Java Lilith's Throne [v0.4.11.3 Hotfix] [Innoxia]

[OffPathGames]

No, it's not. The highest processing fee that Subscribestar charges is 10%, assuming that it gets at least $3 out of the bargain, so Inno's raking in at least $6300 a month.

Hmm, so that number may be too pessimistic. I don't know what Subscribestar's model is, but for Patreon, the numbers I'm seeing are.

Platform Fees: 8%
Payment Fees: 9% at the $5
Declines/Other: 5%

So last month I had about $400 in donos and around $300 revenue. Lilith would be making a slightly more efficient rate - probably 20% total which does come to about $5000-$6000. That's still a pretty big hit to take before taxes.

I mean, I do too. Just like, at a speed that might be indictive of someone spending 40 hours a week working on it. Because that's supposedly what this is. This is Inno's full time job.

I'd also like her to stop lying, but lets be realistic here.

So first, no, these games are not hard to code or design. We've literally been building text adventure games for 40+ years now. Most of them ran better, on way worse hardware, all while doing more than LT manages. Fuck, I wrote my first text adventure game before half the people in this thread were probably born. With less than 100 hours on my current project I have a prototype engine that can handle basically everything in LT worth ripping off. Like, if LT's content was in a format that didn't suck and could easily be parsed out and converted to another format, I could probably lift it wholesale (I'm not doing it by hand). The only part that wouldn't work in my engine as it is now is the leveling and perk systems, because they're horribly designed and why would anyone want to copy them, and LT's casino games which are boring and I've already done better versions of (although my poker AI is legit too hard. I can't beat it. Although I'm not, admittedly, amazing at texas holdem)

I'm not going to do that though, because I'm way more interested in making an interesting sim sandbox than straight copying LT. Plus that wouldn't be challenging or interesting in the slightest. But there's *lots* of engines that could do the same, doubly so considering how poorly LT runs. Finding an engine for a text adventure game isn't the hard part.

The hard part is writing content.

And you need a good amount of content to draw in an audience to begin with. But as has been proven over and over, once you're there community oriented games manage to progress quickly IF they're easy to write for. If LT was well designed, we'd be getting content of varying quality constantly. The fan base is large enough that if it was easy to create, people would create it. There's been like 50 of us in this thread alone talking about this.

Which brings us to my second point. Critical mass is more important to making money than anything else. Everyone plays CoC2/TiTS, so they make the most money. And everyone plays those games because they're the most popular. They're the most popular because they're the most well known. I've played like 80 different text-based hgames over the last six months, and the fact that you're acting like there aren't a ton of them just proves this point.

These games are easy to make. And they are everywhere.

And before you try and say they're not, see point number two.

LT is as successful as it is because of a combination of two things. First, timing. It blew up when there was a lot of movement between projects. Devs and players both were switching between games quiet a bit at the time, so it was a good opening for a new game to slip in. And second, reusable content making the game look larger than it is. But now it has critical mass. Inno can release milestone updates that contain not a single one of the milestone features and people will eat that shit up. The ball is already rolling.

Fair enough - LT definitely doesn't have enough content/mechanical variation for more than a week of gameplay; so if you know 80 of these, I'd definitely be interested in your top 5. Or the ones that aren't totally abandoned/buggy.

I still would maintain that people are sticking around based on a lack of good alternatives. Writing the content is definitely troublesome too. One reason I'm using RPG Maker is that CGs and graphics make up for a lot of the dialogue I'd otherwise have to write - but that means my play time is much shorter per content segment.

 

[IvoryOwl]

I've played like 80 different text-based hgames over the last six months,

Mind sharing some of the best examples you've seen? I enjoy text-games but I've been having a hard time finding something in the same vein as Lilith's Throne (for the record, I already know of TiTs and CoC so those don't count). There's Degrees of Lewdity but I'm not a big fan of feeling powerless all the time and getting raped at every corner. While I don't mind a sub role, I like some variety too.

I don't have the patience for management games so titles like Fort of Chains and Jack o Nine Tails are a no-go for me. I'm also tend to turn my nose at dating sims and sandbox games that make me grind stats or visit a several locations at specific times, hoping to trigger a scene (I know the games who follow this trend are usually visual novels but whatever. Point stands.)

Dryad Quest RPG is probably one of the better alternatives I've found so far. The combat is a bit hard IMO but content wise it's up there, though there's not a whole lot to it as of yet. Then there's also The Company. I love the idea of using drugs on people and watching their reaction. The denial content with mom/step-mom was pretty good! A bit of a shame that the developer didn't expand upon it and decided to segway mom's route into a completely unrelated fetish.

The main thing for me is that there aren't a whole lot of (good) text games with a female protag on the forefront. And some of those that do exist are M2F transformations, which is fine but not the thematic I'm after. NewLife would be another candidate... if the developer wasn't slow as molasses and released tiny updates. He is either on par or even worse than Inno...

PS: I almost completely forgot!! Accidental Woman and Esoteric Erotica!
Both of these games have the potential surpass even Lilith's Throne, the issue is that they have been in development for a long time and yet are little more than proofs of concept, especially Esoteric Erotica.

EE has everything I'd love in an adult text game; extensive character customization, BDSM and Lovecraft themes. The whole "tone" of the game feels right and the UI is something to behold. Unfortunately the dev is... something else. Bad attitude towards people. Unfortunately, the whole project feels like a pipe-dream; dev is more interested in working under the hood and making a technical wonder than an actual, playable game any time soon. Lilith's Throne has better chances of being finished that EE.

 

[Sarkath]

Fair enough - LT definitely doesn't have enough content/mechanical variation for more than a week of gameplay; so if you know 80 of these, I'd definitely be interested in your top 5. Or the ones that aren't totally abandoned/buggy.

Have you played

You must be registered to see the links

? It's been around for a over a decade with a very consistent update schedule, and transformation is a core feature.

Two things to keep in mind are that it's currently written in Inform (a Godot port is currently in the works) so it generally uses a very Infocom-esque control scheme, and it's very furry.

One reason I'm using RPG Maker is that CGs and graphics make up for a lot of the dialogue I'd otherwise have to write - but that means my play time is much shorter per content segment.

I suspect that RPG Maker itself might be largely to blame for the difficulties in implementing the sex system in your game, to be honest. I haven't messed with it in detail for a while, but last time I worked with it it didn't seem very well suited for anything outside of the general JRPG formula. Granted, anything is possible with plugins (it sounds like you were able to get it to work with considerable effort), but it's largely going against the grain.

A transformation system is conceptually pretty easy to implement if you have complete control of the engine. At its simplest, it's essentially a matter of making body part objects for X species and attaching them to Y character instance in some way or another. It's a lot more tricky to design handwritten sex scenes around that, as the writer has to take note of how large the player is, how many dicks/pussies they have, the length of their hair, whether or not they have a tail, and a myriad of other things depending on the exact content. I've written some practice scenes in the past year or so using Twine, and constantly having to keep in mind things like the position of the player's head relative to another character's body during, say, an embrace can be pretty draining.

I'd argue that LT's dynamic sex system is kinda cheating, but it's very pragmatic given Inno's general approach to the game's flow. Rather than having richly written interactions designed around whole characters, the interactions in LT are based around interactions between body parts at a given pace (rough, normal, and gentle) and against a set of fetishes (though it largely boils down to hate/tolerate, as everything outside of that is purely mathematical). It's good in that interactions generally make some degree of sense without requiring too much development time or restricting player freedoms, but IMO it tends to lead to interactions that are largely forgettable. It's good for a quick fap in the moment, I suppose, but it results in a distinct lack of personality. Everyone with vaguely similar parts behaves identically at a given pace.

The only really unique scenes are stuff like the absolutely obscene hand-holding scene with Rose. There's a handful of them in the game, and it shows that the dynamic sex scene can really pop when it's fed the right stuff. The problem is that those scenes are few and far between.

I think a lot of that would be mitigated if more care was taken with regards to named NPCs. There was a lot of potential for character and world-building with the now-scrapped companion system (assuming sane limits were put in place to keep it from becoming overwhelming), but I think it's safe to say that ship has sailed.

 

[romantacles]

If one did want to make a game with similar systems, (ie tranformation, procedural sex scenes, procedurally generated npcs that are saved as part of the world, etc...) but with a very different premise, could a javascript/typescript app handle that? or would using something like java be better? (I'm familiar with java, less so with html/javascript, and quickly looking I don't think there's really any good free plug and play GUI solution for c++ unless I went with a solution that uses html anyway)

 

[throbzombie]

So last month I had about $400 in donos and around $300 revenue. Lilith would be making a slightly more efficient rate - probably 20% total which does come to about $5000-$6000. That's still a pretty big hit to take before taxes.

It's $6300 a month, not $5000-$6000. At the average contribution that Inno pulls in, Subscribestar charges a 10% processing fee, and 90% of 7,000 is 6,300. She said she only needed $2500 not to work a job, so she's making more than double what we can assume is her cost of living. For this.

 

[tehlemon]

Fair enough - LT definitely doesn't have enough content/mechanical variation for more than a week of gameplay; so if you know 80 of these, I'd definitely be interested in your top 5. Or the ones that aren't totally abandoned/buggy.

I still would maintain that people are sticking around based on a lack of good alternatives. Writing the content is definitely troublesome too. One reason I'm using RPG Maker is that CGs and graphics make up for a lot of the dialogue I'd otherwise have to write - but that means my play time is much shorter per content segment.

The top 5 are all the obvious ones you already know, I hate to say. And you're probably right about alternatives.

edit: where did the 10 other replies come from... dang it...

There's a handful of them in the game, and it shows that the dynamic sex scene can really pop when it's fed the right stuff. The problem is that those scenes are few and far between.

The other problem is that there hasn't been much added in the last few years.

 

[Sarkath]

If one did want to make a game with similar systems, (ie tranformation, procedural sex scenes, procedurally generated npcs that are saved as part of the world, etc...) but with a very different premise, could a javascript/typescript app handle that? or would using something like java be better? (I'm familiar with java, less so with html/javascript, and quickly looking I don't think there's really any good free plug and play GUI solution for c++ unless I went with a solution that uses html anyway)

Sure, any of those languages could do it without much of an issue. The main things you need to consider are: a) are you comfortable enough with the language that you can make it work? b) does the ecosystem support the platforms that you want to support? and c) how easy is it for users to actually play the game?

A is a pretty easy one to answer, and it's generally pretty subjective. You could do this with C if you wanted to. Would you want to? Probably not.

Much of B depends on your own capabilities and hardware. Let's say you only have a Windows PC. If you write a web app you can be reasonably sure that anyone can run it (though there might be some caveats on mobile devices). If you're more comfortable writing a native app, supporting platforms that you don't own would require you to either put out speculative builds or enlisting help. The steady rise of ARM in the PC market (new Macs, Surface Pro X, Raspberry Pi, etc) complicates things a bit as well.

C is something that actually impacts Lilith's Throne and likely other JavaFX apps. It's super easy to play the game on Windows, but getting it to run on Linux and macOS can be tricky due to it relying on an old version of Java that ships with JavaFX, and most OpenJDK distributions don't include it. I've been able to get it to work on later versions of Java (Linux/x86-64, and both Intel and ARM Macs) but that, in turn, makes it more difficult to run on Windows because Java 8 is still highly recommended for general use. If you're primarily targeting Windows, with Linux/Mac support being a nice-to-have (like LT) this could work. If you want all three to be first-class platforms, it's going to require some thought and effort when it comes time to distribute your work.

As far as my thoughts are concerned: if you want to be able to develop once and deploy without too much angst on the client side, just use HTML with JavaScript/TypeScript/CoffeeScript/whatever. Webdev is a very handy skill to have professionally, so if you're either in the industry or planning to get into it, it's a good thing to learn.

If you want to go with a desktop app, Java is a fairly safe bet if you get the deployment issues under wraps. .NET has some promising cross-platform toolkits available as well if you wanted to go down that rabbit hole (Avalonia, MAUI, and Eto.Forms come to mind).

Going with a game engine is another option, too. Godot, Construct, Game Maker Studio, and Unity all let you export games to web, desktop, and mobile. If you're planning to add more graphics and interactivity this route would probably save you a fair amount of time, and the fact that they generally have fairly complete, cross-platform UI toolkits included is another plus. This might feel like overkill for simple games, but keep in mind that development time is also a very important asset in one-man projects. If it saves enough time it might be worth going with something like this.

 

[DietrichGRU]

Mind sharing some of the best examples you've seen? I enjoy text-games but I've been having a hard time finding something in the same vein as Lilith's Throne (for the record, I already know of TiTs and CoC so those don't count). There's Degrees of Lewdity but I'm not a big fan of feeling powerless all the time and getting raped at every corner. While I don't mind a sub role, I like some variety too.

I don't have the patience for management games so titles like Fort of Chains and Jack o Nine Tails are a no-go for me. I'm also tend to turn my nose at dating sims and sandbox games that make me grind stats or visit a several locations at specific times, hoping to trigger a scene (I know the games who follow this trend are usually visual novels but whatever. Point stands.)

Dryad Quest RPG is probably one of the better alternatives I've found so far. The combat is a bit hard IMO but content wise it's up there, though there's not a whole lot to it as of yet. Then there's also The Company. I love the idea of using drugs on people and watching their reaction. The denial content with mom/step-mom was pretty good! A bit of a shame that the developer didn't expand upon it and decided to segway mom's route into a completely unrelated fetish.

The main thing for me is that there aren't a whole lot of (good) text games with a female protag on the forefront. And some of those that do exist are M2F transformations, which is fine but not the thematic I'm after. NewLife would be another candidate... if the developer wasn't slow as molasses and released tiny updates. He is either on par or even worse than Inno...

PS: I almost completely forgot!! Accidental Woman and Esoteric Erotica!
Both of these games have the potential surpass even Lilith's Throne, the issue is that they have been in development for a long time and yet are little more than proofs of concept, especially Esoteric Erotica.

EE has everything I'd love in an adult text game; extensive character customization, BDSM and Lovecraft themes. The whole "tone" of the game feels right and the UI is something to behold. Unfortunately the dev is... something else. Bad attitude towards people. Unfortunately, the whole project feels like a pipe-dream; dev is more interested in working under the hood and making a technical wonder than an actual, playable game any time soon. Lilith's Throne has better chances of being finished that EE.

100% agree on EE. It's ironic that the devs wrote more about the game on their blog, rather than for the project itself. Other than that:

• Female agent — customizable fem protagonist, some bdsm. Project kinda maybe returning from dev hell.
• Repurposing center — M2F fem protag, bdsm included. Sandboxy and grindy-ish though.
• Whore of Babylon — fem protag, bdsm and occult stuff. And nuns. Light sandbox with stat juggling without much grind. Dom/Sub routes vary noticeably. Amusingly enough, this one's narrative does not completely fall into whoresim mentality, which is great.
• The Fixer — fem protag, not too grindy and somewhat unusual storyline. Artstyle could sometimes go into nightmare fuel territory, so bring some lucky charm or holy water to that.
• Concubine — fem protag with bdsm galore. Completely sub narrative, but done competently, even if a bit insane. To be fair, more of a book, than a game.
• X-Change pill — gender-bender fest. Early in development, but somewhat promising to keep an eye on. Cringeworthy minigames are annoying though.
• Succubus Stories — fem protag with some tf options and alchemy. Got a fairly significant updates recently, worth a look.
• Tales of Androgyny — trap-futa carnival. Has interesting combat mechanics, for example, an option to lewd opponent into compliance the hands-on way. Or full-pure playthrough.

The are good chances that you've already seen/played all of them, but maybe some've slipped unnoticed. In terms of female PC and occult-ish themes Whore of Babylon is the brightest imo. A bunch of nuns summoning Satan praise be! through ritual orgy is fairly entertaining to see.

 

[OffPathGames]

Have you played

You must be registered to see the links

? It's been around for a over a decade with a very consistent update schedule, and transformation is a core feature.

Two things to keep in mind are that it's currently written in Inform (a Godot port is currently in the works) so it generally uses a very Infocom-esque control scheme, and it's very furry.



I suspect that RPG Maker itself might be largely to blame for the difficulties in implementing the sex system in your game, to be honest. I haven't messed with it in detail for a while, but last time I worked with it it didn't seem very well suited for anything outside of the general JRPG formula. Granted, anything is possible with plugins (it sounds like you were able to get it to work with considerable effort), but it's largely going against the grain.

A transformation system is conceptually pretty easy to implement if you have complete control of the engine. At its simplest, it's essentially a matter of making body part objects for X species and attaching them to Y character instance in some way or another. It's a lot more tricky to design handwritten sex scenes around that, as the writer has to take note of how large the player is, how many dicks/pussies they have, the length of their hair, whether or not they have a tail, and a myriad of other things depending on the exact content. I've written some practice scenes in the past year or so using Twine, and constantly having to keep in mind things like the position of the player's head relative to another character's body during, say, an embrace can be pretty draining.

I'd argue that LT's dynamic sex system is kinda cheating, but it's very pragmatic given Inno's general approach to the game's flow. Rather than having richly written interactions designed around whole characters, the interactions in LT are based around interactions between body parts at a given pace (rough, normal, and gentle) and against a set of fetishes (though it largely boils down to hate/tolerate, as everything outside of that is purely mathematical). It's good in that interactions generally make some degree of sense without requiring too much development time or restricting player freedoms, but IMO it tends to lead to interactions that are largely forgettable. It's good for a quick fap in the moment, I suppose, but it results in a distinct lack of personality. Everyone with vaguely similar parts behaves identically at a given pace.

The only really unique scenes are stuff like the absolutely obscene hand-holding scene with Rose. There's a handful of them in the game, and it shows that the dynamic sex scene can really pop when it's fed the right stuff. The problem is that those scenes are few and far between.

I think a lot of that would be mitigated if more care was taken with regards to named NPCs. There was a lot of potential for character and world-building with the now-scrapped companion system (assuming sane limits were put in place to keep it from becoming overwhelming), but I think it's safe to say that ship has sailed.

Working in tech and being able to code, it's actually not too difficult to extend the RPG Maker engine to do whatever I want. The biggest problem is actually getting art assets, UI elements/functionality, and moving the UI around in a performance friendly and user friendly manner.

Something like transformation would be theoretically possible with equipment types and hidden items, but it wouldn't fit with the graphics-heavy bent of RPG Maker. The UI would be too opaque to be manageable and the amount of extra data, functions would slow the game down just like LT has trouble with.

 

[romantacles]

Sure, any of those languages could do it without much of an issue. The main things you need to consider are: a) are you comfortable enough with the language that you can make it work? b) does the ecosystem support the platforms that you want to support? and c) how easy is it for users to actually play the game?

A is a pretty easy one to answer, and it's generally pretty subjective. You could do this with C if you wanted to. Would you want to? Probably not.

Much of B depends on your own capabilities and hardware. Let's say you only have a Windows PC. If you write a web app you can be reasonably sure that anyone can run it (though there might be some caveats on mobile devices). If you're more comfortable writing a native app, supporting platforms that you don't own would require you to either put out speculative builds or enlisting help. The steady rise of ARM in the PC market (new Macs, Surface Pro X, Raspberry Pi, etc) complicates things a bit as well.

C is something that actually impacts Lilith's Throne and likely other JavaFX apps. It's super easy to play the game on Windows, but getting it to run on Linux and macOS can be tricky due to it relying on an old version of Java that ships with JavaFX, and most OpenJDK distributions don't include it. I've been able to get it to work on later versions of Java (Linux/x86-64, and both Intel and ARM Macs) but that, in turn, makes it more difficult to run on Windows because Java 8 is still highly recommended for general use. If you're primarily targeting Windows, with Linux/Mac support being a nice-to-have (like LT) this could work. If you want all three to be first-class platforms, it's going to require some thought and effort when it comes time to distribute your work.

As far as my thoughts are concerned: if you want to be able to develop once and deploy without too much angst on the client side, just use HTML with JavaScript/TypeScript/CoffeeScript/whatever. Webdev is a very handy skill to have professionally, so if you're either in the industry or planning to get into it, it's a good thing to learn.

If you want to go with a desktop app, Java is a fairly safe bet if you get the deployment issues under wraps. .NET has some promising cross-platform toolkits available as well if you wanted to go down that rabbit hole (Avalonia, MAUI, and Eto.Forms come to mind).

Going with a game engine is another option, too. Godot, Construct, Game Maker Studio, and Unity all let you export games to web, desktop, and mobile. If you're planning to add more graphics and interactivity this route would probably save you a fair amount of time, and the fact that they generally have fairly complete, cross-platform UI toolkits included is another plus. This might feel like overkill for simple games, but keep in mind that development time is also a very important asset in one-man projects. If it saves enough time it might be worth going with something like this.

Thanks for the info!! I am actually working on a prototype on godot- but I'm still in the stage where I'm considering trying new things because the UI system as it is in godot while isn't exactly unfriendly to text games, definitely isn't made for it. (I hear some of that will improve in 4.0, but that's a ways off) So I got curious about other solutions that are already more text/legibility orientated. Spending time making a good UI/understanding the UI system in godot would be worthwhile but part of me wants something that works better out of the box so I can concentrate on the fun things (ie system design and implementation, rather than tutorial hell. Which I'd still be in for html, since I am rusty, but I feel like I'd see results faster since I have some prior experience). Eh, all I can do is experiment with different things and see what works. It's good to know html could handle everything just fine if I go that route- I wanted to check in somewhere first lol.

I have to say I really love the system design in Lilith's Throne, the turn based sex is an interesting change of pace from what's in other games. And the transformation system is super detailed too.

COC2 looks like it simplified the transformations a lot (ie you can't go taur) to simplify things. Is implementing transformation that performance heavy? I know just from fiddling around with class design that a character object would get pretty complicated just from keeping track of all the body parts, let alone everything else you'd want to store in there.

 

[tehlemon]

Working in tech and being able to code, it's actually not too difficult to extend the RPG Maker engine to do whatever I want. The biggest problem is actually getting art assets, UI elements/functionality, and moving the UI around in a performance friendly and user friendly manner.

Something like transformation would be theoretically possible with equipment types and hidden items, but it wouldn't fit with the graphics-heavy bent of RPG Maker. The UI would be too opaque to be manageable and the amount of extra data, functions would slow the game down just like LT has trouble with.

If it were me, I'd probably switch to Unity rather than doing all that work with RPGM. Unity is surprisingly easy to work with, and if I was doing that level of customization, that's the engine I'd prefer personally.

COC2 looks like it simplified the transformations a lot (ie you can't go taur) to simplify things. Is implementing transformation that performance heavy? I know just from fiddling around with class design that a character object would get pretty complicated just from keeping track of all the body parts, let alone everything else you'd want to store in there.

CoC2's transformation system is weird. It somehow manages to be overly complicated while also being overly simple when playing. Like, there's a whole bunch of conditional nonsense tied to every transformation, yet you end up with really limited options with what you can do with it.

I really think it could be good, but only if they changed most of the transformations so they're not all or nothing. Like, right now you take a transformative item, and most of them do a full body pass checking their conditionals. Only a handful let you target transformations in a way that'll let you really tweak your character. So you get stuck in a situation where the game engine actually recognizes a whole bunch of body states that you can't actually achieve in game. And then there's the extra annoying ones where it does a 100% transformation every time, so you can't even abuse the conditionals.

I get that they made up some bullshit reasons why it makes sense in lore, but that makes the system boring IMO. Through save editing you can see just how much their engine can support, just let me actually customize the details in game.

I have strong opinions about this, and not just because I'm loaded on cold meds lol

 

[Sarkath]

Working in tech and being able to code, it's actually not too difficult to extend the RPG Maker engine to do whatever I want. The biggest problem is actually getting art assets, UI elements/functionality, and moving the UI around in a performance friendly and user friendly manner.

It might be just a simple lack of patience, but often times when I see extreme extensions to RPGM I just get the vibe that it just might have been easier to do in Unity or something like that.

I should probably familiarize myself with the newer versions a bit. My experiences with it are admittedly fairly rusty, and just the fact that one of my favorite games (OneShot) was made with RMXP and I didn't even realize it probably means that there's a lot of good that I'm missing.

Thanks for the info!! I am actually working on a prototype on godot- but I'm still in the stage where I'm considering trying new things because the UI system as it is in godot while isn't exactly unfriendly to text games, definitely isn't made for it. (I hear some of that will improve in 4.0, but that's a ways off)

I'm messing around with Godot as well, actually! The UI system isn't the worst I've seen but it does leave a lot to be desired. In particular, the anchor system is a bit on the wonky side, and the containers are a bit too freeform for my liking (I'm used to setting the dimensions of a container and then adding children, not adding children and adjusting the children's size).

So I got curious about other solutions that are already more text/legibility orientated. Spending time making a good UI/understanding the UI system in godot would be worthwhile but part of me wants something that works better out of the box so I can concentrate on the fun things (ie system design and implementation, rather than tutorial hell. Which I'd still be in for html, since I am rusty, but I feel like I'd see results faster since I have some prior experience). Eh, all I can do is experiment with different things and see what works. It's good to know html could handle everything just fine if I go that route- I wanted to check in somewhere first lol.

Modern web technologies are surprisingly powerful, and the ecosystem has expanded to the point where you can build stuff like C/SDL games to run in the browser via asm.js. It's kind of crazy, really. Granted, that still doesn't stop frontend tech like CSS from being a bit fiddly, but at least it means that you can target the browser even if you don't directly write HTML/JS.

I think my biggest complaint about web development is that package managers like NPM tend to be an absolute mess if you're used to something with actual structure like Maven or NuGet. The fact that I do web development for 40+ hours a week also kinda drove me toward alternatives, lol.

I have to say I really love the system design in Lilith's Throne, the turn based sex is an interesting change of pace from what's in other games. And the transformation system is super detailed too.

I tend to think that it leans a bit too heavily toward dynamic sex. Given that LT is a sandbox there's no way they could have handwritten sex scenes for every alley mutt, but I do wish unique NPCs had a bit more flair and personality outside of the talky bits.

COC2 looks like it simplified the transformations a lot (ie you can't go taur) to simplify things. Is implementing transformation that performance heavy? I know just from fiddling around with class design that a character object would get pretty complicated just from keeping track of all the body parts, let alone everything else you'd want to store in there.

I think some aspects of that are to simplify the writing process. CoC has always been about meticulously written sex scenes, and completely changing the player's body type would add a pretty huge variable to that equation (most scenes would have to have swathes rewritten for the taur variant).

In LT's case, its performance issues aren't due to the transformation system but rather from some questionable design decisions elsewhere (such as iterating every single status effect against every NPC each time the player breathes).

 

[OffPathGames]

It might be just a simple lack of patience, but often times when I see extreme extensions to RPGM I just get the vibe that it just might have been easier to do in Unity or something like that.

So I actually started with Unity - and was doing a diablo-like action game with action H and animations. I may go back to that system another time - but I ran into the same problem where I was either using a 3rd party extension like the ORK RPG system and having to learn that and then also extend that system for sex or coding an RPG from scratch. Also, art assets are still a problem. I had to go buy a bunch of UI pieces, learn Unity UI, create dialogue, combat etc all from scratch or using 3rd party stuff which I also had to learn the commands for.

I started implementing the stat system and then realized I didn't code the sex system and combat system on the same stat framework bc I was hardcoding for prototyping and would have to spend a month fixing that. I implemented dialogue and then spend 3 days trying to figure out how to scale the text to resolution bc the plugin didn't support that. I implemented an item system, then had to extend it to make penis, vagina etc items, then figured out the item system wouldn't work for that because I'd have to break my hierarchy to bring character stats into those items so I recoded that.

So all these systems have problems. People here are talking theoretically about how Unity or some language is powerful enough to code these games - but the problem is knowing what you want to design and then prototyping it in a way where you won't have to code everything from scratch or rework the technicals all the time while releasing regular content at the same time. Obviously LT is pretty simple in concept but getting it to code and then adding content without breaking it is probably way harder than people here realize.

What I figured was that RPG Maker was the best prototyping system to figure out all these problems and have a good framework for displaying content and dialogue that wouldn't break all the time.

 

[tehlemon]

People here are talking theoretically about how Unity or some language is powerful enough to code these games - but the problem is knowing what you want to design and then prototyping it in a way where you won't have to code everything from scratch or rework the technicals all the time while releasing regular content at the same time. Obviously LT is pretty simple in concept but getting it to code and then adding content without breaking it is probably way harder than people here realize.

What I figured was that RPG Maker was the best prototyping system to figure out all these problems and have a good framework for displaying content and dialogue that wouldn't break all the time.

I mean, yeah. That is one of the hard parts of designing and coding anything, not just for building a game. There's a lot of planning and design work to be done before you even start coding for that exact reason. You're not just designing game systems, you're designing workflow and Skipping that portion of the design process is how you end up with a mess like LT.

Stuff like modding support and having a good way to generate content that doesn't require constantly reworking should be planned ahead for. The reason LT sucks to add content on was because it was badly designed from the start. That's why those systems are constantly being reworked to try and make it less shit. If you skip the important planning and design steps, you'll end up in the exact shitty position you just described.

 

[Sarkath]

So I actually started with Unity - and was doing a diablo-like action game with action H and animations. I may go back to that system another time - but I ran into the same problem where I was either using a 3rd party extension like the ORK RPG system and having to learn that and then also extend that system for sex or coding an RPG from scratch. Also, art assets are still a problem. I had to go buy a bunch of UI pieces, learn Unity UI, create dialogue, combat etc all from scratch or using 3rd party stuff which I also had to learn the commands for.

I started implementing the stat system and then realized I didn't code the sex system and combat system on the same stat framework bc I was hardcoding for prototyping and would have to spend a month fixing that. I implemented dialogue and then spend 3 days trying to figure out how to scale the text to resolution bc the plugin didn't support that. I implemented an item system, then had to extend it to make penis, vagina etc items, then figured out the item system wouldn't work for that because I'd have to break my hierarchy to bring character stats into those items so I recoded that.

Art assets aside (can sympathize—I'm definitely not an artist!), it sounds like more of a process problem than a tool problem in this case. I get the impression that you did a lot of learning/prototyping in situ, which is a very risky approach when you're putting a project together.

It sounds like you've gotten over a lot of those hurdles with your current game, but here's some unsolicited advice anyway:

I would strongly advise keeping your experimental prototypes far away from your production code. Sometimes you can evolve a prototype into the basis for a project, but generally that's only doable after a few iterations.

When you're scoping out a new project, you should develop a technical scope before you even open the IDE/engine tools. You're not going to be able to nail down every aspect, but if you go in knowing roughly what your project is going to look on a technical level it'll help significantly.

It's pretty easy to forget specifics when you have a lot of moving parts, so you need to come up with a way to organize them. Using a Kanban board is a pretty good way to organize everything. Two popular examples are

You must be registered to see the links

and

You must be registered to see the links

(I personally use

You must be registered to see the links

, since I can self-host it). Basically, you scope out your project in tasks and subtasks, then you can drag them around a grid to signify their status (for example: new, declined, in progress, on hold, in testing, complete…whatever best fits your workflow, really). It gives you a nice visual of where everything stands so that you don't suddenly realize that you're missing something at a crucial moment, and it's a huge boon if you ever bring on other team members.

This isn't really related to design, per se, but learn

You must be registered to see the links

(or another SCM) if you haven't already. If you make a fucky wucky at some point it gives you the option of rolling back to previous versions of the code, among other things. If you collaborate with another dev at some point, I'd consider an SCM to be mandatory.

Most importantly: don't be afraid to throw away work. Learning through failure is an important skill to develop. Just try to make sure that your failures happen outside of your main project (or, at the very least, occur in a separate code branch).

Obviously LT is pretty simple in concept but getting it to code and then adding content without breaking it is probably way harder than people here realize.

I've found that non-developers tend to be split down the middle with regards to their attitude on programming. Half think that even writing a "Hello World!" program is an insurmountable feat that can only be accomplished by the gods, while the other half consists of the "adding multiplayer is ez lol" category.

In truth, a lot of difficulty can be mitigated with proper design. The issue in this particular case is that LT never seemed to have a proper design: it mutated rather than evolved. It's not to say that Inno went in without a plan—she absolutely did have a plan, and a lot of thought went into various aspects of the game's design. The problem is that most of that plan consisted of world, lore, and things of that nature. High level design stuff, really. The code behind all of this is a bit of a mess. Very little attention was given to how computers would process data, and that's one of the things that leads to it wildly thrashing memory (among other things). Yeah, it works, but it's a house of cards waiting to fall (and the fact that I can easily and consistently get it to run very poorly on a modern high-end CPU is kind of silly).

And, of course, there's the financial aspect. Perspective changes drastically when money starts to change hands. An inconsistent schedule is excusable if you're already maintaining a full-time job (unless you have a very entitled fanbase), but when something is your full-time job it naturally leads to more scrutiny.

What I figured was that RPG Maker was the best prototyping system to figure out all these problems and have a good framework for displaying content and dialogue that wouldn't break all the time.

It kind of feels to me like Unity forces you to build what you need more or less from scratch, whereas RPG Maker gives you a ton of functionality up front and asks you to mold it to your specifications should you need to escape its boundaries.

 

[Jaybig]

Is there a hope for android version?

 

[tehlemon]

Is there a hope for android version?

No.

 

[StapleComm]

This is slowly turning into a "How to make a video game" discussion page

 

[Monstrous Moonshine]

This is slowly turning into a "How to make a video game" discussion page

Is there anything else productive to be talking about? Normally game threads discuss the content of the game, the mechanics, the narrative, and what have you, sadly we haven't seen a substantial release of any new material within these categories for a very long time.

 

[tehlemon]

This is slowly turning into a "How to make a video game" discussion page

Slowly? We've been talking about game design for like two years now lol

And its not like there's anything to talk about with the game. We've gotten like, an hours worth of content in the last year.