Hello everyone!
Newlife 0.6.12 has been released.
Early-access Patrons can find it in the creations section here. The changelog is below.
The previous version is now public. You can download it using the links on the right-hand side of the blog. The public version's changelog is here.
As usual, saved files & templates from older versions probably won't work with newer ones.
For
new players - just use one of the links to the right to get a zipfile
containing Newlife. Once unzipped, you'll see a folder containing .jar
and .exe files. Either one of these will run the game.
For
either version you'll need to have Java installed. A lot of programs
use Java so you might well already have it. If the jar shows up as an
unrecognised file type, then you probably don't. In that case you can
get it from http://www.java.com/.
The
exe should tell you if you don't have the right version on your
computer, but you'll still need to install java to run the game.
There's a guide for new players here which includes some troubleshooting tips for installation & downloading.
This version allows the PC to attend office parties. The next release is likely to be the final one in the work update, so there'll probably be a vote soon.
Major changes & additions:
Added an office party event. Some paths require a sleazy boss.
Minor changes:
Added some alternative lines for when your husband refuses to wear a condom on your wedding night, as the standard text felt a bit out of place there.
Added some more detail to the dating app's description of the man, as requested by Brobort.
Bugfixes:
Fixes to text issues. Thanks to Sync, Aetherial and AnarChYsT for reporting some of these.
Stopped my patronage a month ago. Sorry, but you just sucking our money for a couple of scenes you can do in 1 day. Do some real job please. The game is good, but more and more people getting know about your fraud.
ReplyDeleteHi, its seems like you've been listening to internet trolls. I'd hope that if you stop and think about things, you'll see that this ridiculous "SO only works one day a month" type of narrative is obviously a lie.
DeleteFirst, "fraud" is an absolutely ludicrous word to use. Newlife is available to play for free, and I encourage people to play the free version before considering whether to support the game - you'll notice that when I post about the game on forums and whatnot I post links to the blog and tfgs page with the free version downloads rather than pushing them to visit my patreon first. On top of that, NL's update history is public and posted openly for everyone, patron or otherwise. Newlife has an extremely consistent update schedule: I haven't even taken a non-working holiday since I started releasing it on the interent!
"Fraud" implies dishonesty, but all the information a potential patron might want to know is right there, available for them before they support. They can try the full game to see if they like it, and easily look back over the update history on a site I actively encourage people to visit. If you think what I do with Newlife is somehow fraudulent then your mind is going to absolutely explode when you find out about this place called "Steam" where people pay for games based on marketing materials without having been able to try a complete version first!
Moving on, let's look at the main claim you make: that the work I do can be done in just one day. Let's further assume that you're saying it could be done in a day by a normal developer, not by some imaginary best-in-the-world legendary super-dev who, if they existed in real life, would be making millions.
DeleteI'd hope that people who look over the custom scenes folder and maybe try their hand at making a scene for themselves will see that this is rubbish. I recommend starting with jerkCheatingBlackmail because I wrote it myself: it's a medium-sized scene much smaller than office-party but which should give an idea of what writing Newlife scenes is like. Still, let's look beyond the custom scenes, because it's not fair to demand that everyone try making a scene themselves before having an opinion.
I'm not going to talk too much about my actual schedule. The truth is that I aim to work a fairly normal amount of weekly hours, typically 35-40 with some extra crunch if I've over-committed at the end of the month. I don't believe it's healthy or reasonable to demand permanent crunch from developers, and if your argument is that anyone working my hours is a worthless person who deserves to be run out of business then suffice to say I very much disagree.
DeleteBut, the trolls will just claim that I'm lying about my hours. Instead, let's look at some actual facts that should be obvious without having to take my word for it. Let me bullet point some for you:
- Newlife has been on the internet since the end of 2014 and there have been people moaning about development speed since 2015, back when it was only out a few months.
- I did not need to pass an interview or have some specific qualifications to make Newlife: I just picked up the dev tools and did it. There's no artificial barrier of entry to making a game like mine.
- There are almost no financial barriers either. All the tools I use are freely available. All someone needs to make a game like Newlife is a computer and internet connection. It wouldn't even need to be a good computer.
- Making Newlife didn't take any rare and esoteric knowledge that required special study. An undergraduate CS student should have the technical knowledge to make a Newlife-style game. People without any technical knowledge could pick it up quite easily using free internet tutorials or by using something like Twine that simplifies the game-making process.
- Newlife has been played by hundreds of thousands of people at least, perhaps millions. I don't have a way of getting a precise number of players, but there are over 200,000 visits to the "getting started" page which didn't even exist until mid-2015 and is not something I put much effort to directing players towards. At least one forum has a thread on Newlife with literally millions of views.
- Trolls always make a big deal about how I make lots of money. This isn't actually true: my income is a little below where it should be for a UK-based Java developer with my experience, and significantly below where it would be if I was in the US where IT pay is higher. Still, my pay would indeed be enormous if I actually did work only 1 day a month. Just think, at that rate I could make 30 games in parallel and in a decade I'd have made enough to retire or devote myself to passion projects! That would be very nice... now I feel a little sad that the trolls are lying!
So, here's the (rhetorical) question: If I'm making so much money from just a tiny amount of work by doing something that anyone else could do then why aren't other people doing it? If I was actually just working 1 day a month then someone who worked 8 days - still very much part-time - would have something of a similar size & scope as Newlife after just 1 year of development. They'd make more money than me as well, because 8 releases/month would bring in a lot more patrons.
DeleteNow, I'm sure the trolls will all have their individual stories about how their work is so important that they couldn't possibly dedicate a few weekends a month to making their own game, but does that make sense for all the hundreds of thousands of players who've been reading these troll comments over the years? The students whose other options are low-paid part-time jobs? The people stuck in minimum-wage careers or sitting at home because their zero-hours job cut their worktime? The unemployed? The people in poorer countries where my patreon income genuinely would be a fortune?
If the trolls were correct then all these people would have been shown a way to make far more money than they do, in far less time, with no need for qualifications or training. And yet, they haven't. Not even a few dozen out of hundreds of thousands.
If the trolls were telling the truth, then there'd be more games like Newlife. Not just one or two, but dozens or hundreds. There aren't exactly a shortage of people who want to make good money for easy work with no investment. These wouldn't just be vague ideas or small prototypes or early-in-development games with potential, but games that match or exceed Newlife in size and scope.
Far exceed it, in fact: if I actually worked just 1 day a month then someone who started full-time on their own project in March 2020 when covid lockdown started would today have something equivalent to 20-ish-years of Newlife development.
But these games don't exist.
I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of adult games, but as far as I'm aware there's only one Newlife-inspired game of significant size. That's ThaumX's "Accidental Woman". I haven't tried since it first came out but from reading on forums I don't believe it's orders of magnitude bigger than Newlife (as it would be if the trolls were right and if thaumX worked even part-time). In fact the troll-heavy forum gives it a pretty negative reception, like most other games that make even a vaguely-respectable amount of money. Besides, if making a game like Newlife was so easy then there wouldn't be just one - there'd be hundreds.
I can see how it's easy to belive the trolls' lies if you don't think about them too deeply. What makes Newlife special is the large variety in character traits and that they impact both text and game mechanics. The downside is that this means content takes a long time to write because a general-purpose scene needs to work for both a promiscuous baby-crazy sex-fiend and a shy mousy virgin along with a bunch of other character types. That means that an event a player can click through in 10 seconds might take weeks to write.
DeleteAs for this update, it's obvious why the trolls are out in force: the changelog is short. But the size of a changelog doesn't reflect the amount of work that goes into a release. Adding a massive scene is just 1 entry in the changelog, but so is adding just a few lines of new content to some existing scene. By the quick-and-dirty measure of lines-of-code the office party scene is around 20% bigger than the spitroast one. If that extra length had instead been split into little tweaks and changes here and there then the changelog would be massive, but it'd still be the same amount of work.
So, there you have it. I'm not going to suggest you start confronting the trolls: they might start targeting you and it would probably be unpleasant for you to deal with their harassment. I do feel a little sorry for them as well, because they seem to me like sad, lonely people with miserable lives who lash out on the internet as a way to feel better about themselves. But next time you see one spouting their ridiculous claptrap I hope you'll remember what I've said and roll your eyes at their silliness.
Now, if you or any patron still feels really unhappy with how develpment is proceeding then they should PM me on patreon and I'll refund their last month. This also applies to any patron who's run into financial difficulties even if they're happy with my work. Regardless of that though, I hope those of you with the patience to read this essay of mine have seen that the accusations of internet trolls are not to be taken at face value.
Sorry to hear about trolls, but this post makes sense, I mean about your unfair amount of work.
ReplyDeleteI was reading your eloquent essay and thinking about our politicians, who can speak people's minds away from a problem. What are you talking about? This is not about other peoples or even trolls and their "miserable" lives. This is not about other developer's games. You are saying "If the trolls were telling the truth, then there'd be more games like Newlife". What's the point of that? There is a bunch of adult life-sim games with different mechanics and used engines. And ofc there is also a lot of games with a very little update per month so dev can keep getting money for unfinished game he could have finished a while ago. The world is huge, but this is not a point of this problem.
I understand other people because they see a very little of added content each month comparing to previous versions. I know other developers doing it the same way. But does it even matter? This post is for you and you only. While people trying to say they are displeased by amount of content each month, you writing about something else. Ofc that could make sense for you, but this is not a straight answer and looking like a throwing sand into eyes.
I don't think you have understood what I'm saying.
DeleteHere's a simpler version:
I work around 35-40 hours a week, every week with no holidays. At the end of the month I often have to work a bit longer: maybe an extra 5-10 hours for the last week of the month. If someone says that I work less than that then they are either lying or they are mistaken.
I'm not saying that "other devs are lazy so it's ok if I am too". I don't think that other devs are lazy. Most successful games represent a huge amount of hard work. I think other devs work very hard.
People can want more content. Of course. More content is better than less content. But what am I to do about it? Should I work 80 hours a week? 100 hours? No. That is not healthy and it's not fair for people to ask it of me. It's especially rude that they act like I'm some evil monster because I don't want to destroy my health with crunch.
You say "I understand other people because they see a very little of added content each month comparing to previous versions". Newlife has been in development for 7 years. Of course 1 extra month of content is going to look small compared to everything that's already in the game. I started work on Newlife in late 2013: it represents something like 85 months of development. If you expect 1 month of work to look big compared to 85 months then you are not being reasonable.
Newlife is a massive game. It's hard to measure size when code & text is combined, but a word-count regex run over the java source that I wrote comes out as 1,539,807 words. The bible has 783,137 words, so Newlife is almost double the length. And that's only the java - there's also various other files including over 100 pages of documentation for custom scenes. If you think Newlife is just some small thing that anyone could make easily, then you're wrong.
Every update for Newlife represents a lot of work and a lot of content. I work very hard on these releases. But I don't just write the words you see on the screen. I also write all the paths for characters you aren't playing. Maybe you're playing a shy cute character, but I also have to write for the confident one, the sultry one, the bitchy one, the baby-crazy one. That is how Newlife is designed.
Maybe you think that's bad design, that I should be making a game where the player is always a shy cute woman and can't be confident or sultry or whatever. That might be a fair criticism. But, if you say that I don't work hard on the game then you are wrong.
As a fellow game designer, based on what you have written above, I think there are 2 things that result in what we have.
ReplyDelete* 1st *
The process of creating custom scenes in Newlife is indeed excessively complicated, but in a bad way. While complexity of scenes creation is unavoidable in a sandbox-ish multi-branching game such as Newlife, it severely lacks a tool that would be able to create scenes in a convenient way, though an interface with dropdowns and edit boxes and help notes and such.
Putting everything by hand into YML and YAML turns a otherwise fun process of creation into a tedium and excessively increases hardships of debugging. As such, it really can take much more time to create a scene, but in a bad way. Also severely it decreases accessibility for players who want to create custom scenes meaning there will be less of it.
* 2st *
Even with complexity of creation Newlife scenes as it is, I find it extremely hard to believe as a fellow game designer that 40h per week = 160h per month is what it takes to create one scene and little to nothing else additionally. Sure, you might be working 8h per day, but I hightly doubt that majority of that time is dedicated to Newlife.
Even if it was - it probably should have been explained why it took so long. People who come to blogpost and see that 1 line of major additions and 3 lines of tweaks is all that was produced for this game during a month by a person who claims to be working non stop naturally will result in severe doubts.
Even if you were working so hard as you claim to, just by mere reading of the last update notes it looks like you don't really care about the game, because you wouldn't even bother to explain why so seemingly little additions took so long and that's the major issue I think everybody have for the last years and especially now.
It just looks like a lack of passion, and I've seen this many times. Especially in cases with lackluster toolset.
will there ever be a mobile version of the game or is there? it's a great game and I feel like it would do well on android like other game similar to it?
ReplyDeleteHi, I believe the UI used by Newlife isn't supported by mobile versions of Java. I do want to replace the UI at some point, so I won't say that it's impossible, but it's not something for the short term.
DeleteThere may also be further issues with an android conversion beyond the UI that I don't know about yet as well. I therefore can't safely promise that Newlife will come to Android even when I do the UI update. Still, it will be something to look into at that point.
I've been playing since 2015, the problem is that the base of the game is refined but that's all you're really focusing on in these updates. Instead of drawing from other games with newer ideas that people have been asking for like glory holes, toys, alternate prostitution scenes/expansion, random encounters, etc. IIRC prostitution wasn't even initially in the game although I may be wrong, but while you're working on these scenes for cheating and relationship, everyone is asking for alternate scenes entirely that make the experience different. I don't know about others, but having an encounter on the way home or something that interrupts the work-club-street cycle is the best parts of the game. I unfriend and befriend people just to hope I get the street scene. Speaking of which, certain ones like the cake photography is limited to one trait only, and the street scene only works if you're with a nice girl. The game does feel like it's drying up, and I'd consider an engine change or announcing a new development plan.
ReplyDeletetl:dr its like eating a muscle, crack it open, enjoy the meat, then discard. Or pound cake, nothing else, just bread and a bit of flavor.
ReplyDeleteIs there a way to alter the sexual tastes of female NPCs? Like, their "size" preference, their sensitivity, their like/dislike of roughness, etc?
ReplyDelete