Love the Background Art. I have been working on simplifying my art, to make it more abstract, so that it is easier to self evaluate (because I am too critical), I figured out the art style I can do rapidly for characters, now I am trying to perfect backgrounds and I think the art you have is a great example for me to follow.
Love that it is point and click, I think it is one of the greater types of game mechanics to use for a visually focused game such as adult games tend to be.
Sounds like a pretty large project, in terms of the content required to allow for interesting loot drops to come in a varying range, and the various big milestones, such as in-game player house to upgrade or user logins.
Have you any experience with this kind of stuff before, any vision you have on what you plan to do in a technical aspect? Such as game engines? I imagine if you want to make a game to be able to log in, possibly browsers based since you would want to be able to log in on a website, that to do that you are going to need to know a bit about servers and hosting. Unity I know has some multiplayer support, but I am not sure about how detailed, such as being able to make accounts or not. I imagine that you are going to need to host or pay someone to host a server for the log in details, which I am not too familiar with Unity's networking abilities, but last I check it was pretty limited. In order for me to get such custom and advanced networking functionality out of unity, I had to make a secondary executable which handles all the networking. If trying to use unity with WebGL, which is what I think the only version which can be played in the browser, if it doesn't have the support of the necessary networking functionality, nor is it able to run networking scripts (at least when it is not in experimental mode), then I image you would have to use a similar workaround, asking users to first download this secondary program to their computer so that the game can detect it and use the secondary program to then communicate back to the main server. Then there is the issue about security and being liable. I found a good workaround to this being, instead of being responsible for accounts, data, and any personal information, even if you ask some other company to host your server, is to use the patreon OAuth system, which lets uses their account to log in, without ever actually seeing the data like passwords and such, so it is all secured, and also gives you the benefit of being able to integrate patreon stuff into the game that is available to appropriate users. You still need a server to coordinate all this stuff with a personal private key, but it could save you some headache. If you use HTML (something else I think unity can export to) with a custom WebGL engine, I am sure it could run the networking code in the browser without extra programs to download. I myself do not know too much of how to do any of all this, I only experimented a bit, but since I couldn't be bothered to buy a domain name to test with, I can't say for sure if this process works, nor do I know what all the steps and bugs would be, but then you may be more experienced with I.T. than me.
Even with my experience, I would find it hard to try and create half of such a game alone. For the most part, your game sounds like a hybrid between Mass Effect's romance mechanics, and simpler and more basic RPG's such as skyrim or golden sun.
If you are interested in hearing an opinion, then I have this. Missions, fighting, loot, allies, and relationships seem to be the Minimal Viable Product for the idea you want to sell, but what exactly is going to be the lewd hook? Besides romancing and what I assume are going to be sex scenes, how are you going to make this an adult game? Assuming adult content is a focus point. I assume I will not be as interested in the story or the characters like I was in Mass Effect, so it would be the adult content I really would come to play for. So how do you plan to make this an adult-focused game? Will the monster be sexualized somehow? will there be sexualized encounters and actions? Will you be able to customize armor for your followers (I mean, be able to pick what they wear, not a full-on customization system), and will there be lewder armor options, and would characters react to wearing certain items? Are you going to try to focus on any particular sets of interests and or fetishes, or are you going to try and keep things generic to make the game as appealing to the most amount of people as possible (at the risk of diluting the specific content various people will want). I find that a good mechanism for both adult content and being able to have multiple fetishes available but allowing players to focus on what they want, is an exploration/experimentation mechanism. There is physically exploring, such as around a house to find a hole to peep through where you can spy/get caught to lead to interesting sexual encounters. Experimenting would be like, certain kind of armors encourages certain types of behavior (maid outfit) and sometimes one character is particularly suited for a particular loadout (mean girl gets a dildo sword, which leads to her secert femdom storyline.) The only issue is that using such mechanism quickly makes a game much more complex and that much harder to work on.
So basically, I am just wondering, what is your adult content hook? If it is an rpg with dating, I might as well replay mass effect instead (unless somehow you have interesting characters, with each one appealing to different fantasies, such as a shy girl to save, goth girl who's heart you melt, mean girl who wants to dominate the player, the cheerleader who loves to tease the player, Pickle rick because nothing is sexyer then pickle rick
, etc.).
Lastly, is this a strange question? could you share an image of the background, without that glow around the lamp? I ask because I could download it, and I want to do an experiment with the sky and light behaviors to see if I can bring more life to the image, or more fantisy feeling to it. The more one pushes for realism, the easier it is to make an image look not right, the line you walk gets thinner and thinner in a sense. Your art looks great, but there could be a few simple effects to enhance it and I want to see if what you have now is already at the limit of how far you can go and look good, or if the effects I have in mind will actually manage to further improve the artwork.
Thanks for sharing!
