Ren'Py is it worth going on?

[samson125]

Hi guys,

I've started this game a while ago but I'm not sure how to proceed or
rework it from scratch.
It is about a dog trying to seduce some girls and start breeding his own pack.
I thought about the Idea about a choice driven game but that is getting me into a mess of different paths
and the choices are just too obvious.
I would love to hear your thoughts.

It is playable and I found no serious crashes and some spicy situations in there.

Thanks

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[osanaiko]

Whoa... that subject matter is a looong way out there.

/me attempts to erase that last image from my mind and put on my sensible advice hat

Sounds like you are hitting the wall, motivation wise.

That's not surprising because making any game as a solo dev is a fuckton of work.

One way to keep motivation is to get a group of superfans of the genre, and interact with them to regain enthusiasm. maybe you should try to sniff out your own pack.

Obviously you'll have no luck monetizing such extreme content via patreon or itchio. not sure about substar.

the only saving grace might be the sheer rarity of such content - the more rare/extreme the fetish, the more money the true fans are willing to spend. maybe you could accept doge-coins or something .

 

[Count Morado]

Hi guys,

I've started this game a while ago but I'm not sure how to proceed or
rework it from scratch.
It is about a dog trying to seduce some girls and start breeding his own pack.
I thought about the Idea about a choice driven game but that is getting me into a mess of different paths
and the choices are just too obvious.
I would love to hear your thoughts.

It is playable and I found no serious crashes and some spicy situations in there.

Thanks

You must be registered to see the links

View attachment 4812232 View attachment 4812234 View attachment 4812235 View attachment 4812237 View attachment 4812238

Without looking at the game or going into detail where you are in the process, but to look at the overall concept of "do I proceed or start over from scratch"... this is an important piece of advice.

Based upon your screenshots - you have no ability promote the game on any major USA/Europe based funding platform - none (I can't speak for any Asian or some other culture). At least not without breaking their Terms of Service and risk eventually getting caught and account terminated. You may be able to find a way to get funds in some facet, but that may require some creativity and obfuscation. That may be something to keep in mind as you move forward with whatever path you choose.

 

[Saint_RNG]

me attempts to erase that last image from my mind

Unfortunately, some things cannot be unseen.

 

[samson125]

Thanks for your answers.
First I have no interest in getting any funds, that might put me into a situation to having to deliver
and not continuing at my own pace. And there are only some very 'weird' sites to support this kind of game.
osanaiko : Yes it is a long way out, and still not sure about the subject. There are so many games about:
"boy comes home to his mother and sisters" or "young male has to seduce every female to get a harem" or
"young female explores her sexuality"...... I wanted to do something different and out of the box.

Count Morado Thanks for that Video, he is right in what he was saying.

Maybe it's too much realism on the game, the renders are promos and not part of the game (for now?)
But I am certainly hitting a wall here.

 

[Arkanae]

Maybe it's too much realism on the game, the renders are promos and not part of the game (for now?)

I think the game is quite playable at the moment, if still quite light in content. So there is nothing "wrong", in itself, about the way you approached the design of this game.
But as I think you are hinting at, you are going to have trouble "filling in" this world, given the way you have approached the implementation of the story lines, because that's going to require a terrible, awful lot of hand crafted writing and rendering.

As a single dev (or small team) without the army of content creators a major studio can throw at a game, you basically have two choices:

1. create content for a very small number of story paths, railroad the player into choosing one or the other, and therefore be able to ignore the potentially infinite interactions between story lines,
2. create content that is not story-line specific, but hinges on stats / state of the world, and instead create systems that make the state of the world and stats of the characters evolve based on player choices.

Solution 1 is agency-limiting, but the only sane option if you want to have a good degree of narrative control.
Solution 2 can lead to amazing games with high replayability, or an unplayable mess, depending on how good you are at designing systems, and how lucky you are to find systems that kinda sorta generates the type of playthroughs that match the story you want to tell.

In your shoes, I would ask myself:
- do I prefer to write, or do I prefer to code,
- how much do I care about the actual play experience of a random player being close to what I imagined, or do I delight in being surprised by what people experience
- how much time am I willing to spend debugging complex interactions, or alternately being comfortable with a certain level of jankiness and the grumbling from players that comes with it
- am I willing to invest in creating a rendering pipeline to make varied renders that account for stat changes in each scene, and dynamic text that is able to adjust to what happened so far

 

[samson125]

Thanks for your reply, those are actually the decisions that I have to make.