HTML Female Agent [v1.20.1p] [Crushstation]

Enfrize said:

I mean, I understand that creator might have a real job to attend, that he is busy with it and can't devote a lot of time to the game, it's all known. But in my opinion, if this "hobby" of yours bringing you $6k/month, it isn't just a hobby anymore. So you need to either rationalize your life to spend a meaningful amount of time on something thats bringing you this much money and start to add something more than just few lines of dialogues once in a half a year and keep improving technical aspects that nobody cares about or stop leeching money from your community at all, quitting giving false promises and adding "teasers" of that Big Bangkok Thingie you've planned.

Makes me wondering who are these desperate 2k people.

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He is not working alone, and honestly 6K a month (minus 30% to Patreon) isnt that much, especially when you also have to split some of it with 3 (I think it were) others.

PinkBishop said:

He is not working alone, and honestly 6K a month (minus 30% to Patreon) isnt that much, especially when you also have to split some of it with 3 (I think it were) others.

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30% to Patreon alone? Isn't that way too much? They were founded on the premises of taking 5% plus any transaction fees or am I remembering something woefully wrong? Now, taxes may bump the share of money not seen to 30%, but that's taxes, not Patreon. Or the banks may do so, but again, that's kinda too much, even for a couple thousand transactions under $20 all over the world West.

Ppsha said:

30% to Patreon alone? Isn't that way too much? They were founded on the premises of taking 5% plus any transaction fees or am I remembering something woefully wrong? Now, taxes may bump the share of money not seen to 30%, but that's taxes, not Patreon. Or the banks may do so, but again, that's kinda too much, even for a couple thousand transactions under $20 all over the world West.

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At the very end, i.e. minus the bank fees and PayPal, ecetera, the artist receives just under 55% of the amount paid. Here is an example from 09.10.2019, whereby the conversion from dollars to euros also plays a role.


Patreon.com takes payment fees.
Instead of the specified $ 2.50, the patrons pay $ 2.98 when paying with paypal.
I get $ 1.80 of it.
If I have this amount paid out by paypal, it says:

PayPal exchange rate: 1 USD = 0.8867625 EUR. This exchange rate includes our exchange rate fee of 2.5%, which we add to the purchase exchange rate of our financial partners when you withdraw money in a foreign currency from your PayPal account to your bank account.

$ 1.80 = € 1.60

Supporters who do not pay with dollars (like me with euros) pay their own exchange fees.
To give the developer $10, I have to pay € 11.90.
In the end, the developer gets paid just 50% of the amount actually paid.

Crushstation said:

I've never understood this theory. Surely the game would get more support if the content came out faster?

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Generally, money earned should be considered in conjunction with the time spent. It is nicer for most people to receive 6000 dollars for one hour a day of work, than 12 000 dollars for 8 hours a day.
And it certainly seems that the team behind this game spends very little of their time on its development.

Crushstation - man, your game is one of a kind. Completely in-house built engine and a pretty large scope (for a "porn-game"). People are really spoiled these days. I think it's because of all these "exclusive beta access" thingies and "open beta" periods that AAA game producers introduces a couple of years back.

People think that what they were seeing there was the game in an actual beta state and that since the release date was usually a month or two later, it doesn't take too long to flip from beta to RTM and then go live. They're not used to the fact that development - especially of something completely new - takes a lot of time and effort.

That being said - I absolutely cannot wait for an update.

Okay, if you are putting enough hours into your game like you said, then how come you've not gotten to Bangkok in two years? Why you keep spending these hours on some technical gimmicks and additional descriptions of things? Do you really want to tell that 2 years of hard work like you mentioned were all for this, firstly for some teasing content before Bangkok, then new avatar pictures, then prequel of what happened before you got enrolled into military, then array of technical fixes and development of your "BrAnD nEw SeX sYsTeM, woaah". If this is true then you aren't been spending your hours wisely.

Id much prefer game with a one-two bugs here and there, with not too clear UI, less descriptive but filled with actual CONTENT, than what you are trying to do. Here it just looks like you want to consciously stretch the development in order to get more money.

Osodrac13
bonus point for the idea
deduction of points for the statement

If you cannot have a disagreement without resorting to personal insults, your posts will be removed and you'll be threadbanned.

Crushstation said:

Lots of criticisms about me and about the game are valid and fair, but "Crush is a con-man and the patrons are being tricked" is just flat-out wrong. If you believe that's the problem, you're wrong, and so any analysis you present on how to fix that problem is 100% useless, because you're trying to fix a problem that only exists in your head.

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I think this is a good time to remember Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or incompetence).

I'm with you on this boat: I don't think you're milking Patreon's money. But I think we both have to agree, there have been some moments that can only be explained by incompetence. I've said it before: It hasn't happened to you alone. It will keep happening. Poor project management, unforeseen problems, they really do happen to everyone, but some people (with more experience) can either prevent or properly allocate resources to those.

BizeBire said:

Crushstation - Completely in-house built engine ..

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This isn't accurate. It's based on Sugarcube. I haven't taken a deep look at it, but it very much is Sugarcube with a couple of in-house built extensions.
It isn't a bad engine at all, don't get me wrong. But saying it's "completely in-house built" is disingenous.

Crushstation said:

Fuck yeah NOW we're talking!



Okay, this is a fair question! (Although IMHO it's couched in an unnecessarily bitchy tone. ) Let's examine the version history:

- -

Sep 4 2017: Female Agent 1.0
First version!

Sep 13 2017: Female Agent 1.1
First update! Adds faces to the avatars (previously they had no faces, just horrifying empty faces made of skin), and the ability to customise your agent's appearance (previously name, looks, nationality, Kink etc were randomly generated on startup).

Nov 28 2017: Female Agent 1.2
First sex scene! Previously the game ended just before the date with Max: this update added sex to the game. (The code created for this version is still the code used for all the sex scenes in the game.)

Mar 13 2018: Female Agent 1.3
Added Operation LIONESS to the game. This is the training mission in Scotland, where your agent visits three nightclubs and seduces three civilians as prep for Bangkok, culminating in the wet t-shirt contest at Oceana.

1.3 got 21 updates.

25 Feb 2019: Female Agent 1.4
Created RPG rules system – stats, skills, XP. Added the Lifepath, allowing players to set their agent's unique backstory from childhood, through university, and their agency career before starting the mission.

1.4 got 10 updates.

23 Aug 2019: Female Agent 1.5
Avatar upgrade: all avatar art redrawn in HD resolution. Added customisable facial features, rear view, body types, etc.

1.5 got 8 updates.

Soon: Female Agent 1.6
New system for sex scenes.

- -

So looking at those dates leads us to an interesting discussion. Were all those versions necessary?

Here's my thinking:

If I'd gone to Bangkok right after 1.0:
There'd have been no character customisation, and your agent wouldn't have a face. Just a haunting

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.

If I'd gone to Bangkok right after 1.1:
There'd be no sex in the game.

If I'd gone to Bangkok right after 1.2:
The whole Corinthian/Cathouse/Oceana sequence (i.e. the sexiest part of the game) wouldn't exist.

If I'd gone to Bangkok right after 1.3:
There'd be no RPG rules – every character would be the same as every other character. Task resolution would be purely random in every scene. Every character would have a vague and generic backstory.

If I'd gone to Bangkok right after 1.4:
Avatars would be blurry, with identical faces, body types, no rear view, etc. (This could in theory be fixed later, but the longer it was left the bigger a task it became, and it already took ages.)

If I'd gone to Bangkok right after 1.5:
All sex scenes would be the same; no variation for situation, partner attractiveness, kinks, cock size, etc...every single sexual encounter in Bangkok being "You touch his shoulder...He kisses your mouth..."

So I feel like there are three arguments here, two useful:

1) These updates weren't all necessary. This is a question of design and I welcome challenges to my designs: in the past they've help me improve my designs (1.3 was totally not part of my plan, it came from Dissonant Sountrack and esclavage). At the very least I feel that discussions about design help me explain what I'm trying to achieve better, which is good for all the fans. If you want to argue design goals it's literally my favourite subject! HMU!

2) These updates took too long. This is a question of efficiency and I desperately want to improve efficiency. I'm doing all kinds of experiments and speaking with consultants to help me speed up the dev cycle: if you want to talk efficiency I'm interested, HMU!

3) The problem is that Crush works for an hour a day, if he worked 8 hours per day dev speed would increase 800%. This is not the problem, if you believe this you're wrong. This problem is imaginary, so coming up with ways to solve it is a waste of time.

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Here's the thing: Your own dev history kind of proves our point of "Things going too slow":

We don't exactly know how much time you took since you thought "I'll make a smut game" and first release (September), but in any case: From early September until March (half a year) we got a pretty nice and mostly functional "vertical slice" of the game: You can customise your character, you have spy missions where you use your female assets, you have sex scenes. Really nice "demo" of the game.

Then... a whole year goes on. Where are we one year later? Well, we have more customisation...most of it is somewhat meaningless, and it isn't (wasn't, it's getting better now) as good as it should've been for a whole year of development. On top of that, the RPG system, I want to believe it won't need any rework as one year should've been enough to foresee any situations where the system might crumble...but I feel like t hat won't be accurate. In any case - over 1 year for something that wasn't as functional as it should've been for that time. Let's give it a somewhat arbitrary "should've been 6 months" instead - you're on 6 months of "borrowed" time now.

Another half a year goes on: We get redrawn avatar system. This isn't a bad thing, but we're talking half a year of something that, if I'm not mistaken, wasn't even done by you, but by another artist. Let's say... it should've taken a month? We're not talking amazing art here, it's "just" (that word doesn't do it justice, I know it's more work than that) a few body parts. Let's round it to "you're on 10 months of borrowed time".

Not pictured: Another 3 months or so of "tan lines are broken, let's spend months fixing them".
Not pictured: relatively minor variations of origin stories
Not pictured: a whole other bunch of stuff...both good and bad.

If you start adding the whole "Oh there's actually more than one person in this project"...those "10 months of borrowed time" turn into even more.
So really, no matter how you look at it and no matter how much Mercedes will hold her imaginary shield to protect you, you really can't deny it: Game is progressing at a glacial rate.


I will actually leave one suggestion: In this day and age, and especially considering your game is hosted online, there's nothing wrong with doing quick fixes almost on the fly. Someone reports a bug with a specific avatar customisation? Add it to a bug tracker, fix it "whenever". Someone notices a line is misplaced in one scene? Whoops, add it to the bug tracker. You don't really need to constantly go and look for stuff out of place every single release. You don't even need to push a bug fix update if they are minor issues! If an image isn't loading, just fix it and move on. Is it ideal for big software projects? No, it isn't, but this isn't a big software project

Crushstation said:

Well it's Sugarcube + 130,000 lines of code

Your thoughts are interesting, but it's not really very useful to tell me that something that took six months "should have taken a month". (And yes, you are mistaken that it was "done by another artist" – she drew the art, but you're not playing an Illustrator file, each individual piece of artwork needed to be coded into the game.)

You seem to think a 500% increase in productivity would be easy to achieve, which sounds great and I'd love that, but how?

Looking back specifically on the avatar upgrade, I think we could have shaved some time off if we:

• Cut the different body types
• Cut the rear view
• Cut the different clothes for the different Lifepath cliques
• Cut the customisable faces
• Cut tattoos & piercings
• Cut the "push up" effect of bras and tops on the avatar's breasts
• etc

Maybe cutting all of those things would have reduced the time from 6 months to 1 month – is that what you're suggesting I should have done? Or something else?



The game isn't hosted online, the source code is maintained in a bitbucket repository, so we can't really do as you suggest unfortunately.

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I can literally click a link and play the game on my browser, without downloading anything (leaving the pedantic "well your browser downloads some stuff locally at runtime" aside). That counts as "hosted online" (I'm aware there's an offline version as well). That's no excuse really: On one hand, there's automated builds for software hosted in git repos. You can set them up in multiple ways, be it "every night push new build of the latest commit on X branch" or "only push new build if it has tag X". And that's for much more complicated software, that actually requires multiple steps of compiling and linking.

But coming back to the main issue:
130k lines of code, is, again, disingenous. Either that, or a really bad thing considering the current state of the game; if it was that case, this would be almost YanDev levels of bad. 120k+ lines of text, maybe! With an extra ~10k lines worth of "actual coding" (checking conditions, dice rolls, updating state, you name it). I'd argue even then it's somewhat inaccurate, since some parts are machine generated (Sugarcube) HTML, so it bloats the numbers.

Really, I didn't say that to diss your work, I'm just saying, not every line of code was written from scratch (and that's fine, and I would expect that in 201X)

Even if each individual piece of artwork "needs to be coded into the game" - can you go into detail? Surely you didn't manually input the name of each file. I would certainly hope you gave each asset a useful (following some naming scheme) name and then used whatever tool you're most familiar with to grab a list of those to then paste into the code much more easily. I hope.

I need more details on this, because even if that was the case, you don't need 6 months to hardcode 2000 filenames. Not to mention, you can use placeholders in the code and eventually grab the asset once it's ready. I'm bringing this one up because I hope it wasn't (won't, I hope it doesn't happen late down the line) like "Well I wanted to code it but artist spent 2 months to give me all the files"

As for the "list of cuts": I wasn't really suggesting that. But it could've been done as far as quantity goes. You can code the engine to dynamically support multiple body types, tattoos, even more other customisation, but only have a couple of different options on "release", because that way, while you're writing whatever Bangkok scene, the artist can pump out more clothes, or tattoo designs, or makeup.


Really, we've been telling you for months stuff in the realm of "This shouldn't take this long". What some people mean by that is "He's milking patreon money". What some of us mean by that is "He is working hard, not smart." A good rule of thumb is that, if you're ever making a repetitive task, it's worth looking into, because chances are, you're not the first to think that. And because you're not the first to think that, some other people will have found a better way to do it. Which is the entire point of "modern" coding as a whole.

asdfasdf12341234ACSACA said:

But coming back to the main issue:
130k lines of code

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is untrue. Not to mention that this estimate probably includes everything Crush has written thus far, but hasn't released yet, 40k lines are name lists, many of them very obscure (Greek? Seriously?), to the point I doubt they are used anywhere. And yes, 40 k lines are achieved by having a single name in a single line. So code takes way less space than claimed. And speaking of this:

asdfasdf12341234ACSACA said:

Even if each individual piece of artwork "needs to be coded into the game" - can you go into detail? Surely you didn't manually input the name of each file. I would certainly hope you gave each asset a useful (following some naming scheme) name and then used whatever tool you're most familiar with to grab a list of those to then paste into the code much more easily. I hope.

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I believe v1.4 had this thing, but the sheer amount of new files in v1.5 could've pushed the invention of new tricks. I remember seeing giant lists of "if/elseif" conditions in the code where clothes were on display - they got less in size. And about useful names of assets - well, you can take a look at the offline version. With it's 9k files of art. And see how they are named. Could be better, could be worse, IMO. And honestly, this game code gets opened in Notepad, though it looks clunky that way. Explore at your leisure. As you can see, if there's something you can point out for improvement, you'll be heard (not necessarily listened, but hey)

As a guy who reads his patreon, I can confirm that this fucking Dubai scene was scrapped and rewritten for like three times in the past six months, probably completely. Best practices for writing code, while helpful in other times, are of no use when you're a writer who's just that bad at writing, or thinks of himself as that bad, or too insecure, or too ambitious, or whatever. Smut isn't code, and Crush's currently (finally) writing smut rather than writing code. Honestly, for the locals (i.e. for non-supporters visiting this place IDK why) it may be best to follow the example of that one guy who visits this place annually. No expectations, no regrets, no discussions, just a check-up.

Ppsha said:

is untrue. Not to mention that this estimate probably includes everything Crush has written thus far, but hasn't released yet, 40k lines are name lists, many of them very obscure (Greek? Seriously?), to the point I doubt they are used anywhere. And yes, 40 k lines are achieved by having a single name in a single line. So code takes way less space than claimed. And speaking of this:



I believe v1.4 had this thing, but the sheer amount of new files in v1.5 could've pushed the invention of new tricks. I remember seeing giant lists of "if/elseif" conditions in the code where clothes were on display - they got less in size. And about useful names of assets - well, you can take a look at the offline version. With it's 9k files of art. And see how they are named. Could be better, could be worse, IMO. And honestly, this game code gets opened in Notepad, though it looks clunky that way. Explore at your leisure. As you can see, if there's something you can point out for improvement, you'll be heard (not necessarily listened, but hey)

As a guy who reads his patreon, I can confirm that this fucking Dubai scene was scrapped and rewritten for like three times in the past six months, probably completely. Best practices for writing code, while helpful in other times, are of no use when you're a writer who's just that bad at writing, or thinks of himself as that bad, or too insecure, or too ambitious, or whatever. Smut isn't code, and Crush's currently (finally) writing smut rather than writing code. Honestly, for the locals (i.e. for non-supporters visiting this place IDK why) it may be best to follow the example of that one guy who visits this place annually. No expectations, no regrets, no discussions, just a check-up.

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Yeah, I took a really quick look at the code, saw a bunch of definitions and names (the changelog is in there as well, we shouldn't count those as code or even content) that's why I said it. There is no reasonable way a game this size/scope should come close to even 10k lines of code, and that's with the bloat that is non minified HTML.


Also, if I'm criticising "the code" (really, more like "the decisions") it's because, well, that's basically all the recent updates have done. I can't really comment on new content (past ~mid 2018) because there hasn't been much of it.

Regardless, at this point is not so much "best coding practices" (whcih would help) as much as general project development/management. Rewriting a scene for the third time and remaking the tan lines is all the same thing, really. It's just that, if you add "poor coding" on top of that each mistake is even worse and delays the project more than it should.

I told him months ago: There will be things you have to rework, there will be things that you implement now and see that you have to expand later because you didn't consider one case. It happens to every single project, even something as immobile and (quite literally!) set in stone as a concrete building. Which is why, 9/10, it's better to keep going and have a pile of "things to fix" almost ignored for a while so you can see the whole picture.

I've never understood this theory. Surely the game would get more support if the content came out faster?

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C'mon Crush, don't fool me: the longer it takes you to finish the game, the more money you milk from your supporters. It's the same old story, don't take it to personal, I can truly understand it (everyone loves money), but there are ways and ways to handle it with more fairness.