Ha! Yeah, lot of possibilities, but I don't want to get distracted for now. Will certainly consider once I have the first release of this chapter taken care of though.
I...Is this an April Fools joke? Sarcasm? Just to be safe: Cruel Serenade is a planned five part (chapter) series. This is part 1. GutterTrash is part 2. "Chapter 3", currently in development, is part 3. So very much still in development.
Yeah, that would be silly. The whole point would be to do an ongoing profit split. But again, silicone ain't cheap, and with small-run stuff like this even more so because you don't have the economy of scale. So again, I'd probably target other, simpler stuff. That's in the future though, gotta focus on actually getting the first release of the game out first.
Posters are another possibility, and high probability if I do anything because it's fairly simple to do and has a high likelihood of having room for a decent profit margin. As far as sex toys go, especially fuckable ones, my feeling is that they tend to be very expensive for something that wears out fairly quickly. As with the games themselves, I'd want to sell stuff (at least for the first few items) that was fairly accessible to people budget-wise. Also less health/safety concerns: I'd have to be REAL careful if I was selling toys that they were actual quality material and not contaminated with some shit.
Probably not. That massive book I wrote aside, I'm just not a fan of the style. If I had a bunch of people and money to work with, I'd probably put it toward:
1. Faster production of what I make now.
2. Higher quality of what I make now.
3. Parallel production (more than one thing cooking at a time, although this may just be a version of #1.
4. Possibly exploration of simple 3d games, playing to the strengths of the medium.
This game is effectively done, as is GutterTrash. Chapter 3 work is ongoing, and I share updates on the GutterTrash dev log section roughly every 3 months.
I can understand the enthusiasm, but, as they say, big no from me. Allow me to explain.
I show my age here, but anyone remember a game called SimCopter? No? Ok then. How about SimCity? Biiig popular game in the 90s, early 00s. Top-down, 2d/isometric sprite layout, managing a city. Crucially, everything was laid out in tiles and with pre-defined sprites for everything. So as basic 3d became possible on consumer PCs, someone thought "Hey, what if we just made a 3d model for every tile in the game, and made some code to populate a 3d map with those tiles, in the same layout they were in a given 2d map? And then you could like...explore it in 3d and stuff!" And so they did, both in SimCopter, and in Sim...driver? Some car game. You could take your existing Simcity 2d maps, drop them into these games, and drive or fly around them in primitive 3d. VERY buggy, but a lot of fun for the time.
RPGMaker has actually had a system like this for some time: take existing tiles, make 3d models, use the map file as an guide to arrange these models in a 3d space. The only real new thing in the system described in the article seems to be the...presentation of the 3d models? The style? But "3d RPGMaker!" has been a thing for years now.
However, the keen-brained among you may have already picked up the problem with this system:
1. It requires a 3d model for EACH tile
2. 3d models are orders of magnitude harder to create and modify than 2d sprites.
Thus, a system like this is fine and dandy as long as you're sticking to default sprites and tiles, but utterly falls apart as soon as you try to customize anything, because you're on the hook for making all the new 3d models. Now, details are scarce here: To be fair, it COULD be that the models are generated by the system itself automatically based on some internal ruleset (walls all look like THIS, player sprites all look like THIS, etc, with the textures grabbed directly from the 2d character and tilesheets.) The previous plugin that ALREADY EXISTED seems to work like this. But that seems...less than ideal, as, just as an example, said sheets are far too low resolution to look good on a 3d model, even a "low poly" one.
About 75% of the tile and sprite work in Chapter 3 is non-default. Mostly made by others, used with permission or bought, but a few hand-crafted myself. This takes some work, but that's mostly down to mixing and matching tilesheets, which amounts to editing image files on a grid. That takes some time, but it's not all that complicated. There is no way on earth I could make even simple matching 3d models (And matching textures!) for all these tiles and sprites. If everything is auto-generated, great, but that's likely still going to require more work to make the system happy, and leads into another problem:
3d is an entirely different design language than 2d. You can see developers discovering this in the early days of the n64 and ps1. You design differently for 3d than you do for 2d, it's not something that can be simply translated, because something is lost in that translation. You have to play to the strengths of having that 3d space, and the limitations, and if you do, that's a LOT more effort and time. When I started considering making games, I very deliberately went with 2d because the workload for even a simple 3d game is insane. There would be no time or energy left to build out something with fun space and detail and function. You can see this in the history of professional games: back in the early days, it wasn't uncommon for a game to be made by 1-5 people. That grew to 20 or so by the SNES era, and now it's HUNDREDS. It pays to keep the scope simple.
I don't mean to crap on people's enthusiasm, I can see it looking neat at first. But it PROBABLY (though maybe not!) involves more work, and I think, as presented, it would get old fast, and not really work with the mechanics of the game as such. How do you dodge chasing enemies, for example, when your camera is so low to the ground like that? Everything is obscured by a building.
P.S. I hate journalists so, SO much. This is not RPGMaker's "first major visual overhaul ever". RPG Tsukūru Dante 98 came out in 1992 for the NEC PC-9800. I'm willing to bet things have PROGRESSED a little since then visually. Even the difference between RPGMaker 2000 and VX Ace were pretty significant compared to MV (as I'm reminded every time I find a neat tilesheet only to discover I can't use it because it's the GODDAMN VX RESOLUTION). But no, you're right PCGamer, this 3d trick that has existed since 2019 is totally unprecedented.
Just the fact that you've heard of the phrase "funny animal" does my soul good. Bothering to think about the technical palette of images as well. Exactly the kind of care/insanity I respect. Will keep an eye out as work continues then. Best of luck!
I dig it! I especially appreciate that the character portraits appear to be in...traditional physical media?! Which is glorious, and deeply appropriate for something that's an homage to Twisted Metal (and maybe a little Carmaggedon?) It would feel deeply wrong if those portraits were super polished modern digital art.
Gameplay's simple but fun. Basics seem solid, though even with the tweaks I think the AI may be spending more time focusing on the player when it should have more of a chance of infighting. Not terrible though. Could use a little more (or any) skid, though I have no idea how hard this would be to program.
UI could also use a little more polish: Not an insane amount, but I think it's pretty good already: just a LITTLE more would help it feel a lot more "complete", help things flow a little better etc. An actual exit button on the character info for example would help a lot (I was able to figure out esc without too much trouble, but the typical user won't).
Not a bad start at all though. You say you don't want to charge, and fair enough, but if you did end up polishing up the UI and overlay, fancying up the effects a little etc, I can absolutely see this being worth five or ten bucks. If you ever go crazy and decide to dump some money into this, I'd absolutely nominate some VAs for taunts being the way to go though. It's rough having a Twisted Metal tribute with no taunts.
There are no backups. Credit card companies control basically all online commerce, and for some reason they listen to a handful of wingnuts on things like this rather than just...process the payments and continue to take their cut and make money. I can't stress enough how utterly absurd this is: MasterCard and Visa are GARGANTUAN. They're routinely sued by NATIONS STATES, including the US, and every time they shrug it off with (for them) minor fines and slight adjustments to the way they do business. And yet for some reason random moralizing agitators no one has ever even heard of before have them quaking in their boots? Utterly bizarre.
Payments on SubscribeStar are up and functioning again for the time being. Paypal continues to work here. And at the time of writing, the wallet thing that was the original point of this post is ALSO back up on SubscribeStar for now. Things function, more or less, for now. But that's about it. There SHOULD be a law utterly preventing payment processors from making customer decisions based on "reputational risk" (yes, there's the executive order, but good luck seeing any actual action out of that, especially on adult entertainment). There SHOULD be a digital currency, backed by the government, that doesn't have the scam casino trappings, complexity, or unreliability of crypto, that people can just USE to buy stuff online on its own, without having to rely on ANY private corporation. Eventually we'll probably arrive at both, but I doubt it will happen in my lifetime.
Specifically in terms of the Substar TOS nonsense: It's the same as everything, you wait and see. It's looking more and more like the recent tossup there WAS to do with cc pressure, and their goofy re-write of the TOS was some attempt to fix or placate them? But now it's all reverted, and I'm not aware of people actually getting the axe over it. This whole thing operates a lot like healthcare in the US: it's a big black box that you don't get to see inside. What does THIS mean? What does THAT mean? Does this policy mean something is banned, or is it just there to nod and wink? How about that one? Who can say? Everything just kinda...gets along, the best it can. You can only deduce the contents of the black box by its outputs. I'm still up on Substar for now. Hopefully, that will continue.
I am not, obviously, constantly hard and jerkin' it while working. It's work, and a lot of it is somewhat mundane. I've been going a WHILE on the wolf area now for example, and I haven't even gotten to most of the sexy stuff, because I have to lay down the "ordinary" game first.
But obviously I do enjoy what I make, yes. That's always been my metric. If I was writing horror stories, I would want them to scare me. As I'm making porn games, I want them to turn me on. If they do, they have a good chance of doing so for other people too. And yeah, working on a particular thing over time will bring it in and out of being super hot, but it comes back after time, and these games are so big at this point that I'll often end up working on something for one pass, go off to do other stuff, and by the time I come back to do another pass (say the art) it's fresh and fun again.
But yes, I do, and it's not accidental, it's essential. It guides what goes in and what doesn't. Gotta be hot, or it's no good.
Yup, I saw. Probably not going to make yet another post though. Updated a bunch of TOS in some scary ways, walked a bunch of it back (but left some very concerning stuff), and are now claiming that it was just "clarification" and that nothing with enforcement will change. Well, I guess we'll see.
Yeah, a number of places have tried some variation on this. The problem is that the intermediaries often end up looking (or actually beings) somewhat shady, which shakes customer trust: people don't want to spend their money there. At least with Dlsite it all feels a bit more polished and professional.
Also, Foxy! Not to call you out, but are you aware your Substar membership has been in "Payment Failed" for a while now? If they don't accept your current card, or you just aren't interested in supporting right now that's ENTIRELY fine, but given everything that's going on right now, and that you're still active and interested enough to post, I figured I should ask.
Yes, I'd say my active subs are more or less recovered as well, at least in terms of the Feb. loss. It remains to be seen whether those actually process next month, but for now it seems like we may finally be done with this particular bit of "fun".
Oh no worries. Officially, no. The only supported system is Windows. Unofficially, RPGMaker MV is just a bunch of Javascript running in a local web page, running in a headerless browser. So it's somewhat possible to get it running anywhere that has a modern browser. Literally just drag and drop the html file (You'll probably have to turn off some nonsense "security" features preventing you from running a local web page). However, some of my plugins assume a windows filesystem for various things, so you may end up having a variety of things break. You're certainly welcome to try though.
Well, and more than that I worry about fatiguing my fans with all this nonsense. But if I DON'T say anything, then people who are supporting over there suddenly see this new button and have no idea what the deal is with it because Substar seemingly doesn't know what production and test servers are or how to do a smooth rollout of a new feature. So I'm a little screwed either way.
But the good news is that the initial problems seems to be mostly fixed at this point, numbers have mostly returned to normal. It is an annoying distraction though, any time I have to spend figuring out this stuff is time I can't spend making the game. Progress has been going fairly well regardless though; so far this has been much less of a concern than the summer nonsense, and hopefully will stay that way.
"Bit" Ha! But yeah, no problem. As always, I only want people to do what makes sense for their budget, of course. Appreciate what you were able to help with though.
Ha, oh no worries, I just enjoyed the coincidence.
And pity, was hoping I'd finally have some sign they were doing something. Numbers do seem to be gradually improving though, for one reason or another, so hopefully that continues.
1. In broad strokes, I have the full 5 game narrative arc planned, yes, although things obviously always shift a bit in development. But some general planning was needed, because there's an overarching story for the whole thing. That said, Chapter 3 is going to be a bit of an oddball, because it's somewhat separate from that. SOMEWHAT, but not entirely.
2. We'll see. A bundle is certainly a possibility, but that's a loooong way off. I certainly wouldn't hold off buying the games in hopes of getting a bulk discount.
3. It definitely gets easier and faster to do x or y as I go, and as I learn. But also, I want to make each game more sophisticated, more interesting and hopefully a little more fun than the last. 3 is going to be a LOT more complicated than GT: more content, more stuff going on in Haven (especially eventually with the addon packs), and just a lot more refinement to little things here and there. If I just cranked out GT, but with new setting and species, I could have finished a lot sooner, but every time I want to try out new things I wasn't able to do before.
I don't want to get expectations TOO high, it is an RPGMaker game at the end of the day. But there are a lot of neat little things going on with 3 that GT didn't have. I just spent a day, for example, setting up an instant retry option on a mini-boss, something I've never done before and something RPGMaker surprisingly has no built-in system for, and which is surprisingly difficult. This is definitely something people are going to die to their first few tries though, AND it has a fancy lead-up to it, so I didn't want to subject people to having to watch that same leadup over and over and over and over until they want to throw something. Now it's a nice clean "try again", like a real game!
Quick question: Are you the same Furluver that's over on Substar? If so, did you recently manually refresh your payment info? I ask because I'm fairly sure your account was non-active in the past few days, and it's now in active and healthy status again. So if you HAVEN'T touched it, that would mean Substar is indeed starting to fix the database bug (or whatever it was) themselves.
Also: "Just now excited that’s it’s August cause that’s my birthday lmao"
Appreciate it, helps to check in with other devs on this stuff, see what generalizes and what doesn't. And yes, TECHNICALLY a lot could be extracted from that CSV, but you'd have to whip up a bunch of custom scripts to get this kind of granular subscriber info from them, and even then I'm not sure if they neatly label subscribers into those same categories in the CSV. In general I just wish Substar was a lot more clear about what payment status a subscriber was in, and what that meant. But you work with what you've got; it's something of a miracle they exist in the first place, and I am grateful for that despite my complaints.
Oh hey guys, thanks for the heads up. Saw this too as I was checking things just now.
That said, this is very much still a "believe it when I see it" situation. For review:
1. This situation, by my records, started at LEAST at the start of February, possibly going back as far as December of last year. I show a SHARP drop of subs during that period (20% or more), not into "unsubscribed", but into "unpaid" or "sub expired". I have yet to get an explanation from substar on why subs are allowed to "expire" at all; this would seem to defeat the purpose of a subscription platform. It may simply be another way of saying "payment failed". Bafflingly, some accounts in "not paid" show no reason at all: no expiration, no failed payment. They're just...there.
2. SubscribeStar said nothing about any of this until Feb. 28th, after people had started freaking out about their disappearing subs on social media for several days. In that post, they framed the whole thing as "routine maintenance". Great. Then tell us BEFORE you do it, so we can brace for impact and know what's happening. As it was, we weren't given the full picture of what was going on, and what we did get wasn't in a timely manner. Also, this was a post on their OWN Substar page, which also appears in everyone's feed, if they check that. Something this serious should have been an email. It took me quite a while to dig up their Substar page (it's not linked on the main page anywhere, and I forgot the posts were also in the feed).
3. In that initial post, they claimed things would be resolved by the 3rd. It is, now, the 3rd, and things have not been resolved. I am down from 20% to 14% of subs lost, but that's likely entirely down to my fantastic supporters seeing my posts about this situation and manually fixing their payment info, something they never should have had to do in the first place. And now we get THIS post. I hope it's accurate. More compatibility with more cards and/or more ways to pay would be great. And I'm glad they're posting SOMETHING. But from my side, I have yet to see ANY improvement or fixing of the situation coming from SubStar. Have you? Aside from those recovered via manual fix by my subscribers, my lost subs are still lost.
Hopefully this post is true, and those subs will re-appear over the next week or so. But I'm certainly going to be keeping a close eye on this.
I will also say, let this be a heads up: you should probably be manually recording all your sub numbers (active, not paid, unsubscribed, payment failed) at least a couple times a month if you aren't already. Substar provides no historical data on this, and I'm only able to have a point of reference for all this because I started doing so a while back when I realized the big, official sub number was wildly misleading (active + not paid).
Excellent, thanks for checking. Thankfully it wasn't EVERYONE, but at one point I was down nearly 20% of active subscribers, so it was a little worrying. With everyone's help it does seem to slowly be coming back to normal though.
I do tend to have fairly in-depth main posts a lot of the time, but this one was "brief" by my standards because I had so much else on my mind with the ongoing subscribestar nonsense. But yeah, I like, and make a point to reply in depth if it warrants it. It helps that I have great fans that actually have interesting questions to answer.
On sprites, no in fact ALL of them are custom for these games, "sprites" being the actual character graphics. Proportions and certain ideas referenced from pre-existing stuff of course, but there's obviously no Mezz or Farthing or rat street thief, so that's all custom. In terms of everything else, the TILE work, that's largely pre-existing, but pulled from a LOT of sources, and often tweaked slightly. CS was 100% vanilla tiles that come with RPGMaker, GT was MOSTLY vanilla tiles, but with a few extra pre-made sets mixed in and with some tweaks. 3 has a LOT of variety and work put in there to have some visual interest while still trying to stay mostly coherent (not just look like it keeps changing into a different game every five minutes). So I'm glad that comes across, even in screenshots.
"I wonder if you'll ever had to scrap something solely because you did not have the texture packs for it?" It's kind of a back-and forth between what I want to do, and what resources are available. I pushed a LOT harder on 3 to actually make my planned stuff happen, one way or the other, but I'm still somewhat flexible to what the available resources allow, and sometimes they suggest possibilities I wouldn't have thought of too. Ha, and yes, I've mostly learned my lesson with the lighting. There IS still a lot of cool lighting in 3, but I keep a closer eye on how big of a hit it's giving to performance, and the code is a bit better optimized now. So there might be a LITTLE slowdown occasionally, but it should be very mild and rare.
Appreciate it! Realistically though, attention is a resource (especially because it converts to cash to some degree), and that resource goes down with time. So it's always a fight between getting a decent amount of finish on a game and getting it out before people start to lose interest. But I'm glad to see so many are still excited for it (I certainly am), and hopefully it won't be too much longer.
Eh, Lucky! I saw your account in the non active category and was especially confused, since I could remember you being active and interested recently. You are indeed showing as active status now though, thanks for checking.
