Old Habits

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Old Habits

Postby Eldormain » Tue, 17Dec19 17:38

Hello All,

I am posting the teaser for my project. It's been quite a crazy ride to get here. So much learning and many mistakes. Then there is the usual day to day stuff that likes to get in the way. I am pleased to finally be at this point, tho, and am not entirely sure how or why I came across this story. I think it might have been my way of taking advice about doing a simpler project first time out of the gates. Oops. My original intention was a more involved story (different characters and such),so, I opted for this idea. But this isn't going to turn out to be as simple as it, perhaps, should have been. It will, however, take place in the same world/universe as my original idea.

I present to you...
Image

Download Teaser Here

Story:

You play Adam, the protagonist, an ex-superhero now earning his monies as a super powered gigolo. But life is never that simple and it looks like you may have fallen for one of your clients. Or maybe the damsel in distress.

Through the story you will see the world they live in with super powered people and technological advances. I am planning on the completed version of this to be Part 1 of 3. This is going to be a story based erotica with a super powered twist.

I look forward to your feedback. That is one thing I have come to appreciate about this site. Lots of good opinions.

Enjoy,

Eldormain

[img]images/icones/icon13.gif[/img]
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"Don't only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise man to the Divine." - Ludwig van Beethoven
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Re: Old Habits

Postby moskys » Wed, 17Dec20 17:32

It looks promising. Graphics are quite good, I really like the fire effects at the beginning (I guess she's the hottest chick I've seen in a while :D ). We'll talk about story once we got more of it but it's an interesting setup. On the other hand, I personally don't like to see 'narrator text' included in dialogues. I mean, renpy shows who's talking, so I don't like the format <"Xxxxxx", she said with a smile.> Just write the words the character says and play with fonts, italics, font size etc to add some spice - it's like a comic, after all. And if you REALLY need to clarify the tone or another detail just write a narrator's line with that, before or after the character speaks but not in his/her line. But that's a pesonal issue of mine.
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Re: Old Habits

Postby Eldormain » Wed, 17Dec20 19:55

That's solid feed back, Moskys, thanks. I had toiled over that for a bit and decided to use it in situations where there was movement or perhaps an emotion that might not have been clear. Most visual novels do it the way you're suggesting, tho (I think :p). I will take a closer look and see about rewriting.

Cheers,

Eldormain

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Re: Old Habits

Postby Hindemith » Mon, 17Dec25 04:51

Has potential. The superhero theme is very interesting, keeps it fresh. The sex scene could maybe use a little more of flair. I like where this is going.
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Re: Old Habits

Postby Eldormain » Wed, 17Dec27 19:41

Thank you for the input, Hindemith. I have liked the superhero stories for as long as I can remember. And I don't recall ever seeing a super powered gigolo before. The comics have certainly been sexual but mostly it's the same 'fade to black' thing that Hollywood does far too often.

Again, thanks for viewing the teaser. The next step is wrestling with the computer to get more out.

Eldormain

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Re: Old Habits

Postby tlaero » Thu, 17Dec28 20:56

This is a great start, Eldormain. I like the superhero theme. Between the times when I was working with Phreaky and Mortze, I had started a superhero game. Unfortunately the artist got bogged down with something else, and it didn't work out. I think there's a ton of room for erotic superhero games, and I'm glad you're working on one.

I love the visuals of the world you've set up, with old school cars and buildings intermixed with modern and futuristic ones. Although I suspect that was driven by the availability of models, it works really well and gives the setting a distinct look and feel.

I like that your characters are large and muscular, but not, "And now I call forth the power of super-massive-boobs!" They're strong but human looking, and I appreciate that.

The fire effect is great, as is the way you used it to introduce them as superheroes. Better to show (as you did) than tell.

The story is interesting and leaves me wanting to know more. Importantly, I'm more interested in the world and the characters than the sex, which is a win. The sex is good too, but it's the desire to know what is going on that will bring people back.

The actual English (the grammar and individual sentences rather than the overall story) is good, but could be better. I wasn't in "edit mode" so I didn't see any glaring mistakes (and there might not be any) but some of the phrasings and such were a little awkward and could be tightened up. It's small stuff, though, and you'll get better with practice.

The file size is ridiculous. Saving Chloe is up to like 1500 images and will be a smaller download than this short preview. Does Renpy require that you use PNGs or something? Or are you using JPGs at quality level 100? I hope there's some way to reduce the size, because as this gets longer, it'll become unwieldy. I stopped playing the updates of Starship Ina-something because I didn't find the download time worth the small amount of content.

I'm looking forward to seeing more of this. Keep up the great work!
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Re: Old Habits

Postby Eldormain » Thu, 17Dec28 23:27

Tlaero, thanks so much for chiming in. Hearing this as a fan of yours (and Mortzes) means a lot.

My original idea was to have a very diverse world swinging between the old school with magic to high technology as well as fantasy races. But ended up reining in this idea due to finances and, ultimately, time (putting together the city I had envisioned would have taken ages). In the end I am glad I had made this decision mostly because of the release of Bright.

I've been bouncing various bits of this project off of people in my life and had gotten similar feedback regarding awkward phrasing (interestingly enough, that's almost a direct quote from one of those who helped). I had done some last minute revisions and would be extremely interested in your "edit mode" take on this. If you find the time and wanted to PM me your insight that would be hugely appreciated. No pressure though, I have an idea of how busy you are.

I remember one of your posts mentioning compression of image files. I think it was in one of the Adventure Creator threads. This is not something I have ever done before but plan to look into it. I used jpegs for this and they weren't at 100% (converged ratio).

I would prefer to do this web-based as I get the impression there is the potential for greater exposure that way. And frankly, ease of play (not having to download and unzip). But I'm a creator and not a coder (as with most languages I understand more then I can speak). I first looked at AC but sat scratching my head. After this experience with Renpy I have thought about looking at AC again. I too have stopped playing games, Starship Ina-whatever being one of them, for the same reason.

Once again, I appreciate you taking the time to give feedback.

Cheers,
Eldormain

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Re: Old Habits

Postby tlaero » Fri, 17Dec29 00:28

Do you have the text in a file somewhere that I can read directly without going through the pictures? If so, post or PM it and I'll go through it carefully. If you post it here, you can get more opinions than just mine, but if you'd rather it be PM, that's fine too.

Any graphics program will let you save your JPGs at lower quality/higher compression levels. The levels usually are 1-10 with 10 being 100% quality level, etc. Most things default to saving at 100% and it's a complete waste of space. Generally, if you side by side compare a quality 6 file to a 10, you won't be able to tell the difference. But the 6 file will be like 1/10th the file size. So your 120M file would be more like 12M. Mortze and I go back and forth on this. I can't see a difference at 6, but he can. I don't think either of us can see a difference at 7, but he really wants to go higher, so we've settled on quality level 8. That's still like 1/5th the file size though. So, rather than our images being 500K, they're more like 100, which is a huge deal when you have 1500 of them.

There's a tool in the AC2 distribution called jpgConv. If you run it, set the quality to 7, grab all of your files and drag them to the window, it'll convert them all at once. Do this on backups, just to be safe. I can also help you configure it so that you can have it automatically convert everything in a given folder and put the converted files into a different folder if you prefer. That's how I actually use it.

I'm happy to help you get going with AC2 if you'd like. There's no perfect solution. Renpy has advantages and disavantages, as does AC2. But you should probably decide what you're going to use before you go much farther, as the conversion is going to take some effort.

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Re: Old Habits

Postby moskys » Fri, 17Dec29 10:21

tlaero wrote:Do you have the text in a file somewhere that I can read directly without going through the pictures? If so, post or PM it and I'll go through it carefully. If you post it here, you can get more opinions than just mine.


You could even get some crazy people who'd translate your game for free in his spare time :crazy: ;)
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Re: Old Habits

Postby Marco6661 » Fri, 17Dec29 10:49

moskys wrote:
tlaero wrote:Do you have the text in a file somewhere that I can read directly without going through the pictures? If so, post or PM it and I'll go through it carefully. If you post it here, you can get more opinions than just mine.


You could even get some crazy people who'd translate your game for free in his spare time :crazy: ;)

Why not? ;) :lol:
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Re: Old Habits

Postby Eldormain » Fri, 17Dec29 22:34

Hello Tlaero. Here is the link to the text file.

Download Text File Here

With all the reading that was needed to get this project into Renpy I don't recall seeing anything similar to what you described for the compression.

I look forward to your feedback.

Eldormain
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Re: Old Habits

Postby tlaero » Sat, 17Dec30 03:01

Everything we're going to talk about here is minor grammar. They're small mistakes that many people won't even notice, but that jump out at some of us. I'm going to say a lot more words than is justified for these minor things, but please don't think I'm trying to be pretentious. I'm just trying to teach you to fish.

>She draws a long, slow gasp as her body shudders above you then releases it just as slowly.

This reads as though "then releases it" modifies "as her body shudders above you." But, even if you didn't have the shuddering in between the two parts, you'd still need an "and" to join them. Consider the simplified "She inhales then exhales" and compare it to "She inhales and then exhales." "Then" is almost never sufficient for joining parts of sentences together. You almost always need an "and" with it. When writing, look distrustfully at any place you use a lone "then" outside of an "if-then" structure.

Here, minimally the sentence should be:
She draws a long, slow gasp as her body shudders above you and then releases it just as slowly.

But there are other issues. A gasp is a sudden intake of breath. You literally can not draw a long, slow gasp.

Also, the shuddering confuses the sentence. There are 3 parts here. She inhales, she shudders, and she exhales. If those three things happen independently, then you'd have to order them the way you did. But, since you said "as" the shuddering is happening during the inhaling and exhaling.

Finally, always look to remove words. If you can say the same thing with fewer words, you're usually better of doing so. In this case "above you" is unnecessary. We've got the picture to show us that she's above you, and, realistically, the deep breathing and shuddering is the important part. WHERE she does it is less so. She could do that in the next room and it would still be erotic.

I would write it like this:
Her body shudders as she draws a long, slow breath and then slowly releases it.



>"Watching her jerk upright you quickly fill your lungs, holding your breath."

This has a similar temporal problem as the previous one. Think about the ordering of what happened. 3 things happened here. You watched her, you filled you lungs, and you held your breath. As it's written, all 3 things happen simultaneously. Clearly that didn't happen, though, since you can't hold your breath while filling your lungs. The watching might have happened simultaneously, but it's not clear, grammatically, why it's part of the sentence. Did you fill your lungs and hold your breath BECAUSE you watched her jerk upright? Or did you just happen to be watching her when you took a breath? The answer to that will affect how the sentence goes.

In general, I recommend avoiding the whole "doing something he did something else" structure. People get it wrong more often than they get it right.

Maybe:
When she jerks upright, you quickly fill your lungs and then hold your breath.

Better, though would be an explanation of why you're doing this. It's not really because she jerked upright. I'd do something like:
When she jerks upright, you quickly fill your lungs and then hold your breath in anticipation of what's about to happen.


>"She falls forward lying on you, regaining her breath while staring at the fire in her hand."

This is similar. "She falls forward lying on you, regaining her breath" means that she did all three things at the same time. You need temporal markers to separate these actions.

>"Slowly closing her fingers around the flame, they die down..."

If I'm successfully teaching you to fish, then you know what's wrong with this.


>"That was intense," as your hands caress her.

There's actually no verb in this. It should be something like:
You say, "That was intense," as your hands caress her.

>"It sounds it but you know I don’t do the boyfriend experience, Cynthia," your tone, gentle and diplomatic.

>"Well, you should," pouting, she bites your nose playfully.

Same issue. There needs to be some equivalent to "he/she/you say" in the sentence somewhere.


>"Then leans forward and kisses you on the head."

I'll let you decide if this "then" is a perch or a salmon...

>"Then you remember the phone call she was on when you arrived."

This "Then" is actually okay. So, be careful. Don't just add "and" to all of them. (-:

>You'd be early if you headed there now which wouldn't be too bad."

This is subtle. It's awkward because being early is socially kind of bad, so you need an "although" or a "but" to show the that in this case it isn't.


>Staring at your phone without seeing it you continue to think about Cynthia.

Salmon. (-:

>A nearby car horn rudely pulls you from your reverie and you look up.

This is one I struggled with forever. One of my editors starting writing in ALL CAPS every time I did it, and that was a lot.

You're joining two things together with an "and," and you need to know whether to add a comma or not. Here's how I remember it. If you could add a period and remove the "and", then you need a comma. The punctuation karma has to balance. If you remove the period, you need to replace it with a comma.

In other words, if the thing after the "and" has both a subject and a verb, you need a comma.

Consider:
"He went to the store, and he got milk."
"He went to the store and got milk."

Both of those are correct. "He got milk" could be its own sentence. You could do. "He went to the store. He got milk." If you're going to join these two sentences together and remove the period, you have to balance the punctuation karma with a comma.

On the other hand, this does NOT work. "He went to the store. Got milk." There you didn't join two sentences together, so there's no need for a comma.


That should be enough to get you started.

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Re: Old Habits

Postby Eldormain » Sat, 17Dec30 14:29

Thank you, Tlaero. As I read through your post I was recalling teachers from junior high school mentioning several points. I had been using the "she said" bits to help depict things that the image might not show like movement or speakers tone. However, I'm leaning in the direction of losing most, if not all, of those. And... I do love my comma's. [img]images/icones/icon10.gif[/img] I think that in the many years of writing in MMO chats I have gotten into the habit of using punctuation and phrasing to simulate verbal conversation. Which, of course, isn't the way text writing works.

Marco6661 and moskys, thanks for mentioning that. If you know anyone who might want to do what you suggested point them in my direction. ;)

Eldormain

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Re: Old Habits

Postby Marco6661 » Sat, 17Dec30 15:42

Eldormain wrote:Marco6661 and moskys, thanks for mentioning that. If you know anyone who might want to do what you suggested point them in my direction. ;)

Eldormain

[img]images/icones/icon13.gif[/img]

Hi Eldormain,

I have the feeling that Moskys is thinking of someone especially about a translation of your texts into Es ... ;)
If you want, I'll take a look at your screenplay and work on a Fr version.

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Re: Old Habits

Postby Eldormain » Sat, 17Dec30 17:16

Marco6661 wrote:I have the feeling that Moskys is thinking of someone especially about a translation of your texts into Es ... ;)
If you want, I'll take a look at your screenplay and work on a Fr version.

Marco


By all means. That would be great, Marco. I'm looking for exposure. Who would turn down the potential of being exposed to an entire country. [img]images/icones/icon14.gif[/img]

Eldormain

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