Hello all, aspiring hobbyist adult developer here.

[scrimbul]

Just wanted to introduce myself here, as I'd lurked the Discord and forums a couple of years.

I've been working on an RPGMaker NTRPG comedy-lite for the last couple of years, with some survival-lite crafting elements and think I'm 6-9 months from launch whether that ends up being a commercial or free product. The project is a proof-of-concept involving a human couple trapped in a youkai dream shrine and forced to play a pregnancy escape game to be able to wake up. Because it's a proof-of-concept status and unexpectedly solo developing the thing, I expect some inconsistencies.

I realized that I'm essentially done with the gameplay loop and necessary plugins but have 50% of the game loop to do, am tidying up some needed remaining assets and around 40% of the writing left to do (storyboarding is done but some core routes and filler content are missing.)

I am a solo developer, not by choice, but the writing is mostly collaboratively roleplayed, and I'm trying to strike a balance between asset quality (not just videos but also cut-in and VN bust assets), gameplay tedium, writing length. I need to run the marketing circuit (twitter, iwara.tv, Pixiv, Patreon) and wanted some general advice from other folks on this stuff without them necessarily feeling like they have to jump in and work on or evaluate the project directly. I had avoided dev-logging up to this point because I didn't know how long it would take.

Like many developers I scope-crept this project to hell and it probably should have been backburnered or cancelled ages ago. Yet I'm close enough to release with enough promising feedback that I thought I would fix my post count here and redo my discord involvement by asking for general advice while I'm putting together alpha testing materials. I know independent development requires both luck and timing and this project should have been announced probably long ago, but didn't have the bandwidth or time to get stuck dev-logging.

I'm still familiarizing myself with forum rules before posting any requested assets to discuss further.

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My normal background is IT and I picked up RPGMaker and the Visustella plugin set, along with Galv's, Moghunter's, Nijiplayer and KageDesu's phone plugins. A year ago my artist quit, so my assets have been in Koikatsu Party for better or worse, to avoid AI gen and discuss anything necessary with artists and animators later. After my artist quit a year ago to focus on RL, no bridges burned, I found I have a knack for timeline/keyframe animation but need a lot more practice on things from scratch. I've also learned a fair bit about why garage bands deserve to fail and my own project management skills without burning any bridges, so this has been a fun blessing.

This means the project has been in the works two years and two months now. Mostly, I'm just pushing this project to the end to see the feedback and evaluate if I want to keep doing this type of development in the future, regardless of whether the project is considered a success or failure, or is pirated. I'm also curious what exactly it costs to compete in any art style at all with Live2D/Spine2D without using AI gen these days or suffering from too many Unity jank pitfalls in 3D animation. I need more practice with Blender and sprite drawing tools such as Aseprite but am in a position to commission more of the usual template R18 sprites for RPGMaker MZ games soon.

I've been lurking f95zone off and on for a while and looking forward to chatting with you all more.

 

[Finuee]

Just wanted to introduce myself here, as I'd lurked the Discord and forums a couple of years.

I've been working on an RPGMaker NTRPG comedy-lite for the last couple of years, with some survival-lite crafting elements and think I'm 6-9 months from launch whether that ends up being a commercial or free product. The project is a proof-of-concept involving a human couple trapped in a youkai dream shrine and forced to play a pregnancy escape game to be able to wake up. Because it's a proof-of-concept status and unexpectedly solo developing the thing, I expect some inconsistencies.

I realized that I'm essentially done with the gameplay loop and necessary plugins but have 50% of the game loop to do, am tidying up some needed remaining assets and around 40% of the writing left to do (storyboarding is done but some core routes and filler content are missing.)

I am a solo developer, not by choice, but the writing is mostly collaboratively roleplayed, and I'm trying to strike a balance between asset quality (not just videos but also cut-in and VN bust assets), gameplay tedium, writing length. I need to run the marketing circuit (twitter, iwara.tv, Pixiv, Patreon) and wanted some general advice from other folks on this stuff without them necessarily feeling like they have to jump in and work on or evaluate the project directly. I had avoided dev-logging up to this point because I didn't know how long it would take.

Like many developers I scope-crept this project to hell and it probably should have been backburnered or cancelled ages ago. Yet I'm close enough to release with enough promising feedback that I thought I would fix my post count here and redo my discord involvement by asking for general advice while I'm putting together alpha testing materials. I know independent development requires both luck and timing and this project should have been announced probably long ago, but didn't have the bandwidth or time to get stuck dev-logging.

I'm still familiarizing myself with forum rules before posting any requested assets to discuss further.

-----

My normal background is IT and I picked up RPGMaker and the Visustella plugin set, along with Galv's, Moghunter's, Nijiplayer and KageDesu's phone plugins. A year ago my artist quit, so my assets have been in Koikatsu Party for better or worse, to avoid AI gen and discuss anything necessary with artists and animators later. After my artist quit a year ago to focus on RL, no bridges burned, I found I have a knack for timeline/keyframe animation but need a lot more practice on things from scratch. I've also learned a fair bit about why garage bands deserve to fail and my own project management skills without burning any bridges, so this has been a fun blessing.

This means the project has been in the works two years and two months now. Mostly, I'm just pushing this project to the end to see the feedback and evaluate if I want to keep doing this type of development in the future, regardless of whether the project is considered a success or failure, or is pirated. I'm also curious what exactly it costs to compete in any art style at all with Live2D/Spine2D without using AI gen these days or suffering from too many Unity jank pitfalls in 3D animation. I need more practice with Blender and sprite drawing tools such as Aseprite but am in a position to commission more of the usual template R18 sprites for RPGMaker MZ games soon.

I've been lurking f95zone off and on for a while and looking forward to chatting with you all more.

Welcome on board. I wish you a lot of luck with your project, it sounds like you've already put a ton of work into it. I'm in awe that you managed to keep your motivation without feedback of building a community. Kudos to you!

 

[scrimbul]

Welcome on board. I wish you a lot of luck with your project, it sounds like you've already put a ton of work into it. I'm in awe that you managed to keep your motivation without feedback of building a community. Kudos to you!

Thanks! In my case the community I am involved with to get the writing done are all fellow roleplayers, so it is normal to discuss the project daily and get help from interested parties (usually coders or ex-artist/developers themselves)

But the corollary to this and why it's been two years is that collaborative writing takes three hours minimum commitment to get right for a single scene, and we're all in different time zones with day jobs (US, UK, JP) so it's an absolute shitshow even without any drama. Artist was unemployed for two years and quit, so I had to drop all the development work to learn animating and basic lighting/shading with the models they produced, and will have to commission or learn to do character design proper, the other half of this software. The other writers for the secondary heroine, main heroine and secondary bull as their OCs have all had to change jobs and move 1-2 times this year.

I hope to eventually move to Blender instead and keep up the quality, but obviously I have to release first and avoid any DMCAs or whatever. The payment processors acting up have also made me seriously consider cutting 50-60% of the content and DLC a bunch of it as alternate what-if routes.

So if my story has a plot vehicle protagonist, a main heroine, a secondary heroine, and two bulls, I'd have to cut it to a love triangle, which for a first project isn't a dealbreaker depending on art quality but definitely damages the writing quality to prevent it from being too much slop.

I'm hoping if I learn enough I'll be able to collaborate with other developers on small errands and concept pieces between planning much more constrained scope creep on future projects. To that end, I'll take any advice on the networking and marketing fronts or any directions on how to formally announce the project itself here (what forums and rules) you may have. As a lurker I have a general feel for F95zone but none of the specifics.

 

[Finuee]

Thanks! In my case the community I am involved with to get the writing done are all fellow roleplayers, so it is normal to discuss the project daily and get help from interested parties (usually coders or ex-artist/developers themselves)

But the corollary to this and why it's been two years is that collaborative writing takes three hours minimum commitment to get right for a single scene, and we're all in different time zones with day jobs (US, UK, JP) so it's an absolute shitshow even without any drama. Artist was unemployed for two years and quit, so I had to drop all the development work to learn animating and basic lighting/shading with the models they produced, and will have to commission or learn to do character design proper, the other half of this software. The other writers for the secondary heroine, main heroine and secondary bull as their OCs have all had to change jobs and move 1-2 times this year.

I hope to eventually move to Blender instead and keep up the quality, but obviously I have to release first and avoid any DMCAs or whatever. The payment processors acting up have also made me seriously consider cutting 50-60% of the content and DLC a bunch of it as alternate what-if routes.

So if my story has a plot vehicle protagonist, a main heroine, a secondary heroine, and two bulls, I'd have to cut it to a love triangle, which for a first project isn't a dealbreaker depending on art quality but definitely damages the writing quality to prevent it from being too much slop.

I'm hoping if I learn enough I'll be able to collaborate with other developers on small errands and concept pieces between planning much more constrained scope creep on future projects. To that end, I'll take any advice on the networking and marketing fronts or any directions on how to formally announce the project itself here (what forums and rules) you may have. As a lurker I have a general feel for F95zone but none of the specifics.

I've been meaning to try roleplaying for a while, I have several friends who play it and say it's great. But I've never found the time to try it. They play for like a whole day and for several days, I just don't have that much free time.

 

[scrimbul]

I've been meaning to try roleplaying for a while, I have several friends who play it and say it's great. But I've never found the time to try it. They play for like a whole day and for several days, I just don't have that much free time.

It depends on what you're thinking and what you're trying to do, really. Even for the project I'm working on, certain subject matter or genres don't work for spontaneous play and take some trust and structured planning.

A not-insignificant portion of my work will end up being ghostwritten (people stepping into the shoes of characters they do not own, which impacts the quality of the writing but not enough for the audience to notice without knowing the characters extremely well, perfect for Fruit of Grisaia type ero scenes) or solo written, as a simple result of scheduling and brain bandwidth constraints.

Holding a day job on top of this development with no expectation of seed capital to pay the day job living wages absolutely slows things down, and even an experienced roleplayer for writing as recreational sake cannot necessarily always function in a structured environment where deadlines are important and expectations start to form for writing quality to adhere to the themes.

And then of course, pushing past the 'inspiration muse' phase to churn out writing, since LLMs have already proven humans are more formulaic in writing than they believe, takes just raw experience and willpower even if you're not immersed in what's being written, in which case it's best to keep it short.

I'll be happy to discuss in this thread or in a separate thread further about eroge writing, since it's an interesting delve into how some games just don't do writing at all, or are inexperienced at it, and being good at storyboarding or worldbuilding doesn't necessarily automatically tie into spontaneous character development where experienced roleplayers tend to shine... it's just different skillsets.

Obviously many games go viral with shit writing, and good writing gets overlooked if the other assets don't gel nicely or the scene just goes on too long, and some of the more famous eroge of the past are famous for being overly wordy. Roleplaying is just a shortcut to better writing, but it can be used to quickly brainstorm more detailed writing later as well. There's multiple styles depending on whether it's recreational or structured when it comes to collaborative writing styles.

 

[Finuee]

It depends on what you're thinking and what you're trying to do, really. Even for the project I'm working on, certain subject matter or genres don't work for spontaneous play and take some trust and structured planning.

A not-insignificant portion of my work will end up being ghostwritten (people stepping into the shoes of characters they do not own, which impacts the quality of the writing but not enough for the audience to notice without knowing the characters extremely well, perfect for Fruit of Grisaia type ero scenes) or solo written, as a simple result of scheduling and brain bandwidth constraints.

Holding a day job on top of this development with no expectation of seed capital to pay the day job living wages absolutely slows things down, and even an experienced roleplayer for writing as recreational sake cannot necessarily always function in a structured environment where deadlines are important and expectations start to form for writing quality to adhere to the themes.

And then of course, pushing past the 'inspiration muse' phase to churn out writing, since LLMs have already proven humans are more formulaic in writing than they believe, takes just raw experience and willpower even if you're not immersed in what's being written, in which case it's best to keep it short.

I'll be happy to discuss in this thread or in a separate thread further about eroge writing, since it's an interesting delve into how some games just don't do writing at all, or are inexperienced at it, and being good at storyboarding or worldbuilding doesn't necessarily automatically tie into spontaneous character development where experienced roleplayers tend to shine... it's just different skillsets.

Obviously many games go viral with shit writing, and good writing gets overlooked if the other assets don't gel nicely or the scene just goes on too long, and some of the more famous eroge of the past are famous for being overly wordy. Roleplaying is just a shortcut to better writing, but it can be used to quickly brainstorm more detailed writing later as well. There's multiple styles depending on whether it's recreational or structured when it comes to collaborative writing styles.

I do my writing following the methods used for book writing, or at least I try to, with character profiles and a setting bible. But I'm absolutely amateur at everything, I've never had any formal training on it and I'm completely self-taught. A hobbyist, basically. I'm not sure this whole roleplaying thing would translate into writing in my case though.

 

[scrimbul]

I do my writing following the methods used for book writing, or at least I try to, with character profiles and a setting bible. But I'm absolutely amateur at everything, I've never had any formal training on it and I'm completely self-taught. A hobbyist, basically. I'm not sure this whole roleplaying thing would translate into writing in my case though.

Shouldn't be a problem with that at all.

You need character profiles for two things: Your game design documents, both internal and external marketing docs (crowdfunding or investor pitches) which book writing rules work fine for this, especially with art references.

Once you actually have the character profile you would either pass each character profile to a writer or actor, no matter how amatuer, and no matter whether you're playing by email, forum or a real-time chat, and then hash out a basic plot, which is doubly useful if it's for your game development.

Leaving it open-ended is recreational but for more structured play you would do the same as you would solo, start at the end and work your way backward in the outline for a draft. This is where I'd want to discuss my particular project without showing off, doing animation work and then working backward roleplaying around the animation work. Doing the other way around just necessitates brutal editing cuts or major expensive changes to the animation.

The rest is just starting small, 1-3 sentences for prose, move to semi-paragaphs at 4-7 sentences (ero visual novel pacing) and optionally moving to multiple-paragraph later if it feels comfortable at 7-10 sentences.

The best part is, in a structured environment since you're a developer, you already know it doesn't matter if the writing end result turns out shit or feels bad. That's what the editing room is for later. Same if it goes on too long and the writers start describing too much that is already in an animation dialog box (in the case of RPGMaker/Unity) or an animation loop. That gives you tons of freedom to work AND break the writing into as small a chunk as your scheduling allows so long as your partner(s) are checking notifications to write their next 'pose' or whatever.

Everything after that is understanding that the rules are guidelines and made to be broken, and it applies to roleplaying styles as well. Sometimes your roleplaying isn't for spending 3-6 hours between youtube videos tossing prose back and forth either privately or in a chat. Sometimes you really only have an hour to craft one or two perfect paragraphs.

Show, don't tell, is another writing rule to be broken in a lot of eroge, again depending on the target audience's patience for prose and a skip button/recollection room/VN log function being in the game.

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So more often than not anything you can think of for solo writing is up for negotiation with a writing partner. The only kicker is that you can't wait around forever for the prose or development slows down, so there's a balance to be had and a team that is on wages and has financial incentives to understand not to fuck around with the deadlines will also at least generally produce roleplaying writing as well, the quality doesn't much matter.

Just the pros to having a partner are both motivation and an overall quality increase to the writing at the cost of having to cut extraneous prose and the scheduling constraints.

 

[Cajun Fox]

Hey there

Good luck