This weekend marks the first anniversary of the release of the Renpy version of. Since its release, it has been downloaded 2. There may be some overlap as multiple versions were released, and people were updating, but in the same time frame I have had over 2 million unique visitors to the web site. Some numbers: 55% were windows downloads, 38% were android downloads, 6% were Apple Mac, and 1% were Linux. Pretty impressive considering the foreign language versions have only been around since late March. The game has gone viral in Brazil, with 750,000 downloads from there in the last 4 months. Date Ariane has a with over 100 videos listed. A produces 473 videos currently. Notice how the window reflects the interior now, which happens when it is dark outside. All the new renders are in the living room and the drive-in diner. English version build 112 has a number of fixes and tweaks to game play covered in detail. However, the improved pictures are there, and also a new TITLE SCREEN! Once released the French, German, and Portuguese versions will no longer say they are in beta. More build notes and bug fixes. All versions should be updated by the end of the month. There seems to be a lot of call for a Portuguese version, but it would need 6 to 10 translators to do it right. I could release a machine translation that I know everyone would hate. Got some ambitious plans for the future, including a 6 episode season of stories involving Ariane and Rachel where is the first episode. I think I got my work cut out for me. Once upon a time I was actually fluent. If you ever tried to translate anything in Google Translate, you know how inaccurate it is. If anyone wants to take a stab at fixing the translation. I posted a notice for translation help and got quite a few volunteers. The French version is 100% human translated, and even I a non-french speaker can tell the difference. The funny thing is that just a week before the French version was ready for a beta release, the game went viral in France thanks to a popular vlogger name who posted a video on March 7th that got over a million views: The result was that my site crashed, first time that happened since I removed the online version. Anyways, I have been posting links to the french beta around french websites that link to my english game. Other helpers: Dipsode, maniusz, Ramses212, Thedevilsadvocate, and Ticamus. The Spanish version has gotten around 1,000 downloads in the month it has been available, the French version has gotten 6,000 downloads in the week it has been available. Odd version trivia: Only version with a translated title. Since the beginning of 2016, Germany is the 1 source of visitors to ArianeB. This was the first of what looks to be 9 videos: Anyways the German line translation was 97% complete when I realized I need to do the scripting and testing ASAP. Thanks to Thomas Kiehl who has done 70% of the work, Bardo did another big chunk, and Daff, Airjoe, ebenezum, Nico, Kurai, Terrorbait, Crowd, and crayon all pitched in. I should warn you that Thomas has a wicked sense of humor: Kind of wish I knew German, who knows how many odd jokes are in his German translation. This is now released. Unfortunately, it is only 93% human translated for now. There is that was machine translated and needs to be corrected. There will be updates once it is done. Date Ariane has a huge fan base in Brazil. So yes, I wanted a version of the game that Brazilians can enjoy. My two primary translators are Henrique Riffel who speaks Portugal Portuguese did most of the pre-dinner and dinner texts, while Danilo Bini who speaks Brazilian Portuguese did most of the post dinner scenes. I find it charming that there are crazy video bloggers in every country and language. I have had inquiries about the possibility of other languages. The lesson I learned from the Spanish version is that there needs to be a decent amount of interest in a language to make it worth while, so if you can organize a group of translators and I can see interest via web traffic, I may entertain other languages in the future. Date Ariane English Since its release in July of last year, the renpy version of Date Ariane has been downloaded over 1 million times! So here are two projects I am already starting to work on that hopefully will get done sometime this year. Date Ariane International I have had a few requests from volunteers to translate Date Ariane into other languages. Renpy has already translated the game interface into the following languages: Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and both simplified and traditional Chinese. Basically, I am looking for some bi-lingual volunteers to translate Date Ariane into as many of these languages as possible, especially French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese as my games biggest fan bases are in countries that speak those languages. I am trying to work out a way to provide these translation files online so anyone who wants to help can do so, either via Google Docs or set up a Wiki. I also have not decided if I will release each language version individually or one big international version where you can select your language in the settings menu. To show you how big the project contains around 70% of the text in the game, not including text stored in variables and lists. Rachel Meets Ariane: The Game As a second project, I want to make a game out of the story I wrote back in October. It will be a lot shorter than any game I have done; maybe 50 to 60 pictures total and maybe around 4 endings. This is sort of an experiment. I want to see how well a short game with a 3rd party perspective can work and how difficult it is. If it proves both fun to make and fun to play, there may be more of them. I got an idea for a Heidi and Wendy story if it works out. Date Ariane Wiki In hopes of having a place to post files that groups can edit, I decided to start a Date Ariane Wiki. Due to the large number of questions, the first thing I did is post a list of the Date Ariane achievements and how to get them. The address is Currently, public editing is disabled but that may change in the future. The above picture is the oldest picture from the oldest version of Date Ariane. The modified date is listed as August 6, 2004. As I was finishing the Renpy version of Date Ariane, I decided to dive into my archives and attempt to play the oldest version I could find. The game was written for Internet Explorer 4 using some HTML coding that only worked on IE4. Over the years I updated the code to run on as many browsers as I could, but the first version is now completely obsolete. It gets worse: Date Ariane was written using which basically has ceased to exist. This week I upgraded to Windows 10, and FrontPage loads on Windows 10 but it is unstable. Besides that is already a reason to throw in the towel and stick with Renpy version from now on. Recently security flaws were found in Flash Player, one of the most used programs on the web. You Tube, once the biggest supporter of Flash has. Worse yet, by default until Adobe released a secure version, , but who knows how long it will last. So now as the world scrambles to move to HTML5 or some other substitute to flash, what happens to the millions of flash based videos, and online games which someday soon may no longer run? Preservation efforts for the internet? We humans like to preserve the past. There are whole industries devoted to film preservation thanks to the unstable nitrate most of the old films were originally filmed in. More than half of the movies made before 1950 no longer exist. This is why film gurus get excited about to a classic movie thought lost. Similarly we are slowly losing our musical heritage as most master tapes before 1990 or so are on a medium which also degrades over time. Most all of it has been digitized, but many music gurus will tell you music is better in the original analog, and the original analog sources are decaying. We see it also in video games. Many of my old games will no longer run on my computer, and the ones that do run in a tiny 800 x 600 window, since that is how they were designed. Some classic games like or , have gotten the HD treatment, but hundreds never will. Will much of the internet content suffer the same fate? Yes, I know about things like which archives lost text and picture content, but what will preserve online games? Entire libraries are being digitized, although paper books have largely proven to be a resilient medium, sometimes finding that rare volume is a lot easier online. Sometimes we lose some things in the conversion, even as recent as and Communication mediums eventually get replaced, by better mediums that we all convert to. Yes, one of the most popular web sites on the planet is seeing a sharp decline in active users. My solution to fixing it is pretty revolutionary: Drop the 140 character limit. We can thank twitter for the abundance of short link generators. Those links leave Twitter and go to other web sites that allow long essays. If twitter dies then so does the hashtag. All the favorite moments are here on a format that is faster and smoother than ever before. I have temporarily taken down the online version. My web traffic has increased 40% with the better graphics version and I could almost never get into my own website. Now when you go to you get a website where you can download the game. I made it available in Windows, Mac, and Linux, and there is an experimental Android version which I have no idea how to use. You can still download the offline HTML version. Go to the options screen and you can turn on hints, go full screen, and turn off music and sound effects if you want. A lot of this stuff is available on the lower right corner of the screen. The lower right menu is very helpful if you are on a tablet as well. There is also some new content, the majority being expanded scenes that existed before, especially in the museum, night club, and dress shop. The museum and nightclub play a little differently depending on what Ariane is wearing. I also added a new character, a pizza delivery man named Evan. An online friend for 12 years named Evan Kirk recently passed away suddenly, and as a tribute, I have immortalized him as an NPC. Like me, he was way more famous online than off, with a sharp twisted sense of humor and a community leader. He was a gay dude from Alabama which he joked about all the time. This is not a picture of him, this is a young Chris Pratt, who he idolized and used as his avatar. They range from easy and obvious, which you will probably pick up naturally, to some spectacular failures, which some of you may get naturally as well but veterans may not realize are there. There are also some hard ones that require some knowledge of the game mechanics to complete. Speaking of game mechanics, besides the , there is actually now a scoring mechanism. This score is used to calculate some of the achievements. Once you complete an achievement, open up the gallery, and click on the name to see why you earned it. Here are the names of the 78 achievements, with some notes on the harder ones. You can probably figure out the rest by their name: Multidate achievements 1. All 5 Dinners House Achievements 1. Three Naked In Bed a Rebecca achievement 7. Ariane Owes You A Favor 10. Impromptu Strip Show 12. Cheap Thrills before dinner touch her boob, then walk in on her while changing 14. Boobie Prize Backyard Achievements 1. Hide and Seek 2. Hand Job involves the hot tub 4. Steal From Rebecca 7. Wrong Breast lose at Marco Polo 8. You Got Mail 9. Voyage to the Moon 12. Squeeze Play Downtown Achievements 1. Devil In A Blue Dress 5. Twinkle Toes win the new dance game without cheating 8. Downtown Nudity a multi date achievement involving different locations Neighborhood Achievements 1. Nude Pics in the Park 2. Shutterbug all 5 versions of the park photoshoot over many dates 3. Three for Three Ariane has to hit all 3 of hers, too 4. Playing Without Pants 9. Playing Without Clothes 10. Naked Beer Run 11. Well Protected involves buying lots of condoms 12. Ice Cream Run Lake Achievements 1. Head Stand Scenic View Achievements 1. Moon for the Camera 2. Kiss Where it Counts Cabaret Achievements 1. Amateur Night Victory 2. Win Without Nudity 3. Live Sex Act 4. Two Nude Dancers 5. A Dirty Mind Special Dates 1. Casual Date finish a successful date without changing clothes 2. Kiss you all over 5. Exceeding Expectations finish a successful date with only two traits Any other hints to playing? I also had to make it with no budget so compromises in quality are inevitable as well. For both of those reasons, I never really cared if someone did not like Date Ariane. The game is not meant for everybody, and I am very well aware of its flaws. I mention this because there are now well over of people playing Date Ariane. Some of them are , some of them are , some of them are , many of them are , including some. On the one hand, reviews of my work do not bother me in the least. I am very well aware that You Tube bloggers like to make fun of stuff they find online, it is what they do and it brings them a lot of subscribers. As I said above, the out of mainstream nature of the game and low budget nature of the game makes Date Ariane a very easy target to make fun of, in fact I do it myself. There is something about watching other people play my games that feels a little creepy. I have never been able to get through any of them. My feelings when I watch them is similar to someone standing uncomfortably close to me. I wanted to know if I am weird feeling this way, so I reached out to a few other indie game producers. Reactions are split around 50-50. Some developers are like me, a little weirded out. Others enjoy watching others play their games. Developer reactions to mixed reviews seems split as well. I guess it depends on what your goals are. My goals are to make something I enjoy and just put it out there and let the audience find it. Other developers with more loftier goals of mainstream success can take bad reviews a little harder. I can understand that. And speaking of improvements, my , project of making a Renpy version of Date Ariane is on again. It was absolutely necessary to do the graphic update before attempting it again. My previous attempts were way too ambitious, my goal this time is to keep it simple. Why make a downloadable Renpy version of the game when the online is so successful? My first instinct was to. Two things prevented that from happening, one was the accidental erasure of a hard drive with my only copy I was only 5% complete anyways. An online SITA would just make it worse. Making an improved stand alone version of Date Ariane available should make it better instead. I have no idea how long it will take, probably at least the summer. I am basically rewriting the entire game as there is no way to port the game directly over. What you see above is all I have done so far, about 28 lines of code. There are a couple of unofficial ones out there designed for Classic Date Ariane, but I decided with the changes I made they are going to be out of date. So I started posting walkthroughs at arianeb. I then created a page you can go to on my website: containing links to the 24 walkthroughs as well as an alphabetical index of the 53 points of interest and where to find them. I did find a handful of bugs, nothing major, but the walkthroughs will work best if you download the game again or use the online version. Experiments for the next game Another thing I did since finishing the game update was try out which is a tool designed to quickly and easily create the hundreds of html files needed for a dating sim type game like Date Ariane. I wish I had this tool before, because it would save me a lot of time and effort. Version 5, just released, creates pages which will highlight hidden picture links so you can play these games on tablets. Again, something I wish I had earlier. I think the experiment was a success in that I learned that converting a developed project into HTML simply involves a lot of copying and pasting between a Renpy editor and the Adventure Creator. Why would I want to convert it to online? It took a little over a year for SITA to reach 100,000 downloads. In the past year the online version of Date Ariane has been played by around 1 million unique visitors. Download reaches about 10% of what online does, a figure more or less confirmed when comparing online virtual worlds with ones you have to download a client first. Habbo, an online virtual world in 2D, gets 10 times the traffic of Second Life, which is in 3D and requires a client download. I only finished about 10% of the conversion so far. That concept being that Renpy is easy to develop games in because everything is laid out in a nice script, but once developed I can fairly easily convert it to HTML using Adventure Creator for online play. In SITA, I established she has a fetish for fantasy, so she goes on what seem like ordinary dates, but then she starts to imagine a fantasy scenario to make the date more interesting. The challenge would be to get your dates to play along instead of sit there very confused. The first trouble with the concept had to do with this being a date simulator of. The latter made me realize this would work better as a web comic than a visual novel. Thinking also about the cost of new 3D sets and costumes for each date also made me realize this would work better as a hand drawn 2D web comic. So I am no longer going to do that project, back to square 1. My next concept I imagined was an Ariane part 3, that starts where SITA ends: You and Ariane are on a trip together on a tropical paradise. I like the idea of taking Ariane somewhere exotic where nudity is not a big deal, and a new location might get Ariane to be more sexually adventurous. Trouble with the idea came when I tried to come up with a conflict. Without conflict, the game would just be a bunch of tropical vacation slides. Bottom line I would not have fun making a game like that, nor do I think many would like playing a game like that. Maybe once for the sake of the story, but there is no replay value. Create a new character and create new activities. I could throw in a bunch of sci-fi concepts I have brewing around in my head as well as pick and choose concepts from many of my favorite sci-fi books and shows. I could also make up a bunch of new activities that are not possible today thus mostly avoiding the self repeats.
