- Joined
- Dec 13, 2022
According to the reviews, it's a major downturn of an update. Something about a forced drug melodrama plot and the entire update being freeroam, in a VN that had those sections but was mostly self-contained. My opinion is this is the beginning of the trainwreck. DiK has been overrated for a long time and perpetual stories like this suffer from Simpsons's syndrome, in that they have to rely on melodrama and padding to lengthen the story/development time for pateron bux which results in a loss of quality.holy fuck that being a dik update sucked big time
Searching for trash, as I often do. Came across 3 things. One is Luna in the Tavern. A game about a female being degraded in operating a tavern. Usually wouldn't concern myself, however. It has 1 and a half stars from 60 ratings on fagzone. What could cause it to have such a low rating despite making 6k a month on patreon?
Answer:
In order to get access to the full game, you need to log in through a patreon log-in this mangled rpgmaker of an engine and even then, more slave slots than one are locked behind the pay wall. Which means if you want to go back to get scenes, you can't simply roll your mouse wheel like you can with renpy, you have to restart it proper. Locking features behind a paywall is never a good idea and I can't remember a single game that's done this well. Even UE4 games that are paid for arn't stupid enough to gate content and most renpy patreon games also don't do this for the exposure. You want people to play and come to you, not having to pay for the privilege.
The online requirement for the game means that when it does eventually go down, it will be killed and eventually forgotten. This one is just a mess.
2nd would be Barbarian Babes. I remember these guys creating a new game/animation every few months back between 2017-2020 and then just silence from them. Just randomly remembered them and the posts in the thread said they wrapped developing things when flash died, as that was their main engine and they didn't move over to unity for some reason.
3rd is amazingly I discovered Simgirls is still alive. Those around during the early days of flash and newgrounds would remember one Japanese guy's dedication to this one series called DNA2. He made a flash game out of it and made probably the first "dating sim" game, which was a sub-genre that you could say grew into the modern renpy sandbox formula.
Anyway, for the past 5 years or so he's been drawing doujins and then just a few months ago he announced he was remaking Simgirls with Honey Select. Using RPGM as the engine he's directed full video type cutscenes in honey select.
The intro cutscene is uncompressed 400mb and has his doujin in at about the two minute mark. They're also voiced with English subs.
I'm not saying this to belittle but to more be amazed. This guy has made various doujins, online games and even pioneered techniques in online software for almost a quarter century, simply dedicated to this one anime series from the mid 90s. It's amazing.
Recent Amazon update for SU has a korra knockoff called Pallas.Shit is fucking broken and messy. They even created a Korra-inspired character called Shiva which is just another copy of Shey, the "amazon-like" female character.
I also want it noted that in the space between updates for SU, someone in the artwork thread has received the SU rebuilt fan demo, made mockups for UI, is actively coding it to also include girlpacks and is then going to send it back so the guy can make some finishing touches. These fans are remaking SU in renpy using assets ripped from SU so they can make their own game. It's kinda cool to see it happen in real time, what passion and dedication can do.
Their goal is to turn it into something like Brothel King I think. Where you'd have a core select of characters from SU then can add in any art that was made via a pack.
Girl packs are really interesting from a programming perspective. You'd have to program in the interactions that the new pak has to go through, then you template it and make it simple enough that someone can find images for certain actions. I'm kind of surprised that more games don't do this as it'd be an easy way to add content and generate a community.
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