Doomskull

Member
Sep 13, 2017
423
581
...is it me, or all the characters made by ScarlettAnn look like each other? I mean, no difference between a game or another... and those massive tits...
No shit that characters made by an artist all have similarities, that's pretty much the same for most artists. It's called styling.
 
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Iggybousse

Member
Jun 16, 2017
326
447
almost all of zombie theme is male protag, what a shame.
Well yes and no, the sex scenes with male protagonists in zombie games are mostly with humans.
If it's a female protagonist, it's the opposite, less with humans, more zombies.

I'm a huge fan of female protagonists in general, however, I prefer human sex in zombie games rather than rotting flesh inside women lol. Gives me the creeps. That's why I loved AZL, it kept the story decent. Just my opinion.
 

Dictateur

Active Member
Aug 7, 2016
690
794
So, it's the same universe as Town of Passion where there are no zombies at all, but it shares the same settings and even art than Zombie life and Urban demons (if i'm right) but it's not related at all to those two, wait what ? Still, looks quite good, even if the concept of " imma start another game even if my main project is just about 12% finished "
 

dingo4life

Member
Oct 20, 2016
307
347
I can understand starting a new game if your original project is like 80% done, but come on man. Unless this guy only sits as home coding and have managed to make his main project his job already, this is gonna slow the original project down.
 

dingo4life

Member
Oct 20, 2016
307
347
Of course he will claim it will have no effect, it would be stupid not too, but time does not exist in a vacuum. Once you start a new project that time needed will have to come from somewhere. So unless patreon is his full time job he will have to cut it out of the breaks he have from his regular job, which is probably also the time he uses on his patreon project. At least I would expect as much if your asking money for something.
 

ANTagonist

Active Member
May 27, 2017
709
1,272
Of course he will claim it will have no effect, it would be stupid not too, but time does not exist in a vacuum. Once you start a new project that time needed will have to come from somewhere. So unless patreon is his full time job he will have to cut it out of the breaks he have from his regular job, which is probably also the time he uses on his patreon project. At least I would expect as much if your asking money for something.
Chill fam, so long as we don't expect the world and ToP is given the lions share of the time I'm more than fine with this side-project. If you remember that the last few updates for ToP were mostly incomplete at the time because the artists and animators needed more time to get their stuff done then a side-project while he waits for the assets he needs for the first game to be complete is fine.
It'll be a bit of a strain but it's probably more about keeping himself busy rather than letting himself get burned on a single game. Most people tend to get impatient when they want something done but have no control of how the other members of a project will complete their tasks.
 

dingo4life

Member
Oct 20, 2016
307
347
Chill fam, so long as we don't expect the world and ToP is given the lions share of the time I'm more than fine with this side-project. If you remember that the last few updates for ToP were mostly incomplete at the time because the artists and animators needed more time to get their stuff done then a side-project while he waits for the assets he needs for the first game to be complete is fine.
It'll be a bit of a strain but it's probably more about keeping himself busy rather than letting himself get burned on a single game. Most people tend to get impatient when they want something done but have no control of how the other members of a project will complete their tasks.
I know my dude... I'm just tired is all and kinda annoyed with all the constant 0.0.0.1 patreon releases. Can't they at least wait until the game is in beta before asking money? Anyways I'll go get some coffee, have a nice day or what it happens to be in your part of the world... No, the last part weren't sarcasm.
 
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ANTagonist

Active Member
May 27, 2017
709
1,272
I know my dude... I'm just tired is all and kinda annoyed with all the constant 0.0.0.1 patreon releases. Can't they at least wait until the game is in beta before asking money? Anyways I'll go get some coffee, have a nice day or what it happens to be in your part of the world... No, the last part weren't sarcasm.
It's fine fameroni. Either way, looking forwards to the next ToP release. Finally get to do something with Minerva.
 

brynhildr

Compulsive Gambler
Jun 2, 2017
6,477
56,850
Why. Why these devs bite off more than they can chew? I mean, I know that someone here already said this a couple of times, but this is exactly my same opinion: what's the point in starting another project while you've to do another one? Is the income that they already make not enough? They want more money? Jesus.

- And for Nergal is this (and then look at what happened. Then he came back, but he is going to take again even A Zombie's Life? Don't think so since right now there's this, seems)
- And for Paper Waifu is this (and I don't know if they'll ever complete their other project)
- And for this one is this.

Meh. 90% of the devs don't actually complete their first game and instead start a new one just because :pokerFace:
 

popober

Well-Known Member
Jun 9, 2017
1,036
2,504
Honestly, at this point I'm just happy to fap to anything with ScarlettAnn's art style. Just hope this really doesn't mean Siren's Domain is stretching themselves out, like some have worried.
 
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ANTagonist

Active Member
May 27, 2017
709
1,272
Honestly, at this point I'm just happy to fap to anything with ScarlettAnn's art style. Just hope this really doesn't mean Siren's Domain is stretching themselves out, like some have worried.
It's been routinely stated by Siren that Zombie's Retreat is nothing but a side-project. More than a few times the art was lagging behind on ToP and if it wasn't the art it was the animators, meaning that the releases were never honestly finished until the bugfix a few days after. Obviously working towards a deadline with art and animation is rough and the animators couldn't do much without the finished art anyway, meaning that the animators were always behind. So, following this Siren extended the deadline from monthly to like a month and a half but that still wasn't quite enough it seems.
So, to stop himself from getting burned out, the animators from being overworked and to prevent the quality of the art from degrading any, Siren probably opted for this. In a way you could say it's filler and might divide his attention but it's a back-burner project while the assets and everything else he needs for ToP is finished.

This would be my best guess.
 

Runar Orested

Newbie
Jul 15, 2017
36
57
A small review:
As far I can see, yes it looks a lot like A zombie's Life, but mainly because the two of them use both the services of ScarletAnn ( , ) for illustrations and D Machin for 16bit era, low res backgrounds and sprites ( , ). In fact, that explains the small slowdown on new comics by ScarletAnn.

The sprite sheets are the Horror City sprite (characters) sheets, and the tile (background and objects) is mainly the Slasher Forest (vs the Horror City sets used in A Zombie's Life).
Also, thank god it's made on RPG Maker VM, which means it is an HTML5 game running on a dedicated Firefox with WebGL and hardware acceleration. No matter how much more inefficient and breakable is Javascript compared to Ruby, the hardware acceleration, multicore support, and optimized execution engine makes them run far more smoother: no need a high end processor to run AZL or UD without slowdowns or noticeable frame-skipping.
Taking into account that RPGMaker XP/VM/Ace would use some hardware acceleration on Windows XP, and only Windows XP, and a little bit on Vista/7, it was sad seeing AZL, and specially UD run better in my old (and I mean OLD old) Intel Core (1) Solo 1.6GHz Windows XP laptop, than my AMD 2.8Ghz 6 cores Windows 10 workstation. :FeelsBadMan:
Gameplay wise, it is nice that someone must have read the sugestions of :FeelsGoodMan:, or at least agree with some of them. Using renewable sources of resources makes it FAR easier (maybe a bit too much, but well, demo).

Giving the companions an useful skill (lockpicking) beyond higher farming rate IS nice.
The gameplay is still incomplete, and I do understand that. It is hard to make relatively quickly a barebones game with a few maps, enemies, graphics, learning to use the menu customization system, etc. Even if much of the graphics are bought or comissioned, it is NOW when the planning and programming is most important and time-consuming. I hope the author takes time to polish the gameplay first before starting to add graphics and story, and skip the enormous amount of bugs and wasted time that changing the engine midgame will cause.
As a note, since the basement does have 4 rooms, it means that it can have up to 6 female leads, one more that AZL. Nice!

Plot wise... there is basically no plot for now, and the attempt to be able to customize the relation between the characters to hide the incest it is nice if you do care, as long as either he makes it a custom file / script to replace more variables, because "you are my older Tutor sister" and some other dialogs that do not match with the default (relations) correctly. I, personally, would do away with it for now even if it means keeping the incest, and implement it again when a good amount of plot is already written, so alternative adjetives and even dialogs can be used.

Release wise, the author, once the gameplay is done well enough, can simply release content, adding a couple new areas and a recruit-able female with little interference with the rest of the game, each time. The most time consuming thing would be to wait until he has collected enough money to pay the art comissions, and add the new dialogs. It should not interfere with his other game if he spaces it well enough. And even if it had to cut it off sometime, the game would still keep fully functional. The problem would be releasing it like Nergal did: advancing ALL routes a fraction on each release, and switching codebases mid-project.
For comparison, AZL was also very formulaic: each female would usually have around 13 relationship points, and each point would match to a sidequest. The exception was the teacher, whose route was cut short halfway (and because probably could be netorate), and the scientist, who was there to make advance the overall story plot (and also was cut short). Even each point usually matched: recruit quest, get her tipsy, getting oral sex/handjob, sex when collecting resources, loyalty mission, sleeping together, fetching a romantic gift, 3 way sex, etc.
If Siren does the same, even if the game ends being a bit cutout and formulaic it would allow him to progress very quickly. We will see if he also does have the talent to make it not seem repetitive, or too small, or empty, when few characters are available.
And as ANTagonist just said, it is a nice way for Siren to keep his hands busy while waiting for the artwork of ToP to be finished. Still, in this case, I think it would have been better, after making a poll, to put it on the same Patreon as ToP.
 
Jun 30, 2017
273
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Uhhh...are you talking about Japanese H-RPG games? Or English games? Female protagonists in zombie games...let's see.

JUST off the top of my head:
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Those were mostly English ones...I'm sure I could probably find a LOT, LOT more if I actually looked instead of just brainstormed, or if I included ALL the Resident Evil parody flash games, or if I included all Japanese H-games, or if I included visual novels or click/point games, or if I was a bit more liberal on what "zombie" meant...

Sooo yeah, long story short, I have no idea whether you're just ignorant or you're salty about male protagonists in zombie games in general. But it's really not much of a contest. It's not to say that male protagonists in zombie games don't exist, however, it's definitely not 'overrun' with male protagonists as you say.

Just let us have this...please.
Well no, i'm not salty about male protag with zom theme in general, i'm still playing if it have quality. But i really want too see a quality zom game with female protag which have only 1-2 games so far.
 
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4.40 star(s) 117 Votes