Could use some advice for a game I'm developing.

[Rabcor]

I have a 3D hentai game that's very early in development (we're still prototyping, not even pre-alpha yet). The initial base we're working towards as a starting point is an SDT clone made in unity. I know we're not the first to try that, but we're gonna do it, we're gonna do it well, and we're gonna do it right, there's no question about it. It's gonna take a while but when it's done and we release it, with all the features of SDT and then a couple more on top, that's not the finish line. It's the starting line.

After the SDT clone which is sorta just to get our feet wet, the real project we want to work on begins. We'll expand upon the game we'll already have and move into the territory of illusion games like ai shoujo or honey select, or KISS games like custom maid.

At it's core, the game we'll eventually make is going to have a similar kind of versatility as illusion's games when it comes to different sex positions and personalities, but with more interactive elements in the sex scenes, somthing like what you'll probably have seen in many interactive flash games in the past (including but not limited to SDT).

I've typically felt disappointed with hentai games due to either lack of interactivity or lack of versatility (it seems like any game that has one always lacks the other), and since nobody seems to have beat me to it as far as I can tell, I'm gonna create a game that has it all. The kind of hentai game I'd like to play.

There's gonna be some other gameplay as well besides the sex scenes, there always has to be at least something; but that's sort of a problem for later, we have our hands full with developing the sex systems and isnce that's gonna take at least a couple months (and we're not rushing either), we have plenty of time to think about what we want to do. I'm leaning towards something slave-maker~esque maybe; but we're somewhat open to ideas since we don't have anything really concrete planned for it yet.

Which leads me to what I've come here to ask for advice on. Aforementioned games like Honey Select, AI Shoujo, Custom Maid.

What do you think are the biggest failings of those games?
What could they have done better?
Did you have any particular favorite features in those or any other hentai game you've played that you'd like to see again?

 

[LesserKing]

I'd eyeball the custom mods and patches for the game. Most illusion games give you a shovel and bucket to do what you want with (yes im aware i just described a sandbox game)

What I'm trying to say is uh... pretty much for all the things that people wanted in these games, someone took the chore of making mods to add them and that's where i you'll find the treasure

Adding popular mods in these games as actual features as well as making it convenient for anyone who wants to make their own mods for the game.

What do you think are the biggest failings of those games?

bullets in your wallet

What could they have done better?

Better collisions, more accessories and generic clothing, ooh and GUIDES! the guides in a lot of these aren't really helpful so you have to kind of dig the internet for help wit things.

Did you have any particular favorite features in those or any other hentai game you've played that you'd like to see again?

i really like being able to change the lighting and location

 

[Rabcor]

Those were all good points, thanks! Can't promise much in the way of more accessories and generic clothing, that will sorta come on it's own; but better collisions are 100% gonna be there. The ability to change the lighting wasn't smoething I'd really thought about so that's a good one too.

Guess I'll have to browse some mods then, that was a good tip.

This game is gonna be moddable, possibly more moddable than Illusion's games. Although I can't say it'll be anywhere near as versatile as TES games like Skyrim (I mean, I would if I could, but their plugin format isn't something i think I can replicate, even if I were to open source parts of the game so people could use the unity editor like the creation kit, that wouldn't quite cut it) but adding content or editing existing content should at least be easy up to a certain point.

I want to make it as modding friendly as I can, but I'm new to it so I don't know exactly how far I will be able to go with that. I guess the good thing is that there's always bepinex to fall back on since it's unity.

 

[♍VoidTraveler]

I'm leaning towards something slave-maker~esque maybe; but we're somewhat open to ideas since we don't have anything really concrete planned for it yet.

Wanna try something slave-maker-esque, only in space?
Say, you start as a pirate in a wide galaxy with all manner of worlds and races living upon them.
Make it arcanepunk. Because why not?
Maybe add some base building and shit, because why not grow from a humble pirate into an interstellar menace that has his/her own fleet?
And you could also go for a

You must be registered to see the links

parody or borrow some ideas from there (because it has plenty of cool ones in my opinion.)
If one wants to create truly unique space game, look not further than space rangers to teach you how.

Well anyway, this kinda thing.

 

[DuniX]

Which leads me to what I've come here to ask for advice on. Aforementioned games like Honey Select, AI Shoujo, Custom Maid.

If you are going to do this you might as well target it's utility as a tool by giving it a proper license and letting other developers use it for 3D characters and sex scene support.
Illusion stuff is still in a "legal gray area"(at least developers pretend to be that).

What do you think are the biggest failings of those games?
What could they have done better?

They don't have much gameplay, technically it is supposed to be a AI driven waifu but that was beyond the technical ability of the developers at Illusion and only recently with things like ChatGPT and whatnot there might even be a possibility of achieving that kind of fantasy.

What is possible as gameplay is a Slave Trainer and Brothel Sim as there hasn't been a 3D one with more involved sex interactions, they so far have been using Image Packs or just Text.
It should be already known how to make good gameplay for that.

 

[Deleted member 5410619]

What do you think are the biggest failings of those games?

Lack of challange.

What could they have done better?

Of those i played i could never lose.
Without the risk of losing.
Victory feels hollow.

Did you have any particular favorite features in those or any other hentai game you've played that you'd like to see again?

Urge to molest and urge to molest if has a decent risk management system.
In hentai highschool+ you get to set the dress code, slowly corrupt the school by creating increasly pervert lessons and eventualy exploiting the school into a all-but-in-name-brothel.
If your reputation gets to 0 you lose the game.
So you need to balance your corruption against your reputation.
In lab rats 2 you can set the clothing your employe's wear, make them happy using drugs even when you threat them like shit.
Make them as slutty or prude as you like.
Superpower has a similier more primative system as lab rats 2 but using mind control instead of drug's.
Milf next door has you sneak around and find stuff you can use the rape the sleeping victem.
If she wakes up without being tied up you lose.
Sleep sex games have you slowly remove the clothing while they sleep.
Constantly watching her face to see if she is close to waking up.

What i like too see is challange.
Even something as simple as having the option to shove her underwear in her mouth or bring duck tape to ensure she cannot scream for help.
Meaby following a target around until you find a good time to strike.
Meaby a preparation system where you need to bring stuff along to make it easier but can only carry so much.
Meaby get a lockpick or steal a key.
Place camera's or use drug's.
Meaby seduce the mother to get access to the daughters.
Whatever it is.
You need to be able to have multiple ways of dealing with the problem and coming prepeared makes it easier.

Risk vs reward.

 

[Rabcor]

Space Rangers

Space Rangers looks like the X series on a whole lot of crack... But yeah making it a space sim has crossed my mind

But it's a lot of extra work. It's so much extra work that making the space sim parts of the game would take longer than making the parts of the game you'd all be there for!

It's a nice idea though, and I'm not gonna dismiss it just yet, because I might think of a really awesome way to make this a space sim, but so far I haven't; and it's best not to lose focus on the fact that it's porn and not star citizen, and if ur making a space sim, it's very easy to forget that it's not star citizen looks like. You seen the feature creep on these things? (Wait yeah, space rangers, course you've seen it)

Tool & Slave/Brothel Sim

I wouldn't mind trying to explore the potential use of the game we're creating as a tool, but I never used Illusion's tools so I wouldn't know how to reimplement them or what people expect to see in them.

If it's just posing characters in custom environments that would be simple enough I suppose. Animating them even might be doable. Beyond that i got nothing though.

For a slave/brothel sim, that's basically what I'm leaning towards. Something similar to slavemaker. There was a lot good about that game. The tricky part about reimplementing it in 3D is that any explorable area would have to be actually created and any character created, animated and voiced. The biggest reason I'm hesitating going straight for something like that is the scale. We would essentially have to create an entire 3D city to be explored. Wouldn't have to be as big or populated as the cities in CP77 or GTA, but it'd still have to be there.

Which is why I also leaned towards the idea of a space/slave/brothel sim, with a space sim we'd just need a couple space ships and maybe a space station or two. I'm very confident we could manage that asset wise. But code wise it's an even bigger hurdle.

To be honest this is something we have to think about quite a lot, luckily we have a lot of time to think about it.

Without the risk of losing.
Victory feels hollow.

I agree. This is something that's easy to forget when designing a hentai game, or easily ignored when you're a big triple a company and you want all the 6 year olds to like your game. But good gameplay is always comprised of a challenge with success and failure conditions. Even if it's something as killing all the enemies without letting ur hp drop to 0.

 

[♍VoidTraveler]

But it's a lot of extra work. It's so much extra work that making the space sim parts of the game would take longer than making the parts of the game you'd all be there for!

Of course it is a lot of work. Anything worth making is.
And it's up to you whether you gonna make an actual adult game, or yet another boring as piss porn book that pretends to be game.
If one really puts their mind to it one can make anything, even star citizen with porn.
Think about it, make plans, research, learn, show us your creativity.

There is one thing i can say for certain, i am not interested in "games" that offer nothing but porn.

 

[Rabcor]

Of course it is a lot of work. Anything worth making is.

That's easy to say, but the reality is as a two man team we face a lot of limitations, and we're already putting a lot of work into the sex aspects of the game. That alone is already miles further than most hentai games. We're 2 people already working on something we intend to have go toe to toe with games like Honey Select and win; that game in particular made by a sizable company that's been doing this for 20+ years successfully. This is already highly ambitious.

If we try to make a game that does everything we will end up with a game that does nothing, or rather, no game at all.

Projects like this thrive on limitations and die to overambition. Maybe if making the sex systems turns out quicker and easier than anyone expected then yeah, we can make some crazy good space sim or rpg with the best sexual content system ever seen. But we're 2 people. This is extremely unlikely.

The most likely way we can get some good gameplay in is some mostly-text management sim (like a brothel manager or something) whichwe can weave our sex systems into, and as slavemaker for instance has proven, such a thing can make for a surprisingly good game.

We're already ambitious enough with the interactive sex system we're developing, this'll test our skillls to the utmost and then some already. It might take years if the pieces happen to fall that way. This is what's important, everything else is already an afterthought, which is why we need some clever, fun, relatively-easy to implement gameplay. Not gameplay that even a 100 man company would struggle to make.

 

[Count Morado]

That's easy to say, but the reality is as a two man team we face a lot of limitations...

If we try to make a game that does everything we will end up with a game that does nothing, or rather, no game at all.

This is why you really shouldn't solicit suggestions from F95. Just create a product that drives you. There are as many opinions on what makes a game good as there are people who visit F95. Use common sense, please yourself first, and be aware of trends that may fit your vision. Players will suggest, applaud, criticize, condemn each moment of the game. Take them all with a grain of salt and do which brings you the most happiness.

 

[DuniX]

If it's just posing characters in custom environments that would be simple enough I suppose. Animating them even might be doable. Beyond that i got nothing though.

Let them expand and develop it themselves while you develop features that you use yourself for your projects. It just needs to be modular enough to be used on other projects and be flexible enough in terms of modding support for adding content.
If you can attract a few developers that also means whatever they develop can also be used by you.
But whatever the case first develop it for yourself and what you use, that in itself has some utility for others.

The tricky part about reimplementing it in 3D is that any explorable area would have to be actually created

You can pull tricks similar to how Illusion does and use 2D Backgrounds with 3D Characters for Normal Scenes while you implement 3D maps for things that can be used for Sex Scenes.
There is also nothing stopping you for using a big 2d map for the main interface of the game and other 2d screens, you don't need to necessarily make a interconnected open world.
For a Brothel Sim you don't need that many Scenes and Locations you need to implement and fewer that actually need 3D maps.
Only the Brothel itself in terms of Training Scenes and Customer Scenes with things like Dungeons and Bedrooms.

 

[Meaning Less]

What is SDT?

 

[Lerd0]

What is SDT?

..super deep throat?
https://f95zone.to/threads/super-deepthroat-v5-41a-konashion.4605/

 

[Meaning Less]

Okay now it makes more sense, so here is my take:

What do you think are the biggest failings of those games?

Most of those games thrive on the simple fact that you can simulate sex content with your favorite game/anime/tv characters, which means character customization is essential if you want people coming back to your game frequently.

What could they have done better?

For these games the gameplay outside of sex is often where they had a lot to improve, sex scenes are fun but if you don't apply them properly suddenly they will feel completely detached from the game.

Did you have any particular favorite features in those or any other hentai game you've played that you'd like to see again?

Artifical academy 2 had a system that if someone caught you doing sexual stuff around school other characters would react and the results would vary depending on their personalities, (telling the principal, getting jealous and seeking revenge, just getting horny or even joining the fun).

This is something I really miss from illusion games because that allowed for lots of fun exhibitionism, public masturbation or similar content that also had a challenge attached to it, there are consequence if the wrong character catches you being lewd in public, this mechanic alone made that game a lot more thrilling than all illusion games that followed.

So in general, more exhibitionism stuff is something I would love to see in those free-roam type games, seeing other characters reacting to overly lewd clothing and lewd acts is fun.

 

[Akakoy]

Hello, are you actually still developing the game? Junior C developer here, right now learning 3d graphics and vulkan API. 2d artist in the past, always want to try myself in UI\UIX.
I guess you are not hiring and happy with team that you have right now, but I want to participate somehow anyway Honestly, porn sandbox with customization is what people want. And this is hard to achieve with already existing commercial proprietary engines, unless you have the source code. Especially with modding and customization, you have to use something like Godot or write your own from scratch. Can Unity project even allow drag-n-drop of models\textures into its window?
I'd rather start with something simple, like a primitive sandbox for posing and taking pictures, like HS or 3dSexVilla. The only tough part about villa will be animation sequencer.
"Studio modes" of games like Honey select 1 and 2 is not that complex - more like a demoreel with some primitive physics and crappy graphics. Graphics part shouldn't be that hard to re-implement, unlike memory management for mods (and their textures). And Honey select is AWFUL in that sense: game was not intended to be modded, editing .unity3d is a complete pain in the ass and all tools are solely made by enthusiasts. Not to say Unity is always crashes. I mean, there are already a lot of plugins has been written, like LRE and IBL that changes look of the game completely, why not put all this effort into a new project? This is exactly what creator of MMD did. Search on github, for example: there is a lot of FOSS engines written from zero and performing better then this piece of crap!
I not going to promise anything, but I am very enthusiastic about learning Vulkan (because of cross-platform and possible RT functionality), seems like people was overexaggerating it complexity. Don't want to use Godot because I have to deal with C# in this case, but I might have to switch to some engine. Maybe I will try to re-implement HoneyStudio in the future. If someone is already creating something like this - I'll be glad to participate... But more on art\UIX part, it's too early for me to start career in programming.

 

[Rabcor]

Snip

Yes, we are still working on this game. But we're not far enough along yet with it to consider bringing more people on board. We're still working on creating a base for us to work from, even the engine isn't 100% decided yet, although we are working in unity for now we're considering switching to godot or unreal, or staying with unity, it's all kinda up for grabs right now.

I don't think the ability to drag and drop models into the game is a feasible feature in the first place,there are steps that must be taken to make a model properly compatible with a game engine, an import process, and some things may not be properly be importet and need to be re-done or re-adjusted in the engine in order to work properly.

When I say moddable I'm thinking more along the lines of like skyrim. my base idea for moddability is to have a special folder structure for the project, and a mods folder with a mirrored folder structure, and all files within specific folders will be loaded when the game is launched and implemented based on which folder they're in.

This is already tricky though, it sounds simple, but there's a lot more to it, if it's a static object like a vase, it's simple enough. If it's a deformable or animateable object though, things can get very complicated. To animate we generally need to use a skeleton, and for the base animations to work, the model must conform to that skeleton. (Skyrim modders have taken to even swapping out the skeleton entirely to support new/better animations actually). That's not even going into the more dynamic animations like skinned mesh physics or softbodies; in a nutshell, any models and textures to be imported need to be in the right format, this needs to be standardized; in order to make things as easy as possible for the would be modders, we have to develop those standards and make them publicly available so modders will know what to do to port their models and possibly textures and even animations to our game.

As for more advanced modding like creating scripted events or new features, I have no idea how we'd allow fo rhtat. Bethesda has a whole plugin system and editor developed just for that, replicating that is beyond our capabilities.




You can use C# in Godot though. You don't have to use GDScript, it's just better in the end if you do (GDScript was created for a reason i suppose).

Raytracing has always at it's core been simple, maybe even the simplest rendering technique out there, it's path tracing where things get complicated. Raytracing is simple but it is extremely resource heavy, we still do not have 'real-time raytracing' capabilities on any gpu, Nvidia RTX raytracing was just some hobbled form of path tracing that was kinda garbage, only the latest iteration (the one they're advertising lately called path tracing, which is funny, cuz RTX was never anything else than that); is proper raytracing.

You should learn the difference between path tracing and raytracing, and why we use path tracing over ray tracing (to put it in simple terms, raytracing is the ultimate realistic rendering technique, path-tracing is a performance optimized variation on raytracing, it has lower accuracy but much better performance, and it's still improving in both areas; to have any hope of 'real-time raytracing' path-tracing is the only real option). Raytracing is not complicated, but if you're working with any sort of realtime rendering, raytracing is not what you'll be working with, you'll be working with path tracing, and path tracing is very complicated. It's not perhaps that complicated at it's core, it's just sorta a reverse form of raytracing; but the optimizations part, that's mind bendingly complicated.