Thanks loads, that will have taken you a while to pen down. I'm no game developer, you will have guessed that, but often can't be satisfied with just playing games so I take some time thinking about how they're made. Not entirely different than imagining you're engaging with an author while reading a book. 4th wall breaking and all that. It's great to get a sobering insight into the toils of actually making something happen like the the scenes one may think of, let alone a coherent story and game. TBH I never pondered on the trouble of making 3dcg visuals. I guess Ren'Py makes it particularly important, as the text per screen is much more limited than what you get with other engines, especially those more geared towards text like twine/sc and qsp. My only attempt to develop anything was in qsp, using "real porn" - which makes it doubly easier compared to ren'py. I noticed some ren'py authors circumvent part of the trouble by reutilising sprites instead of rendering a unique scene each screen change. May seem lazy, but it works, when you have a lot of text, to have sprites with different poses and expressions that let you change something on the screen when the text changes without having to create an entirely new render. "Shattered" comes to mind, that endless wall of (great) text. Only full renders are sexy scenes, if memory doesn't fail me.
If you ever decide to poke around Ren'py (or just watch some tutorials), you'll find that the "standard" process is actually just what you mentioned: static backgrounds with character sprite overlays. In fact, a good chunk of the screen language that it uses is dedicated just to that, and is set up to to layer compositing (such as having a base character, and then multiple expressions that can easily be changed without reloading anything else) to streamline the art development even more and dramatically reduce the number of unique renders needed. Remember that it was originally designed for pure visual novels, so the core of the engine was built around the needs of narrative and dialogue.
Then, of course, the wonderful degenerates of the internet got ahold of it, took DAZ (originally just a content creator for Poser, which was really just intended to be an artist's tool to replace reference mannequins), and hit the ground running like they stole something (they did, we did, and everyone is still giddy about it).
The sprite style of Ren'py games definitely has its place, in that it provides a more "interactive" seeming style of play (generally more movement on-screen because of the sprites sliding/popping in and out, and those style of games are generally heavier on the dialogue), but for the AVN market, in my opinion at least, AFV's style of fully rendered scenes to drive the story is far more engaging. It might be a
bit metric fucktonne more work, but the visual payoff is huge. As
strenif mentioned above, if you ever decide to start dabbling with DAZ, it can be a lot of fun, and very rewarding. There's a massive asset release thread here on F95 (because we're dirty, dirty pirates), and you can find more at Shadowcore, render-state, and several other sites if you
really get into it (and have a couple spare hard drives lying around).
This is how I ended up developing AFV with Will btw.
Went from fan, to making story suggestions, to learning DAZ so I could do fan art, to being a part of the team once my DAZ skills were up to par.
All because I wasn't satisfied with just playing the game =D
It's very rewarding if you ever decide to dip your toe into these waters.
I've always wondered how you managed to sneak your way on board lol. I remember seeing your renders start popping up in the fanart thread a few years ago when I was a solid lurker, and the next thing I knew, you were officially working on AFV. Honestly, I hold you and Will personally responsible for recently getting me into DAZ and deciding to make my own game, so thank you for all the sleepless nights and hours of cursing all the control sliders in Golden Palace. Like, seriously, why are vaginas so fucking
complicated? You know you've spent too much time in DAZ when you start looking at porn frame by frame just to figure out how everything is supposed to move
