Feedback on my first (draft of a) game

[NicoleWorks]

Hey everyone! I'm Nicole and I'd like to learn game development.

As you could've guessed, I'm on this forum to learn more specifically about porn game development, as it combines programming and having fun .
I already know some Python but I'm completely new to Renpy, Daz Studio, 3d rendering, story writing, music creation... (basically everything else)
To start off, I decided to create a really small game, to test out a few things and slowly enter the world of asset creation.
I've really been helped by the resources on this website, so I wanted to thank all those who contribute to this website in any way, be it by providing assets or valuable advice.
I'm posting what my game turned out to be. Don't expect much from it, it gives about 12 minutes of gameplay if your eyes don't bleed out from the terrible asset quality before that.
If you want a quick jack off, please consider quitting this thread and visiting

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but if you have 10-15 minutes of free time and want to help a new developer, I'll be really grateful for any piece of advice you could give me (either from your experience or someone else's).

Here are the links to download the game:

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-

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-

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(Windows) -

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(Mac)

Anyways, here are the biggest issues I see in my game:
1. The assets - Probably the biggest issue I see: right now poor quality, the characters feel like they were found in the Daz Studio tutorial pack (this can be solved by practicing I think - I don't know how to use PS yet though)
2. The story - Probably the second biggest issue: There is no consistency, as I didn't plan what I would write. Even if there are 4 endings the gameplay is pretty much linear.
3. There are no animations, no sex scenes - This goes hand in hand with 1: That would have been a little too much for a first game.
4. Minor issues, in no particular order:
- The length (it was intended, but still - it makes the game quite unsatisfying)
- There is a useless stat (knowledge) - caused by point 2
- The grammatical errors - As you could've guessed, I'm not a native English speaker: I don't think this will impact the game experience, but it could bother some players
- There is no android version
- There's no start image, no game icon, no splash screen (that's something I'd like to fix asap) Fixed - the images still look terrible, but at least there's something
- It's impossible to change the characters' names (MC's name is set at the beginning)
- There are no screenshots/tags (same as start image and splash screen)

If you have anything you'd add to this list/know a fix for any of these issues/want to discuss just about anything, please comment down below

 

[pnhwk]

thx for sharing the demo

 

[Deleted member 1427961]

You're on the right track, but there are definitely a lot of things that need improved on when it comes to the writing and art. I'm sure a lot of the art is just placeholder images for the sake of testing, but the renders need a lot of work.

The best advice I can give you for getting into this stuff is to focus on one skill at a time until you confidently understand the basics.

I've been using daz for years now and the best advice I can give you is to start with your lighting. All of the character renders look like they were lit by the default hdri and had no spotlight on them. Quality lighting will help improve your render speeds by a lot and make your characters look much better.

Once you get the lighting figured out, then focus on the character materials. Daz assets are made to be "Photorealistic" usually, so they aren't well optimized for game renders. When messing around with skin mats try to keep the changes the same for all characters to make sure they all match the same quality.

When I optimize my characters I start with the translucency. I tend to set a standard value for all my characters before starting a project. In this case I set the translucency to 0.4 and adjusted the colors to make up for the loss of skin tone. This sped up her render time by about 2 minutes when compared to the original translucency value of 0.9. Also as you can see I have setup a light and hdri to light her evenly. An evenly lit character looks much better than a character who is lit from one side and doesn't match the background lighting.

You must be registered to see the links

These are the lights I used for my render. Just an hdri and a front key light.

Materials take a while to learn if you have no previous experience with 3d rendering. If you see a setting that you don't know much about look it up on here

You must be registered to see the links

I've learned so much from this page and it's very easy to find what you're looking for.

I'm not a writer so my advice might not be the best, but from what I saw in the demo is that your dialogue sounds very basic. The dialogue all looks too formal and there isn't a difference between each character.

I would recommend you watch this guy

You must be registered to see the links

 

[jezzoo]

Gave it a whirl. Yes there's not much content, but it was surprisingly well rounded, with increasing stats and even that "X-ray" tool allowing to see you through clothes, to give it a bit juice.

It's refreshing to find someone humble enough to start small, and not ask for patreon money right away.

The assets look OK actually, simple but functional (with a bit of noise at times). The backgrounds are perfectly fine. A minor bug - the pic of Anna in pink underwear from behind doesn't horizontally align with Anna clothed from behind.

I expected a couple of scenes and some linear dialogue, but there were actually a few decisions here. The story was simple, but it was there. The writing felt competent, again better than most here.

Where to go from here? Well, a proper story mostly. But that's easier said and done - you need good ideas on a plot with conflict, on how to develop characters in a satisfying way. Maybe enhance the emotional level a bit, give us a chance to get to know the characters, give them individual personalities.

I'm also surprised you didn't actually give us a chance to fail at the casino. A simple way to enhance gameplay would be to give us several choices and rely on the player actually using their eyes.

 

[NicoleWorks]

Gave it a whirl. Yes there's not much content, but it was surprisingly well rounded, with increasing stats and even that "X-ray" tool allowing to see you through clothes, to give it a bit juice.

It's refreshing to find someone humble enough to start small, and not ask for patreon money right away.

The assets look OK actually, simple but functional (with a bit of noise at times). The backgrounds are perfectly fine. A minor bug - the pic of Anna in pink underwear from behind doesn't horizontally align with Anna clothed from behind.

I expected a couple of scenes and some linear dialogue, but there were actually a few decisions here. The story was simple, but it was there. The writing felt competent, again better than most here.

Where to go from here? Well, a proper story mostly. But that's easier said and done - you need good ideas on a plot with conflict, on how to develop characters in a satisfying way. Maybe enhance the emotional level a bit, give us a chance to get to know the characters, give them individual personalities.

Thank you so much for your feedback!
I completely missed the bug, I thought I had done all renders with the same camera setting. I think I'll work on my skills first before coming back to this/starting a new game.
As a sidenote, most of the backgrounds look good because they were taken from

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.

I'm also surprised you didn't actually give us a chance to fail at the casino. A simple way to enhance gameplay would be to give us several choices and rely on the player actually using their eyes.

Indeed, that should've been an option. I don't know what I did there.

 

[NicoleWorks]

You're on the right track, but there are definitely a lot of things that need improved on when it comes to the writing and art. I'm sure a lot of the art is just placeholder images for the sake of testing, but the renders need a lot of work.

The best advice I can give you for getting into this stuff is to focus on one skill at a time until you confidently understand the basics.

I've been using daz for years now and the best advice I can give you is to start with your lighting. All of the character renders look like they were lit by the default hdri and had no spotlight on them. Quality lighting will help improve your render speeds by a lot and make your characters look much better.

Once you get the lighting figured out, then focus on the character materials. Daz assets are made to be "Photorealistic" usually, so they aren't well optimized for game renders. When messing around with skin mats try to keep the changes the same for all characters to make sure they all match the same quality.

When I optimize my characters I start with the translucency. I tend to set a standard value for all my characters before starting a project. In this case I set the translucency to 0.4 and adjusted the colors to make up for the loss of skin tone. This sped up her render time by about 2 minutes when compared to the original translucency value of 0.9. Also as you can see I have setup a light and hdri to light her evenly. An evenly lit character looks much better than a character who is lit from one side and doesn't match the background lighting.


View attachment 689736

You must be registered to see the links

These are the lights I used for my render. Just an hdri and a front key light.

Materials take a while to learn if you have no previous experience with 3d rendering. If you see a setting that you don't know much about look it up on here

You must be registered to see the links

I've learned so much from this page and it's very easy to find what you're looking for.

I'm not a writer so my advice might not be the best, but from what I saw in the demo is that your dialogue sounds very basic. The dialogue all looks too formal and there isn't a difference between each character.

I would recommend you watch this guy

You must be registered to see the links

Thank you so much for taking the time to go through my game and commening on it! Indeed, the renders were done with the default lighting. I'll have a go at rendering with your settings and I'll go through all the links you posted.

Daz assets are made to be "Photorealistic" usually, so they aren't well optimized for game renders.

I don't really understand this...
Do you mean that Daz assets aren't made for renders? If so, how does one fix that? Is it by changing the translucency/ tweaking other settings/playing with the lighting?

I'm sorry, I'm a complete newbie at this...

 

[jezzoo]

Also a classic problem is the design of choices in VNs. Some pitfalls are when a game appears to give the player several options, but either the result is exactly same for all answers, or there is only one correct answer with no previous indication which one it is.

You do this a couple of times. The good/evil moral choice when I learn of Anne's financial trouble - I chose not to exploit her, but the script didn't let me go on until I chose the evil option. You can see how this feels worse than being given no choice at all.

Another that stuck was later when I could choose my "reward" for helping Anne. 2/3 options result in an immediate bad ending. You're punishing the player for taking a lewd option in an erotic game.

I think there's no simple solution. Everyone wants the player to have meaningful choices that influence the story, but such a story is hard to write well and requires extra content the player will miss out on.

Options (independent of story + minimum of extra content):

• a kinetic novel with no choices
• "light" choices, ones that make a small, not significant difference (some extra text, maybe one new graphic per choice). The good/evil option could have been like that. Maybe MC could deliberate a bit on the moral or personal aspect of that choice and that's all we get for a difference
• choices that only change the order of content consumption, not story or which content is available. You got that with library/gym, this can also be used in dialogue trees, or if you have several smaller independent storylines
• only branch the storyline near the end of the game, basically "choose your ending"
• choices that only have an effect near the end / influence which ending you get. A classic in dating sims for which girl you choose. This is tricky and risky. It's hard to write and hard to communicate to the player without spoiling the story.. it could feel unfair, being cheated into an ending the player didn't want. Actually I'm not sure I've ever seen a game where this is done in a satisfying way.

 

[NicoleWorks]

Also a classic problem is the design of choices in VNs. Some pitfalls are when a game appears to give the player several options, but either the result is exactly same for all answers, or there is only one correct answer with no previous indication which one it is.

You do this a couple of times. The good/evil moral choice when I learn of Anne's financial trouble - I chose not to exploit her, but the script didn't let me go on until I chose the evil option. You can see how this feels worse than being given no choice at all.

Another that stuck was later when I could choose my "reward" for helping Anne. 2/3 options result in an immediate bad ending. You're punishing the player for taking a lewd option in an erotic game.

I think there's no simple solution. Everyone wants the player to have meaningful choices that influence the story, but such a story is hard to write well and requires extra content the player will miss out on.

Options (independent of story + minimum of extra content):

• a kinetic novel with no choices
• "light" choices, ones that make a small, not significant difference (some extra text, maybe one new graphic per choice). The good/evil option could have been like that. Maybe MC could deliberate a bit on the moral or personal aspect of that choice and that's all we get for a difference
• choices that only change the order of content consumption, not story or which content is available. You got that with library/gym, this can also be used in dialogue trees, or if you have several smaller independent storylines
• only branch the storyline near the end of the game, basically "choose your ending"
• choices that only have an effect near the end / influence which ending you get. A classic in dating sims for which girl you choose. This is tricky and risky. It's hard to write and hard to communicate to the player without spoiling the story.. it could feel unfair, being cheated into an ending the player didn't want. Actually I'm not sure I've ever seen a game where this is done in a satisfying way.

Thanks for your answer and for taking time to go through my game! I definitely understand that feeling when the choices are not really ones. In the game I didn't elaborate on the choices because it was only a draft, but I really like your list for giving choice to the player without adding too much content.

 

[Deleted member 1427961]

Thank you so much for taking the time to go through my game and commening on it! Indeed, the renders were done with the default lighting. I'll have a go at rendering with your settings and I'll go through all the links you posted.



I don't really understand this...
Do you mean that Daz assets aren't made for renders? If so, how does one fix that? Is it by changing the translucency/ tweaking other settings/playing with the lighting?

I'm sorry, I'm a complete newbie at this...

Thank you so much for taking the time to go through my game and commening on it! Indeed, the renders were done with the default lighting. I'll have a go at rendering with your settings and I'll go through all the links you posted.



I don't really understand this...
Do you mean that Daz assets aren't made for renders? If so, how does one fix that? Is it by changing the translucency/ tweaking other settings/playing with the lighting?

I'm sorry, I'm a complete newbie at this...

They are made for renders, just high quality ones. Since games need a lot of renders in a short amount a time, you need to optimize the assets to be able to manage that or else your renders are going to take ages to complete and are going to be the thing holding you back.

 

[polywog]

Welcome to the game, and good luck with your forum.

 

[NicoleWorks]

They are made for renders, just high quality ones. Since games need a lot of renders in a short amount a time, you need to optimize the assets to be able to manage that or else your renders are going to take ages to complete and are going to be the thing holding you back.

Ok, thanks for explaining. Indeed the renders take a LOT of time, especially since I don't have an NVIDIA Iray graphics card...

 

[NicoleWorks]

Thank you everyone for your helpful answers! I've decided to focus on making better assets first, because that's something I feel I can greatly improve. I've started by modifying the pink underwear for Anna pose. Here are the results of my attempts. While they definitely look better, they are still far from perfect:

Render 1 - That's how the asset looked initially
Render 2 - I feel that made the biggest difference: I added a warm front light
Render 3 - I changed translucency to 0.4, reduced light intensity
Render 4 - I changed the light size (rectangle) from 10x10 to 80x80

The last render was an attempt at removing the bright white dots appearing in all my renders (in the brightest spots) - I've also tried rendering for a longer period of time, without much success. Does anyone know a solution to this?

Here are the rendered images:


And here they are with a background:




I'll be really glad if you let me know which one you like best and how you think I could improve them further.
Thanks again for your kind advice and comments on my draft of a game ❤︎
Nicole

 

[Evic]

The last render was an attempt at removing the bright white dots appearing in all my renders (in the brightest spots) - I've also tried rendering for a longer period of time, without much success. Does anyone know a solution to this?

The spots, or noise, is something you'll have to deal with often until you get used to what causes it and how to clean it up. The good news is that the fastest, easiest and most reliable "fix" is simply to render at twice the size you plan on using and then resize the image in your favorite image editor (anything more robust than MS paint should work fine). You'll hear this referred to as "down sampling" and it essentially removes noise by averaging pixel values from adjacent pixels while resizing the image.

The root cause, in layman's terms, is the rendering engine having trouble deciding exactly how those specific pixels should be lit and colored. This is most often caused by insufficient or over complicated light data at that pixel whether from a light source or a reflection. You can reduce this in the render itself by more evenly lighting your scene with a well setup fill light (many HDRIs do this very well on their own) and then applying one or two key or rim lights to bring our the details so your image doesn't look flat.

Start simple and add lights rather than dumping a ton of lights into a scene and trying to adjust them. If you peek at my DA gallery in my signature almost all of those renders are done using no more than an HDRI dome and one or two additional lights. Ghost lights (transparent emissive surfaces) work very well in cases like your example where you don't really need or want sharp shadows and strong highlights on the character.

Some handy Daz assets for many, if not all, of your renders will be: Scene Optimizer and Ghost Light Kit (or learn to make your own), you should be able to find both here on this site so you can play with them before spending any money on them.

 

[NicoleWorks]

Thank you so much for taking the time to explain that! It's so much clearer right now. Thanks for providing the down sampling fix - I'll try playing with the lighting as you suggest first though.

 

[Evic]

So I shouldn't admit my selfish intention of wanting another new game to play?

You're welcome, good luck and don't be afraid to try crazy stuff, you may be surprised with the result. If you can scrape up a few bucks you can probably get a decent 10-series nVidia card cheap and that will really speed up your renders, just go for the most VRam you can afford if you're going to be using it for rendering.

 

[NicoleWorks]

So I shouldn't admit my selfish intention of wanting another new game to play?

You'll have to be patient for this one, but some day it will come

You're welcome, good luck and don't be afraid to try crazy stuff, you may be surprised with the result. If you can scrape up a few bucks you can probably get a decent 10-series nVidia card cheap and that will really speed up your renders, just go for the most VRam you can afford if you're going to be using it for rendering.

Thanks, I'll get to that eventually

 

[NicoleWorks]

By the way, here's a small update to bring a few little fixes:

• Added a main menu image and window icon (pretty terrible for now)
• Added a very basic splash screen
• Fixed the Anna in pink underwear alignment (thanks to jezzoo for pointing this out)

It doesn't add any new content so I'm only posting it here:

You must be registered to see the links

 

[Squaller]

When I optimize my characters I start with the translucency. I tend to set a standard value for all my characters before starting a project. In this case I set the translucency to 0.4 and adjusted the colors to make up for the loss of skin tone. This sped up her render time by about 2 minutes when compared to the original translucency value of 0.9. Also as you can see I have setup a light and hdri to light her evenly. An evenly lit character looks much better than a character who is lit from one side and doesn't match the background lighting.

This seems like a really good method to speed things up. Any other advices?