I think it's very easy to create a good game.

[DuniX]

Then the porn game fairies come visit you at midnight and bestow you with the perfect project. They set up all the code and assets while you're sleeping, and just like that when you wake up you're a successful dev

So you are arguing that cloning the gameplay and programming of Escape Dungeon is too hard?

 

[Nagozo]

Honestly, I have no idea how hard it is to make a clone of that particular game. All I know is that even if it looks simple, it'll still take a bunch of headaches and time.

If you want it to be a good clone, you're still going to have to learn about how to create an enjoyable player experience, how to create and manipulate your art assets properly, how to manage your codebase... That sort of stuff. That's what I consider part of the 'skillset', and it's why I disagree with the notion that creating good games takes no skill/is easy.

 

[DuniX]

If you want it to be a good clone, you're still going to have to learn about how to create an enjoyable player experience, how to create and manipulate your art assets properly, how to manage your codebase... That sort of stuff. That's what I consider part of the 'skillset', and it's why I disagree with the notion that creating good games takes no skill/is easy.

Then explain to me how those Japanese Indies you find at DLSite manage to do it?
You don't even draw your own art like they do.
You think everyone is a professional there?

"Adult Game Development" is incredibly privileged compared to regular Indie Developers.

 

[MrSilverLust]

It needs to be said but this, right here, is the absolute dumbest comment I see people make on this site.

I mean that sincerely, it's moronic.

The thing is, he isn't criticising a game; he's criticising all of western gamedevs and saying that a better job could be done in 2 weeks and it would be profitable.

If you don't make the same "story/sandbox" visual novel garbage you can make some simple games with porn pretty cheap and easy and that still sells.
It's not the OP that is wrong. It is this entier cottage industry that is wrong.

With talentless and delusional hacks like you I am surprised anything gets done.

You can bang something like that game in 2 weeks in a game jam minus some polish and content.
You get Characters, you get Sex Scenes, you even get Monsters in Honey Select, what more do you need?

Is making the Combat System too hard? Spoilers! You can Carbon Copy Clone It from another game. It's a Porn Game, nobody cares about plagiarism.

At this point it's fair to ask to provide some evidence to back up those very strong claims. He doesn't even need to do it himself, if he truly believes that, then what's his excuse to not hire one of those game jam's dev for two weeks, "copy past" combate systems from other games, and get rich?

He's basically in the middle of a very busy Grand Central Terminal, sees an open suitcase with $100k, and starts yelling to everyone how we're hacks, lazy, talentless and too stupid to just pick up the suitcase. As if no one else has thought about it before, it needs a genius to think of that. And we're saying: "pick it up yourself dude, if you're right we'll all look like fools that didn't think about picking up the suitcase. If you find out the suitcase is filled with monopoly money, the fool is you..."


Even the OP, in practice, is saying:

Moreover, I fully agree about saying that creating a good game require a gargantuan amount of work. What I'm unsure of is if it also requires a gargantuan amount of skill.

The scenario is fully set and I'm doing all the writing. It's 40 % done for now. I think it's my best skill as I have a lot of experience with that. My main drawback is that's the very first time I have to make a complex work in english, but I have a Proofreader to help me out.

Regarding graphics I'm really lacking skills. I'm basically doing everything related to UI/UX but everything else is outsourced. This is where I'm using all the money invested into this game.

So, basically his case in practice is:
Hard work + doing what you're good at + outsourcing what you aren't good at = good game

This is not a particularly ground breaking theory, is it? I could say the same thing about me doing an Hollywood movie. I'd just need to know what I'm good at, finding good talent to pay to do the rest, and having money to invest. Indeed, these are the requirements to make a good product.

 

[demonbra]

Where do you set the bar which define if a game is popular or not ?

Because following the pattern you described doesn't automatically mean your game will be popular. Competition is rough.

HAHAHAHAHAHA.
Oh jeez, you're the best.
I apologize for wasting your time (and mine).

 

[Nagozo]

Then explain to me how those Japanese Indies you find at DLSite manage to do it?

I imagine they spend a bunch of time learning and acquiring skills, then put those to use, just like any other indie dev. Maybe they outsource parts of the work, like MrSilverLust mentions.

"Adult Game Development" is incredibly privileged compared to regular Indie Developers.

I agree. The bar for adult games is lower, because hey, it's porn. It's just that generalising people to be 'talentless hacks' because you might not appreciate the effort required to create any good software product isn't something I agree with, lol

 

[aura-dev]

I thing that creating a good game is not a question of skills, but more a question of time and ressources, which are in a way, easier to get than skill. (not for everyone, I know)

Your posts made me think of the Infinite-Monkey-Theorem. Given a monkey and a typewriter, the probability of the monkey eventually producing any given text, such as Hamlet or the Bible will converge towards 1. Logically, the probability of the monkey eventually producing a good adult game will also converge towards 1.

So, yay, even a monkey with a typewriter can make good adult games! No skill needed! It really is that easy.
He just needs a little bit of time*.

*Close to infinite in terms of a human lifespan (or maybe I should say monkey lifespan here)

 

[OsamiWorks]

How hard could it be, you literally just push buttons

 

[Nagozo]

Creating art is trivial

Drawing? Just keep putting lines in good places.

Writing? Just keep typing good sentences.

Composing music? Just put some notes in the right order.

It's literally that easy.

 

[DuniX]

At this point it's fair to ask to provide some evidence to back up those very strong claims. He doesn't even need to do it himself, if he truly believes that, then what's his excuse to not hire one of those game jam's dev for two weeks, "copy past" combate systems from other games, and get rich?

He's basically in the middle of a very busy Grand Central Terminal, sees an open suitcase with $100k, and starts yelling to everyone how we're hacks, lazy, talentless and too stupid to jusy pick up the suitcase. As if no one else has thought about it before, it needs a genius to think of that. And we're saying: "pick it up yourself dude, if you're right we'll all look like fools that didn't think about picking up the suitcase. If you find out the suitcase is filled with monopoly money, the fool is you..."

In a Topic about how creating good games is easy, I mention how you can create good games the easy way.

Yet Woe is Me for not agreeing with the Hivemind.
It's not a "Mystery" what my Agenda is, I want more games with Actual Fucking Gameplay.

 

[Alcahest]

In a Topic about how creating good games is easy, I mention how you can create good games the easy way.

Yet Woe is Me for not agreeing with the Hivemind.
It's not a "Mystery" what my Agenda is, I want more games with Actual Fucking Gameplay.

And why should any adult game dev care about what a whiny, clueless, entitled, insulting person like you want?
You have a solution, which is to make the game you want yourself (Which is a very a common reason for adult game devs to becoming one). Seeing that it is so easy for you, you should be almost done with your crappy-looking, unpolished, low-content honey select game by now, if you spent the time making the game you want instead of whining about it here

 

[Niv-Mizzet the Firemind]

In a Topic about how creating good games is easy, I mention how you can create good games the easy way.

I wouldn't qualify what you described in the previous pages as a good game. At best it's a low effort rip off.

 

[Doorknob22]

I do agree the title of my thread is too extreme, and I stated later than it's more a question of "skill floor" and "skill ceiling" than skill itself.

My point is that the main audience of H-game is not very demanding compared to many other audiences like for books.

Which make creating a good game easier for newcomers than some other media like mainstream gaming.

You, my friend assume that creating a good AVN is easier than writing a good book, and I respectfully disagree. Creating a good VN is not only about dialing the size of the breasts all the way up, it's also about balancing the tease with the payoff, the amount of text that will make you want to to f%^k that hottie with drowning the players under walls of text, about allowing enough meaningful choices without losing your plot in a spaghetti nightmare and all of this without literally hundreds of years of storytelling knowledge humanity possess which book authors can utilize.

Writing a working AVN may not be a complicated task, writing a good one..? Well, how many of the AVNs currently on F95 do you consider to be good?

 

[Gwedelino]

You, my friend assume that creating a good AVN is easier than writing a good book, and I respectfully disagree. Creating a good VN is not only about dialing the size of the breasts all the way up, it's also about balancing the tease with the payoff, the amount of text that will make you want to to f%^k that hottie with drowning the players under walls of text, about allowing enough meaningful choices without losing your plot in a spaghetti nightmare and all of this without literally hundreds of years of storytelling knowledge humanity possess which book authors can utilize.

Writing a working AVN may not be a complicated task, writing a good one..? Well, how many of the AVNs currently on F95 do you consider to be good?

And we end-up with the "how could you tell if a game is either good or bad" question.

That's a question for which everyone can give a different answer, but mine would be that it must be linked to F95 review and rating system.

I would trust the general opinion. It's still linked to popularity in a way since you need a minimum amount of review get something meaninfgfull,
but well, it's always hard to state if something is good if nobody saw it, that's kind of a "does a tree is really making noises if there is no living soul to hear it" situation.

+it doesn't really state if a game is either good or bad, but more if it looks god or if I can't know f it's good.

This is an answer that has it's flaw, but there is no perfect answer.

 

[DuniX]

And why should any adult game dev care about what a whiny, clueless, entitled, insulting person like you want?

Are you saying every single developer here is the same? Maybe that is the problem?
How many Steam Indie Games mired in obscurity would be better served as Porn Games?
Why can't they become developers of Porn Games?
Just because this Industry has its current bias doesn't mean it has to be this way.

I wouldn't qualify what you described in the previous pages as a good game. At best it's a low effort rip off.

Can it Sell? Can it be Successful?
One man's trash is another man's treasure, I take what I can get.
And there is far more variety that is possible since you can use pretty much any game from any genre as a base.
Literally Minesweeper has been made as a hentai game.

 

[Ambir]

So you are arguing that cloning the gameplay and programming of Escape Dungeon is too hard?

Honestly, it's quite a bit more challenging than you might think.

Spoiler: Here lies an aggressive wall of text of an explanation of what it would probably take to make the game. Read at your own peril.

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I'm not an expert with unity, so there's probably a couple of things I got wrong, or didn't estimate right. And there's probably a couple of ways to make things easier than I anticipate. Still, this is like, several orders of magnitude more complex than just 'oh you copy and paste the gameplay'.

 

[DuniX]

First, you need to know how to make a 2d or 3d grid movement system.....

We know how to make a Roguelike, even if you don't you will have tutorials up the wazoo for whatever engine you want.
There are game jams specifically for roguelikes so the very basic gameplay is a non-issue.

You need to get the tiles. You need to make them into prefabs so that the game can know to use them as building blocks for the level. (Just this can be several hours of work, because no, getting art assets is not a magically easy process, and even if you just use placeholders, you still need to make them recognisable, so you would need to have some design of the different elements of the dungeon done, and then you would need to art something that looks reasonably close to what you want, so that it is recognisable)

Yes getting the Tileset is something you have to figure it out yourself. And tend to need Higher Rez than your typical 32x32 as that wouldn't work with the Rendered Sprites that well.
Worse case you can make them yourself and use something like

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as Raytraced Rendered Voxels can work well with Rendered Sprites.

There are a lot of skills in ES2. I think I've seen about 12 to 15 of them, and that is a decent number to make, for certain, especially since they are quite varied, from basic skills that just improve your stats, to passive skills that add you a unique modifier such as a chance to heal on getting hit, or an auto-attack each time you attack, to actual targeted skill, with a targeting UI.

Also known as "the fun", you would need to have no creative bone in your body to not do something here, and even then creativity is optional and you can just clone the better games.
And a Porn Game doesn't have that high of a standard like Indie Games that live and die completely on their gameplay.

Let's talk about the cutscenes. All of them are fully animated, with a decent amount of text and they are fully voiced. So, someone needs to write a scenario for each of these cutscenes (well, they're mostly sex scenes, but whatever), then once you've written it, we need to get assets for the environment, as well as character and monster assets. Let's say we use Koikatsu for this. Just finding a map that fits is going to take you like half an hour, because the selection is not that ample. Once you find it, you will probably take 10 to 20 minutes to find a model for your monster.
In KK, the monster models just have some bones that you manipulate and they dont have premade poses or premade animations. So, you're going to need to pose your character, pose the monster, and probably replace the monster dick with an object dick, because if you don't do that, animating the shit is going to be a nightmare.

I completely agree, but this isn't a new problem, this is what you have to do in your regular AVN here. If this was a real problem this Industry wouldn't exist.
And the content requirements are much more modest.
How many sex scenes total does those games have?

Even if you manage to finish the project, you still need to deal with a lot of bugs that will crop up at this stage, because as a one-man dev team, no matter how much you playtested your game, you haven't had hundred of hours to do it, and there are almost certainely some scenarios that you have not had the chance to experience. And if you haven't had the chance to experience them, it is likely that there are still bugs, even if you've been dilligently eliminating any bugs that you found. So you need a playtesting phase, and probably a whole lot of time to fix bugs.

It would be the same Early Access and Patreon Model just like any game here, you can expanded the content with new dungeons, new enemies, new skills, etc. all the while you fix things and polish stuff.

 

[woody554]

It's funny 'cause I would have said the complete opposite : it's much easier to make a popular game than a good one.

There is a pattern that works every time :

I don't disagree that it's a good genre/formula, but there's like less than 5 successful mom son games out of thousands. it definitely doesn't work every time. and 99% of them get abandoned early.

 

[demonbra]

I don't disagree that it's a good genre/formula, but there's like less than 5 successful mom son games out of thousands. it definitely doesn't work every time. and 99% of them get abandoned early.

I was mostly a joke, I'm ready to take the challenge !

Using the research feature I checked these tags :
Male Protag, Harem, Incest.
I exluded HTML games as they rarely go anywhere at all.

11 pages of results.

Only the abandonned ones :

2 pages...
Some might be abandonned but not officially, but that's still a huge majority of living projects.

Now I invite you to uncheck "abandonned" and to sort the result by "likes", or "rating".
You'll find the 2 first pages full of almost all the major games (and successes) from the last few years.

 

[MarshmallowCasserole]

But they also do not criticize how the movies, music or meals are made, only talking about the final result. Would a critic start talking about the making process itself, saying that this part of the melody should have been played by a violin and not a guitar, that "here" it should have be a close up and not a panoramic view, and so on

Yes, they absolutely would. It's not practical to make a full pass on every minute mistake for a general review, but in general, that's exactly what a critic's job is: breaking down the whole into smaller pieces and identifying what went wrong, and what went right. "Great cinematography, shit plot, you have to watch it shitfaced to have a good time."