Interactivity and Expandability in Games; Goals Among the Developers; Text Games

[Zerei]

Surely many of you have thought about how great it is or would be to have many, many options and interactions within games. What was the scope of your dream game you still thought possible, and how close to it was any existing game you found?

It isn't quite a type of game like what this forum has, not to mention it's often excessive complexity and difficulty in navigation etc., but have any of you perhaps heard of Dwarf Fortress? If not, watch first 3 minutes of this video (heck, do it if you know it! It's hilarious!):

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Now that's what I call complexity!

Regrettably, few developers seem to be interested in going for advanced things like that, opting more for making visual novels of sorts limited by pictures and amount of content added or simple RPG games.

Well, in the first place not that many people could accomplish much in those areas now, could they?

Look at our local "Lilith's Throne" for instance.
It is among the most ambitious games we've got on this forum that left early phases. However the developer clearly bit off more than she could chew. The code eventually became a mess and the developer does things at slow pace regularly failing to meet whatever goals she set for herself. She's upfront about it. Honestly for all the self-criticism she does, she still does better job at regular updates than many others... Still, that is comparison of a turtle and snail.

Back to the topic
Lilith's Throne is an excellent example of why not just anyone can aim for that. At least without a proper plan.

To make advanced work of this sort requires ability, dedication and a plan. Now then, do I have some ambitious examples that more or less fit the bill? Yes, yes I do. First of all I'd note those:

"Degrees of Lewdity"
The developer knows what he wants, and he does it well. However it isn't exactly your usual... sandbox/RPG/LifeSim, as more of a survival game without game overs. Just go check it out (even just reviews) instead of hoping for my description as I can't describe it well and keep myself short

"Eratoho K" and probably "

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" in general are another example.
Notably closer to the Dwarf Fortress mentioned at beginning, mostly due to being strongly text based and not the most intuitive games in general... That aside, "Eratoho K" is something of a RPG war game with... life sim elements? The "elements" being nevertheless much better than in most other games you'll find on this forum.


I could mention some more titles, but the point of this post isn't to list them but discuss a topic, as such let's move on
How can one make something "more advanced" as I called it?
A thing that few seem to think of (or perhaps it is more difficult than I'd think?), is trying creating a simple but easily expandable groundwork. Not only so that you yourself would have it easier to add content, but so that others can do so as well. The more ambitious the project, the harder it is to do it alone. And the later one thinks of it, the harder it is to change...

Perhaps if Lilith's Throne maker would think of it all early, the work would have progressed much smoother than it currently does? We may never know, but my bet is "yes".

An example from top of my head would be in Fort of Chains. It is a simple game having its' own content creator allowing things such as creation of new traits, events, along with requirements and effects... It's not much, but it is something. Something that a person needs no coding knowledge to use to expand the game somewhat.

What is the purpose of this thread?
Mostly for me to ramble and see you ramble some more. Add your own thoughts. Maybe to get someone more ambitious and making something big.

Honestly I find it a pity we lack stuff like say

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going into a bit different areas, or

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-like games too. At the moment we can't hope for some super-nice 3D/2D games and those less flashy types are the ones that give the greatest freedom to players and developers alike, but yet so few touch such things or inspire themselves from them

 

[chainedpanda]

I'll start with LT. It had a ton of promise early on. It featured a lot of mechanics that hadn't been tried before. To top this, it had the support of both the furry community, and HGG (At the time, HGG was thriving). Not many other games have accomplished this. It really had some of the best groundwork, skeleton, engine, whatever you want to call it of any h game I've played. Yet, it has drastically dropped the ball time and time again. The issue with its release schedule is the lack of content in each release. It's all bug fixes that should have been squashed years ago, or bugs from the previous update. Many times she's moved bugs from the "bug list" in the change log and placed it under a "feature" list, potentially just padding out the list of new features. My personal feelings aside, LT had tremendous potential. I was both a fan, and patreon of them for a long time. I'm not really sure if any h game can make me as excited, and disappointed, as this game did.

Honestly, if Innoxia had worked with HGG and made her game more modable, it would have likely exploded in both content and popularity. Even if we ignore HGG, there are plenty of her furry fans which have tried to mod the game in the past, but it was unorganized and like one or two people working on it so it fell apart and the best bits were incorporated into the main game. She didn't work with them despite their interest. They criticized her and her work ethic. When her furry community did nothing but support her and fight HGG, she began to ignore that massive potential recourse. Both the players and the game suffer for this decision.

I can't speak of DoL very much, simply because I can't get into it. I'm not a fan of playing female protags in h games, neither do I enjoy playing a submissive guy. That said, what I have played of it, I can understand why people adore this game. It has a lot of content that is hard to locate, and when you do find it, it feels like a rewarding experience through natural exploration. I'm not convinced this was due to any sort of groundwork laid out, but more so good planning, sound judgement and amount of content.

Eratoho is a weird beast that, honestly likely won't be able to be replicated by western developers. This is due to the fact the game is a parody from a massive game franchise with several games and other contents, with tons of characters with deep backstories and unique personalities. The gameplay of Era is fun and I do greatly enjoy it, but I feel what makes the game shine is the world building and diverse characters. There are dozens of unique characters with their own unique events/mini storylines to locate. If a western dev were to attempt this, they would have to create a bunch of characters from scratch, or merge a bunch of franchises together and somehow make them play nicely with one another for the game mechanics. Not to mention most of the popular engines used in the US for text based games simply couldn't handle the amount of calculation that game does. Like seriously, it has over a hundred characters, plus any you personally created, a shit ton of traits and skills, plus dozens of countries, and calculates the brutal dlc shit. Twine would explode, everyone hates qsp, only thing that is really left is unity, which could prob do it, but it's not exactly built for text based games.

I don't have enough to say about FoC, I only played it for the first time like a week ago and decided to wait for more content. However, I thought of it as just a No Haven alternative with a less annoying engine. The fact that players can simply mod the game, doesn't mean a lot if the dev can't grab a stable and dedicated fan base to mod it to begin with. Strive for Power did something similar later down the line. Yet it wasn't until quite a bit after the game was finished when some random dude decide to mod the hell out of it. Mods prior to now were incredibly small in scale and honestly weren't even worth using. There were quite a few good image packs tho.

One of the key things to remember is that text based games will always make less money than any other type of game. This is going to affect many developers when they begin thinking about making a game. When I first started playing H games, they were mostly MUDs or Twine games, but most of them are dead, lost or forgettable. It's always more enjoyable to play a game with a proper UI, and AI Dungeon team has been losing a ton of money month after month. Their expenses are growing and their struggling to keep up. There's a current fear they are planning to sell to a larger company. Which would likely mean the game will be censored to shit, and nothing kills porn faster than censorship. I don't think we can reasonably expect any porn dev to create even a weak version of AI Dungeon.

Take the exploration fun of DoL, the modability of FoC, half the complexity of Free Cities, and the level of character uniqueness of Era games and you may have a decent game. Throw in some popular tags, and pray. Pray that your lucky like LT was, just don't throw it away. I am no dev, so many of the things I say may be complete bullshit, but this comes from years of playing many types of H games and following their development.

 

[Sinaxxr]

That video was indeed pretty hilarious and it definitely brings to light one of the pitfalls of complicated code. Sometimes the code will do things you didn't expect or plan for. It's a big problem for devs and it's something I come across from time to time but it can be pretty amusing at times and other times downright frustrating.

The hardest part of big projects is the planning for me because you can't know everything all at the start. It takes a lot of brainstorming and even then you will think of things later on so you can't plan for everything. What you have to try to do is make you code consistent and, if you can manage it, make it somewhat modular. If it's modular then it's easier to upgrade and it's easier to move things around to work in other areas.

Another thing I'd recommend anyone that's interested in coding do is to make friends with other devs. You'll never be smart enough or prepared enough to solve everything yourself. Whether you have to google for half the day or ask someone else to look at a section of your code, you're going to need outside help. Pays dividends to have people to ask that may know something you don't.

If all else fails, explain your code to a rubber duck.