It's a Skill Issue

 

This month has been jammed packed and has made me exhausted. Hosting guests for a few weeks and then looking for additional work to make ends meet on top of existing work commitments has me struggling to scrounge the creative energy to get things done like I wanted. I at least managed to keep (for now) my self-made promise to not buy any new games until after first release.

But enough of my excuses, what have I managed to do so far?

I’ve managed a lot less writing than I wanted to for Piety than needed for the release. I’ve hit some minor writers block that I’m remedying with some short story practice. I’ve had a recurring fantasy about a hero and his wolf girl companion just going ham with breeding making the poor girl just huge. I’m drawing inspiration from Setsuna of Redo of Healer fame and Fenrys from Chilling in Another World. I generated this post’s image with that vision in mind. It should be just a few chapters long in total, and I’ll need the critique which I’m sure will help with writing for Piety. I’ll host it somewhere like deviant art or AO3and link back to the blog once it’s ready.

I’ve also performed some tests with stable diffusion webui-forge, which is something of an improvement over automatic1111. There’s just so much knowledge and cutting-edge stuff when it comes to this that it’s hard not to feel constantly behind the curve. One major obstacle I’m facing is using different checkpoint models. The nun images I’ve shared so far having been generating using an SDXL model, which while looking great, doesn’t have the same level of support that the older SD1.5 model has. The image shared here is using the SD1.5 model with the support of a hyper proportion Lora. It works well, but the amount of trial and error in prompts required is extreme, compared to the SDXL model. It will take me more time to establish a work-flow that I will want to use for Piety.

In short, I did some more research for the project, but the end of the month goal to release Piety alpha version is looking mighty unreasonable. Instead, I am aiming for at least my short story release by then. It honestly is a skill issue: I can code a storm, but my writing and art stinks still. Hopefully, I can get better, and soon

Tick Tock

 

 

Piety Character Profile – Nadeen

 

 

The first maiden is Nadeen (final name still pending). She is a young and impressionable woman, who has always looked up to the main character. Her hobbies are taking care of the orphanage children and tending to her personal garden. Her nature is timid and shy but is easily excitable when given praise and encouragement. She is naïve and inexperienced and ripe for corruption by the player.

She begins as a small and meek woman which I hope to develop as the story unfolds. Her body shape is top heavy hourglass, and I’ve provided a series here to demonstrate the types of growth steps I’m intending to add. I plan for higher levels of growth, but am still practicing getting the kinds of results I want from Stable Diffusion, including pregnancy forms. All images are currently just reference and will not necessarily be used in game.

As for general project progress, I am still in the process of writing the first few chapters and coding events. I do not think I will make the self-imposed playable build deadline for this month and will move it to late next month. That should give me more time to make the first impressions demo just a bit better.

In the meantime, I plan to post a few more character profiles and any other general progress updates as I get closer to the first build.

Tick Tock

Why build a game in RenPy?

 

 

Why build a game in RenPy?

This was something pretty important to settle before I got to work on Piety. It came down to a number of factors and personal experiences.

Mobile platforms

Once upon a time, Flash worked everywhere, and the iPhone was not yet popular. You could build stuff on the web and people looking for lewd content knew about places like new-grounds. Today, one of the most used platforms by far is mobile devices. I was kind of shocked by the numbers shared by other devs by the large number of players willing to play explicit games on their phones. To this end, I was originally looking at using Unity before they threw developer confidence into the trash. This left Renpy as a viable possibility as it has builds across PC and Mobile. I’ll be able to target PC, Mac, Linux, Android and Apple devices all with RenPy.

It just works

Coding is very straightforward, using a mixture of RenPy’s own language and Python, it’s easy to develop and make complex UI or mechanics. It uses just about any popular media format I would want to use, and distribution builds are a breeze. One of the most important features, roll-back, is readily available and easy to maintain as well as making and managing saves.

Free Open Source Softare (FOSS)

Circling back to the issue with Unity, RenPy is FOSS. It will not cost me extra to develop with and is something that is continuously developing. It has a nice community and active developer scene. While I don’t intend to work on furthering RenPy itself, I am happy enough with just using it to build games. Other platforms such as Godot exist, but I have yet to delve deeply into it, and it is also a general purpose engine opposed to targeting VNs. Twine also exists, and I may touch on it if a particular idea strikes.

RenPy games are pretty fun

There’s a huge library of existing games that use RenPy and are sources of inspiration. There are a few great examples of expansion based games such as Hypnosis by Expanding Universe, Research Station M-OO by Galactase and Fattening Career by Bladerune9. I recommend you check these out for their stand out excellence.

 

The next post I will provide some progress on Piety. I’m still hoping to squeeze out some sort of build this month, but am expecting some extra work the next few weeks. If not a release, I’ll at least drop down some news or screen shots.

 

Tick Tock