A tip for Ren

[Eggplants]

Sorry Suraru but it's probably best not to ask. I've no idea what Ren is actually doing with the code either but he's doing something and that's all I need to know because with only two team members, time is not an issue. Also in regards to your other comment, Ren IS a hired coder, lol!

[Suraru]

Ok then, I look forward to something super epic

[trunks2585]

The only thing I can add on to this conversation was about the story questions.

I don't know what Ren and Eggplants have done with the full story, however if it hasn't really changed much since I was on the team, then the next release still won't be the full story, there won't be an ending in the next release, but new content should be on about the same level as what was in part one.

Again this is assuming the story I helped them come up with isn't totally scrapped.

[Smackman]

i dunno about HTH, the guys house burned down or some shit first of all... I gave up on that one a week or so after i found the newer version though

[Thaedael]

HTH is around and kicking, the guy updates frequently but the way he has it set-up is a little counter-intuitive to me. However considering he has managed to do a lot more than I ever have/will props to him.

[BlueLight]

HTH? sorry what is that?

[Mr D]

HTH? sorry what is that?

HTH stand fot hand-to-hand combat . Just kidding it stands for "high tail hall" its a furry flash game

[Renara]

High Tail Hall, you can find a slightly tweaked version somewhere (actually, probably on Funny Games), used to be on Newgrounds but Crowchild's replaced it with something from HTH2. High Tail Hall 2 proper is down at the moment I think, some problem with their servers. Anyway, it's a furry kind of adult pleasure resort game, still very rough but fun to play (when he hasn't taken down all the characters to work on them at least).

But ehm… my point in raising it is that it didn't too far, then there was some kind of fire damage and he decided to start over, but it was nearly five years before anybody really saw anything, and even though it's still only being updated slowly and in little bits and pieces, people are still plenty happy to play it, and the original for that matter. I don't see LoK being any different; it won't be that much larger content-wise than the current game, but there'll hopefully be a lot more to get out of it, and it should grow quickly from there since all the ground-work for new content should be done. Not that content creation is easy or anything, but it'll be easier for more people to get involved again.

[MastrMarz]

... My only thing is really, to bring it back up, it HAS been two years since .2 ... And I understand with all the complications and everything, but if you say you're making a commitment to something, "having a life" shouldn't really be a valid excuse. I still stand behind the argument that you should show a bit of proof you have been working on it. Maybe the new sprites or just animations or something? I'm not saying a full demo, but just proof of this epic coding you've been doing.

Two years... It took Gorepete just a month or two to finish Dusty's castle. He's halfway done with that Sakyu game, and he's started on a third. These are all pretty big imo, and last time I played LoK v.2, it seemed... like, waaay shorter.

Also, I forget who said it and I'm too lazy to look, someone said there was combat in LoK? I thought it was her being a whore till she got enough exp to be a bigger whore to the next guy? If that's the case, okay, that's a lil more coding, but still... I think I support Trunks on this topic. And it isn't trolling either, it's getting answers. HTH is a completely different game and I have no clue why it's mentioned here, but still. I've been a loyal fan of LoK since Playshapes posted it oh so long ago, but I think he'd be a bit disappointed to see how his game is going now...

Just saying.

[cabelxxx]

Alright, I have been lurking around on this site for nearly a year now, and wanted to put out several ideas for how to progress from this point forward:

1) Renara could create a new thread off of the main page in which he could post requests for specific code/sprites/whatever along with what would be needed to make them. Then, any user who has time to work on them could post what they have, and the team (or whats left of it) could select the one that they like best and fit it into the game. This process could be used to take a lot of the work off of Renara, use some of the sizable fan-base to our advantage, and put an end to people asking for what's being worked on/ what they can do to help.

2) Get back in contact with old team members and try and get them to become active on the site again. Ever since the end of Area 51, I think a large number of people have lost most of their hope that this project will ever be finished (no offense Renara, but I think that this is true). By getting some of our better coders, artists etc. back and working on new projects or any current project on the site, we can begin to expand the fanbase again and hopefully bring in some new, more enthusiastic members.

3) This last one is kinda touchy, so I want to make sure it is taken with the assumption that I am not trying to make anyone angry: Very few people on this site provoke as much respect from members as Renara and Trunks. Because of this, if the two of you were able to accept that the last group attempt at this project was a colossal screw-up on everyone's part and continue to work together, even begrudgingly, I think that the entire project would benefit enormously from your combined experience.

Lastly, even if none of these ideas is what you are looking for, please at least consider trying to make a new plan for the future of the project that would better fit your needs. I don't think that this site will maintain its members for much longer if we continue and change nothing.

[Thaedael]

It is a discussion that has been happening on an off now for two years. Is having obligations outside of making a game that has no profit in my life other than the joy of making it, is "I'll work on it as I want" not a valid excuse? I think so. I am a full time student, I work full time outside of school on top of that, and then I here I am in my spare time moderating and dealing with people who don't think before posting. Renara works, a real job, has real obligations as I do (How many of you pay for you own living standards straight out of your pocket sans-mother and pappa?) If I quit my job and still went to school, you would have to pay me $19.50 an hour to make my current standard of living. 40 hours a week, 5 days a week, 12 months a year.

Instead of just waiting (how long have you been waiting for Bowser castle 2 mastrmarz, go yell at playshapes, my ass he would be ashamed). My issues in that two years the amount of people saying give me give me give me in a self-entitled way that expect stuff to the amount of people who said how can I help and genuinely mean it have not lined up at all.

I worked with Area_52, had to deal with a lot of things, coordinating between different members, ensuring open communication, lots of work, lots of feedback, and hell I had the easy part. That has nothing in the amount of work that went into a scrapped engine, the many backgrounds that RP made, the models that Malcanthet and KatsuO_O made, hell people give trunks a hard time but he spent weeks at my side writing the plot. For what? Nothing more than people riding our ass about everything, bitching about stuff without getting their hands dirty.

I worked on Ascension. Every day I got spammed about 20~30 pms that told me to eat shit and die because I wasn't working fast enough, or complaints about decisions I wanted to make on my own plot, my own game, you know the thing I was losing sleep over, and ignoring homework to do.

For argument's sake lets say the game is all just a lie and no one is working on it ( I know its being worked on since I am privy to knowledge and also just know Renara). Your life will still continue. You would still lurk, and I say lurk because most people only post requests and for status update (and some don't even bother to keep up with what is going on anyway).


Area_52 wasn't a failure. It was a success in many ways showing progress by complete amateurs is not only a dream but a possibility. In 4 weeks we had a prototype engine, a fully articulated model, a design document, a full, yes full, sound track, all the backgrounds done. Instead of saying it was a failure, people could actually take all this and make a game, just make the remaining sprites, everything else is done and made public. Instead people are just shouting for someone else to do the work without anything else.

Problem is self entitlement, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter.

[trunks2585]

3) This last one is kinda touchy, so I want to make sure it is taken with the assumption that I am not trying to make anyone angry: Very few people on this site provoke as much respect from members as Renara and Trunks. Because of this, if the two of you were able to accept that the last group attempt at this project was a colossal screw-up on everyone's part and continue to work together, even begrudgingly, I think that the entire project would benefit enormously from your combined experience.

The issue isn't so much that I can't work with Ren, and more so there's nothing I can do to help right now. I was in charge of the story, I wrote something up and gave it to the group. Unless Ren is scrapping everything (I know that's not the case) I can't do shit, it's pretty much on Ren and Eggplants shoulders now. They need code and characters, not a plot.

It is a discussion that has been happening on an off now for two years. Is having obligations outside of making a game that has no profit in my life other than the joy of making it, is "I'll work on it as I want" not a valid excuse? I think so. I am a full time student, I work full time outside of school on top of that, and then I here I am in my spare time moderating and dealing with people who don't think before posting. Renara works, a real job, has real obligations as I do (How many of you pay for you own living standards straight out of your pocket sans-mother and pappa?) If I quit my job and still went to school, you would have to pay me $19.50 an hour to make my current standard of living. 40 hours a week, 5 days a week, 12 months a year.

Instead of just waiting (how long have you been waiting for Bowser castle 2 mastrmarz, go yell at playshapes, my ass he would be ashamed). My issues in that two years the amount of people saying give me give me give me in a self-entitled way that expect stuff to the amount of people who said how can I help and genuinely mean it have not lined up at all.

I worked with Area_52, had to deal with a lot of things, coordinating between different members, ensuring open communication, lots of work, lots of feedback, and hell I had the easy part. That has nothing in the amount of work that went into a scrapped engine, the many backgrounds that RP made, the models that Malcanthet and KatsuO_O made, hell people give trunks a hard time but he spent weeks at my side writing the plot. For what? Nothing more than people riding our ass about everything, bitching about stuff without getting their hands dirty.

I worked on Ascension. Every day I got spammed about 20~30 pms that told me to eat shit and die because I wasn't working fast enough, or complaints about decisions I wanted to make on my own plot, my own game, you know the thing I was losing sleep over, and ignoring homework to do.

For argument's sake lets say the game is all just a lie and no one is working on it ( I know its being worked on since I am privy to knowledge and also just know Renara). Your life will still continue. You would still lurk, and I say lurk because most people only post requests and for status update (and some don't even bother to keep up with what is going on anyway).


Area_52 wasn't a failure. It was a success in many ways showing progress by complete amateurs is not only a dream but a possibility. In 4 weeks we had a prototype engine, a fully articulated model, a design document, a full, yes full, sound track, all the backgrounds done. Instead of saying it was a failure, people could actually take all this and make a game, just make the remaining sprites, everything else is done and made public. Instead people are just shouting for someone else to do the work without anything else.

Problem is self entitlement, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter.

I'm too lazy to multiquote you so here we go.

I agree, yes this is something that is done on Ren's free time and when he feels like it. I'm terrible at managing my own updates for my crappy LPs and my reviews, let alone any artwork I do. (Before someone asks, no I'm not going to draw character models for any project, and I just said why, I'm lazy and I admit it.) At the same time it sounds like Ren is self employed from how I've heard him describe his work in the past, and he's also admitted to being a procrastinator. He should have just said from the beginning 'I have no idea when this will get done, I work very slow, don't hold your breath' or something. Instead he's hyped up this project and made it sound great to the point that people arn't only interested but demanding something. It was a fatal mistake and I know all of us willing to jump on the bandwagon and contribute to the project didn't help things at all, but even after some member rotations it probably still wasn't too late to back down on the hype.

Half the reason Playshapes doesn't get shit about working on bowser's castle is likely because he has flat out said it'll be a long time from now when it's done. (Then again I don't know how often his PM box gets flooded with update requests and whatnot.)

To be honest working out the plot didn't take that long. I mostly reused what I wrote for Ren and made some changes. The annoying part was revising the damn script 2 or 3 times after I thought the story was resolved, because it's what Mal wanted and I was too nice to be a dictator about it.

I didn't know we had a full soundtrack, and we still had a few backgrounds we needed but not many. Anyways your point still stands, we produced enough that someone can take what we did and build a game out of it, shit that's exactly what playshapes did and hoped for, but only a few people have used his stuff for little more than making new animations or edits.

[cabelxxx]

@Thaendael: I understand your frustration with the unappreciative users that flame people who are only trying to have a bit of fun with this project, and eventually show an impressive result. I am not trying to downplay the amount of work that you or any other team member has put into this project, and I have a great appreciation for the time you all spend making something for the entire community. I do however want to discourage everyone from growing too angry at the trolls who constantly hound them for updates. There is an enormously large portion of the community that appreciates your work (including myself), and even if most of us avoid PMing you all about our satisfaction, not one of us would want to see you quitting out of anger, disappointment or any other reason.

@Trunks: I went into writing this just after having read Renara and your "disagreement" that made its way into this thread from the Haters Gonna Hate thread, and likely exaggerated the actual situation. The fact remains that if the two of you encouraged the community to help by submitting candidates for the needed code and sprites to go with your story, I think that you would get a better response than if the same suggestion was made by only one of you. Like you mentioned, this is a hobby and something to be done during free time, the easier we make it for Renara and Eggplants, the sooner we will see progress.

[Eggplants]

I could be completely wrong but the way I see Rens work style is that he's pretty much trying to get all the coding done from the beginning so once it's all done we can make serious progress. Now I'm not sure if this is the best way to go about it but I am exited to see how it goes and that's why I haven't made any progress besides a bit of practice here and there because when it's all done I believe this will take off and we'll actually be able to bring new team members on board as well.

[Renara]

Now I'm not sure if this is the best way to go about it

Oh, I'm absolutely certain it wasn't, but unfortunately we didn't have two years of foresight back when the project started, or we could have done things very differently!
Still, while we almost definitely aimed way too high from day one, I still hope to stick to most of those goals so the time hasn't all been wasted. I know that might count as over-hyping as well, which I'm trying not to do, but I also don't like saying nothing!

accept that the last group attempt at this project was a colossal screw-up

Which do you mean, the "main" project or Area52? I don't think Area52 was a screw-up of any kind; as Thaedael points out there's lots of good stuff come of Area52, the only real problem is the same thing that any volunteer project faces, that it can get really difficult to keep it all going. A big part of that is because the only thing that really keeps people in the team is the fun or challenge more than anything, since there's no money involved (certainly not for LoK, completely original works could I suppose), this means people can be forced to drop out due to other priorities, or even just lack of interest, and even if they're replaced it means constant disruption. I'm not sure what the Area52 team members would attribute to their having to stop in the end, but I doubt it was really anyone's fault. All their stuff is there to see in the forum, so literally anyone could pick it up and carry on, or even just use it to make something similar.

someone said there was combat in LoK?

I don't think that came from the LoK team? There was a discussion in the public forums somewhere when somebody was suggesting the idea; the engine could probably do combat without much extra work, but there's no plan for that in LoK itself. That doesn't mean there won't be some stuff to do besides constant sex, but in LoK, I think sex is Krystal's weapon for this particular adventure

[trunks2585]

Ren, I think when he said 'the last group attempt' I'm pretty sure he means your group.

And for the combat section I think he means the sex scenes, and how they'll be handled.

[cabelxxx]

I was referring to both projects in a way. While they have each accomplished quite a lot in terms of development, I meant that the team came apart far before either project was done due to disagreements on how the project was to be carried out as well as complications with the deadline system. Members grew frustrated when they couldn't continue work due to delays in work from others, and with so much to accomplish and so few people to share the work load, frustration joined the list of problems, ending both projects.

On a different note, one of the common arguments on the site appears to be on what scenes and features could be included. I don't know how feasible this would be, but if the main game was designed to be able to easily accept the addition of new areas, events, actions, etc. The community could create large blocks of whatever type of content they wanted to see, and the team could choose parts to add and focus on combining them rather than creating tons of new content by themselves. I am just throwing out ideas here though.

[Thaedael]

Regarding your second comment, it won't work.

Renara wants to make something that can be added to and in part addresses much of what you suggest post-release. However expecting a team to pick and choose other work and incorporate won't work just on the basis of how things are done. What some artists do for animating one thing, versus how another programmer goes about making the same event won't line up, which means he would have to redo it all again in the first place, so he could've just done it himself from the ground up.

Problem is what people understand of game making once again. Time invested towards product release is an inverse proportion, that only further grows exponentially per member added. The quality will be better but take even more time.

[Smackman]

I dont doubt that once it comes out people will play it, but people arent even really waiting around for updates at this point...
And I bet had this forum not been created some of the members of the original team would have had something together... either them or some nameless people who saw the original game and went (oh well i could finish that *google* oh damn someones already doing that *wait*)
Nowadays people arent even finding version 0.1 theyre finding .2 (did you take out playshape's little challenge or not? dont remember)
I dunno if anyone would be willing to make their own attempt at finishing the original 2 years later either...

[spartan117]

Ive been here since this forum started. This game will never be made. Its hard to keep people waiting when theres not even a v.03 in 2 years, theres nothing. I spend more time in the creative corner where people are actually making progress.