Advice wanted regarding making a patreon supported game

[Bill_Jerkpole]

Hi

Basically what I am going to do is to make a "Witch trainer" inspired, story light, perversion heavy game. After about two years of trying to make it look the way I want to, I have settled for trying to make it look as good as I can, and then update as I go.

The advice I am looking for is twofold: The first is regarding the Patreon I am going to make: Currently my plan is to make tourists at 1$, citizens at $5 (gets to vote) and politicians at $10 (votes, get to decide one thing to vote about per release and one executive order that they get to vote on among themselves). Does that sound like enough to entice or should I consider other ideas?

The second thing is, surprise surprise, about my drawings; I bought Moho in the Humble Bundle this summer and finally found an easy way to make animations, in clean lines with easy-to-fix details, (not done in image, don't look at the hands )So I made all my characters once more, as I was learning the program, and then two days ago I thought "I can do better faces" - so here are the old faces at the bottom and the new ones are at the top; again not all details are done, but I would like your input on what is better: My personal picks are 1 new, 2 new, 3 old, 4 ?, 5 old, 6 ?, and 7 new.

View attachment everyone.webp

I appreciate any comments or advice you can give me.

 

[anne O'nymous]

The second thing is, surprise surprise, about my drawings;

I'll address this, because it's clearly the elephant in the room: OMFG it's awfull...

Don't get me wrong, it's not a criticism, I'm 100% sure that I wouldn't be able to do better. It's just a observation, your drawings are horrible.
Looking at them, I'm sent back to the early 00's and both my children's pre-school drawing, as well as all those cheap flash "porn" games. By itself art is rarely an obstacle, but there's a limit to that, and I think that you've reach it.

I know that saying this can sound harsh, but it's in your interest that I did it. Better me saying it now, as nicely as it's possible to do, than dozen of people trashing you later when you'll release your game for the first time.
You still need time to improve your drawing skills. Knowing it while it's still possible, and while you still have the desire to make a game, well, it's better than loosing all desire because people atomizes your dreams.

Take your time, practice, again and again, and only release your game when your drawing skills reach more or less at least that level.

 

[Ratrio]

Seconding the comment about the art, it definitely needs refinement/improvement. I don't see anyone wanting to play a game with art like that, sorry.

 

[VieS_Et]

If you want to use a close to the drawn style, why not use Koikatsu?

 

[Bill_Jerkpole]

I'll address this, because it's clearly the elephant in the room: OMFG it's awfull...

Don't get me wrong, it's not a criticism, I'm 100% sure that I wouldn't be able to do better. It's just a observation, your drawings are horrible.
Looking at them, I'm sent back to the early 00's and both my children's pre-school drawing, as well as all those cheap flash "porn" games. By itself art is rarely an obstacle, but there's a limit to that, and I think that you've reach it.

I know that saying this can sound harsh, but it's in your interest that I did it. Better me saying it now, as nicely as it's possible to do, than dozen of people trashing you later when you'll release your game for the first time.
You still need time to improve your drawing skills. Knowing it while it's still possible, and while you still have the desire to make a game, well, it's better than loosing all desire because people atomizes your dreams.

Take your time, practice, again and again, and only release your game when your drawing skills reach more or less at least that level.

So you think I should do something more in this style?

 

[Bill_Jerkpole]

If you want to use a close to the drawn style, why not use Koikatsu?

I'm going for more of a cartoony 1990-2000's adventure game graphics style, rather than anime. I did consider it for a short while though.

 

[VieS_Et]

Koikatsu doesn't necessarily look like anime, with the right mods and character adjustments you can make some nice western cartoon characters.
like this

You must be registered to see the links

 

[Living In A Lewd World]

I think, the main question is, what you want to do? When you want to get people to fap and to live from your art (at least partially), I think, you will have a hard time to find enough support with that kind of art.
When you want to make art and use Patreon-Support only as a tip-jar, you can basically do what you want, but you may be here in the wrong forum to find the support you need, as this here is rather the fap-community.
What you might try to is to create art like that from "The Simpsons", "Beavis and Butthead", "Southpark"... But those are in my opinion quite storytelling-heavy cartoons. The images support the story and not the other way round (like it is unfortunately often in lewd games, where the story is only the side-dish). So you should better first start to create a story and then ask yourself, if the images, you created support this story.
But when you want to make any money from this without using an existing brand, your story-telling skills and your image-composition-skills must be on a very very high level. And you need quite good skills in conveying emotions through the poses and facial expressions of the characters, you create. This is also something, I don't see here yet.

 

[Bill_Jerkpole]

Koikatsu doesn't necessarily look like anime, with the right mods and character adjustments you can make some nice western cartoon characters.
like this

You must be registered to see the links

Uh - some of them have that creepy 3D depth that cartoon just shouldn't have, but those that look flat are really well done. Thanks I'll keep that in mind, if I fail this animation attempt as well, it might just be what I need to do

 

[Bill_Jerkpole]

I think, the main question is, what you want to do? When you want to get people to fap and to live from your art (at least partially), I think, you will have a hard time to find enough support with that kind of art.
When you want to make art and use Patreon-Support only as a tip-jar, you can basically do what you want, but you may be here in the wrong forum to find the support you need, as this here is rather the fap-community.
What you might try to is to create art like that from "The Simpsons", "Beavis and Butthead", "Southpark"... But those are in my opinion quite storytelling-heavy cartoons. The images support the story and not the other way round (like it is unfortunately often in lewd games, where the story is only the side-dish). So you should better first start to create a story and then ask yourself, if the images, you created support this story.
But when you want to make any money from this without using an existing brand, your story-telling skills and your image-composition-skills must be on a very very high level. I think, you need then also quite good skills in conveying emotions through the poses and facial expressions of the characters, you create. This is also something, I don't see here yet.

The reason I wanted to make these kinds of games was based on me getting angry at all the games that release about 30 minutes of updates every year, for years on end, only to either release a "final" without an actual end or any closure or just abandon it. My thoughts are that Renpy games are easy to program, so the only thing that could slow them down was the drawings, but if making 50 pictures takes a year then something needs to be done differently.

That's why I am aiming at "just fappable" levels of animation, so the game(s) can be updated and completed as quickly as possible, with the Patreon determining how fast I can work on the game... I can see I'm not quite there yet, but if I was then I wouldn't need to ask for advice.

As for the poses and facial expressions in the picture, they are just in their "T-pose" so people could help me decide which head was better for the characters, but now that you mention it I should practice animating emotions other than happy and sad.

Story wise I am probably going to disappoint you: As the two fanfics I finished, before the quest to learn how to draw consumed me, I imagine games like this to be porn-forward - I do have an idea of a crime noir story in the style of one of the early POV/FMV games, as that would be very easy to make in Renpy (again apart from the animations), but that feels like more of a "finish it and put it on Steam" kind of thing, rather than adding naked people and source founding from here and the like.

 

[Living In A Lewd World]

If images are your main selling point, then you should really best rely on something like Honey Select 2 or Koikatsu, those are as far, as I know easy to learn, easy to use and produce quite good images quite fast.
E.g. this is made with HS2. And I don't think, the dev invests much time in it:
https://f95zone.to/threads/polyturnon-v0-009-zinkopoly.143993/

 

[anne O'nymous]

So you think I should do something more in this style?

Yes. It's not marvelous drawing, but as I implied, anything "decent enough" can works.

A game, whatever a real one or a Visual Novel, is a mix between visual, story and game mechanism. The important point is to ensure that one will not drag down the two others.
A game with amazing 3D realistic visual but a totally shitty story will not works, like a game with an amazing story but repulsing visuals. But a game with average everything can find it's public. This while players will pardon average visual if the story strongly interest them.