Same could probably even be said for Karryn itself tbh.
Unity Light-Space Love [v0.601] [Halftilt]
- Thread starter BaasB
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- 2dcg adventure anal sex animated big ass big tits corruption creampie exhibitionism fantasy female protagonist futa/trans groping group sex handjob humor lactation lesbian masturbation monster girl multiple penetration oral sex parody sandbox sci-fi sex toys teasing titfuck turn based combat vaginal sex voyeurism
Integrating sex and gameplay has to be carefully designed, otherwise the gameplay parts are just an annoying barrier. I understand making a game on your own is a lot of effort, but I worry that people's effort could be better organized or even more efficient with some serious planning.
Kind of like having an editor for writing projects. A second set of eyes, even if just to go 'wait, why is this here?' can help a lot.
Kind of like having an editor for writing projects. A second set of eyes, even if just to go 'wait, why is this here?' can help a lot.
Darkstrain
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kinda, but it probably depends on what aspect of the game drew you in.
for me it was the prison unlock system, where every new floor had a little bit of the ecosystem change, a la suikoden 2.
and then it never went anywhere after floor 3, with a very rushed floor 4 and not even edicts.
but hey karryn is the best karryn-like
They might, but what they really don't realize is how much effort it takes.
Karryn's prison has 4 floors (or mini-dungeons, to compare it with other games) and across those, 5 minigames, 2 of which are very low stakes. The last floor is a single fight/feature so I can't count that.
That's it. On the surface, that sounds very content poor and barebones but that's because it almost has to be. If you try to jam a long-winded story into a game where the focus is battlefucking and corruption through a detailed passives/statistics system, you're quickly going to fall victim to Scope Creep like so many others.
Remember, even Karryn's Prison is unfinished. Floor 4 and 5 show very clear signs of a rushed end of development.
Karryn was a once-in-a-lifetime fluke, don't expect anything even close to it ever coming out again.
Karryn is the Elden Ring and BG3 of hentai games
Darkstrain
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you can always just copy a popular normal game and put hentai in it. yet for how easy it is a concept, it's rarely done well.
look at every vampire survivors clone that appears here, they all suck because they cannot be bothered to make the girl have lewd events happen mid run... so you end up doing 10-20 minutes of game without anything particularly exciting... might as well play megabonk.
Darkstrain
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the thing is, the games in this site that are in development would benefit way more from a short scope in terms of story-length while keeping a big scope events/mechanic wise.
look at a dead game like simbro, when all it needed to do to be remembered fondly rather than a failed cashgrab, was to have an ending.
release your beta of the game with the entire main plot, but with WIP alerts for events that will be there and i assure you your development experience would be better.
another dead game, big brother:
-all it needed was a few endings on certain points, like the NTR/share/harem/monogamy ends. and only after you have the endings, you can start dogpiling whatever event your patreons voted to put.
it is worse if i have to play an unfinished game every few versions to barely see 1-2 scenes and then have the game die when it's too big or convoluted... than having a game where you can finish the plot early into development cycle, and then have more endings and more events added later.
there are very few games that i have used money on, and it's rarely put on patreons, and even rarer if the game isn't even out yet. the only patreons i have are of devs that already finished one game. not gambling on the gacha ever again.
Also, just burnout is burnout. A lot of the devs on here can draw or have at least mastered Blender, but both are a hand eye coordination thing... coding is not. Unity, Godot and the other IDEs for gaming certainly help, but they can't do everything, and that's not even getting started on stamping out bugs. Yes, people on f95 (or discord, Patreon, whatever) can report bugs to be fixed and effectively operate as free beta testers, but reporting a bug is not the same as reporting a bug with adequate documentation to determine which of many possible multiple interacting systems has a typo or a syntax error somewhere. This also assumes that said indie dev even possesses enough coding knowledge to fix it anyways (congrats on learning Ruby, but we needed python!).
This isn't some left brain/right brain diatribe. Just that learning coding and its abstractions by doing is inefficient (although cheap), the barriers for entry to make a lewd game are low, and there's really no penalty for not delivering unless your Patreon account starts losing subscribers beyond a loss of rep that doesn't really exist anyways. Well, that or a copyright lawsuit, but no need to get into that...
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varak
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- Jul 4, 2017
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Amen to that.
Or another one, Loser - the one with, honestly, pretty brilliant idea of giving LIs skill points by using certain "conversation topics" that you get from all the different world events, then using those skills to unlock more depraved "versions" of the LIs with new scenes, events, dialogues and such. It was a simple and beautiful concept (even if super grindy in execution). But the game never had any plot, there was (and is) no end goal, hell. there's probably even no clear progression planned for each character, and so the dev is now just forever stuck in a swamp of intertwined and more and more complicated mechanics (because when you have no plot in your game, you start inventing different things to keep your fans at bay, and those things eventually make you redo your whole game again and again).
And the same shit is going to happen here - you all know perfectly well why he's planning to publish a part of the game on Steam - to get as much money as he can in a last final grab and abandon this project whatsoever. Trust me, this one is 99% certain to never get finished.
Darkstrain
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highly probable, the correct way to approach game development is to build the skeleton first and add the flesh later.
in this game's case, you should do one route from start to finish:
-you get abducted, you escape
-you develop your ship in X way
-event happens after developing enough
-main conflict resolves
-the adventure ends
and then you start adding and adding scenes and events and npcs, and the limitation of having the main plot done is actually a relief, since you know if you're straying too far from the goal, since you are discouraged from adding further npcs and stuff that will complicate the plot or creates plotholes.
also, just as a pet peeve. what is the point of a sex-counter that starts at cero, for a character that already has gone around the entire space fucking????
Asavar
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Why cant the clown that posts the updates just post the damn changelogs as well...
Dom1ngos
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- May 22, 2023
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I don't understand anything, what's new here? I've already reached the end of the first prologue, so what? What's new? All the minigames that were there are still there. This is an update with nothing in it.
I think the game is a bit misleading. It says that you play as Linessa, however during the intro, she speaks to the player as well as having sex with them, and your gender is male. Like, what?
Peach Enthusiast
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Yeah, I'd like to know if there's an anal-only path.
Axeltheflurryofflames
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I'll be honest, while I'm not the most averse person to AI by any means, its going to take a lot for it to get past its pretty basic visuals alone. If the gameplay of it really comes together though, I'm all up for giving the game its praise, but it's fighting an uphill battle on that alone.
The worst part is too that, having a stable diffusion model locally, its really not that difficult to make something that at least has some variety and looks different then your standard AI generations, and Cibelle does at least differentiate itself some, but it could absolutely do better on that front.
Anyways...
There's lots of developers I've seen that could absolutely benefit from better project management, and keeping scope in check. Some definitely feel more blatant in doing it just to milk Patreon and other subscription services, but there's a good few that feel much more obviously like they at least started with genuine passion and purpose, only to be bogged down by their own perfectionism or unnecessary feature bloat. Both suck for different reasons, but a lot of people either just don't have the time or knowledge to properly manage their own time when it comes to game development, especially when in a solo or small team environment there's very little to keep you true to your word, or your original goals without going off the rails.
Agree. Looking at the amount of "great start/potential" projects with crazy scope creep and ending up fizzling out highlighted the economic of crowd funding. Since the incentive is not to finish the project but rather dragging it out as long as possible, it turns projects into hype generation machine in which even once passionate creator become corrupted, spending more time on social media update than working on the project. Yahtzee discussed this in his "let's drown out series" and one year indie game project thing. He alluded to internal pressure, like having someone like PM or investors, being the primary drivers for long complex creative projects to reach some milestone rather than stuck waiting for the next spark of inspiration. I would like to list some examples I can recall of this degradation:
+ The Island: I thought it had interesting concepts, pretty clear artistic vision with frequent updates. Then everything went down hill as the dev lose interest in their project and started another one. The creator spend a lot of effort update the media, but it all seems aimless eventually. They added too many "gameplay" elements and then having to spend months ironing out issues, performance, then jumping on an entirely new engine to try to "fulfil" their vision only to end up starting an entire new project with AI art.
+ Insexsity: One of the more interesting project that's "somewhat" completed, despite its abrupt ending. One of the main achievement in my opinion was their focus on adding "contents", not gameplay; the main pitfall of these projects. Even then, it's quite obvious they ran out of interest in the project by the end. Good thing it has somewhat of an equivalent in UiTC. That game itself is looking more bloated and overly ambitious.
+ Forbidden Fruit: While the eventual failure of the project is due to internal conflict, not project management; it has been mismanaged for years before completely derailed. Their updates were cycling gameplay elements with new scenes, changing it into a chimera of some sort, and quite difficult to discern what's the original vision.
+ Inquisitor Trainer: In my mind, a classic in scope creep. Great creative concept, completely abysmal project management adding more onto something that doesn't need it. Ended up with few "contents" and super bloated scope. They even make a 2D adventure game, the audacity.
+ ORS, Seeds of Chaos, Lust Hunter and others: victims of the model in my opinion. Talented and passionate devs surrendered to the warped incentive of crowd funding. They grew such a large following that they could not help themselves to drag out their project through confusing direction and dripping updates to farm for the remaining crowd funds.
I can think of 2 solutions to the issues.
First is to address the financial incentive. This is effectively impossible, but only by forcing "micropayment" of updates, i.e, people can buy latest update at a huge discount if they bought the game at any point in the past, would there be an incentive for devs to push a good, somewhat completed product at some point. If they choose to milk their successful concept, they have to provide sufficient, substantial updates at good enough pace to ensure people would actually pay while keeping interest. This would not benefits the creators nor platforms so it would be implausible.
Second is less important but game/project design itself.
VN: these games are ill-suited for the multi-choice/multi-path model in my opinion. ORS which is a good attempt, but the episodic release exposed the huge amount of work required to cover all of their previous routes, decisions, seems like a project management nightmare. Asking them to plan it all out on a map is quite extreme. It's not that easy, and plans are often met with unexpected obstacle. It's much better to simplify the plan as much as possible, basically do something with minimum branching and a lot of expected works and iteratively getting them done as much as they could. Classic Japanese VNs were exactly like this, I suspect for similar reason yet it suits the episodic release of crowd funding perfectly.
Scope creep: any project can benefits from realising erotic games focus should be on the content, the art. As everyone have hammered this to the ground, erotic games main draw is not the gameplay, especially if the gameplay is not married to the context i.e. erotica. Some games tried to do Darkest Dungeon erotica. That's not a bad concept but clearly it's hard to remake Darkest Dungeon and then adding "contents" on top. Meanwhile the DD modders have done a decent jobs at making one, rendering "competitors" frankly quite redundant. Therefore adding more gameplay, minigame, side activities, "systems" like The Island will cause inevitable scope creep. I know the scope creep usually is the result of the dev wanting to add a "scene", and their creative juice pushes them to try to create gameplay around the scene. Being aware that having the scene in game is more important than the scene having gameplay attached to it. It would certainly be nice, but if it's not feasible, be creative in "writing it in", not trying to recreate another game with it.
In which case, my idea for scope creep, if it's inevitable for games, is to use Insexsity/UiTC's model. They are by no means perfect nor arguably, even good products. However, I thought the crowd fund model works well in something that's more modular, standalone; "microservice" almost. Somewhat like the Sims, Paradox games; the cutting up additions to the product into somewhat independent bits that doesn't rely on previous works as much while being somewhat iterative and enriching the experience as a whole, makes the content dripping works. If it has to be somewhat independent and separated, then the scope would be limited during conception, changing the way the creator think about their planned content and vision of the product. They would not imagine something sweeping, but fits into its own box. When it doesn't quite pan out, its existence would still enrich the experience. The formula is simply to create a core "strategic consideration" to manage to sustain gameplay. Usually this is money. Then add contents and activities to "make" this resource independently, and to "spend" it. This is rather generalising, but some games can be reduced to this model.
Finally, the bottleneck is almost always the art. That I have no idea. Even AI might have the opposite effect as many projects lost support due to AI use.