Prospective developer with some questions.

[AdelphiaGaming]

Recently discovered AVNs like a month or so ago through Steam. I think I stumbled upon Summers Gone first. Then kind of fell down a rabbit hole of games. While I'm pretty inexperienced with AVNs, I'm familiar with Daz and Blender. The former is great for character prototyping and getting some ideas. Traditionally, I've used Blender for promo models. Nothing huge. I recently stumbled on Diffeomorphic, as well.

I'm here because it seems like there's a fairly knowledgeable base of devs that would probably offer some good insight on some of the questions I have, but I'll save that for the dev help thread. Just gotta get that pesky post limit out of the way.

Thanks.

 

[Asteroius]

Welcome! And goodluck with your future endeavors

 

[DesireForgerTeam]

Hey there! I'm the developer of

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— it was my first game, so I'll just share what I’ve learned along the way, in bite-sized chunks.


Like you, my initial plan was to create characters in Daz and then do all the animation and rendering in Blender. But since I started with very little technical knowledge, that plan quickly had to change.

One key lesson: the more VRAM your GPU has, the better. That might not be an issue in smaller games with fewer characters, but my game ended up with 64 characters, and I ran into constant VRAM limitations. For large scenes, I simply couldn’t render them in Blender. So I had to do all animations and rendering directly in Daz, which was a painful process — especially because Daz's viewport becomes incredibly sluggish with complex scenes, making animation tweaking almost impossible. So yeah, high VRAM GPUs are essential in my opinion.

Then there's the scope and character count. I honestly don’t know how I got the courage to make a game with 64 characters in my very first project . If I could go back, I’d definitely start with a smaller, more focused story with fewer characters. That said, having so many characters forced me to learn a lot very quickly, so it wasn’t entirely a bad thing.

That’s just the visual side — when it comes to the coding side, it really depends on your project, but most AVNs use Ren'Py. One tip here: look into the plugins you might want early on. For example, I added controller support mid-project and it got messy. If you plan ahead and integrate those things early, your life will be much easier down the line.

 

[Cajun Fox]

Hey there

 

[Verdance]

That's awesome! Your experience will definitely come in handy. 3D modeling is a huge barrier to some peoples ideas and can be very intimidating. I'm not sure I'll be much help but I'll check out your dev help post too if I can find it.