I have been a Unity developer for 8 years and would like to delve deeper into this hentai universe. What would be a good way to start? I'll make a small team with some artists, but at start, I do not have a lot of budget, but enough to pay for sounds and some animations/illustrations.
Well that was a bunch of non-answers wasn't it? or answers to the title but not the post. Challenges for developing a hentai game are, at the base level, the same as any other game, however the more complex you want to make it, the challenges increase faster than for any other type of game, if you just want to make a VN or an RPGMaker game, that's easy enough.
If you wanna make a shooter with some porn in it, that's real easy too, you just add some maybe illusion style porn animations for sex scenes and you're good, hell, they can even be cutscenes really, a lot of really famous hentai visual novels and jrpgs had the porn shit added in kinda like an afterthought.
But if you want to make something highly interactive, something along the lines of VAM; well, there's a reason that the garbage that is VAM is the best such game we've currently got, and most it's potential competitors are now abandonware. Shit's hard, extremely hard. The reason it's hard is because the road has not been paved yet. You can fire up the unreal engine, make a new first person template and you already have the beginnings of a first person shooter, or you can go for the third person template instead and you have the beginnings of an action game, or the car game one and have the beginnings of a racing game... or the top down one and have the beginnings of either an RTS or a top down rpg, and so on... The road is paved for those kinds of games, they are contemptuously easy to make, the only thing most people who make those kinds of games have to spend time on is asset acquisition, most of the work's been done for them. Sure, the really good ones will do quite a lot more than that, but how many of those are there every year?(Less than 1 per category usually...)
So really, tips? Make what you're truly passionate about. If you're truly passionate about it, it's not going to become abandonware, because you'll make it even if you aren't gonnamake any money from it, because that's just what passion is. You're gonna make that game, and you're gonna finish it as the best game you could have made. So long as you have the passion,even if it isn't a commercial success you will still be satisfied in the end. There's no way to guarantee commercial success, and it's harder for a hentai game than any other game, it's kinda funny isn't it? hardest kind of game to develop and the hardest to make any kind of money with.
So the best tip anyone could give you really is... don't make a hentai game unless you're truly passionate about it, unless you absolutely need to make one, the thought of making one is keeping you up at night, because really; it's probably not gonna be worth it from a financial standpoint in the end, it's extremely unlikely. A few thousand dollars monthly on patreon isn't enough to fund an entire team of developers.
