue blocks, containing 6,510 words and 33,306
characters, for an average of 18.9 words and 97 characters per block.
Genre:

Spoiler

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Installation:

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[shlongwrangler]

What I have done so far, just in case anyone's curious how much work goes into making one of these games:

• Set up the game project folder (game script, characters, locations, scenes and vehicles folders)
• Backed up everything to a GIT repository that lives inside a mapped Google Drive folder, I ain't losing no progress on this game.
• Created script files for the individual chapters, as well as all variables, characters, choices made in the game.
• Written chapter 1, then rewritten it extensively. I lost track of how many hours went just into the writing, phew.
• Chapter 2 is pretty much mapped out, only a few scenes missing to be actually written.
• Chapter 3-6 exist inside my head and are partly written out, or at least scaffolded inside actual script files.
• Collected all the necessary assets that fit the post-war-soviet-vibe, which is not exactly easy when most of DAZ content is anything but historically accurate.
• Created 15 different characters, and 25 different locations (so far).
• Set up 75 unique scenes for chapter 1 (plus 30 for chapter 2), many of them with up to four different camera angles. Manfriday, I love you for making this queueing tool, it makes my life a pleasure instead of pain.
• Fixed like a million little bugs on the rendered images, I HATE how DAZ thinks that if you disable the dress it should still display the dress buttons. FFS DAZ, who hurt you to be like this?
• At one point I got pissed about render resolution getting messed up and wrote a complete debugger in Python that basically does what RenPy Lint does, only better. Tells me undefined and unused variables, images that have the wrong resolution, images that exist inside the image folder but aren't used in the game files, and referenced images that do not exist inside the images folder. Soooooo useful to keep track of a project even in the early stages, let alone later on. It also tells me if a variable or image is merely misspelled, but exists under a similar name. This is a life saver as well.
• Set up the Patreon profile (shameless plug:
  You must be registered to see the links
  ) and obsessed over the right tier images, descriptions, patron bonuses.
• Set up like twenty dozen two hundred social media profiles, to reserve names and post game updates / still renders over time.
• I think that's it?

 

[GingerSweetGirl]

A very interesting topic! I'll be sure to keep my eye on this. I know that I had some concerns about the title before, but looks like that ship has sailed. This sounds like an extremely ambitious effort with a complex story. I'll be sure to give the first chapter a try when it's released.

 

[shlongwrangler]

A very interesting topic! I'll be sure to keep my eye on this. I know that I had some concerns about the title before, but looks like that ship has sailed. This sounds like an extremely ambitious effort with a complex story. I'll be sure to give the first chapter a try when it's released.

Thank you! I have so many ideas for this game that I need to make sure to keep myself in check and finish one storyline before adding another haha Some cool stuff coming up I think.

 

[GingerSweetGirl]

A few suggestions:

1. You may want to reconsider your tier names. Long Schlong Silver is clever enough, but I'm not sure the other two connect with the audience. Not a big deal, but if you get enough patrons it could be confusing and cumbersome when they discuss the tiers. Adjusting the names is basically a User Interface improvement.
2. The pictures for the tiers aren't really helpful. You may want to consider different ones.
3. Is that German in bullet points of the tiers? Is that critical information you're trying to share?
4. Let's be honest, most of your players will be men and they probably need to see more of the MC. You may want to consider finding a way to showcase her more.

I had my own Patreon for awhile, so I sympathize because it's a pain in the ass to set everything up. The process is simple enough, but doing it right is difficult.

 

[shlongwrangler]

A few suggestions:

1. You may want to reconsider your tier names. Long Schlong Silver is clever enough, but I'm not sure the other two connect with the audience. Not a big deal, but if you get enough patrons it could be confusing and cumbersome when they discuss the tiers. Adjusting the names is basically a User Interface improvement.
2. The pictures for the tiers aren't really helpful. You may want to consider different ones.
3. Is that German in bullet points of the tiers? Is that critical information you're trying to share?
4. Let's be honest, most of your players will be men and they probably need to see more of the MC. You may want to consider finding a way to showcase her more.

I had my own Patreon for awhile, so I sympathize because it's a pain in the ass to set everything up. The process is simple enough, but doing it right is difficult.

Thank you, those are all very helpful! I have only done minimal work on the Patreon page so far until the last renders were queued up, I'll get working on it as soon as possible. Also, that is very annoying that the Patreon tier descriptions are actually in German, that is what they recommended and I thought they would surely display as English for international audiences

 

[GingerSweetGirl]

It isn't fully in German, here's what I see for the Schlong Before Everyone Else tier(see how cumbersome that is?):


You support, I write next month's story instalment full of twisted twists and twisting fingers.

You get early access to the new chapters one week before they are released to the first tier.

• Frühzeitiger Zugang zu Inhalten
• Zugang zur kompletten Sammlung
  
  

 

[shlongwrangler]

Alright, last night's renders look surprisingly good, I haven't found a single major flaw with any of them (though some are on their fifth iteration ). That means I can lay some finishing touches on the game and figure out how / where to upload the files, probably on the weekend where I have more than a few hours of time.

In the meantime I have started working on the renders for chapter 2 as far as I can at this point, the writing is still WIP but I have enough scenes ready to where I know what's gonna happen.

I also fixed the Patreon page and made it all a little bit cleaner, and went through chapter 1 and did some playtesting to play all the options that I normally don't choose to see if they match expectations.

Here are a few more renders from last night's batch:

 

[Mimir's Lab]

There's a lot of clipping with your characters' hands in some of the scenes. The one with the nurses also has one nurse's shoes stuck in the ground. You'll want to make sure to iron out obvious issues like that or else people will give you shit for it when your game's out.

 

[GingerSweetGirl]

I think they look pretty good, but I did see the clipping issue with the shoes. Also, there are some sort of strange dots over the MC in the pic of her in front of the mirror. They look like they're supposed to be buttons from her uniform.

 

[Deleted member 3917737]

Yeah, I noticed the clipping issues too and those white dots that GingerSweetGirl mentioned


The guy's right hand is clipping through his pants.




Looking from left to the right, the 4th girls shoe is clipping into the floor.




and here are the white dots as mentioned that are on the MC.

 

[MissFortune]

Yeah, I noticed the clipping issues too and those white dots that GingerSweetGirl mentioned


The guy's right hand is clipping through his pants.

View attachment 1395490


Looking from left to the right, the 4th girls shoe is clipping into the floor.

View attachment 1395491


and here are the white dots as mentioned that are on the MC.


View attachment 1395492

The button one is a fairly easy fix with Photoshop and the Content-Aware Fill tool, actually. Also ran it through Camera Raw just because.

 

[Deleted member 3917737]

The button one is a fairly easy fix with Photoshop and the Content-Aware Fill tool, actually. Also ran it through Camera Raw because the lack of any post irking just because.

Woah! you fixed it that fast? my goodness O.O you are brilliant!

 

[MissFortune]

Woah! you fixed it that fast? my goodness O.O you are brilliant!

I wish I was.

It's not especially difficult with Photoshop, honestly. In cases like this, it's basically just drawing a circle (in this case, at least) around the buttons (and then shadows) with the regular lasso tool, right-clicking, and selecting Content-Aware Fill on the submenu that pops up.

 

[Deleted member 3917737]

I wish I was.

You wish you were? I mean, there's proof of it. You easily got rid of the white dots very quickly, you're also making your own game (or second game, since you do have that HTML one too) you have a lovely WWJK game page (which has lovely banner art that you made for it, the one that is behind the tags on top and the one in the post) you have beautiful character models & location sets in your game. You clearly know many awesome things and you seem to be very talented with what you know. So, yes, you are brilliant x3 Sorry, I just wanted to let you know how good you are ^^ definitely deserve more Patreons.

To be honest, I barely understand what you just said xD I never used photoshop so, all those details are flying over my head >.< I am just here nodding like, "yesh, go on, tell me moar" lmao! You sound like an excellent teacher though one that would give the best advice for game making, editing and such. I didn't mean to go off-topic here, so I am sorry.

 

[shlongwrangler]

There's a lot of clipping with your characters' hands in some of the scenes. The one with the nurses also has one nurse's shoes stuck in the ground. You'll want to make sure to iron out obvious issues like that or else people will give you shit for it when your game's out.

Thank you for noticing, I looked at so many renders in the past few days that I'm starting to miss things. I'll clean those up and see if there are any others.

I think they look pretty good, but I did see the clipping issue with the shoes. Also, there are some sort of strange dots over the MC in the pic of her in front of the mirror. They look like they're supposed to be buttons from her uniform.

It seems that I missed the buttons in this image, I thought I had fixed all the renders that had that. Imagine how I annoyed I was when I had like ten naked renders that all had those stupid buttons, I hate how daz thinks that if you disable the dress the buttons should still be visible -.-

The button one is a fairly easy fix with Photoshop and the Content-Aware Fill tool, actually. Also ran it through Camera Raw just because.

View attachment 1395498

There is also the Bandage tool or whatever it is called, that may be even faster. But I'll fix the scene and render again instead, otherwise I'll just have the same issue again.

 

[MissFortune]

There is also the Bandage tool or whatever it is called, that may be even faster. But I'll fix the scene and render again instead, otherwise I'll just have the same issue again.

Oh, for sure. Whatever works for you is obviously best. With Photoshop, there's usually several ways of achieving the same result on any one thing. Lasso+Conent-Aware is just the fastest for me when it comes to poke through or of the like on renders.

 

[shlongwrangler]

Oh by the way, I wrote a little script last night that cleans up the game folder and deletes all savegames and caches and so on that could mess up the game during the build or that just aren't necessary to share. Just place it at the top level of your project (so on the same level as your game folder)
Remove the entries you don't need, and put it into a powershell script file like "release_script.ps1"

Remove-Item .\characters -Recurse
Remove-Item .\scenes -Recurse
Remove-Item .\locations -Recurse
Remove-Item .\.vscode -Recurse
Remove-Item .\errors.txt
Remove-Item .\log.txt
Remove-Item .\autocorrect.ahk
Remove-Item .\.gitignore -Recurse
Remove-Item .\game\saves -Recurse
Remove-Item .\game\cache -Recurse
Get-ChildItem *.rpyc -Recurse | foreach { Remove-Item -Path $_.FullName }

 

[shlongwrangler]

Alright, unless I messed something up the demo / first chapter is now live, what a behemoth of a project haha. Please let me know if you find any issues, and of course how you like the game so far. While I have all sorts of automated tests and playtested it all manually myself I have been a programmer for too long to think that any piece of software is ever released bug-free.

 

[MissFortune]

Alright, unless I messed something up the demo / first chapter is now live, what a behemoth of a project haha. Please let me know if you find any issues, and of course how you like the game so far. While I have all sorts of automated tests and playtested it all manually myself I have been a programmer for too long to think that any piece of software is ever released bug-free.

I think you might've posted it in the wrong area. You should probably post it in the game requests forum, so you can get some extra exposure out of it on the "Latest Updates" page. Your formatting in the OP seems fine, aside from being center aligned (should be left-aligned.).

My goal with this game is to create an experience you'll remember, and a game you'll play more than once.

You should probably create a "Developer Notes" portion for this bit as it's just more fitting.