I disagree with your point about skippable anims defeating the point. The sex animations exist to arouse the player, but if I don't want to sit through the same animation for the seventh time then I can skip it. But I'm always going to watch it through fully the first time, and probably a few more times if I feel like it at the time.
Right, but when you have something that's making people want to skip it, in general, that's not good design; you ideally want a player to engage with all parts of your game. It's not the worst thing in the world though, like you said, of course.
Recovering health off defeated enemies isn't a bad point to me. I'm not looking for difficulty in sex games.
This is probably where we fundamentally differ in viewpoints; we're making
games with adult content, not
adult content with some gameplay. For all intents and purposes, we treated the design of this game exactly like we would a regular game, without sex content.
That said, we also DID make it a bit easier than we normally would have, specifically
because the prevailing attitude right now in the west is that "porn game = no challenge/need to try to win", and if we made a game at full levels of challenge, it'd probably alienate most people with how the trend is currently for these games in the west.
And besides, the main challenge usually goes into the boss fights anyway. And if a dev really wanted to restrict it then some form of libido mechanic that gives diminishing returns is easy enough. You could also punish the player for doing this by having sex with enemies advance a counter (like Sexuality points) and therefore making non-Sexuality Ending runs more challenging, but as a bad gamer I hate that idea.
Yeah, we'd want to avoid punishing the player in a permanent/hard to undo way for any given choices related to sex, so that'd be out for us too.
Letting an enemy have sex with the MC to auto-defeat an enemy without killing them is also kind of hot. I'm sure you scoff at the idea, being able to bypass all the challenge without consequence and also not making sense in lore, but it means the frequency of sex in the game is at my control without penalty.
I don't think this is a bad idea inherently, and it'd be easy to work into the lore of a game if you designed it as such from the ground up, but the issue here would be, yes, balance issues. You'd need to design the game around it so that the game doesn't just become a cakewalk, because while people could play normally, as you noted, all of our games will have SFW modes.
So if we made that too fundamental of a gameplay mechanic, it'd make SFW mode need entirely new mechanics, which would be a bit of a nightmare. As for why we'd have a SFW mode for our games, that ties back into the mentality up above of wanting to make regular games; if we can get these games out to the mainstream, and people play the SFW mode, they might be tempted to try the NSFW mode.
If that happens, people who may normally never have played NSFW games, might be into trying them (both ours and others).
There are two ideas: (a) sex scenes are the main collectable of the game, and (b) the player should be punished for failing in the game. Sex on defeat puts these two ideas completely at odds. Players are obviously going to intentionally sabotage themselves when they come across a new enemy.
We did try to stave this off, by having animations
only be unlockable in the gallery through
positive actions (achievements, specifically). So while I know there's the whole entertainment of seeing it in-level, if you want to have permanent access to it, you'd need to do well.
Games with group animations are even worse, because (as sexy as they are) they encourage constantly taking damage on the off-chance the devs made a specific combination. Having to go all the way back to the lore-checkpoint because I wanted sexy times is irritating.
We also staved this off some by having "easy mode" where you can watch an animation for as long as you like without taking damage, and we may even change that to just have it do
no damage based on post-launch feedback.
Additionally, there are powerups that actually buff you against taking damage during sex/do damage to enemies that try to do this, or that negate that damage altogether.
On top of that, the "stun" system means that enemies can do low damage, but get you into stun faster, depending on how you get hit and what you get hit with, so you can see more sex animations, while taking less damage.
And finally, if you do lose, you get returned to the hub, which is at most, only 4-5 rooms from where you were at, with infinite lives, and no need to return to the title screen and go through menus and such.
(Plus of course, the number of animations in the game that
are based on player choice, and those won't return you to the hub.)
but plenty of sex on defeat games let you get stun locked into animations. That's irritating. Also sometimes very sexy. But also irritating.
I have yet to play a game like this, but I wouldn't doubt there's a lot of them, and that definitely would be terrible design.
There is something very erotic about a female MC being forced into sexual pleasure, but it sure is a stain on the design of h-platformers.
It is; for future games, we'll definitely look at different ways to try and do it.
But our next two or three games, we'll be doing entirely different genres, so that shouldn't be much of an issue
