- Jun 1, 2017
- 240
- 318
It was an easter egg from FM when Lucas was talking with the bouncer about dubstep. I didn't actually realize it was her until she "kinda" confirmed it on the lagoon.
- Thread starter N7
- Start date
- Jun 27, 2017
- 165
- 147
- Nov 24, 2018
- 1,004
- 4,942
Hello folks. The lagoon has been slowly drying up, so I've decided to check this place out. I just read this thread and will respond to some of the comments, but I'm here to answer questions, etc. now.
(My god, is there any way to make the ads stop wiggling while I'm trying to type?)
Episodes:
It was an interesting experiment. The cynical among you probably assume it was a greedy attempt at a Patron grab, but that's only partially true. I was trying to please my patrons (and certainly wouldn't turn down getting more) but my original thought was that, in the past, we always "went dark" for 6-9 months and then released a game. People didn't like that. And these are people who are willing to give Mortze and I their hard-earned money to tell them stories. I wanted to do better for them. I wanted to be more engaged with my fans. So I thought that releasing something monthly would help with that. (And, in fact, I ended up releasing two things a month.) In my past, I was a novelist (no, I won't tell you who), and while standard novels were good and all, I once did a high frequency serial that was engaging and a ton of fun. That was my model for the episodes.
Did it work? Ish? We've successfully released an episode on the first of the month for 9 months straight. We're hard at work on DF5 and it's coming down to the wire, but we're close. So, we didn't fall into the patreon trap of not delivering what we promised. But, did it make things better? I'm not sure. I hear your feedback, especially the early feedback from the first few "setup" episodes, and understand it. And, an extreme downside for me is that the main thing I enjoy about writing these games is reading the conversations people have around them. There's no question that episodes took that away from me. As the content dribbles out, the commentary dribbles in.
I'm not ready to discuss our future plans, but I will say that I'm trying to learn from this experience and get better.
Multiple Concurrent Stories:
So why alternate between episodes of Coming to Grips With Christine and Darkness Falls? The simple answer is that I've done a lot of erotic dating games. And there are only so many ways you can tell the "Boy meets girl and convinces her to have sex with him" story. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to do Darkness Falls. But, I know that's not what my fans really want. So I took a page out of Arnold Schwarzenegger's movies in the 80's and early 90's. His fans wanted more "Running Man." He wanted to do "Kindergarten Cop." So he alternated between action movies and comedies. My thought was that, even if you didn't really want to follow a crime drama, you only had to wait another month to get more sex with Christine.
Did it work? Ish? There are people who really enjoy DF, and that's immensely gratifying. And in aggregate, I didn't lose too many fans by doing it. (Although, every time I post an Ad for the release of a CtGwC episode on the lagoon, I get an influx of patrons, but, not surprisingly, that doesn't happen with DF.) But it's definitely taken its toll on me. I've been juggling three storylines (DF, CtGwC, and a monthly text-only episodic story called "AAA") and the release schedule has been burning me out. I have a 50 hour/week day job, and I spend another 10-15 hours every week working on these stories on top of that. I've been getting closer and closer to missing a deadline, and it's been causing a lot of stress. CtGwC Ep5 which released November 1st was the end of that story. DF5, which hopefully will release on December 1st is the end of the first "Season." And AAA10, which hopefully will release on December 15th is the end of that story. I'm definitely not going to stop. But, for my sanity's sake, after these I'm going to change things to reduce the release pressure.
Grainy Pictures:
(Subtext "Why aren't you greedy bastards spending some of your patron money to buy better hardware?") We have been. Mortze has a machine with two of the fastest Nvidia cards you can buy in it. The challenge is iRay vs 3Dlight. Up until Redemption for Jessika, Mortze rendered in a CPU based renderer called 3Dlight. It made clean (non-Grainy) images with unrealistic lighting. Starting with Finding Miranda, he switched to an Nvidia technology called iRay which makes much more life-like shadows and lighting, that really looks great, but is significantly harder to render. It results in images that, we believe look much better, but that, if not left to render for hours on end, can look "grainy." It's a tradeoff we made intentionally, but we hear the complaints. The real tradeoff, though, is in how we do our games. Most games have static backgrounds and a small number of character foregrounds. That lets them do a large game with around 150 images. Mortze does a different image for each page, resulting in our games having roughly 10 times as many images as typical. While it's reasonable for a game with 100 images to render each of them for 8 hours to remove the graininess, it's not reasonable to do that with 1000 images. We could go to a model of fewer, less grainy images, but that's not how we want to tell our stories. We understand that the graininess turns off some potential fans, but until GPUs get faster, this is how we'll operate.
Above I originally typed that I'd "briefly" respond. I just deleted the "briefly." (-:
Anyway, I hope this gives you some insight into how we came to the decisions we did. I don't expect you to like them, but it would be good if you understood them.
Tlaero
(My god, is there any way to make the ads stop wiggling while I'm trying to type?)
Episodes:
It was an interesting experiment. The cynical among you probably assume it was a greedy attempt at a Patron grab, but that's only partially true. I was trying to please my patrons (and certainly wouldn't turn down getting more) but my original thought was that, in the past, we always "went dark" for 6-9 months and then released a game. People didn't like that. And these are people who are willing to give Mortze and I their hard-earned money to tell them stories. I wanted to do better for them. I wanted to be more engaged with my fans. So I thought that releasing something monthly would help with that. (And, in fact, I ended up releasing two things a month.) In my past, I was a novelist (no, I won't tell you who), and while standard novels were good and all, I once did a high frequency serial that was engaging and a ton of fun. That was my model for the episodes.
Did it work? Ish? We've successfully released an episode on the first of the month for 9 months straight. We're hard at work on DF5 and it's coming down to the wire, but we're close. So, we didn't fall into the patreon trap of not delivering what we promised. But, did it make things better? I'm not sure. I hear your feedback, especially the early feedback from the first few "setup" episodes, and understand it. And, an extreme downside for me is that the main thing I enjoy about writing these games is reading the conversations people have around them. There's no question that episodes took that away from me. As the content dribbles out, the commentary dribbles in.
I'm not ready to discuss our future plans, but I will say that I'm trying to learn from this experience and get better.
Multiple Concurrent Stories:
So why alternate between episodes of Coming to Grips With Christine and Darkness Falls? The simple answer is that I've done a lot of erotic dating games. And there are only so many ways you can tell the "Boy meets girl and convinces her to have sex with him" story. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to do Darkness Falls. But, I know that's not what my fans really want. So I took a page out of Arnold Schwarzenegger's movies in the 80's and early 90's. His fans wanted more "Running Man." He wanted to do "Kindergarten Cop." So he alternated between action movies and comedies. My thought was that, even if you didn't really want to follow a crime drama, you only had to wait another month to get more sex with Christine.
Did it work? Ish? There are people who really enjoy DF, and that's immensely gratifying. And in aggregate, I didn't lose too many fans by doing it. (Although, every time I post an Ad for the release of a CtGwC episode on the lagoon, I get an influx of patrons, but, not surprisingly, that doesn't happen with DF.) But it's definitely taken its toll on me. I've been juggling three storylines (DF, CtGwC, and a monthly text-only episodic story called "AAA") and the release schedule has been burning me out. I have a 50 hour/week day job, and I spend another 10-15 hours every week working on these stories on top of that. I've been getting closer and closer to missing a deadline, and it's been causing a lot of stress. CtGwC Ep5 which released November 1st was the end of that story. DF5, which hopefully will release on December 1st is the end of the first "Season." And AAA10, which hopefully will release on December 15th is the end of that story. I'm definitely not going to stop. But, for my sanity's sake, after these I'm going to change things to reduce the release pressure.
Grainy Pictures:
(Subtext "Why aren't you greedy bastards spending some of your patron money to buy better hardware?") We have been. Mortze has a machine with two of the fastest Nvidia cards you can buy in it. The challenge is iRay vs 3Dlight. Up until Redemption for Jessika, Mortze rendered in a CPU based renderer called 3Dlight. It made clean (non-Grainy) images with unrealistic lighting. Starting with Finding Miranda, he switched to an Nvidia technology called iRay which makes much more life-like shadows and lighting, that really looks great, but is significantly harder to render. It results in images that, we believe look much better, but that, if not left to render for hours on end, can look "grainy." It's a tradeoff we made intentionally, but we hear the complaints. The real tradeoff, though, is in how we do our games. Most games have static backgrounds and a small number of character foregrounds. That lets them do a large game with around 150 images. Mortze does a different image for each page, resulting in our games having roughly 10 times as many images as typical. While it's reasonable for a game with 100 images to render each of them for 8 hours to remove the graininess, it's not reasonable to do that with 1000 images. We could go to a model of fewer, less grainy images, but that's not how we want to tell our stories. We understand that the graininess turns off some potential fans, but until GPUs get faster, this is how we'll operate.
Above I originally typed that I'd "briefly" respond. I just deleted the "briefly." (-:
Anyway, I hope this gives you some insight into how we came to the decisions we did. I don't expect you to like them, but it would be good if you understood them.
Tlaero
- Aug 5, 2016
- 820
- 1,193
nice to see you here tlaero.. ive used lagoon before but i do agree with you.... i think you will find a more active comunity here 
- Jun 27, 2017
- 165
- 147
Hey its Tlaero. Glad you finally found this site. I'm already following you guys on Patreon but I first discovered your games on this site. Hope to see you guys on here more. Two questions tho, any plans for a Pandora sequel? And how do you pronouce Tlaero?
- Nov 24, 2018
- 1,004
- 4,942
Hi folks. It's good to see people I know and nice to meet new people.
Ivan, I'm not ready to announce our upcoming plans yet, but we are definitely not done telling the Pandora story...
As for the pronunciation of my name. In my head, it's "Tah lair oh"
Tlaero
Ivan, I'm not ready to announce our upcoming plans yet, but we are definitely not done telling the Pandora story...
As for the pronunciation of my name. In my head, it's "Tah lair oh"
Tlaero
- Jun 27, 2017
- 165
- 147
Lol thks for clearing that up for me, always thought maybe the T or L was silent.
Also no rush on Pandora, I'm happy to wait till you guys are ready to get back to it. (And see Rita updated to the new CtGwC/DF artwork
)
- Aug 6, 2016
- 7,793
- 43,635
welcome mate, i really enjoy the stories you make...
one first stories I play on html was those of Keely-Verse, I really enjoy Getting to Know Christine, was challenge, was exciting, and open the doors of this kind of games or stories.
Redemption on Jessica really touch me, especially the part of Rolling Stone song, now i always i hear that song i remember Jessica.
Pandora was great i was expecting more "different" paths or ending but was cool.
Elsa-verse is really interesting and intriguing, i wanna know more about that world. Short Stories of elsa-verse are always appreciated.
Darkness Falls really put another view of Elsa-Verse, i really like it was darker and more serious.
We always be glad, you keep working and bring it us more cool stories.
one first stories I play on html was those of Keely-Verse, I really enjoy Getting to Know Christine, was challenge, was exciting, and open the doors of this kind of games or stories.
Redemption on Jessica really touch me, especially the part of Rolling Stone song, now i always i hear that song i remember Jessica.
Pandora was great i was expecting more "different" paths or ending but was cool.
Elsa-verse is really interesting and intriguing, i wanna know more about that world. Short Stories of elsa-verse are always appreciated.
Darkness Falls really put another view of Elsa-Verse, i really like it was darker and more serious.
We always be glad, you keep working and bring it us more cool stories.
- Nov 24, 2018
- 1,004
- 4,942
They're HTML and JavaScript. I'd expect you to be able to play them on anything. You just need to be able to unzip it and launch the "Continue.htm" file. Presumably that means you need an android device that has a file explorer. Alternately, many of our games are available to play online. I'd fully expect you to be able to play that way from any web browser.
Tlaero
Tlaero
- Apr 23, 2017
- 818
- 977
- Sep 8, 2018
- 431
- 911
It's called "Adblock"...
Anyway...
When will EP5 be released for thouse who don't let themselfs be ripped off by patreon???
You're the kind of person that gives Tlaero's loyal followers reasons to not upload updates on here. Please don't be rude to the creators and stop acting so entitled.
- Sep 8, 2018
- 431
- 911
That hasn't anything to do with "entitlement".
Simple fact is, Patreon has become some kind of "Hipster-benefits-system"... Just look at Dating my Daughter or Dual Familiy for two obvious example!
I have absolutly no problem if M&T or anybody else wants money for their storys but FFS do it in a serious way, like vdategames or LOP. This "part time buying" sucks ass.
How 'bout I sell you a car. You can pay by installments over the next 2 years and I'll give you right now 2 of the 4 wheels. Next month the other 2 and the month after that you'll get the doors or the undercarriage. In 3 months then the wheel and half the seats...
I hope you get my point or do I have to draw you a picture?
- Nov 24, 2018
- 1,004
- 4,942
Patreon is a way to fund the creation of the games. Even if you ignore time and effort, there are actual costs associated with game development. Patrons make us able to do what we do. You could say, "But you used to give away your games for free," but
1) We still do. The finished version of CtGwC will be released for free to the public (on December 15th, by the way). That was the documented plan from the start (other than the date, since we didn't know precisely when it would be done). And
2) If you look at the original games I made, with their single camera angle character faces over stock picture backgrounds, and compare them to the current fully rendered ones, well, I like the new stuff better. But buying all of those 3D models and the computational power to render them costs actual money.
There's also time and effort, but I know that this place doesn't consider that to be something worth being compensated for.
Patreon itself doesn't encourage or discourage how creators work with their patrons, so it's not right to blame them for "ripping you off." And it's also not right to lump everyone on Patreon in the same boat because you don't like the way a few creators are behaving.
Now, if you feel that I'm ripping you off by the way I'm handling things on Patreon, then I'd love to have a discussion on ideas you might have for things I should do differently. But, please, let's focus on what I should change, not what other developers are doing.
Tlaero
1) We still do. The finished version of CtGwC will be released for free to the public (on December 15th, by the way). That was the documented plan from the start (other than the date, since we didn't know precisely when it would be done). And
2) If you look at the original games I made, with their single camera angle character faces over stock picture backgrounds, and compare them to the current fully rendered ones, well, I like the new stuff better. But buying all of those 3D models and the computational power to render them costs actual money.
There's also time and effort, but I know that this place doesn't consider that to be something worth being compensated for.
Patreon itself doesn't encourage or discourage how creators work with their patrons, so it's not right to blame them for "ripping you off." And it's also not right to lump everyone on Patreon in the same boat because you don't like the way a few creators are behaving.
Now, if you feel that I'm ripping you off by the way I'm handling things on Patreon, then I'd love to have a discussion on ideas you might have for things I should do differently. But, please, let's focus on what I should change, not what other developers are doing.
Tlaero