Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Holidays!

Done a bit of writing and coding but most of this week was lost to Holiday stuff.  Between family, friends and work had very little time to get much done.  Will try to have a bigger status updated in a few days.

Monday, December 21, 2015

Update 12/21

Things weren't as bad I was worried about with the 3dcg.  Wasn't a Windows issue making the game break, looks like either my video card or power supply went bad.  Taking out the old GPU and running off of integrated has gotten 3dcg to work again, albeit a lot slower then before.  I have the replacement parts already but don't want to install them until get 2.2 out.

So I was able to make progress this week.

Terra - All written, just base needs to be coded.  Talk event written.  All of her is done except for her base events which are fully written.  While the events superficially resemble those of v1 the actual storytelling is far better this time around and it flows far better then the old version.
Sarah - 8/8 written, 6/8 coded.  Talk event started.  Same as Terra, she's fully coded in the world just requires her base scenes imaged and her talk event finished up.
Cindy - Completed
Donna and Samantha - They have some interactions written but not sure how much they'll have their own time in the spotlight this chapter.

Essentially I just have to write the base events but that can be done and implemented without focused testing itself so it can 

Timeline
-I've officially started testing although we've been unofficially testing all week and worked out most of the gamebreaking stuff already. 
-If everything goes according to plan we'll be finalized by the end of the month.  The early access Patreon group will get it as soon as the pledges go through and then the public release will be a week after that.

Monday, December 14, 2015

Update 12/14

Another week of forward progress but might have had a significant setback.

Work accomplished
Sarah - 6/8 scenes written, 6/8 imaged and coded.  I forgot how much of a pain combat eventing is and it took me most of the day to script the 3 fights with her.  But hopefully they'll be interesting.  Overall a lot more character in her capture sequence.  Only thing left is base scenes.
Terra - Completely rewrote her capture and mind sequence.  26 pages overall.  About End will still give you a choice but it's going to different on the dark path and not as immediate of an impact.  2/4 scenes written, again just base stuff left to do.  Nothing imaged, see the note below.
1 sidequest implemented.

Combat/leveling
There will be a series of scripted fights with Sarah
There will be random fights inside of Terra's mind
There will be random fights in the side-quest dungeon.
There will not be random fights in the overland map

Leveling will be two part.  There will be exp from battles that will raise level, but it will apply to everyone in your harem atm.  I've coded a sequence that will let me bring new slaves up to the same level as everyone else at the same time.  But as you progress from one chapter to the next you'll get put up to a minimum level if you haven't done any side-quests along the way.  The content in that chapter will be balanced as if you were that minimum level.

What's left?
Base scenes.  I'm not sure if I'm going to do them for everyone currently in the group.  Terra will need 2 for story progression.  Sarah and Samantha may share a scene and Donna's featured in a sidequest scene so I may just leave it on that.

Jessica's introduction - Fairly simple and the existing writing will just need a few slight tweaks.

What's the setback?
Windows did an update this morning and now 3dcg won't work.  Freezes as the default character does her introduction in Japanese.  Doesn't matter how long it sits, never moves forward.  Tried different compatibility settings, didn't help.  Tried to remove all arcs, didn't help.  Tried to reinstall 3dcg in a clean spot, didn't help.  If anyone knows a solution to this, the help would be appreciated.

System info
Windows 10 Pro 64 bit, set region to : Japanese
i7-3770k
16gb RAM
Nvidia GTX 670 graphics
Running on a 180gb Intel SSD

What's the result?
Trying to set up a virtual Windows 8 computer to solve the issue for now.  But it'll be bad in terms of productivity and workflow.  If that doesn't work I can reuse old images or just got imageless until I build another computer to handle this specific job.  For 2.0.2 I might go re-used image/imageless and then fill in content over time.  I'm hoping this won't interfere with me releasing in early January to Patreons and Mid January for everyone.

Monday, December 7, 2015

Update

Been a busy week personally so I haven't been able to get quite as much done as I was hoping but we've still been making progress on 0.2.

Completed all mapping.  ACE comes with some really nice preloaded maps and I'm using them to get a better world.
Cindy - 2/2 scenes completed.  Turned into a lot of backstory as well as swelled to about 30 pages of text in 4 event sequences.  Fully imaged and coded
Sarah - 5/8 scenes written, 1/8 imaged.  Much more character background and interactions during her capture sequence and I think it's more interesting overall.
Terra - Nothing written/imaged yet but it's fairly well plotted out.  Going to be 5-7 scenes and one dungeon.  Going to follow roughly the plot of v1 but with some significant twisting to have your actions be more logical on the dark route.
Fenja/Bounty hunter quests - Won't be part of 0.2 but we might recode/rewrite them in the future.  For now focused on primary storyline more then anything else.
Coding - Chapter 2 doesn't have any great challenges from a coding perspective.  Both the implementation of the scenes and events should be fairly direct.  It is a lot of writing of which almost all of it demands a rewrite due to low quality in v1. 


With any luck we'll be in testing for it before the end of the month.  I have a few days off coming up which should give me a few days of writing/coding for progress.

Patreon updates-

First THANK YOU.  There's been a lot more support then I was expecting considering the limited content of 0.1.  A few updates specific to that
-If everything goes according to plan the pre-release copy should be ready in the first week of January which coincides very nicely to the pledge times.
-While nobody has gone up to the $25+ tiers I am developing content for it.  There should be anywhere between 2-4 non-canon scenes available to that tier with the release of Chapter 2. 

Questions for everyone -

How important are the sidequests to people?  My own inclination is to work through the primary storyline first but I want to hear feedback on that.
Part of the reason why there was no exp gain is VX is that there wasn't a good way of addressing actors out of party with their exp gain and didn't want a scattering of levels forcing players to use particular slaves in their party and then get punished if I hide away their best characters for a story sequence.  VX ACE seems to address this fairly elegantly and I'm wondering if exp/power gain from combat might make the fighting a bit more enjoyable.  So please let me know what kind of combat you'd like to see in Harem.

Friday, December 4, 2015

Patreon launched!

There's been a lot of people asking me about Patreon because they want to support my development of the game.  Not one to turn down offers like that I have created a Patreon account!

Big note though : I'm still learning this as I do it and I'm sure I"ll make a few mistakes in the process.  Also essentially all the Patreon bonuses haven't been implemented yet and are slated for at or around the 0.2 release.

Have at it, and you have my humble thanks if you do decide to support the development of Harem!
Patreon Link!

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Harem v2 0.1 released!

Harem v2 0.1 released!

We've completed and tested the first Chapter of the Harem remake!  This is the Fisher's island content involving Donna and Samantha.  8 scenes, reusing a bit of old content but adding in 50 pages worth of writing (in the reduced width of ACE of course) and 70 new images.  Should take about 20-30 minutes per side if you read everything that's being said.

Base game, requires RTP
http://www.filefactory.com/file/1lpvy2nktk69/Harem.exe
http://rg.to/file/d268858504c5bf251765f68a88976cf2/Harem.exe.html

RTP loaded.  Larger file only necessary if you don't have the ACE RTP loaded
http://www.filefactory.com/file/10g4zs47f1vj/Harem%20w%20RTP.exe
http://rg.to/file/c4e7b35cf5678eb4ce85e770fd382d8f/Harem_w_RTP.exe.html
Additional links will be provided in Downloads page.

NoMoshing's from Harem Collector been kind enough to let me use JBurton's CG mode script but it's not implement yet.  There is a review mode, the door to the far side of your hideout.  It is save specific and can only review what the scenes you've seen that run.  By 0.2 the full CG mode will be up and running.

You're feedback is always appreciated, frankly necessary in the development of Harem.  It's key to building quality and keeping up motivation.  Seeing a download counter tick up is one thing but interacting with the players has been by in large why I've been doing this.  So speak up and say something!

Also you'll see on the right I've redesigned a few elements of the blog.  I want to set up a Patreon for the game but I want to know your feedback on the criteria.  It's under 'Patreon Proposal'.  What would motivate you to donate and what do you think fair prices are for it.  Just keep in mind that the game itself is already free.

There's also a 'Help Wanted' page.  I usually get plenty of people who want to volunteer their time instead of money and I'm always glad for the help.  I am refining the positions and placing stricter requirements on them.  Me spending more time training then they spend testing doesn't help the game get done any faster.

There's a 'Development Progress' page as well. It sounds like a good idea but I'm sure I won't update it enough for it to be useful and delete it within a few months.  But it's a good enough of an idea to try out.

Finally, I'm going to update my game recommendations and porn reading recommendations as well, but that is a goal for a future day.

Saturday, November 21, 2015

Back!



Sorry for the extended absence everyone.  

What happened?  The plot had gotten overly complex and had evolved in ways I didn’t intend nor enjoy.  In addition, since the plot was developed while I was creating the game there were many parts of the game that simply disagreed with itself.  The relationship between the protagonist and the spirits, what the spirits themselves where, what the nature of your control of Terra was etc.  The code of the game was horribly complex and chaotic.  This is my fault, I don’t have a programming background and literally learned how to create the game in the process of creating it leaving random code junk throughout the event structure and making it essentially to any top down fixes or construction.  Finally, the quality of the content had gotten so inconsistent that I hated reading the early game but it would require so much work.  And trying to be tech support for the various RTP issues and script incompatibilities was annoying.  I got frustrated and simply walked away.  I had no clue of where to start fixing things so I simply did nothing.

The game always itched at the back of my mind though.  There was a lot of parts of it I enjoyed creating and not doing wasn’t enjoyable either.  I picked up ACE and started playing around with that trying to create new things but never really got into them.  I decided to try to work on Harem but that it would require essentially redoing the game in order to make any progress.  So for the last few weeks I’ve been working on rebuilding the game from the ground up.  Reordering my entire 3dcg arc folder so it works consistently and start fresh in ACE, using existing content as a guide rather than something that had to be worked inside of.  

In the last few weeks, I’ve essentially rewritten the entire first chapter of Harem (Fisher’s village) with completely new scenes and a renewed focus on character interactions.  While the light/dark path will still exist their natures will change, dramatically on the dark path.  While Harem will never be a PG game, I plan to steer away from the darkest extremes of the game, particularly the violence and rape aspects to it.  Especially when your character is inflicting that on others.  The dark path will be more coercion and callousness then overt violence and domination.  The light path will also change but I can’t really define how that will be done yet.  But hopefully the content will be superior to the old game and I know from a coding/testing perspective it is already massively better.

Mostly I want to apologize for the vanishing and to let everyone know that I still exist and that there may be new Harem content in the near future.  I also want to apologize the team of people helping me.  I did little to explain what was going through my head and vanished for them as much as I did for everyone.  Especially considering how much work they did on the game it was a shitty thing for me to do.  A big Thank You to HirotonoRei, TheEye, Calristian and Ninjician.  Within hours of me reappearing, they’ve already offered to help again and that does a huge amount to convince me to keep working.

Chapter 1 isn’t ready to release yet but I hope to have that done within the next few weeks.  It will be based on VX-Ace so you’ll need to have that RTP installed to play it.  If that’s received well I’ll continue to work on resetting the old content in the new design but that’s likely to be a slow process.  Fortunately, I figured out how to import the VX maps but trying to reuse the event structure would doom the project.  Essentially the first third to half the game has to be completely rewritten from both a content and design standpoint.  The changes intended will also involve at least altering much of the rest of it.  So don’t expect 0.7 any time soon, but hopefully 0.2.1 isn’t too far away.

Edit - Clarifications :  While I won't remove any of the old content from the blog or websites, I haven't and will not support it.  Enjoy what's there but part of this entire mess is that code was so sloppy it could not be troubleshooted anymore.  So if it blows up, well it blows up.  Existing saves will be meaningless and will not be portable.  The CG mode is written in RGSS2 and ACE uses RGSS3 is not currently functional.  Trying to learn RGSS3 is not practical for me so unless a scripter volunteers to fix it it's MIA from here on out.