BEW Forum

botc76 wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 19, 2020 2:19 pm

There are dozens of games that are as well written as BEW, many as complicated branch-wise, many with even more women to pursue.

I usually don't comment and stay away from controversies, and maybe this is just Coronavirus confinement talking, but I feel compelled to say that I really don't agree with this affirmation, and I have to admit that I don't understand why you stick around if this is what you think, even more so given that you seem to consider that it should be made completely differently. Notably, the fact that you would like to be able to skip content and praise games for having "even more girls to pursue" makes me think that you are completely missing the beauty and uniqueness of this game. This is maybe why you seem to have misunderstood some comments, thinking people were praising dated pics, when in reality, what they meant was: what is really important is the content, not the appearance (even though the appearance does count), and old games with great content and poor aesthetics may be better than recent games with great aesthetics but poor content. For instance, I was a fan of adventure games, and it is a fact that their golden age is in the past. Well, I personally prefer an old game such as Monkey Island or (the one I prefer) The Beast Within rather than modern action games where the goal is to shoot'em up, even though they are often really beautiful, and in any case, certainly more beautiful than old games. If you have other preferences, I of course totally respect that, just please dont' ask this game to be anything else than it is; there are enough games out there for you to find what you are looking for without transforming a game that is not into a game that is. Variety is the spice of life!

Just to be clear: I'm not saying BEW's appearance is poor! I don't have any complaint on this subject, and I do like the fact that you have to roam your screen to find other reaction options, which is something that I don't think I found in the Renpy, RPGM or Unity games I've played.

Valerielychee wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 22, 2020 2:17 am

Well, I personally prefer an old game such as Monkey Island

One of my favourite games: i prefer games that require a bit of thought to FPS games, although the Assassin's Creed franchise is pretty good, as is Kingdoms of Amalur - Reckoning.

Wolfschadowe wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 20, 2020 2:57 pm

lurking wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 20, 2020 6:15 am

Chances are that there aren’t many people here who have a basic understanding of programming...

I still remember the first 2 lines of code I ever wrote:

10 PRINT HELLO
20 GOTO 10

Mine were <p>Hello World</p>

thanks for shr

any news for september?

az89 wrote: ↑

Sun Sep 13, 2020 3:00 pm

any news for september?

Working on finalizing the new engine for the game. My To-Do list for getting the engine going and working the way I want it is getting very short. Right now I'm chasing down an animation bug. For example:

With a base character in a base pose like this: When I apply an animation or pose (even to a foot or leg) I get this result So somewhere in my automated pipeline of transferring the poses and animations from Daz over to Unreal, the face rig is getting corrupted, so I'm hunting it down to squash it. I'll get this squashed soon, even today, but these little bumps keep cropping up. Once I get my workflow finalized and get the engine into a fully useable state, the game itself will be extremely fast.

By extremely fast. to compare, let's subtract two parts from the per-page workflow. Subtract writing the text/story, and posing/framing the figures. Those two steps will take about the same amount of time as always. The old way took anywhere from 30-60 minutes to create a static page, including render times, re-renders, postwork, etc... Animated pages took 3-12 hours. The way it's trending, I should be able to make a static "page" in 2-5 minutes, depending on how many characters are involved, and animated pages will take the exact same amount of time.

Of course the posing/framing stage for animations is much longer than static images just because I'm doing more poses per 'page' but that's expected.

The two big questions I'm dealing with right now, that aren't affected by the engine development are:

1. In the static images, should I make the characters "living" meaning that they sway slightly, breathe, blink, etc...? Or should I just leave them fully static. It doesn't really add any time to overall game development since it would be a post-process animation that overlays the pose, but I'm not sure if it would add, or subtract from the experience.

2. For the overall gameplay, should I vastly simplify the game mechanics making it entirely event based with more story where the player doesn't have to worry as much about making the girls happy, but replace it with some more in depth text to substitute from the alternate responses? Or should I leave the mechanics alone and keep the full gameplay and emotional control challenge in place?

Anyway, I'm still here, and I'm still banging away at the game regularly, in-between bouts of yet another modded Skyrim run-through, or the inevitable Cyberpunk distraction coming soonish.

Wolfschadowe wrote: ↑

Sun Sep 13, 2020 4:59 pm

The two big questions I'm dealing with right now, that aren't affected by the engine development are:

1. In the static images, should I make the characters "living" meaning that they sway slightly, breathe, blink, etc...? Or should I just leave them fully static. It doesn't really add any time to overall game development since it would be a post-process animation that overlays the pose, but I'm not sure if it would add, or subtract from the experience.

2. For the overall gameplay, should I vastly simplify the game mechanics making it entirely event based with more story where the player doesn't have to worry as much about making the girls happy, but replace it with some more in depth text to substitute from the alternate responses? Or should I leave the mechanics alone and keep the full gameplay and emotional control challenge in place?

Anyway, I'm still here, and I'm still banging away at the game regularly, in-between bouts of yet another modded Skyrim run-through, or the inevitable Cyberpunk distraction coming soonish.

I'm OK with leaving things "as is" for both. I don't expect any kind of FMV from BEW, I just want the story!

Heaving breasts are nice but not necessary.

Keeping the challenge of figuring out each girl is something I am in favor of. It adds a nice element of realism.

Gameplay wise i'm all for keeping things as they were before. The most fun part of BEW for me is it's structure. Even now i sometimes replay released episodes and find things that i haven't seen before. I know there are some paths i didn't saw yet (judging by the achievements). Vast majority of such games have zero replayability - you just click through the story once and that's it. BEW, with it's score system and branching, is an actual game and not just a story pretending to be game. And it's awesome.

Wolfschadowe wrote: ↑

Sun Sep 13, 2020 4:59 pm

2. For the overall gameplay, should I vastly simplify the game mechanics making it entirely event based with more story where the player doesn't have to worry as much about making the girls happy, but replace it with some more in depth text to substitute from the alternate responses? Or should I leave the mechanics alone and keep the full gameplay and emotional control challenge in place?

Please, no, don't change the gameplay! I'm begging you... That's what makes this game so great and unique

best of luck

Valerielychee wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 19, 2020 7:49 pm

Wolfschadowe wrote: ↑

Sun Sep 13, 2020 4:59 pm

2. For the overall gameplay, should I vastly simplify the game mechanics making it entirely event based with more story where the player doesn't have to worry as much about making the girls happy, but replace it with some more in depth text to substitute from the alternate responses? Or should I leave the mechanics alone and keep the full gameplay and emotional control challenge in place?

Please, no, don't change the gameplay! I'm begging you... That's what makes this game so great and unique

I agree, don't change the gameplay! I love the game for the way the gameplay is.

Wolfschadowe wrote: ↑

Sun Sep 13, 2020 4:59 pm

1. In the static images, should I make the characters "living" meaning that they sway slightly, breathe, blink, etc...? Or should I just leave them fully static. It doesn't really add any time to overall game development since it would be a post-process animation that overlays the pose, but I'm not sure if it would add, or subtract from the experience.

Leaving things static is fine, but I have to say, a number of newer games have "blinking" girls, and personally I think it injects some interesting eye candies. The trick is to not over-do it to the point of distraction.

This board seems to have problems lately.

lurking wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 14, 2020 9:39 am

This board seems to have problems lately.

Yep! The hosting service has been doing a PHP upgrade and, as Wolf said, "it doesn't seem to be going very well."

They'll get it eventually. We just need to have patience.