I'm trying lol. This whole public Patreon post discusses it, but if you Ctrl+F "In Sickness and in Health" and read down, you get a clearer explanation of how my declining health is going to affect development.
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A member registered Apr 14, 2022 · View creator page →
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A free-to-play adult gender bender visual novel about all the ways identity can be messy
Visual Novel
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Did you get any output file anywhere? Also, that seems to be an ultra-budget sub-$100 phone listed with either 3 or 4 GB of RAM. Given that and the scathing complaints I was able to find about it on Reddit and other sites making it clear it's not a phone that can do gaming, it might simply not have enough memory to run a Ren'Py visual novel, especially one with larger assets like re:Dreamer.
The alt history setting is a response to Student Transfer (a body swap visual novel I used to help make) having its own "San Fransokyo" setting it never explains and me vowing to not do that myself. It (the Stephen King novel) was a partial inspiration in that the main character is secretly the town itself through the unbelievably rich and detailed history that is told throughout the story that keeps changing perspective and time frames. I can't say I've matched King during his 80's cocaine bender, but I have done that to a smaller scale, much of which isn't visible to the average reader. I swear it is in fact really important that this setting is the way it is, but it's for reasons I can't explain without ungodly massive spoilers.
Samantha is probably my favorite character to write as I get to be clever through her. Her character is at least partly inspired by the dramatic awfulness of my own mother, but dialed up to 12 and made more sympathetic with the possibility of a redemption arc. But just as I say with Z, they need to work to earn their happy ending, and that must come with a recognition of all of her own flaws.
Before I throw my own wall of text at you, thank you for writing all of this out. I know more than most typing takes time and effort, and I'll make the effort to match.
I know people have issues with the intro, but re:Dreamer is meant to one day be a long visual novel (at least 40 hours per main route). In that context, an intro of an hour or less (much of which you are given the option to skip!) is not just justified but mandatory.
I very firmly and passionately believe gender bender is a kink of contrasts. I'll skip the pseudo-intellectual lecture about how it's a genre uniquely suited to building around the singular pillar of what is ultimately the only story a person can ever tell when you strip it to its base element (what it means to be a person) and jump ahead to the pith: knowing more of who Zach is as a person before the transformation even happens is necessary for giving the type of contrast I need for the story I want to tell with him.
To that end, I have given Zach an intro that sets the entire tone of the game as most of its topics and themes, such as:
- The process of "showing the work" of who Zach is and how they change matters far more than the destination.
- The ego Zach has built about their self-styled maverickish intelligence is a crutch and protective wall of isolation that is making them miserable but which they cling to because it's easier to be smart than it is to be wise.
- Their toxic relationship with their mother, who acts as a sympathetic antagonist where it's up for the reader to decide if she's redeemable and someone Zach or Zoey can trust again, a dramatic foil across generations who herself is a victim of an abusive mother, a black hole who has shaped and warped Zach's views of women (often for the worse), and a larger-than-life figure who casts a suffocating shadow over him or her, both as an impossibly high bar to match and as a control freak.
- That re:Dreamer is going to be a psychologically-focused story with a very introspective protagonist, as shown through a lecture that also introduces the concept of a personality matrix (as it is a feature in the visual novel) (I don't have a psychology degree, but I have taken a few semesters of it at college and have maintained at least a passing interest in it).
- How Zach is stuck and wanting to change but needs a powerful catalyst and someone to react with to make that change happen.
I'll readily admit that there might have been a more condensed way to do that, but all my thinking on the intro over the last few years has only reinforced my view that it has to be there and it's about as lean as I can make it without cutting away the meat of the story to compromise brevity over depth. It acts as a sort of skill gate, because to be honest, if a player stopped after less than an hour, there's not much of a chance they'd like to stick around for more nor care that I think context makes porn way hotter.
I have many thoughts about gender (as you might suspect lol), but I'd like to think I have enough respect for the topic to avoid pandering with easy layups that I know would please certain crowds. Doing so would be a disservice to readers when I know could deliver something better and more meaningful. re:Dreamer isn't really "a transgender game" as some have tried to frame it and I reject that limitation; in fact, one of its design goals is to widen someone's views of identity and present a more nuanced view than "this character was always a girl." It's a weird celebration of the uniqueness of identity meant to be thought about with deliberate ambiguity meant to foster that. I'll sometimes use modern queer terminology when it makes sense and I can't claim I don't find myself rambling on my soapbox every so often, but I'm hardly a gender guru. I'm a weird person with a weird genderfluid identity who doesn't have anything even close all the answers, but I have confidence in my ability to ask good questions.
I love having a lot of attention to detail and like when someone notices the time and effort to put into it. The expression system helps sell the nuance of the story, and I'm shocked that neither my method of separating faces into distinct eyes, eyebrows, and mouths and the exponentially greater range of facial expression I have access to nor focus on sound design is common. I wanna be a quirky bohemian auteur, and I can't understand how people hate making the parts of a visual novel I love to tinker with. It's a multimedia format, and the more I embrace that aspect, the more those parts synchronize to tell a story that punches far above its weight class in impact.
https://itch.io/post/11347935
I have to package the APK in a ZIP due to legal reasons of clearly-labeled credits for assets, to say nothing of it including the flowchart and changelog. I have an Android, and you can absolutely use the Files app to extract ZIP files.
Thank you so much for the feedback, and I'm glad you enjoyed the VN! My health is never going to be good, but I'm at least past the hurdle of the back-to-back cat scratch disease + mononucleosis, my new antidepressants are helping a lot, and I'm able to sit in front of a computer and actually expect to get a full day of work done instead of having to play everything by ear because of my bad & inconsistent energy levels.
Art is the primary reason. I didn't have art for it commissioned yet and I wasn't going to do a second scene in a story day where it's two characters having sex through sprites. The monetary costs of those CGs aren't even too much of a concern, but they take a lot of my time to make the design docs for, it takes an artist a few months to get the scene done, and then I have to edit the files to work within Ren'Py. If I stop work for art, this visual novel will not only never get done, but those scenes with the art aren't going to be nearly as good as they could be if I spent more time writing the characters to have a better idea of who they are and how they work so that when they have sex it is an extension of their dynamic rather than erotic revelry for the sake of erotic revelry. My priority is always going to be developing the story and its characters, and that specific scene is not at all a load-bearing scene to that story. If it's going to exist, it'll be as something that moves the plot forward, and there are just other scenes that take higher priority of the bottlenecks of art and my own limited time on this earth.
The other less important reason is that development is slower than in other similar games because of my attention to detail in development and that I am essentially a solo developer (see this previous comment I made for the specifics). If I limited updates to a full story day each time, this game's updates would come out spaced several months apart even in the best of circumstances because writing is merely a fraction of my job, and I'd rather release the game in chunks more frequently so I can get more immediate feedback on what did or didn't work as that has been instrumental in making me a better developer and more specifically a better writer. If I don't have confidence in an idea, I have the luxury of being able to move ahead in the story and to put off the specifics until I have a better idea of what I want that placeholder scene to be. This not only speeds up development by letting me circumvent a plot idea until I have full confidence in my ability to execute it as well as I can so I can do something I do have a much clearer picture for, but it improves the overall quality of the game by removing the pressure of the bottleneck of having to do the next chronological event. If I have learned any lesson during development, it's that it's not just faster but better for overall quality to make sure I do something right the first time instead of going back to fix it later.
The start of the game is dense as I want to make sure the trajectory of each route is firmly established with the first week of showing what Zach's day-to-day life with a female body (and hiding it) looks like with classes, romance/sex life, extracurricular activities, and social life so that readers can fill in the gaps made by timeskips of a few days or even a few weeks. All routes will anchor loosely around holidays and school breaks, most notably Halloween, Thanksgiving break, Zach's 21st birthday (December 7th; the game starts on October 7th), Christmas, winter break, New Year's Eve and Day, Valentine's Day, and spring break. While not getting into spoilers, each route will have additional focal points (e.g., Britney with the theater club and visiting her family for Thanksgiving break, Keisuke with the swim team), but the game will have an epilogue starting from when the re:Dreamer season ends at close to the end of Zach's freshman year to a few weeks after he graduates so the story ends with a clear idea of what's next in his life. The game can't realistically end with Zach changing his body back due to Zach using his wish for something else he sees as being worth more, but just because this character keeps a female body won't necessarily mean that he will be a woman even though that's probably what most readers are going to get because of the story choices they made.
Tower Topper is possible to "win" by proving to Britney that the game is rigged and impossible to win by getting to the top line and showing how the block skips over the winning position. You can further "win" the game once Ai rigs it by not making any mistakes that expose how she's not just made the game winnable but impossible to lose. Each game is meant to be a thematic lesson of sorts, with this one highlighting not just Zach's unhealthy amount of prideful stubbornness is a product of an environment where he never had to compromise to avoid failure because someone was always around to protect Zach from facing any negative consequences (his mom, Keisuke, and now Ai), and he's never really acknowledged that outside help beyond resenting it.
Dance Uprising is winnable, but it's very hard. The high scores were set by someone I know who is really good at rhythm games, and what I made isn't a good rhythm game in that the notes had to be procedurally generated based on the peaks of the audio file which won't always line up with a beat. Its lesson is that Zach doesn't necessarily have to suffer consequences with experimenting with femininity if he can trust Britney enough to let her help or save him when he missteps, but he should still try to take middle approach of not being too enthusiastic nor too defiant.
Zone of the Zombies 2 is survivable, but I wouldn't call it humanly beatable. The speed you shoot at is far important than your accuracy, and while it might be possible to drop every zombie if you spam both mouse buttons like a demon, it's not a reasonable expectation. It's meant to be a lesson about being distracted with the wrong objective yet trying to conquer it by himself meant to tie into how Zach's goals with re:Dreamer, but more specifically how Zach sabotages himself when he tries to fight Britney to prove her wrong instead of teaming up with her as an equal partner.
Mrs. Puck Man isn't playable, and it isn't a lesson so much as it is a metaphor for many aspect of Zach's masculinity. He talks a big game about knowing way more about the cabinet than you would expect given the impression he exudes of never actually playing it. He feels upset when Britney offers to pay for it and can feel even more upset when she says "ladies first" as a dig. His forceful manhandling of it when he feels it isn't working can result in breaking part of it (the joystick being a further metaphor for the body part he no longer has and yes I have to word it like this for itch.io). Even if it's a relic of the past, he still feels bad about having broken it with a lingering sadness of disappointment for what could have been but never was. If he's played both Tower Topper and Mrs. Puck Man he can feel so bad that he will even go to the manager's office before he leaves and give back the expensive game console he won on the condition that they use that saved money to repair the cabinet instead of hauling it to the dumpster.
This was more than you asked, but I like giving details like this.
https://itch.io/post/11347935
I have to package the APK in a ZIP due to legal reasons of clearly-labeled credits for assets, to say nothing of it including the flowchart and changelog. I have an Android, and you can absolutely use the Files app to extract ZIP files.
Chief, what? You control the settings of the game. If you want Zach to ramble or introspect less, there is literally an option for that. If you do not want the dev commentary setting, turn that setting off. If you do not want to fill out a survey of a game that has a notably queer playerbase, then don't.
As I have stated, I do not have easy access to any older versions. They would require recompiling on a version of the engine which is no longer supported. Attempting to roll back my development files while tracking down a specific older version of an engine with frequent incompatible updates without even knowing what version of that engine I need would to even run the game would be a tedious and frustrating process that quite bluntly I will not give the hours of my unfairly time to make possible when I am still sick with an illness that has lead to me months behind work on the current update.
Please do not ask this again. You have asked me over three times (I'm not quite sure if your other messages were asking similarly), and my answer will not change.
Also, I have checked the Discord link on my main account and my alt, both of which it worked for.
The server is public, but as the changelog shows, there's been so much content added since that version, and I generally ask that readers play on the latest version for the best experience.
I am rewriting those morning scenes in the pending update to make sense. The writing that used to be there in the sento and morning was honestly rough enough that it made me cringe in discomfort, and I don't think it's simply me being my own harshest critic: it's largely uninteresting, I've gotten much better at understanding Zach and Keisuke as characters between then and now, and it's frankly not even good smut.
I usually don't hold on to old versions dues to not wanting to pay for the storage space in a file hosting service (underlying Ren'Py engine changes with large swathes of script incompatibility makes it very tedious and frustrating to compile old releases from GitHub files), but surprisingly, I still have the 0.17.0 files on Mediafire with the sento old scene:
- https://www.mediafire.com/file/2m9x4b54jxlq66l/reDreamer-0.17.0-pc.zip/file
- https://www.mediafire.com/file/kefnrgmb8edfvt0/reDreamer-0.17.0-mac.zip/file
- https://www.mediafire.com/file/vdytr003do2kw9y/reDreamer-0.17.0-android.zip/file
Again though, I am currently rewriting the cut part and the day 2 morning scenes. I am truly flattered you like my writing enough to want to sift through the parts left on the cutting room floor, but cut content from older versions make for a very poor reflection of how much better I have gotten as an author in the last 4 years or so, and it won't even be "canon" in the near future.