dlsavage
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FAQ
🕑 Added 2023-07-23 20:20:50 +0000 UTCThere's a few questions I've been asked more than once, so I figured I'd make a handy FAQ page to answer them in a thought-out fashion!
Why didn’t you just stick to Twine?
See below!
Why is this game taking so long and why have you re-done it so many times in different versions?!
This is a fair question, and one I get asked a lot.
There’s no quick, easy answer, so buckle in …
I started making Girl Games in 2019, after stumbling on TFGames and realizing — holy shit, I’ve been writing transformation/feminization/sissification erotica and how insanely fun would it be to turn one of my own books into something more interractive.
Back then, I knew nothing about coding, programming, whatever you want to call it. Fooling around with Twine slowly taught me about basic logic — if/else statements, mainly — and I quickly found myself falling in love with programming itself … But not so much with HTML/CSS. Unlike all the fun logic puzzle stuff, wrangling with making the game look how I wanted it to was something that just frustrated me more and more.
I even thought I’d figured it out — see Version 0.2 (urgh!) — only to find out that I’d fucked up the CSS so much that it looked like a total mess on other folks’ monitors, compared to my own and … yeah.
Around this time, I’d started digging more into programming in my spare time, simply because I loved it so much, and took a couple of online Python courses, just because …
And that led me to Ren’py.
This seemed to be the answer to all my problems!
I was sooo excited to find something that seemed like it could handle a lot more of the visual stuff right off the bat, leaving me to try out my newfound Python skills on the underlying game logic.
But something just didn’t gel with me and Ren’py. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an awesome engine for making a certain kind of Visual Novel and I’m not knocking it at all. But again I found myself getting frustrated with things like the paperdoll images, making a campus map, etc.
Working with clickable images seemed kind of hacky and I also found myself looking ahead and realizing that if I wanted to do any kind of weird minigames or whatever, I’d have to roll my sleeves up and go way beyond the regular built in functionality (which at that point was still beyond my basic Python knowledge).
So I kept looking, wondering what else was out there. And that’s how I stumbled on Godot.
Honestly, I love it. I fucking love it. It feels like being given a big box of lego; I can make whatever the hell I want now.
It’s weird: if anything there’s way more work to do — I’ve had to build the game and its functionality from scratch (aside from the conversation system, which if anyone’s wondering, is Nathan Hoad’s awesome Dialogue plugin, and has its own scripting language similar to Ink).
Suddenly having free reign to do whatever I wanted and make the game work exactly how I envisaged it led me to make a few questionable decisions like the freaking Rhythm Game in 0.4, lol.) But honestly, I’m having so much fun (re)making the game in Godot, and with each iteration, it’s getting closer to how I’d always imagined it.
So to answer why has this been taking so long - that’s the reason.
It’s been an iterative process.
And during this time, I’ve hopefully worked out what worked and what didn’t in the previous versions (thanks to the shit-ton of bad reviews the game has gotten over the years!), and now — in this latest iteration of the game (which is definitely ‘it’, because honestly, I’ll go insane if I don’t see this version through) — I feel like I have everything I need in my toolkit to finally finish it.
It’s at this point that I should probably say I KNOW. I know I should have most likely just stuck it out with Twine (if only for the fact that almost all other ‘transformation’ games are made in it, and I feel like I’ve somehow offended people simply by leaving the engine!).
Same with Ren’py. It feels like I alienated the other half of whoever was with me on this ride by turning my back on that engine, too.
The funny thing is, with what I know now, I probably could go back to Twine or Ren’py and make the game look and feel just about how I wanted it. But if you ever take a peek at the original Twine code, you’ll see what an absolute spaghetti fest it was.
All I can do now is promise you that this is it. I’m seeing this version through. It’ll most likely still take a while — I’m working on it every spare hour I get — but like I said, I’ll go insane if I don’t finish it and even though it’s sometimes marked as ‘abandoned’, if you check my Patreon history, apart from a few months last year where I hit an absolute low point, I’ve been working continuously on it, in one form or another, since I began in 2019.
And maybe I will do another game in Twine in the future. But not until I have Girl Games finished, and for that to happen, I’m sticking with Godot.
Final note: with each update going forward, I’ll try to listen to feedback and implement whatever I can to make the user experience as comparable as possible to the more familiar HTML game experience. And with each update, hopefully things will get a little quicker and a little more polished too, seeing as I have most of the groundwork laid out now.
What are the images made in? Are they AI?
Yep! If you hadn’t guessed, the images are AI generated, using mage.space, which allows NSFW generation. In case anyone’s interested, my process is to iteratively generate and regenerate, using img2img and photoshop (well, Affinity Photo) composites, to inch closer to the images I have in my head!
But why are you using AI images?! Why didn’t you stick with the original photos, or commission an actual artist to redo them?
I actually do have an artist comissioned, the wonderful Peitho (you can see some of her work on Girl Games right here already if you subscribe!), and she's slowly working on coming up with multiple poses and expressions for all the NPCs. That said, it's a long process, and I don't want anything to halt progress on this game (again) so for now at least, I'm ploughing ahead - and once she's done all the main NPC art, then we can go about switching it out.
ALSO, and this is a biggie — it should probably be right at the top of the list, tbh — the more I read about the topic, the more it seems as if using real photos in my game might risk the Patreon being shut down, which is something I definitely don’t want! So until such time as I can get some awesome 2D art commissioned (and enough of it done that it's ready to replace what exists), I’m afraid we’re gonna have to spend a litttle while longer in the Uncanny Valley.
Speaking of the Patreon content issue, the couple of movies which are currently still in the game are totally placeholder too and will have to get swapped out very soon (if they haven’t already), for the reasons set out above.
Where does the dialogue, sound and music come from?
The dialogue is also AI generated (I used ElevenLabs), and should be considered the same as the art: as something I’d love to switch out for real voices, should I ever be able to fund it! The rest comes from Freesound …
Believe it or not, unlike drawing or voice-acting (both of which I suck at), I’m actually kind of okay at music-making (another hobby I’d love to spend more time doing), so once I hit that luxury point where I’m focussing on fleshing out and adding to the game once the main story is complete, I’m planning to add in and re-do my own music … so long as it doesn’t sound terrible!
