Could this be a possible workaround for Patreon's restrictive rules?

[Holy Bacchus]

Just started playing a game called Living with Mia (formerly My Sister Mia) by a Patreon creator called Inceton and at the very start of the game it has you set up the relationships of the main characters with the MC.

You start by setting your character name, then it shows you Mia with a text box reading, "Mia your...", and the next screen allows you to type your relation to Mia, then says you both live with a married couple and shows a woman who you can enter your relation to followed by a man. Other entries follow to set the relation of the Mia to the MC, the married couple to the MC, and then Mia to the married couple.

Could this possibly be a viable workaround to the anti-incest rules of Patreon? After all, the game doesn't directly promote incest, it just gives the player the freedom to do what they want with regards to the relationships of certain characters which isn't against Patreon rules, as far as I'm aware.

Even if you can't change the character names of Jenny and Debbie like you currently can, it would still be a decent tradeoff for many. The game could say, "You live with Debbie and Jenny. Jenny is Debbie's daughter. Debbie is your... Jenny is your... This is Diane, she is Debbie's... Diane is your... This is your best friend Eric and he lives with Mrs Johnson who is his... Eric is Mrs Johnson's..."

Any chance of this being possible @Dogeek? I still hate to see a key aspect of the original creative vision of this game being quashed by prudish rules about content.

EDIT: OK. Why the hell was this moved out of the Summertime Saga section? I was directing this towards a particular game, not making a general point.

 

[gamersglory]

A lot of newer games do this same thing. It's a slight workaround but not a fix. FYI for summertime saga, there's a patch

You must be registered to see the links

More than likely made by someone on the Dev team but they can't say that for obvious reasons

 

[j4yj4m]

Sadly I don't really think that's a solution. When you play a game it should be perfectly playable and make sense as it is. Which basicaly means that anybody who enters the wrong or no relationships will have a pretty odd experience or vice versa the whole incest theme won't be well written, because it has to be hidden. Great dialogs are one of the major upsides of the game and it wouldn't be good to ruin that experience. So I'd agree that the only real solution is an external incest patch (->

You must be registered to see the links

).

 

[Holy Bacchus]

A lot of newer games do this same thing. It's a slight workaround but not a fix. FYI for summertime saga, there's a patch

You must be registered to see the links

More than likely made by someone on the Dev team but they can't say that for obvious reasons

I know about the patch but since each new version requires a new one for all the new content, and since it seems like those who did the patches are no longer doing them, I just thought this could be a possible solution to negate that.

 

[Holy Bacchus]

Sadly I don't really think that's a solution. When you play a game it should be perfectly playable and make sense as it is. Which basicaly means that anybody who enters the wrong or no relationships will have a pretty odd experience or vice versa the whole incest theme won't be well written, because it has to be hidden. Great dialogs are one of the major upsides of the game and it wouldn't be good to ruin that experience. So I'd agree that the only real solution is an external incest patch (->

You must be registered to see the links

).

Admittedly that is a slight problem with the Living With Mia game because I decided to make the other male character a Step-Dad, but then when the dialogue sounded off when there were lines like, "Did Step-Dad not tell you?", and, "Go talk to Step-Dad". I started again and made him Dad which made the dialogue make more sense, but I'm sure DC and the team would be able to do an even better job with something like this if they were to implement it.

 

[desmosome]

Entering in your relationship is the worst way to go about this. The story will make no sense if you enter the wrong thing, and the dialogue will be extremely limited in how people can address each other. It puts a major constraint on the writer to make any sort of wacky relationship work. The only way this works is to make a built in incest mode that gets enabled when you enter in the correct relationship (ex. Mother and Sister).

 

[j4yj4m]

Admittedly that is a slight problem with the Living With Mia game because I decided to make the other male character a Step-Dad, but then when the dialogue sounded off when there were lines like, "Did Step-Dad not tell you?", and, "Go talk to Step-Dad". I started again and made him Dad which made the dialogue make more sense, but I'm sure DC and the team would be able to do an even better job with something like this if they were to implement it.

Well, that I meant was that the story should be good and make sense if you basically enter "nothing" or even something wrong. One can't expect a player, who plays the game the first time (which is the most important playthrough to coin the actual game experience) to get all those relationships right before he's played the game once, and if he gets them wrong, his first experience will be ruined. To make it work you'd probably need some kind of pretty sophisticated background code which adapts dialogs and context but that would again be clearly against patreon's TOS.

 

[Holy Bacchus]

Entering in your relationship is the worst way to go about this. The story will make no sense if you enter the wrong thing, and the dialogue will be extremely limited in how people can address each other. It puts a major constraint on the writer to make any sort of wacky relationship work. The only way this works is to make a built in incest mode that gets enabled when you enter in the correct relationship (ex. Mother and Sister).

Well there was another game that I played with something like that called Family Matters where entering "Sister" and "Mom" with the relevant characters relationship to the MC activated an incest mode. It sounds like a good idea, but I think they'd still get in trouble for having this because even if it's not the main game's storyline, it's still an accessible part of the game which is against Patreon rules.

 

[redknight00]

MC: 'I should not be thinking of my cumdumpster's breasts this way, this is so wrong!'

 

[Holy Bacchus]

Well, that I meant was that the story should be good and make sense if you basically enter "nothing" or even something wrong. One can't expect a player, who plays the game the first time (which is the most important playthrough to coin the actual game experience) to get all those relationships right before he's played the game once, and if he gets them wrong, his first experience will be ruined. To make it work you'd probably need some kind of pretty sophisticated background code which adapts dialogs and context but that would again be clearly against patreon's TOS.

Is adaptive code against the TOS? As far as I'm aware, as long as incest is not included by the creator then it's fine. If players choose to make relationships incestuous, that's not against the TOS.

 

[Holy Bacchus]

MC: 'I should not be thinking of my cumdumpster's breasts this way, this is so wrong!'

On the one hand, that does perhaps show a big flaw in this system, but on the other hand, it could be a hilarious feature for veteran players who want to have a little more fun with the game.

 

[j4yj4m]

Is adaptive code against the TOS? As far as I'm aware, as long as incest is not included by the creator then it's fine. If players choose to make relationships incestuous, that's not against the TOS.

No, but if you try to nudge it to make more sense and to create a better story, let's say by adding or changing content, as soon as certain relationships are entered. But yes, that's not even the main problem I see.

The whole incest topic requires specific writing/scenes revolving around that taboo and for me it's either "the whole thing" or "nothing" by now - given that both would be properly done. In my opinion, aiming for the the middle ground (i.E. somehow hiding incest in official patreon releases) will result in a bad compromise.

 

[DarthSeduction]

I could see this being workable, with a lot of secret code behind that text box that recognizes certain things.

In doing my game I was thinking maybe I'd just do a simple substitution, but as I spent more time with it I realized that the writing around that substitution is important. I do replace Mom with Colbie in the text. However, what this means is, I can't ever refer to their mother as "my mom" without that being a new line. I always have to make a line that references her reference her by name and not relation.

Furthermore, before bossapplesauce beat me to it, I was working on a patch for Summertime Saga's incest problem, I realized pretty quick, the way the game was written, it wasn't as easy as, when he gives you the chance to name your mom and sister, changing them to mom and sis, or sister, or whatever. For instance, any time your mom references your sister in the game, she can't just call her sis, so she needs a name for when mom speaks about her. Similarly you might want there to be times when other characters do acknowledge your relationship, how do you have this while still maintaining plausible deniability?

So, for that to work, you'd need to create back-end code that recognized a number of different possibilities for what you might input as her relationship to you. Girlfriend, roommate, sister, childhood friend, cousin etc etc etc and then create a system that would call on that data and then sort it through some sort of contextual filter to decide how to present it. So, if you put sister, whenever I called on that data, I'd check who was talking about her, what the context was, and how it would make most sense to refer to her in that spot.

Example:

M = Mom but we're just using the letter so that if the code is read no one will know the landlady is mom.
MC = Main Character
S = The character who is supposed to be your sister/roommate.
BF = Best Friend.

M "[MC] would you go and find [girl1]?"

Now, if you've chosen to make her your roommate, or childhood friend, it wouldn't really make sense for me to call either of those there, so I'd need to create code that would work through that sentence itself and know that the, I have to assume, landlady, is going to call her daughter by her name to the tenant when she asks him to find her.

​

S "[MC] I've been talking to [M] about you lately, she say's we're too close."

Here, we have the opposite issue. If she's not your mom, I don't want to call landlady, I want to call her name here. But more importantly, I'd want it to recognize that it was the daughter talking, so she'd probably refer to her as mom, assuming you didn't make them unrelated as well somehow. Could be that you're both foster kids. So I'd have it check who S is, what they'd call M and still go through the sentence and decide how the thing should display.... Technically, she wouldn't just say, "I've been talking to mom..." unless they both share the same mother, she'd say, "I've been talking to my mom..."

BF "So how are things going between you and [girl1], bro? Is [M] still keeping a close watch on you two so you're not alone?"

Here I'd need to call on the whole system, would he say your sister's name? Would he say your sister? Usually, in my case, when I talk about by best friend's sister, I don't call her Vanessa, I say, your sister, so if you set her as your sister, I'd probably pull her name. However, if you set her as a childhood friend, I'd probably call a name, because I don't see it sounding natural to say, "How are things with your friend?" Moving on, if M is your mom, then it would need to know to add your in there, but if she was a landlady or something similar, I'd need to decide if BF would refer to her as such or if he'd use her name. And of course, with you being able to put in more random shit if you wanted, I'd have to sort through those as well, I'd probably throw the name for those ones.

(Atom users will appreciate my color choices)

 

[desmosome]

That is a shitton of work for the dev to do it right. At this point, the best option is to just go all or nothing. Write the story with incest, but use placeholders like landlady which may or may not make sense, and release a patch. Otherwise, just write the whole thing without incest and stick to that.

 

[Dogeek]

A) It would compromise the story, as others have said in this post.

B) I personnally care more about whether or not I can pay my bills this month.

C) Incest sure is a nice kink, and becoming something mainstream, but as long as patreon bans it, Summertime Sga won't feature any incestous content, and it's final.

 

[anne O'nymous]

Is adaptive code against the TOS? As far as I'm aware, as long as incest is not included by the creator then it's fine. If players choose to make relationships incestuous, that's not against the TOS.

If the code have a branching between two versions of the same dialog line, scene, whatever, then it's included by the creator and so against the TOS. It's the case when entering "this" and "that" activate an incest mode, it's also the case when you turn a "taboo" flag from False to True.

The problem being that if the incest patch resume to a renaming of the characters, the story mean nothing either with or without it. An incestuous story and a none incestuous story are two different stories, they appeal for different reactions to the same situation and so completely different dialog lines.
How many, "I can't have sex with you, you're my best friend !", and others, "I'm is landlady, why do I feel so attracted by his penis ?". And now we start to see the opposite, none incestuous stories that can be turned as incestuous. One day we will show, "Alright, son, I'll let you have sex with me, but pay your rent first", and others, "Bro, when I show you for the first time in 5th grades, I immediately felt in love for you".

 

[Holy Bacchus]

@DarthSeduction

See, this is what I was thinking; an adaptive code that corresponds to certain triggers. Of course, I don't know Ren'py coding and therefore don't know if it's possible or the potential complexity of implementing it, but I used to make Flash games many years ago and some included adaptive code that allowed the dialogue to correspond to user input names and choices. It's been awhile since I did those games (I made them in college) so I don't remember the exact code used, but I basically set up different code references that would refer to certain characters and objects in specific ways and then applied those to certain characters so the dialogue made sense.

To use Summertime Saga as an example, there could be several different references for Debbie/the Mom (bearing in mind I don't know how Ren'py coding is written, this is just how I could imagine it in a basic sense);

• Deb = Name of the character either input by the player or the default name.
  • E.g. "Mrs Johnson: Hey [Deb], how are you?" = "Mrs Johnson: Hey Debbie/Jane/Holly, how are you?"
• DebR = The relationship of this character to the MC.
  • E.g. landlady, foster mom, Dad's friend, etc.
• DebR2 = A specific relationship of this character to the MC that is input by the player which overwrites the DebR reltaionship, i.e. Mom [D1], Mother [D2], Mum [D3].
  • E.g. "my ([DebR] or [DebR2] if [DebR] = (D1), (D2), or (D3))= "my landlady/Mom."
  • E.g. "our ([DebR] or [DebR2] if [DebR] = (D1), (D2), or (D3))" = "our landlady/Mom".
  • E.g. "your ([DebR] or [DebR2] if [DebR] = (D1), (D2), or (D3))" = "your landlady/Mom".
  • E.g. "their ([DebR] or [DebR2] if [DebR] = (D1), (D2), or (D3))" = "their landlady/Mom".
  • E.g. "his ([DebR] or [DebR2] if [DebR] = (D1), (D2), or (D3))" = "his landlady/Mom".
  • E.g. "MC: I love showering with you ([Deb] or [DebR2] if [DebR] = (D1), (D2), or (D3)) = "MC: I love showering with you Debbie/Mom."
• DebMy = Inserts the word "my" for parts of the dialogue where it needs to precede the relationship if the DebR2 condition has been met for the dialogue to sound more natural.
  • E.g. "MC: I can't believe that ([Deb] or [DebMy] [DebR2] if [DebR] = (D1), (D2), or (D3)) just did that!" = "MC: I can't believe that Debbie/my Mom just did that!"

I realise this is a very complex idea (and I realised it even more when I started typing this because I clearly hadn't thought it through, lol) especially since the same sort of thing would have to be applied to Jenny, Diane, and to Mrs Johnson and Eric, but if this were possible it still, in my mind, could perhaps better allow for the dialogue to still make sense and have a good flow to it without having to dumb it down and make it more simplistic and basic like some other games out there.

Also, it could maybe be made optional, as in when playing the game there could be 2 options to play; a "Regular Version" and a "Fantasy Version". The Regular one would of course be the one without an adaptive script/storyline and the Fantasy one would be, thus allowing people who don't want to enter specific relationships to not have to as there would a version of the game that is pre-set.

P.S. Again, I don't know Ren'py coding so this whole thread is probably just me talking out of my ass because I'm still bitter about the rule changes.

 

[Holy Bacchus]

If the code have a branching between two versions of the same dialog line, scene, whatever, then it's included by the creator and so against the TOS. It's the case when entering "this" and "that" activate an incest mode, it's also the case when you turn a "taboo" flag from False to True.

The problem being that if the incest patch resume to a renaming of the characters, the story mean nothing either with or without it. An incestuous story and a none incestuous story are two different stories, they appeal for different reactions to the same situation and so completely different dialog lines.
How many, "I can't have sex with you, you're my best friend !", and others, "I'm is landlady, why do I feel so attracted by his penis ?". And now we start to see the opposite, none incestuous stories that can be turned as incestuous. One day we will show, "Alright, son, I'll let you have sex with me, but pay your rent first", and others, "Bro, when I show you for the first time in 5th grades, I immediately felt in love for you".

Well I checked their TOS and their Community Guidelines, and there seems to neither be a specific or non-specific rule that says game creators can't include a system that allows players to customise a game in some way. So long as the content they're creating doesn't directly include any incestuous elements, there's nothing to say that a NSFW game developer is not allowed to have adaptive dialogue code that allows players to custom set the MC's relationship to specific characters.

 

[redknight00]

As you can see yourself, the problem only gets more complicated as you add more variables and try to keep correct grammar while using different forms. At one point, I would ask is it worth it? I know some people like incest, some people really like it to the point of only playing games with such fetish, but this just keeps adding more and more work in already tight schedules for people who publish on Patreon. Considering most teams are one-man armies or just a few people, I would say it's better for the game to just take the easy way out and make it all landladies, or better yet, make a game without forbidden content and take that extra time to further polish the game.

 

[desmosome]

i love landladies cus it usually means there is a patch hehe.