Private Dick [Development Thread]

[cisco_donovan]

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Private Dick Development Thread

F95zone thread: f95zone.to/threads/private-dick-v0-05-cisco-donovan.112947/


First Post

Hi,

I am here and happy to announce Private Dick - my neo noir lewd game!





I'll have a go at maintaining a devlog here. This will be a bit of a boring first post but I'll attach some screenshots and concept art.

I've been working at this for a couple of months now and I'm starting to come out into the world with an eye to launching a crowdfunder in a few weeks. I've financed development so far but I can't do it for very much longer.

In Private Dick, you'll step into the gumshoes of Sam Steele, a down-on-his-luck private detective. After a chance run-in with his ex - our femme fatale - he is dragged into a world of deception, corporate conspiracy, and of course lots and lots of sex.

I've gone for a really rough, atmospheric, stylistic art style in Private Dick. This is partly because I wanted something distinctive and striking that suits a noir world, but also because I am so tired of seeing the same two or three art styles in so many other games. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing differently. I'm also sticking with the really bold (and perhaps foolish?) decision to make the game black and white with streaks of colour.

This will be a very story-driven game but it will have lots of creative, interactive sex scenes to liven it up. A demo with a full scene will be up soon.

I am writer and coder. I've written a bunch of

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and

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fanfic over on AO3 - it's full of typos and very badly edited because I, aha, write my porn in something of a hurry. Got to keep an edge on, you know? There's also a

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on there in which a young man totally unrelated to myself finds a genie in a lamp - except the genie is Captain Janeway and the lamp is an autographed photo of Kate Mulgrew. Anyway the Janeway Genie has an ability to make any fantasy come true and so our plucky and perverted antihero gets into all sorts of trouble in the office.

Well, that's all from me for now. I've attached some screenshots and concept art. I'd love to know what you think!

 

[Saki_Sliz]

Yes, having a different style certainly helps a project stand out against all the others, and I really like what your able to do. It's good to see you have a start, 50% of the work is getting started... and starting again, and again... Looks like a good start! Best of luck!

 

[cisco_donovan]

So the first demo for Private Dick is out!

You can play it now on

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(download or in the browser).

I'll be uploading a build here in a few days - I'm just tweaking the content of the CGs before I do.

I'm just experimenting right now with comic-style boxouts to help show the action - what do we think?

 

[cisco_donovan]

Actually, let's talk about sex scenes!

So I've played some great 2D lewd games - Akabur and Salty_01 spring to mind really, they create brilliant and expressive scenes. Just thinking about it makes me want to abandon this blog post and draw the curtains.... on the other hand, I don't tend to enjoy the 3D games at all - those soulless, dry-humping manakins just don't do it for me.

But there's quite a lot to think about when working out the style for your own game. Do you show the dude, or just have a floating cock? What position does the girl go in? How many poses / positions do you have in one scene? How much control do you give the player? How graphic and hardcore should you be - how many players will you alienate, either way?

These aren't easy questions! But I do have a few guidelines for what I'm trying to achieve.

In Private Dick, I want to prioritise energy and passion in my scenes. I want vibrant, enthusiastic sex. Romance is a dirty word around here but I want a bit of it in my smut. There's a big difference between sex and porn and I guess I'm trying to close that gap. Poses that make a woman look great don't often allow for a lot of energy in the scene.

So that means I kind of need the guy to be in the scene, like I need to see his body to put the energy into the scene. But his body is usually going to be in the way! I mean look at the scene above. To get a good desk fuck, the guy has to be physically there. I could draw a floating cock but honestly, aside from the fact that I'm cutting the main character out of the game, I always find that a bit weird. I could draw an athletic pose, with Sam standing back and awkwardly poking his cock into her - but I'm not going to buy that as an emotional fuck scene.

My solution to this is to show comic-style box-outs of the penetration. I'll probably also extend this to alternative camera angles and close ups of tits and stuff. I've got a lot of ideas about how I can use these little windows to better paint a scene without removing emotion and energy. In fact, I think these boxouts add a lot of energy and movement to the scene.

Of course, there's a cost. I need to pay artists to draw the boxouts, I need to code them up into the game, I need to design them around the scene. I think there might be a small amount of players who are put off by them, so I'm also going to make them optional and easy to toggle.

I'm still working this stuff out, trying to find what's desirable, affordable, practical. But I've got a lot of ideas I want to integrate, a lot of sex I want to draw and write. Better get back to it...

 

[Saki_Sliz]

The main thing that sticks out to me is that you are developing your own philosophy on what you think is best. Not just 'deciding' but thinking of questions both small and big, and trying to answer everything with one answer or philosophy. I think having a philosophy is important, not because it is a fixed answer, but because it is a flexible answer. What's good for now may change as you learn new things.

A focus on energy/passion and using box outs:

The debate about showing a male in a game that is typically played by male players is a good debate topic. Since I'm just looking at a screen shot, not having read the story, I can't say I feel the true impact of the art in its intended format. However, seeing your art, two things stand out to me, body posture and facial expression. Both of these I think well done, they could each stand on their own, because they both communicate 'the mood' of the scene to me. Maybe not energy and passion, because that may come from the context of the story and scene, but the art definitely sells a mood and tone. In this case, having the male character shown I do think helps with your goal, having them does at least cotribute to telling a mood and possible hint at the narrative (in fact it may change my own philosophy on how I may go about my own male characters).

From how you describe your idea of using box outs, it sounds like your goal is to draw one image for the sex scene to help illustrate the action and tone of the story, and you want to use the close ups to help illustrate the more erotic nuances, ie, showing which hole, what kind of movement, etc. Doing this is an alternative to redrawing the whole scene, saving time, energy, maybe money, but most importantly, scaling the scope of the project to something that feels reasonable to you at still a great quality.

I know what you mean with the 3D mannequins dry humping each other, I'm also going with a 2D toonish style to help focus on character art and design that contributes with adding 'energy' to the scene. Lets say however, someone draw's your scene, but draws multiple poses to achieve the same effect, able to animate the scene to show characters 'humping' each other. For me, that's not that much different than the 3D model version, and while it is erotic, beyond the millisecond of 'ooh' i'd go back to being bored of the sex scene. I actually think its more interesting to go through the scene, and see what goes on and what changes, so the idea of possibly multiple box outs and nuances to explore with in the scene and how characters react to one another as things progress and change seems for more interesting to me than just an animation.

It's for this reason I'm struggled with these kinds of projects for a long time, 1 I like to go fast so rather than words, I would prefer a comic to 'skim' through, focused on minimal words, but then, that's a crap ton of art work to do, even for a simple project; 2 I want to focus on intractability (game mechanics) because having to work to get something can allow for more intimacy and personal attachment to the 'reward' but have never found a game that delivered on a game mechanic/sex scene combo that worked well, so I'm in uncharted waters simply due to my high demands.

your approach seem far more reasonable, with a story focus, and the possibility for variations depending on how you want to go implementing your game (possibly all the ideas that are trapped with in your mind).

 

[cisco_donovan]

Today is going to be a writing day. Which for some reason means I've opened up this devlog

I've been working on Private Dick for a few months now and, initially, all my time was spent writing and coding. This was nice.

Over the last 6 weeks or so I've been commissioning a lot of artwork and plugging it into the game. And this absolutely chews up my time. Every asset I request needs a detailed briefing document trying to outline to the artist what I need. These can be 1k-2k words and I still get them wrong - but after a bit of feedback, I get the assets I need.

Once the art is ready, I need to extract the right layers from the PSD into pngs for use by Ren'Py. It's taken a couple of weeks to work out the best way of doing this. The naive approach - which of course I started with - is to manually extract layers, or sets of layers, and import them. But its not quite this simple, as sometimes I find a line that needs cleaning, or things need resizing, or re-colouring, or layers need renaming or regrouping. I've spent literally hours on the Sam-Emily PSD - which at the time of writing has 53 pngs.

But my process is improving, and a mixture of automation and process is making things easier. Using gimp I've found a plugin to extract all layers - if I set just the right options (preserve layer size, ignore folder structure, use layer name, only export layers with a .png extension) I quickly get a result. And if I give artists a template with the right layer names, and ask them to stick to it, I can export straight from their deliverables.

I need to get better this though. I still need to resize and sometimes clip the PSDs, and there are a lot of options to set on the export. Soon I'm going to have to learn GIMP's script-fu so that I can more easily automate resize and export from the command line.

But it's not just designing the scene, specifying requirements, giving feedback and importing assets into the game. Oh no. Then you have to code it up. Some things are largely automated - the boxouts, for example, cycle images to give me pseudo-animation on every "page" for very little effort.

Coding up a Ren'Py layered with 53 images is, itself, quite a long and error-prone process. Setting the right layers at the right time in-game is also quite hard. Testing and coding for consistency also takes time. For example, in the Sam-Emily scene, the player can optionally stuff Emily's panties in her mouth. If you do this, the scene changes radically: I can't set an expression on Emily's mouth, for example, and there's no real dialog, just semi-random "mmpff!!" sort of sounds. Making sure the game remembers to include Emily's panties, and do the right thing, isn't easy.

What I'm trying to say, as many of you will already know, is that it takes a long time to plug image assets into the game, and lately I've been doing a lot of that.

I'm genuinely worried about how and when I'll find time and headspace to do the actual writing - the bit I'm supposed to be good at. So it's nice to have a day like today when I'm not waiting on any assets and I can get some words on the page.

And then I go and spoil it all by writing something stupid like a devlog.

 

[cisco_donovan]

Well, I didn't do any writing. Ok a little bit. 500 words maybe, over two days, and some important plotting (I can't WAIT to introduce you guys to Martini).

One thing I've been working on is Emily's character design. I loved her initial concept:


But in the re-work into a sprite, something was lost. A bit of energy, a bit of spirit.

So we've been working this morning on some tweaks to her design. The old is on the left, the update is on the right.



I think lots of tiny changes here have made a big difference:
* Her mouth is a little wider
* Her shoulders, waist and thighs are adjusted
* Her head is a little bigger
* Eyebrows a little thicket
* Blouse a little tighter

At the moment, all that's really in the game for Emily is a fixed image with one expression. As part of this work I'll be adding more expressions to Emily's sprite to help bring her to life in-game.

 

[cisco_donovan]

Private Dick has a preoccupation with social media. I guess that's because I do, too. I mean, with so many beautiful women posting themselves (or being posted by others) every hour, it's no wonder I get stuck in it sometimes. Get on the right hashtag in Instagram and it's like porn - except without an obvious ending, if you catch my drift.

But Social Media is also an amazing storytelling tool. A few selfies in a social feed can do as much character development as pages of dialog. It's a place I can put bonus content, nudes, and story-telling that doesn't directly affect the MC. I'm really excited for it.

I'll be putting some social content into the demo over the next few weeks. Nothing huge or story-critical, just enough to show the idea of what could be in the full game.

Expect at least one storyline about corrupting hot influences into posting nudes (and more!)

So I've spent some time today plugging the social media engine into the game. Here's a couple of progress shots. Not massively exciting, I know, but it's some progress

step 1:
step 2:


I'm not sure yet how to style the "Faceparty" pages. It's a noir game and so black and white - but maybe using pastel tones for the UI would add a bit of colour and variation into the game. We'll see.

 

[cisco_donovan]

Couple of updates on the social overlay!

You can now load an individual profile rather than looking at the common feed.



I'm thinking a lot about how this will integrate into the demo. The social overlay will be an integral part of storytelling in the full game, with lots of lewd content. But in the demo it'll just be a bit of an add-on, it won't mean a whole lot. And I'm not prepared to commission lots of artwork yet, not until I have better funding.

What I think I'll do is plug in some concept art, including an Evee nude, just for now. Then it'll be a nice little teaser for upcoming characters and should keep the overlay interesting.

There's lots to do, apart from content: Likes (as a number which randomly increments daily), maybe click-to-zoom, pagination. I don't think I'll do a lot of styling until funding comes through - but as I mentioned in my previous post, I'll probably try and make it a little bit more visually interesting.

 

[cisco_donovan]

Quick update here.

I've mostly been offline over Easter weekend enjoying a few quiet days with my partner.

But I have been wrestling with a problem.

I'm trying to introduce a new storyline into the demo - the content is all written and mostly coded up, but I don't have any artwork.

The storyline involves this character: June Van Beek. Here's her concept:



Nice huh? I was really happy with it (that waistlet is a key "plot" point)

But in the process of converting that to an in-game sprite, my very talented artist blew my mind.

Suddenly, my whole game looks like crap.

I've been trying to work out what to do. I put together a comparison of some of my existing art next to the new stuff.

And... I'm not a million miles off?

(By the way, one of the reasons for adopting an art style like this is that the highlight layer can be dynamically coloured in-game to blend with the background - which really helps add atmosphere and allow the characters to look like part of the world. Neat! I'll blog about this one day.)

So, the project over the next week will be to update as many assets as I can to this new style. Luckily (in way) I don't have loads of art yet, and a lot of what is in the game is still placeholder. So it's probably as good a time as any to pivot to the new style.

So look out, private dick 0.0.8 will be a much sharper looking proposition! Can't wait to see it.

 

[cisco_donovan]

Art redesign is going really well. Bobbi the bargirl has gone from this:



To this:



Yummy.

Sadly it'll be a while before Bobbi gets some good lewd content (she's one of the girls you have to EARN), but really can't wait to get started on her now.

 

[osanaiko]

I just wanna say I think the old art is cute and the new art is also cute . Anything hand drawn is a refreshing change, and the specific details of "style" are probably much less important to players than they are to you.

It's a classic trap for the game developer/artist to fall into: the "not good enough" mindset. Don't overthink it! You are probably too close to the material to realise that it is actually already good enough!

By far the most important thing in any creative pursuit is to keep pushing forward - 80%++ of your effort should be into progress, 15% should be on marketing (if you want to get followers and supporters) and if there is any energy left you can try polishing older stuff you don't feel is appropriate anymore, especially if your skills have progressed.

Of course, it depends on what you want from the project - is it a hobby, you just want to mess around, not really interested in finishing? or do you have the solid goal of getting to "good enough" and release, even if it is not perfect...?

Good luck and enjoy yourself!

 

[cisco_donovan]

I just wanna say I think the old art is cute and the new art is also cute ....

Thank you! Such a relief to hear, and so nice to get a bit of encouragement.

I think at this early point in the project you can argue it both ways. Yes, I need to power forward and just get shit done. But if the art style isn't "right", at some point I'll have to rewind and rebuild everything.

I've been thinking about it a lot an I don't think the original art is strong enough to sell the game and have the right erotic impact. I think the refined art is maybe 20% better and that will carry it a lot further.

If I re-do the art right now, I honestly don't have a lot to do. The MC and main villian need drawing up as proper sprites anyway - I may as well use the cleaner, newer style.

The biggest hit, the really annoying thing, is that I have to re-do Emily again - and her CG scene. This will cost me about £300 - which, in the context of the whole project, really isn't very much. At the time of writing half the work has been done.

So, looking at the short, medium and long-term of the project, I think it's worth it.

I am working on this project full-time and my aim is continue to do so for a couple more months, raise funds through Kickstarter, and get the whole game built six months later. To that end, I'm probably 60% marketing and 40% dev at the moment.

The finished game won't be perfect, I can promise you that I am a ruthless project manager and I have stacks of content I can drop if needs be.

 

[cisco_donovan]

Happy Monday everyone!

Just wanted to take a minute to share some updates and plans.

The social media overlay is mostly sort of done. I've just commissioned a few extra pictures to add as content - some spicy, some cheeky, some character building. And I've got a couple of little jobs to do. I'm not going to do a lot with the visuals, I'll just keep it simple for now. So hopefully next week I'll be able to put out a version of this!

The next CG scene is coming along. This is going really well but I'm a bit torn: it's a two-part scene and the artist will probably take a full week to do each part. And I desperately want the same artist to create a new character sprite for me - and important one, Roxi, who is really the game's main antagonist but only makes a cameo in the demo. I really want her artwork, she's important to my marketing plans and she's right at the soul of the game.

So I'm thinking I'll do half the scene this week, put it into the game (believe me, the first half is hot enough), then switch to Roxi's art, then come back and finish the scene. Getting all that done is probably going to take 3/4 weeks (by which time I REALLY hope I can launch a kickstarter).

So that's two large chunks of work largely out of my hands. Outside of that I'll be dedicating my time to promotion. I honestly think I need to increase my following by at least a factor of 10 before I can kickstart. In a month gone from 0 to maybe 250 on all platforms. Not bad, but also not enough of a platform to launch a crowdfunding campaign from.

Time for a bit of navel gazing with this tasty teaser of June's upcoming scene.

 

[cisco_donovan]

I ended up spending a big chunk of time today on the social media stuff.

Here's how it looks!



And here's how it works:

• The game has a rough day/night cycle as you play, which changes the lighting in some locations and allows the story to progress
• The feed in the middle shows all posts by published date (most recent first)
• You can filter the feed by particular characters on the left, or by the player character using the "darknoirman" link at the top
• I fixed an issue to day which automatically jumps to the top of someone's feed when you switch. By default, because of how I've implemented it, ren'py will preserve the scroll positions as the view is filtered. Which sucks in a UI like this.
• Posts are published as you progress, broadly in-line with your actions and story beats you unlock
• Each post has a published date (from which we calculate the publish date of 'yesterday' or '24 days ago'), and a popularity score.
• From the popularity score and the post age, we work out the number of likes on any given day. This is deterministic, not random, which is really helpful for testing and debugging, and means I don't need to store post likes in save games. It's just easier, but will look random and "living" to players - if they review the post on different days, the Like count will increase.

I am thinking about adding comments, which is great from a narrative point of view, but also it's going to be horrifically expensive. I don't see this happening in the demo, I'll review when I've got more funds available.

I am almost ready to release this - I've just commissioned six bits of artwork to plug into the system. Some spicy, some story - nothing hardcore at this point.

When they come in, and I run a few more tests, I'll be happy to release. Hopefully early next week!

 

[cisco_donovan]

Well friends, things took a turn.

On Friday evening I had the 0.0.9 release almost ready to go - I was just waiting for a couple of simple art assets to come in, with an eye to releasing over the weekend. I like to release little and often so it's not a terribly big update, but it adds the social media overlay and I think that's quite an important statement of intent for the game.

BUT THEN DISASTER STRUCK.

Look, I'm still not really ready to talk about it. I just want to say that I'm a complete idiot. I've been writing software professionally for 15 years and I've never made a mistake quite like it, never done anything quite so stupid. And I've done some stupid shit.

The upshot is that I lost my whole codebase. The whole project, gone. At 5pm a new version was ready to go - at 5.30pm I had lost every single line of code.

This was upsetting to me.

I left my desk. Had a few drinks. Had a few more drinks.

Saturday morning, hungover, I set about trying to recover my project from my backups.

By Sunday lunchtime I was back up and running. Thanks to a remote backup and a couple of standalone builds which I managed to decompile, I'd gotten the game back. And now, just like Friday evening, I'm just waiting for my art assets to come through.

The point of all this, the thing I want to say is: back up your mother fucking data. Every day. Backup like you desk is on fire, like your boss is standing over your shoulder screaming at you for an offsite backup. Take your codebase and save it somewhere, off your machine, and do it regularly.

I'll probably say more about this later. I'll probably write a blog post somewhere about source control and backup options. But today there's only thing I want to say:

Backup your data.

 

[cisco_donovan]

Hi friends!

So the art re-work is going really well - most of the assets have been updated. You can make an argument for both the old and the new styles - but the new style suits the game better overall, so it's staying. I expect this to be released this week and I'll blog about it in more detail later.

I've been working hard on the general look of the game - the UI and such. Here's the basic game's dialog UI:



I mean, you all know what Ren'Py looks like.

I've had issues with this layout for a long time:

* It looks like every other renpy game
* It's almost impossible to share a screen shot with dialog in it, and it's definitely impossible to make a decent gif for marketing
* The text is down at the bottom but the faces, with important expressions telling you about the tone of a line, are at the top. Your eyes have to be in two places at once to read a scene. I solve this by duplicating the face in the bottom left corner, so you can read emotion and content at once.
* Why do we show the character's name on every single line of dialog??????

This game to a head while working on a trailer for the game, where I really need to show some dialog. My solution there was to use a very different layout. Bigger text, something closer to a speech bubble. And it turned out that this looked way better than the standard layout.

So I went to work re-implementing the say screens to use this format:





With this new approach, there are several ways text might be seen:

1. From a visible character standing on the left, right or center of the screen, which we show along the top
2. From a character off-screen (or visible in a CG), which we show along the bottom
3. From the narrator, which we show bottom-center

These each need slightly different positions and borders, so it took a fair bit of work to get this in.

In the game code, the position is automated depending on whether the sprite is visible and what position it's in. So I don't need to re-write the whole game for this to work nicely.

I also added an options screen allowing you to customise the background (it looks nicer with no background, but a lot of players can't read the low-contrast text):



I will probably record a gif of all the different text options to give you a flavour of the amount of work involved here. Little changes have big knock-on effects, and it's critical to get the little details right.

I am planning to release this this week in what will be a significant visual upgrade to the game. I can't wait.

But right now I cba, and anyway I have to go and buy bread. So, catch you next time!

 

[cisco_donovan]

Hi friends!

Difficult days here I'm afraid.

The demo progresses well. The final content is going in and should be released on Friday. There's a trailer almost finished and strictly speaking, everything is ready for a kickstarter to launch in a week or two.

So what's wrong?

I've been looking hard at the kickstarter numbers and my marketing metrics so far. And the numbers are all wrong. The game I envision is too big, too expensive. I don't think I can kickstart the money I need to make the game the way I want to. And looking over my metrics, my hits and my followers, I'm not drawing enough traction. If I release a kickstarter now, will anyone see it, let alone back it? Hard enough to get a follower at the moment, let alone a sale.

In all honestly I had really hoped that my distinctive art style would cut through the crowd and bring a lot of attention to my game. And I still believe that that SHOULD be true. But it's not working as quickly or dramatically as I had hoped, and that is seriously affecting my projections and my confidence.

But it's not all doom and gloom. I am working on a plan, I am pivoting the design, I am exploring alternatives.

I love this game. I love my art style, my characters, my stories. And I still believe that a lot of players will love it too.

But Plan A is definitely failing. So, time for plan B...

 

[cisco_donovan]

Hi!

Game development is an emotional process, as I think you can see by skimming over this devlog.

One day I feel like I'm making a valuable contribution, doing things no-one else has done, or doing them better. Other days I feel like a hack and a fraud and there's no way I can make a compelling porn game. All I need to do is add a few pictures of hot chicks getting fucked in the ass - and yet I'm fucking it up!

I've just wrote a huge retrospective on all the good, the bad and the changes of the demo, from 0.0.1 up to 0.0.11. I won't re-write or re-post it here, but you can have a read on itch.io

You must be registered to see the links

. I hope you'll find it interesting.

With the 0.0.11 release out, the demo is pretty much done. A bit of maintenance, yeah, but content-wise that's it. I can go no further without funding.

I've done a lot of thinking, and taken some advice, and I've worked out how to basically take a 2-hour chunk of the planned 5-act story, making it a compelling and sexy story in it's own right, and kickstart that. My chances of doing that successfully about 500 times better than funding the whole sprawling vision in one go. What's nice is that, actually, the demo gets me over half-way there in content terms - it's just a case of funding the next chunk of content. It won't take long to develop and release.

So I'm in full marketing mode now: preparing the kickstarter and trying to attract backers so I can get this shit finished.

Stay tuned because you can bet I'll be screaming about it here.

 

[cisco_donovan]

Development of Private Dick rolls onwards.

As I reported last time, with the 0.0.11 release out, there isn't much development happening. But I did do this last Friday:



New character, new storyline, new kinks. This storyline will be a stretch goal in the kickstarter and I'm really, really hoping I get to make it.

For those keeping score, I've massively reduced the scope of what I originally intended to do in the kickstarter. The result is a shorter, tighter, better game. The remaining storylines will be pushed back into different Private Dick titles. After, I don't know, two or three of these shorter games, I'll release an Anthology edition with all the content stitched neatly together.

That assumes I get funding, of course, otherwise it's back to the day job.

Here's what I plan for the Kickstarter game:

* It will be called Private Dick: A Debt Unpaid
* All the current demo content will stay
* I'll be extending June's storyline into the main Debt Unpaid story. This is a twisting tale of deceit and blackmail, and for June will include June's waistjob, a double penetration scene, a mystery facefuck, and a final vanilla June fuck to finish things off.
* I'll also add a sub plot, called Liar Liar, about the character in the above. This is largely a breast fetish storyline ending in a facefuck (and probably a titfuck, of course).

I'm really excited about merging these two storylines together into a smaller game, I think it'll be a really neat little project.