Post by JMBaron in Tales From The Unending Void comments

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You're now entering the realm os LitRPG - fiction novels with stories based on imaginary and idealized MMOs. It's actually a thing. And an old friend of mine made a pretty good living at it.

What I mean is that what you'd prefer may make perfect sense. Had it been my game, the setting would be Erigone, Rahia would be the MC, and the game would feature combat between the Acarhyn factions. But no killing of those meltingly gorgeous warrior women. No. The loser would have to fuck the winner 😆 All girl-girl action, all the time, savage action too 😍A bit of BDSM, some St. Andrew's crosses, ball gags, various restraints, whips and...sorry...I sort of drifted off point there 😜

Kidding aside, most Ren"Py scripted games are a combination of the old room-based adventure game design and decision trees. Choosing X opens up options Y and Z etc. Room-based design is simply a subset of possibilities based on imaginary locations. You enter a room, are presented with decisions and options in that room, and you can leave the room once certain tasks/decisions have been made.

TLDR: These games are complex decision tree webs that can grow exponentially more complex with each decision the player makes, with text for each decision, and scripted actions triggered by some decisions. Hence the "rooms" to create manageable decision tree subsets.

They're not called decision trees in Ren'Py scripting which is based on the Python computer language. It's called something else... decision logic or somesuch. But it's the same thing. It precludes allowing players to just move characters around and change the story at will.

Apis437 days ago

My metric for AVNs is not even all that complex, not on the level even of as deep as what your saying your friend used to do.... just simple depravity rules.

Hot women never die, are always seduceable, and should always have many scenes with each woman, that are high frame, multiphase, explicit in the extreme, well blocked, and angled, well lit, with a great control UI, and touch on as many taboos as possible, without changing the gorgeousness of woman in any way (so no weight gain, or pregnancy :P ). Aside from, no hard lockouts, or dead-end gameplay... even if it means you have to give the most unrealistic immature or even slightly sociopathic reasons for why all the Romance paths in the game were capable of being salvaged in to Harem ones.

In other words, the sex, and the ego masturbation for the PC, is all that needs be top shelf. For that? I am happy to sacrifice any realism, entertain the most hilariously tenuous logic, crazy story, unrealistic everything and anything, and mediocre narrative.

I am simple man, who needs but simple things.

Of course, if the story IS good, the ambience of the game on point, with great graphics, lighting, pacing, immersion, with perhaps even real top tier trimmings like quality voice acting, well even better.... but NO ONE has made a game like that yet, not even the BEST rated ones in the genre on here and steam..

So as long every hot woman is a Harem option, and by the time the game ends we've had the option for copious amounts of depraved taboo sex with them, in high quality, long, well done scenes, and there is NOTHING that gets in the way of that, even if SOME women were meant to be monogamous Romance pathways, then I am happy.

Just hurts my depraved perverted soul, to see women who are definitely worthy of my PC's terrible sex game, only get it fleetingly, in one of encounters... or not at all. It is spiritually painful :P :P

JMBaron37 days ago (1 edit)

You misunderstood me.

LitRPG is a genre of writing. They're fantasy novels.

What I described is how most AVNs are assembled. Though I can't be sure. I developed all sorts of games for all sorts of platforms for three decades. I've never even thought of creating an AVN but I did examine the scripting language used for most of them. Putting them together is complex even if our desires are not 😆

Most are developed by individuals using their home computers. A single render can take hours and fail at the last minute. The places I worked for had ROOMS full of computers for that, called render farms.

For animations, that takes some skill. Not only do you have to rig the character, but if you mean to animate it, that's a painstaking process. If you're looking for realism you need to include inserts into muscle groups, often called bones, to serve as attachments, much the way your muscles have attachments to actual bones, so that muscles deform with movement that makes sense. If done right, muscles will appear to flex (deform) with movement as our bodies do. VERY FEW AVN creators have either the skills or the time to do this, much less to animate the characters well. This is why motion capture is still used in game animation but that's outside the realm of an indie budget.

Thus muscular women are rendered as if they're wearing plastic body suits. Muscles are fixed, rigid, and look...well...not great. Knees, elbows, wrists, and ankles often look absurd too.

This is why sex scenes are pretty limited in AVNs. Everyone wants more of them for every gal. And no one wants to see a gorgeous gal killed. That's a kink too far. There's one in Episode 2 that frankly bothered me because the list of evil things that young woman covered in tats was supposed to have done didn't make sense. Plus she was hot 😉

In short, while our desires are simple, creating them in computer animation is anything but, alas.

Apis437 days ago

Ahhh right I get you.

I have some very very limited experience with animations, though it was a VERY basic process of simply linking groups of poses. Using a preset, indigenous proprietary 'skeleton' of the in 'game' character models (it was an open Sandbox deal like Blue Mars more than a 'Game").... and yeah, even that was hectic, basically digital claymation. The more realism, and flow, the more smooth, you want it... the more complex it got, because one animation was 'frame', if you will, limited to about 10 poses.... but there was batching for those, so you could batch up to 20 groups of ten, linked to play one after the other. But that mean the last pose of your first group, has to be a 'natural/neutral stance' and the first pose of the last the same, and the first and last of all the poses in all the groups in between the same, or it looked janky. That worked for sitting at tea... but riding a motorcycle, for example... it looked very strange. You wound always having to chose between smooth and realistic, or what actually looked right for the purpose.... because often you could not have both. It was a VERY VERY long process.

Had a little experience in the same game using basic in world meshing tools, and little blender, doing some 3D modelling, and associated texturing/rendering and yeah, I know all about taking hours to make something, then have to scrap it at the 11th hour... well, in most cases, not scrap, but just return the objects to a default state and start 'sculpting' again because there was way too many changes from base to where I had gotten up to, to even revert via undo tools. I am bit of a perfectionist though.

Me personally, I would love to make a Ren-Py game, but has NO IDEA how to, and I KNOW NOTHING, about language. Tried to learn a little coding once many years ago, but just was not for me, did not interest me, and even the most basic, was beyond my understanding. Doubt my current PC even has the power to do what needs doing, so I can dream, and I do, but I am certainly complaining.... just wishing ;)

JMBaron37 days ago

Ah - so you know full well why we can't get what we want in these silly games - it's HARD WORK. And, when you say you have some basic animation understanding but computer languages make your brain hurt, then you understand why some AVNs do one thing well and other things poorly. Because we're all built this way: good at certain things and not-so-good to gawdawful at others. Most AVNs are made by one person. Therefore...😉

It's why video games are best made by TEAMS!

Thus I marvel at some AVN creators who can get multiple things right. Classy Lemon, creator of Projekt Passion, can write humor like a mainstream comedy writer, create the most outrageous sex scenes that are both arousing yet make fun of the human sex drive, and create stories that can make you weep. Plus he does things with Ren"Py that no one else can do. Not saying everyone else sucks. Not by any means. It's just almost weird that just one guy can do so many things so well. It's not normal 😆

And not everyone even likes his games. Most folks go for those horribly vanilla gals in bikinis who all somehow look the same (to me) and are barely legal. Too young to be interesting (to me). And rely on the magic, stallion-sized penis because they can't write seduction dialog. Just about everything a male MC in almost every goddamn AVN says is, thus, moronic. But when the gals see the magic cock....oy vey!

In short, AVNs or games with lots of sex sit off in the far corner of the culture and the market. Whereas violence, even extreme violence, complete with dismemberment and blood vapor particle effects...that's just fine 🫣

itch.io

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