Senior Year Development Thread

[Matt_D]

what can I say I'm a sucker for uniforms and twin tails/bunches

but yeah they all look good ^^

[DaFool]

I'm now having ideas in my head about making not a dating sim, but a marriage sim.

I like this! It could be fun, having to negotiate arguments or a night out with the guys or managing housework. Then, you'd have to take care of the dreaded mother-in-law visit and the collegeboy wife eater. Of course, remembering crucial anniversaries and keeping in shape, while having a good job (resisting the secretary) would be instrumental, as well as frequent reassurances of your love.

I am planning to do a polygamy simulator sometime. Currently it's 4th in the pipeline (after my current secret collaborative project (a Kinetic Novel), the main Geomancer Chronicles proper (limited-choice VN / near-Kinetic Novel), and Flourescent [No-]Panty Squadron (Nanoha-style Combat simulator using stock DSE).

Rough premise for Polygamy Eternal:
You start with 3 wives. The ending possibilities might be: 1.) You gain a 4rth wife 2.) You keep the 3 wives 3.) You lose one wife but keep two 4.) You lose two wives but become great at monogamy 5.) You lose two wives and yet still have an uncertain marriage 6.) You lose all wives and are back to being a bachelor. Anyone can drop me a pm if they are interested in collaborating, though it'll still be years from now at the rate I'm going. Anyway, the idea is now out there in case anyone wants to make a game but doesn't have a premise yet.

Sorry for the thread hijack, move along folks...

[Matt_D]

I'm sorry I've now been totally distracted

"Flourescent [No-]Panty Squadron (Nanoha-style Combat simulator using stock DSE). "

that sounds like... like... the greatest single thing in the universe, yes I must go and meditate for several days now.

[DaFool]

Since you already thought about how Nanoha stats work, why not work on it together, you and I? I can do the artwork and maybe music. It doesn't have to be Nanoha, but something similar.

Rest will be in PM soon...but I gotta head on home soon.

EwanG: Sorry, but hijacks happen often (i.e. talking about other projects)

[EwanG]

EwanG: Sorry, but hijacks happen often (i.e. talking about other projects)

I suspect I'll survive

Of course, as far as other ideas, I was interested to see the polyamory idea since I have a friend at work who is in a polyamorous relationship (two couples who share several different ways).

The granddaddy of that would be Robert Heinlein. I suspect you could make a pretty good game by borrowing liberally from "Time Enough for Love".

Something to keep in mind for the next game I suppose. For now, though, I'd like to get the first one finished!

[PyTom]

The granddaddy of that would be Robert Heinlein. I suspect you could make a pretty good game by borrowing liberally from "Time Enough for Love".

I just read that one a month or so ago. It moves well beyond polyamory to:

Sleeping with clones of yourself with the Y chromosome changed to X.

(And when we're alone, just me and my close, we'll think of nothing but sex!)

Among a great many other things.

[Jake]

It moves well beyond polyamory to...

I thought that was Number of the Beast, AKA Robert Heinlein's Adventures in Fanfic?

Nevertheless, whenever I hear the phrase "dirty old man" it makes me think of Lazarus Long fiction. For... some reason.

[papillon]

(I ponder trying to do a poly game sometime, but the trouble is, there's not One True Way when it comes to polyamory... trios, quads, vees, chains, harems, puppy piles, people have a wild range of ways of doing things! Trying to find a way to give a fair set of possibilities within a game once you've opened the door to more-than-one is a bit of a headache...)


(The very subtext-astute reader may have seen me at different times refer to both a 'husband' and a 'partner'...)

[EwanG]

See, I'm going down the path of being off topic to my own game...

What I was thinking of in my comment, is that good ol' Lazarus in that particular novel (Time Enough for Love) had a lot of decision points that you could incorporate into a game without being a total fanfic.

For example, imagine your main character is horribly long-lived. What options would you give him/her to deal with being tired of life? Dealing with relationships where you might outlive your wife/wives by as much as we outlive a dog or a goldfish? How would you deal with the fact that if you live that long, the odds are good that somewhere down the line you are, in fact, sleeping with someone who is probably closer to you genetically than you would realize without testing?

OK, now I really should (!) get back to coding. I'm holding all of you responsible if the game isn't ready by Valentine's now...

[EwanG]

OK folks, can anyone point me to a good "Movie Theater" background? Interestingly enough, none of the generic/free backgrounds I've been able to find so far have a theater. I've come up with a temporary solution (picture that I then applied Gimp's Oilify filter to and then blended a bit), but I suspect it will stick out like a sore thumb if I have to use it in the final version.

Alternately I could just find pictures to replace all of my other backgrounds with, but I'm trying my best to not get bogged down with artwork again. Particularly since my coding is coming along well.

Thanks in advance,
Ewan

[DaFool]

You can use my seats:
http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/download.php?id=374
Technically it goes with a bg for a new game, but hey, it's out there, feel free to use it.
You'll need to supply the actual movie screen underlayer though...You can either mod a photo (but wait a minute...cameras in theaters are NOT allowed! ), or just have a gradient off-white movie screen on black. If you want curtains, feel free to ask me if you need it CG'd. Not sure how it'll mesh with your other backgrounds, though.

[EwanG]

DaFool - Appreciate the offer, but I'm actually looking for an outdoor scene of a theater. I think I've found one, but it suffers from the same problem I'm noticing more as I develop the game - that it has only a daylight version.

You would think, particularly for a theater, that there would be sunset and/or evening versions as well.

Anyone know a good tutorial for how to select just the sky regions of an image using Gimp (or Photoshop since the two are a little similar)? I could then move a sunset piece of sky from another image.

Thanks again,
Ewan

[DaFool]

Outdoor, aaaah...

Rather than splicing a sky in, why not just pop the theater image off, then reconstruct the sky beneath it?

To construct a sky underlayer:

1.) Start with a fill (light blue for day, orange for twilight, dark blue for night)
2.) Airbrush the clouds, and use Smudge to make it more feathery. The clouds must be much darker for twilight and night.
3.) Create a solid black layer on top of the sky layer, and render a gradient with it. I usually choose a really huge Sun lighting effect.
4.) Make the mode of the black layer to Overlay, set the transparency, and there you have it. You may also need to put an additional semi-transparent black fill as the top layer on top of the rest of the image as nighttime reduces the colors of the whole picture.

[EwanG]

That all sounds reasonable - except for:

why not just pop the theater image off

Which appears to be the same problem - i.e. how to select just the theater to pop off. I know it's possible to do something like that. I just have never done it before.

In the meantime, I'll be prepping my background sky per your instructions - particularly since I figure I have a few more images that will need similar ministrations.

On a somewhat related note, does anyone have a feel for lines of Ren'Py code per minute of playtime? IOW, if I've hit the 1000 line mark (granted there's some whitespace in there), can I calculate a general length of play from that? To put it another way, how many lines of Ren'Py are there in y'alls games?

[DaFool]

Actually, try darkening the entire daylight image and see if it looks halfway decent as a blackened nighttime image. You can manipulate image properties, or heck, just flood fill with dark transparency.

edit: I know what you mean...there's a term for that that should be googlable, I've seen tutorials of it, heck they even make specific software for that.

I just bear it with polygon select, oh well.

About the lines of code, it doesn't equivalent to gameplay minutes. The convention I use is 1000 words of dialogue = 5 minutes.