Early development history

[Wolfschadowe]

Wednesday, 2013-01-30

The first image was rendered for Brad's Erotic Week.

[Wolfschadowe]

Sunday, 2013-04-14

Just for fun, the original character proof I made for the Bar scene.

Left to right, Creepy Patron, Waitress, Faith (early concept), and amorous couple.

Character proof for the club scene.

Left to right, interest/Dancer Natalie, Dancer Riley, Dancer Azumi, Dancer Sylvia, Patron 1, Patron 2, Dancer/hostess Candace (Candy), and Bartender/Manager James.

[kexter]

A bit of a cautionary tale:

Monday, 2013-05-13

Unfortunately, I had a mishap with some of the early bar and most of the recap images and lost the hi-res originals, but luckily that clears up before things get interesting. (...)
I was using the "find in files" functionality of Notepad++ which does replacement as well, and had "include sub directories" checked. Then I loaded a page into the browser to see if the smart quote was replaced with a standard one and image was corrupt. The fact that Notepad++ made 24000 or so replacements should have been my first clue. Tried a few more pages, and saw more corrupt images. Then I opened the image directory and saw all the images were corrupt Then I realized what I did, mentally shrugged and opened my backup program to do a restore only to see that it was doing it's nightly backup ANDHOLYCRAPIT'SDOINGITSBACKUPIVEGOTTOSHUTITOFFNOWNOWNOWNOW!!!!!

I saved most of the backup images from being overwritten with corrupt ones. If someone had been in the room, I'm sure it would have been funny to watch my reaction as I realized what was going on.

I was able to pull the reduced quality Jpegs from the latest build of BEW, but the originals were lost to the mists, because I had deleted the original BEW build that was all high-res from hotfile, and my local system...and the recycle bin, and the attempt to undelete the file failed. But at least I still had the images and didn't have to completely re-pose and re-render everything.

Tuesday, 2013-05-14 - sylakone2 to the rescue

(...) I still have your orginal download with the high res images.
If you want me to send them to you (...)

Tuesday, 2013-05-14

Syl, that would be fantastic. I'd really appreciate it. I mourn the loss of the original file sizes.

Word of advice to all, don't use a string editor to replace smart quotes with standard quotes en-mass when including the images sub directory. Apparently the code for smart quotes is also used in JPG formats, and corrupts all the images. If for some reason you don't heed my advice and decide to try it anyway, certainly don't do it while the backup is running like I did. And then...if for some reason you DO do it while the backup is running, at least have your backup software keep at one previous version of each image, like mine does now.

Luckily I caught what happened fairly quickly and only lost 40-50 of the original images, but still... heh.

kexter's note: It's sad that I wasn't yet around at the time - even without backups I could have probably restored the damaged JPEGs.

[Wolfschadowe]

Thursday, 2013-06-13

I suspect the final game will be 7,000 - 10,000 web pages, so it will certainly be big. Day 1 alone is a little over 900 pages. (...)

I don't think I could pull off a smaller game and make it compelling. I'm making the type of game I would like to play, and I hope this one is as compelling to others as it is to me. I like for there to be at least a semi-decent story so that there is as much desire to see what happens next in the story as a desire to just get to the next erotic scene. But with that much story in this type of game, I think it needs to be balanced with more erotic scenes as well which is probably the main draw. Hopefully the story enhances the eroticism rather than just acting as filler, and vice-versa. To do that well, I feel that the game has to be generally longer.

Just making a long game wouldn't keep me interested though. Where I am having fun is building lore into the game.
Something that will be evident in later days, or even just the strip club branch of day 1, is that taking alternate paths, or even failure paths will hopefully add dimension to the game. Little bits of knowledge about other characters that make things they do more clear. Those that are interested in the story and lore will have fun replaying to find the why. This is also present in the current bar scene, but many of the bar scene payoff's are in day two.

An example from the strip club scene below:

spoiler: show

On one branch of the strip club scene, you know you have to get help from one of the supporting characters in order to progress with the love interest, and you can secure their help but you don't know why they would help you in the first place. In one sub-branch, Brad can reject the help because he is suspicious of the supporting characters motivation.

On an alternate branch of the scene, you find out what motivates that supporting character to help Brad, but he misses an opportunity to get additional help from a second character which changes outcome possibilities.

On one of the failure branches, (with the strip club romance, not the game itself) attentive players can begin to understand the catalyst behind the event that motivates the supporting character to help Brad progress with the love interest.

The way I could have realistically made the game shorter is to have fewer love interests in the game from the current 5 planned, or have fewer player choices and make it more of a graphic novel than an actual game, but then again, as much as I like those, I like the challenge of the gameplay elements, and the additional replayability of multiple story paths. My only regret is that it will take so long to get done.

[Wolfschadowe]

Tuesday, 2013-07-02

The next version of BEW is ready for playtesting. This version includes the full Strip Club scene, as well as implementation of Achievements, a new savegame format, and game menus. (...) The game is now 1080 pages in size, so there is plenty to do.

There are two methods of achievements, one is a "standard" implementation, similar to Meeting Keely. The second is available once you get the achievement for completing the intro, and shows a breakdown achievement system. Due to it's experimental nature, it is only fully implemented for the office scene, and has some placeholder images. It is partially implemented for the bar and Strip Club scenes. Let me know which achievement system you like better. Some achievements are intended to span multiple days, but for playtesting they have been compressed to available gameplay.

The recap for the strip club is not ready yet due to a sub-scene that takes place at the diner that is not finished yet. That is an exposition scene that allows for more characterization and backstory, plus the option to begin the Natalie corruption branch. Each girl has an optional corruption storyline. In this case, corruption doesn't necessarily mean you are taking a good girl and making her bad, but that you are influencing her to change her nature in some way. These storylines are much more difficult to complete and have many more failure paths than standard storylines. Emily (bar) and Nataile (diner) start in day one, Faith's corruption storyline begins in day 2.

[Wolfschadowe]

Thursday, 2013-08-08

Just released version 0.2.0 (...) This is the full final Day 1, including the Diner, all recaps enabled and the new, new achievement system.

Regarding the achievement system, there are four modes to look at, one for each of the scenes. (descriptions is spoiler for space) Let me know which you like best and It will be the standard for the final game. This only effects how Achievements are displayed once earned. There is also an achievement tutorial based on the intro scene, and the instructions.

spoiler: show

Achievement Mode 1 (Office Scene) - Displays number of achievements, number of sub achievements, and percentage completion for the scene. Clicking into it for details scrolls through all the earned sub-achievements and earned achievements in order of Sub-Sub-Achieve.

Achievement Mode 2 (Diner Scene) - Display number of achievements, number of sub-achievements, and percentage completion for the scene. Clicking into it for details goes either to the earned achievement, and you can click in again to see sub-achievement details. If the achievement hasn't been earned yet, it goes straight to earned sub-achievements. This gives clues to things like how many un-found endings there are, and such.

Achievement Mode 3 (Bar Scene) - Display number of achievements, number of sub achievements. No percentage completion. Clicking into it for details only displays achievements. Sub-achievement details are hidden.

Achievement Mode 4 (Strip Club Scene) - Display number of achievements, and percentage completion. No number of sub-achievements. Clicking into it for details only displays earned achievements. Sub-achievement details are hidden.

Both the Bar and Strip Club scenes have been tweaked for playability and I have also incorporated many playtester suggestions and suggestions from this thread. Also, the diner scene adds additional characterization and story elements to Natalie.

There are nearly 1200 screens for day 1 and 40,000 words or so. Plenty of stuff to look at.

[Wolfschadowe]

Saturday, 2013-08-17

There's a new version (0.2.2), including Thursday morning. Work has started on the next scene. Thursday morning is a short scene, about half the size of the diner scene for Wednesday night (Day 1)

[Wolfschadowe]

Monday, 2013-08-19

I (...) try to avoid using the exact same picture twice in a row. I always try to change the expression, have the character make a gesture or something to mix it up a bit. I will often use the same picture at similar points along separate branches of a conversation though. That means the same picture on a different play-through may have different text above it. I'm attempting to create the illusion of a living world with untold mini-stories in the background, where applicable, and within time constraints. For example, in a run of four or five similar pictures where the main character just gestures, in the background someone may be getting slapped, or drink their beer, a couple making out, etc..

There are (...) times where I wouldn't mind a little help with some of the writing. I do get valuable input from some of the playtesters who tell me where the story isn't working, or that they don't think a character is working somewhere and it needs tweaking. Sometimes a character isn't liked due to a personality conflict between the character and the tester... which is great! That means the character has a personality and it works. Other times I get feedback that a character is acting out of character, or is disliked for the wrong reasons and I take that feedback and ask questions to try find the weak areas in the story, explain more about what the character is thinking and why in order to add context to the discussion, and then tweak it until the character is portrayed the way I intend them to be.

[Wolfschadowe]

Monday, 2013-09-02

The office is about half done, less if you consider that the second half of the day 2 office scene is very different if the player started at the strip club or went to the Bar. In fact, even those who went to the bar can see some very different experiences at the office depending on what happened at the bar. There are several unique endings to the office scene based on that. I'm not sure yet exactly how many web pages will be in the office scene. One item on the storyboard may have up to 5-10 web pages associated with it, or maybe only 1. Anyway, the web build-out of the first half of the chronological time in the office is done, but the second half gets complex.

[Wolfschadowe]

Sunday, 2013-09-08

Been travelling for work this week, so not a lot of progress on the overall game. Rewrote much of the older code in _game.js to be cleaner and more efficient, especially in the Bar scene, and cleaned up some coding errors. Been rendering Day 2 office scenes today and almost have all the story renders done. The erotic renders for that scene will be starting this coming week. For some reason, those are always more fun. Also reworked my toolset while traveling so that it is easier and much, much faster for me to keep track of various paths and scoring along those paths. There will be four different erotic scenes available at the office, depending on what happened during day 1, plus a few variations that make some scenes a little different. Of course, what happens in the office will have an effect on the evening. Day 2 is one of the most complex days for the game. It is the climax of Act 1. (pun only half-intended.)

[Wolfschadowe]

Monday, 2013-09-16

Another week of travelling, but still managed to finish rendering the story scenes for the Day 2 office, and build out 30 or so web pages. I've started rendering the erotic scenes for the office. Once I get all the story pages built, I may release an update to Playtesters, just to give them something to chew on while I render the erotic half. In the day 2 office scene we meet Jasmine who is a supporting character that may become a love interest in a post-game expansion. Her full story line is story-boarded into the scene, but I'm not doing any renders or web pages for those aspects that don't specifically drive the story forward. That's all for a later date. The hooks are in place though, and code divers will be able to see the appropriate scoring associated when she is active in the scene, even if that scoring has no effect yet. No travel for the next week at least, so I'll be able to make good progress.

[Wolfschadowe]

Monday, 2013-10-07

The Genesis 2 figure is growing on me the more I use it. I was less than impressed when it first came out. They made some nice tweaks to it when it comes to posing and how they grouped pose controls. As a result, now the game has characters (main and supporting) using the following bases: Victoria 4, Victoria 5, Victoria 6, Stephanie 5, and Aiko 5, Michael 5, Base Genesis and Base Genesis 2. The variety of using different bases makes it easier to give each character a unique look.

[Wolfschadowe]

Saturday, 2013-10-12

Another week of travel for work, so mainly got storyboard work done this week, and most of that was for Day 3 & 4 stuff, and a little bit of evening day 2. I had some ideas that I wanted to make sure I got captured before I forgot them. I'm trying to decide how much to dip in and out (pun intended) of the main erotic scene for the office. Part of me wants each of the four erotic scenes for the office to feel unique, but that's a LOT of work. Another route is to have 3 of the scenes share some elements, for example take three branches (A, B & C) and four phases of the erotic scene. On all three branches, Phase 1 is a little different but they all converge on phase 2, with some minor differences. In Branch A Brad rubs Emily over the panties for a while before moving on to phase 3 where they both stand up. On Branch B, during phase two of the erotic scene, Brad rubs Emily over the panties, pulls them off and then fingers her a bit before moving on to phase 3, and on the 3rd branch, phase 2 starts with Emily's panties already off, so he pretty much goes straight to fingering her, but that advances to cunnilingus before advancing to the next phase. For branch 1 & 2, phase 3 would be very similar, but for branch 3, it would be very different. Branch 1 & 2 would end after phase 3, but Branch 3 has the option to move to phase 4. The other option is to make all 3 of those scenes completely unique, but it would also take about 2-3 times longer to finish out the overall office scene. Consider that each phase of the erotic scene is 20-40 pages long. An example to what I mean by phases, if we consider the Bar scene, Phase 1 of that erotic scene is when Brad & Emily move to the Booth. Phase 2 is when Faith either starts watching or not. Phase 3 is when either Brad or Emily starts rubbing her between the legs and ends with either Phase 4, or Emily orgasm. Phase 4 is when Faith either joins or not, and ends with both Emily and Faith orgasming. And Phase 5, for those who find it, ends with Brad cumming. The later scene with just Brad and Faith is only one phase long. Sharing resources between phases and branches equals a lot less work, but may detract from replayability a bit. Even in the bar scene, a lot of phases 2 and 3 are shared between the 3 different branches available for those parts of the erotic scene.

[Wolfschadowe]

Friday, 2013-10-18

Have two unique erotic scenes for the day 2 office fully storyboarded, at least through the success path, and made decent progress rendering them. My Daz content database puked on me and I embarassingly discovered I didn't have the right kind of backup. That has been rectifited and tested through a manual kick in the face to the Content Library. Resorting my content into custom categories is taking some time away from rendering. Damn you DAZ, and your lack of a render queue! Also, Damn you Poser, for not supporting Genesis characters in your render queue! Also, Damn you Luxus Render for taking forever to process your render queue! Still, I'm making decent progress on the renders. Still have to storyboard some of the failure paths through the erotic scenes, and also storyboard two more scenes that will share sections with one of the completed scenes. The office will have the first opportunity for actual sex in the game, although that could negatively impact things later, depending on decisions made at the bar the night before. Then the fun of working on Day 2 evening will start. I did get two animations done. They're a long way from the 2-3 frame manual stop motion animations I looped in the bar scene. The latest are 30 frame animations running anywhere from 10-30 frames per second, and they're starting to actually look halfway decent. They are still looped, because it would just take too much time to make significantly longer animations. Those 30 frame animations are taking about half a day or so to set up, and another half a day to render. End result, expect about the same number of animations in about the same places as they were in the bar scene, but much smoother and better quality.

[Wolfschadowe]

Saturday, 2013-10-26

Have all the bar start branches of the office scene completely storyboarded, including all the office erotic scenes. I'm about halfway done rendering the Emily corruption path, and about 10% through the others. The full corruption path through the office scene is 137 pages long. The standard bar start path through the office scene is 124 pages long, only 55 of which are shared with the corruption path (the first 55 of both paths) Add another 30-40 pages for bar path variations, and then yet another 60 or so for the strip club start path, and the full office scene will have close to 300 pages. I expect to have the office fully story-boarded by next weeks update, and also have two full paths fully rendered. All-in-all, progress is going well. Additionally, I have increased the number of save games from three, to 40, plus the quick-save of course. That should make some of my playtesters happy. Unfortunately there's no visual reference about what is in the save, or when it was saved, so some form of manual record keeping will probably be necessary. I'm not smart enough to adapt the system to display that information. I suspect, when all is said and done with the game, the completionists will probably want more than 40 savegames in order to earn the Grand Master achievement for completing every path and variant in the game.