OniArtist
patreon
Survey Responses
🕑 Added 2016-03-17 03:04:33 +0000 UTC Ok, I sent out a survey to active patrons who have already been charged, so if you didn't get one, don't worry about it, it's just collecting feedback on why people are visiting the site and what I could be doing to make it more attractive so you aren't missing out on anything. I assume more results will be coming in, but I wanted to address a few of the general comments coming in so far.- First, thanks to all the people who are happy with the stuff so far. ;) It really does help to know that people are appreciating my work, and while I appreciate those that are trying to be helpfully critical too, it does help to know when I land a hit. And for those paying just a little, but expressing that's all they can manage, I totally hear you and couldn't expect more, every dollar helps and I appreciate it.
- Second, do not worry. I am very sensitive to those who are worried that I'm going to start paywalling aspects of the game, that will not happen. For one thing, people would just pirate and break it anyways, so why be a dick when it just wouldn't work, right? ;) So no, I'm not going to have like some "premium version" of the game that costs $15 and has cooler stuff, that's not on the table.
If I try to add things at higher pricing levels it would be more like community interactions, giving patrons ways of helping to shape the game, not holding any of the game hostage.
- Some suggested I do a commission raffle, or something of the sort. Well, as commission customers can tell you, I have been pretty flaky lately. It's just hard to find the time to work on new projects. I might be able to work something out though. It wouldn't work entirely like a commission, it would be more like "you pick the character, and pick the general pose, then I run with it," as opposed to the normal commission process where there's some back and forth about getting it just right. Maybe not as satisfying as a full commission, but it'd be a lot faster and I could probably manage that, probably at the $10 level, one winner per month?
- Some people suggested that at some pay level I allow people to suggest wardrobe options to add. This is possible, and I do have an assistant artist to make more clothing plausible, but I want to keep the number of random wardrobe items fairly low, because the sprites are already getting pretty huge and I don't want to find out at what point they implode. ;) It would likely be at a relatively high price scale, but you'd only need to meet that scale for a single month. Alternately I could set it at a slightly higher price, but include all prior months in that, so if you put in $15 over five months that would be $75 towards that goal. And of course I'd have veto rights to some degree, it would have to be something that would actually fit in the game without breaking anything.
- Someone mentioned modding. Technically the game is currently moddable, it's Renpy, and people can crack open Renpy and mod it if they'd like. I'd kind of prefer people not do that though, call me a control freak but I'd like to keep a single current version of the game rather than the splintered mess that Witch Trainer's become over the years. That said, I welcome help in all forms, so if someone wants to put the work into a quality expansion to the game, I can help them get started and fully incorporate it into a current build, I'd even be willing to pay them if it really adds to the game. I'm not really sure if there is a way to add "drop in" modding to the game, like just creating a file that you put in the directory and suddenly new content is added, but if there is a way I might try to enable that.
- Someone needed a clarification on "Rogue year one and two?" I assume they mean the "HU year one and two" downloads listed in the patron tiers. Those are zip downloads of the pics that I did for Hentai United, several hundred in all. Patreon doesn't have a great way of "pinning" persistent content, but you can find the links below:
-For those worried I will start "delaying forever just to stretch things out," no worries there. I want to keep this rolling as much as anyone, and if there's ever a long delay out of me it's because the thing I'm working on has left a mess that takes time to clean up. ;) You get things as soon as I get them into a state I feel comfortable releasing, but this is a bit like surgery, right now I've got the game's chest cracked open and if I just hit "build distributions" it would be totally unplayable, so the next build has to wait until I've finished the current round of iteration and corrections. And also Daredevil season 2. I have no intention of stretching because I want to keep making and making. There will be more and more characters added until I figure out something else I want to do, at which point I'll give this project a proper send-off and immediately move to the next thing, but I don't see that happening for years yet.
-And 0.96 will release "when it's ready" (hopefully by early next month or sooner).
I'll probably add more later as the answers come in, and feel free to add anything to this thread that interests you.
Edit 1, moar answers:
-Maybe an HD version? Ok, this one is vaguely not impossible. My work files for most of the artwork is double the release scale (ie a released Rogue sprite is 480x960, the work PSD is 960 x1920). Making the resolution higher would not require redrawing everything. On the other hand, it would make file sizes bigger, and I'd have to re-export all the possible png file variations from the PSDs, which is a bit time-consuming. If this is something a lot of people want. . . maybe?
-Someone asked what some of the UI elements were, I thought these were in the tutorial but maybe not. Ok, the "green bar" at the top of the screen is meant to be a penis (since the default color is green) ;) and it represents how close you are to getting off. The white dots represent how many times you can do so in a row, and refill slowly over time. It starts at a max of three but can raise to five through leveling.
-I got a request for a video tutorial or something along those lines. I don't care to do voiceover (don't even own a mic), and I'd have to find a good video capturing program that would work for my style (I use two monitors), so I'm not really sure I'm well set up to do that sort of thing, but if people have suggestions of the details of how I could do that, I might give it a shot. In the meantime, if anyone had specific questions about technique they can ask in any thread or send me a message and I'd be happy to share. I did a quick tutorial attached to the Spider-Gwen picture a while back, but didn't get a lot of feedback on it, and I really wasn't sure what people were looking for, so questions would help me focus my answers.
-As for updating, I've been asked by some to release beta updates more often, or post text updates more often, and I really will try to. I just don't want to release anything that's more bug than not, or have you download 3-4 different versions where almost nothing has actually changed. Like recently one change I made was to an underlying system that I think now runs better, but to you guys it wouldn't be easy to notice any difference, so if I was like "New version!" and you downloaded one with just that change, it would be a waste of your time. ;) As for text, yeah, I try to keep you guys in the loop about what I'm doing, but sometimes I'm just working on the same issue across several areas for days. Hmm. . . I reorganized how the classroom and danger room interactions work a bit. Not too exciting. ;)
I'll try to keep you all in the loop though. And make sure to check back to previous posts from time to time, you probably don't get alerts when I reply to someone else, but I do reply a lot and there's some good info in there, usually in whatever the latest post is at the time.
Comments
Oni
Well what I mean is, if they want to, say, add a new scene to the game, like some interaction, they could just write it in its own file, with comments like "#this is a variable that controls how much she likes cheese" or "#call this label from the chat menu," things like that. And then I could pop through and cut/paste the bits where they would need to go to fit into the main code. Or they could do things like "# I copied this from the Location menu and changed it, if you like it, just replace the old one." Yeah, bit control freaky on my part, but I don't want to give my blessing to something that might cause more bugs because I don't understand how it interacts with things. If there's a bug, I want it to be my fault. ;) Of course, now you can declare and initialize variables anywhere in the code by using "default VariableName = "default value", so you could put a fully formed scenario into a new file, so long as it didn't conflict with anything, and all it would need is for me to put a call to that label someplace.
Dinker
Well if they wanted to use it in the game they'd have to declare variables and call it from the game's base files at least :P
Oni
If someone wanted to mod something through me I would prefer they just put all their stuff into it's own uniquely named file, commented so I could understand what they intend it to do, and then I'd put it where it needs to go. If they actually changed things in my existing code I would have to spend a lot of time figuring out what was different. ;) I tend to move stuff around anyways, like you may notice that the ends of various files are filled with junk code that doesn't really fit the theme of that file, it's because I was working on something and needed some place to put it, but eventually I'd move it someplace that made more sense. :p
Dinker
Literally
Dinker
Yeah, literally you get all of the files uncompiled. Archive.rpa is literally a big, weirdly formatted kind of zip file. (Hint for fans, early Kitty work is in there! It's really not that attractive yet.) :P And if someone wanted to add on to the project they could just modify Rogue_Chat.rpy (for example) and just send you that file. If it works outside of the archive.rpa it should work inside it (AFAIK, warning, I've never tried to recompile a Ren'Py game with modded files. But if it doesn't work that way it would be DUMB.)
Oni
Hey, when you hack into one of those things, does it include commenting? Because I try to comment things really well, and even I wouldn't know what the hell I was doing if I were trying to mess with an uncommented version of the code. ;) And again, if you want to mod, just key me into the process, I'll try to make it simple to do if it would benefit the game. Anything I don't have to code is time saved on my end. ;)
Dinker
Also, as a note... any time Oni updates and redistributes the game it makes all mods built on older files that have been modified obsolete until the mod author updates the files to include the new information and patches. So if I ever do get the modding itch it'll wait to be scratched until after the game is complete.
Dinker
Just to toss in two cents, for those that are curious... all the files for the game are stored in archive.rpa. Anyone that gets an RPA extractor can pulls these out and take a peek at them. Game code and data is stored in simple text coding files. If you are interested in modding the game, altering one of these files and then dropping it in the same directory as the archive.rpa will extract it. (Though the game might glitch on the first playthrough as it generates the necessary files to incorporate it into the build, afterwards it'll work.) That said Oni has produced some really elegant and complicated code for a lot of stuff. Seriously. I'm one of those goons that plays with Witch Trainer, and I've nearly built a normal patch without updates just to fix game logic problems and typos... and Rogue-Like is five times as complicated on the backend. (Well not that it's needlessly complicated, but the way it's built is actually more... programmy.) So yeah, boom, you can do it. I was gonna do it before Oni put the pathing thing into the last build, just to show off what it would look like to Oni, but (s)he(?) beat me to it, so there you go!
