Question on the importance of visuals in erotic games

[Deleted member 153294]

TL;DR; What are some things you can do as a developer to compensate for a lack of graphics in your game (ex. sex scenes, character sprites)?

Hello everyone, I am an aspiring game developer with some fears about his first major game. I am still in the planning phase, but I want to make sure I take everything into account before starting the big project. While assessing my own skills I realized I cannot produce any art for my game. Now this wouldn't be a big problem for a normal game, you can probably find enough free assets on the internet to fill the base requirements.

The problem is I want to create an erotic game. I've been looking through the most popular ones and a majority, if not all of them, have really pretty visuals. That is something I cannot do in my current position. I'm confident in the other departments such as technical skill and game design (CS degree + experience developing games) and I believe I can still improve lots in my weaker points like writing and marketing.

So this is where I don't know how to proceed. Do you guys have any advice for a game with little to no graphics (think Lilith's Throne level, only some portraits and some textures for the items). Is it even worth getting in this field with no artistic talent? My current plan is to create a smaller scale game that I can finish in one or two years, hopefully gather enough support so I can afford commissioned art and then start working on more ambitious projects. Also any tips for a new contender in the scene would be much appreciated.

If it helps at all the game I'm currently thinking of is an RPG in a futuristic setting, with FGO/auto battler style combat. Maybe if it all goes well add in a crafting system and a planet management system. The main themes of the game would be competing with love rivals, so mostly vanilla and netorare. And don't worry, I don't want to make another RPG Maker copy.

Thank you in advance and sorry if this is a dumb question!

 

[Deleted member 167032]

You need to ask yourself why you want to make a game.

Money or Hobby/fun...

Once you have that worked out then decide on which engine to use. Also just text based or Visual and text based etc... You say you want to do something small now for 2yrs or so. That is a long time and means lots of work. Making a game is a lot of work.

Some VN's with graphics have not so great graphics but loads of people enjoy them still. It may be due to story/character build or humor.
Then some have amazing graphics but game play is not that attractive.

You have to decide how much time you willing to put into it. I assume you dont have the greatest pc now to start off with a more graphically enriched game? You dont need to be very artistic to make a VN honestly, loads of devs aren't they just googled how to lighting, photography and camera angles etc...

Hope above helps you a bit. If you really into making a game for money or fun, both are great reasons then don't stop and make what you want to make and take it form there.

 

[Deleted member 153294]

Yeah, I've thought about using Daz for graphics but my GTX 1060 can't handle it. It does help to get some encouragement and I do intend to at least give it a try. Hopefully something good will come out of it. I'm not going in expecting to make a profit out of it, but I do hope that at some point this could become something more than I hobby. This is why I'm trying to get as much information before getting too deep into the project.

Thanks!

You need to ask yourself why you want to make a game.

Money or Hobby/fun...

Once you have that worked out then decide on which engine to use. Also just text based or Visual and text based etc... You say you want to do something small now for 2yrs or so. That is a long time and means lots of work. Making a game is a lot of work.

Some VN's with graphics have not so great graphics but loads of people enjoy them still. It may be due to story/character build or humor.
Then some have amazing graphics but game play is not that attractive.

You have to decide how much time you willing to put into it. I assume you dont have the greatest pc now to start off with a more graphically enriched game? You dont need to be very artistic to make a VN honestly, loads of devs aren't they just googled how to lighting, photography and camera angles etc...

Hope above helps you a bit. If you really into making a game for money or fun, both are great reasons then don't stop and make what you want to make and take it form there.

 

[Deleted member 167032]

Youre 1060 can handle it as i started off with an old AMD 8 core, 24gb ddr3 pc with a 1060 3Gb GPU. So you can. It's down to settings in your Render Settings part and lighting in your scenes. If you have a 1060 6GB card then doing an inside a room render with 2 characters in the scene that will take from 1h45min to 2h15min. I know as i did this for a long time.

IF i can give you an alternative idea. Start of with a Comic. DO it as a learning curve. A Comic is a visual novel in slow motion as i see it. There are some great comics here on F95. Pegasus and losekorntrol makes some amazing ones. It's a very nice way to get to know DAZ, learn artistic skills without it taking up mega time. You can focus on one scene at a time.

Once that is good or get good reviews you move onto Visual Novels etc...

The hardest part of making a VN is the crowd on sites like F95.

Yeah, I've thought about using Daz for graphics but my GTX 1060 can't handle it. It does help to get some encouragement and I do intend to at least give it a try. Hopefully something good will come out of it. I'm not going in expecting to make a profit out of it, but I do hope that at some point this could become something more than I hobby. This is why I'm trying to get as much information before getting too deep into the project.

Thanks!

 

[Deleted member 153294]

That's good to know, unfortunately I won't have the necessary time to balance everything out (work, uni, coding, writing). But after I finish with uni I'll probably try my hand at a comic to learn DAZ.

Youre 1060 can handle it as i started off with an old AMD 8 core, 24gb ddr3 pc with a 1060 3Gb GPU. So you can. It's down to settings in your Render Settings part and lighting in your scenes. If you have a 1060 6GB card then doing an inside a room render with 2 characters in the scene that will take from 1h45min to 2h15min. I know as i did this for a long time.

IF i can give you an alternative idea. Start of with a Comic. DO it as a learning curve. A Comic is a visual novel in slow motion as i see it. There are some great comics here on F95. Pegasus and losekorntrol makes some amazing ones. It's a very nice way to get to know DAZ, learn artistic skills without it taking up mega time. You can focus on one scene at a time.

Once that is good or get good reviews you move onto Visual Novels etc...

The hardest part of making a VN is the crowd on sites like F95.

 

[Jofur]

I think above all you need to play to the strengths of the visual style you choose. For example take text based games. Lilith's Throne uses the lack of graphics to explore mechanics that few erotic games out there can. Much the same way something like Dwarf Fortress does. But a text based game that is basically just a VN without the images is just lackluster and it doesn't really offer anything that a proper VN would.

 

[anne O'nymous]

TL;DR; What are some things you can do as a developer to compensate for a lack of graphics in your game (ex. sex scenes, character sprites)?

Writing it in my own language.

Text only and massively textual adult games aren't bad by themselves, but few among the players are ready to read long bunches of text in a language that isn't their native one.
It's not just a question of knowledge and/or fluency, but a question of context. Unless you're fully bilingual, the text will have less impact on you if it's not in your native language. And since the text is what carry the information in your game, it make it way less interesting.
It become worse if you aren't yourself native English speaker, or totally fluent with it, since it will be "not this good English". What pass when you've around 50 words by dialog line, especially if you've the images to distract your attention, quickly become uncomfortable if you've blocks of many hundreds of words to read.

 

[79flavors]

If you are still open to the idea of using Daz3D, another option is to write a game using a mix of sprites and fully rendered scenes.

Render the backgrounds once, without characters.
Then render each character at least once (maybe a couple of images per character, clothing, looking left/right, smiling, etc).
The technical difficulty is consistent lighting - but that's not something I can advise about.

Then overlay the character image(s) of your choice over the top of the background scene.

There will still be scenes (probably the sex scenes) which still need to be fully rendered. But if you can tell 85% of your story with the pre-rendered character sprites - that frees up a massive amount of time to spend on the remaining 15% that you need fully rendered images for.

If you can't imagine what that might look like, download Cuntswell Academy:
https://f95zone.to/threads/cuntswell-academy-ch-10-se-virtual-indecency.21573/
... and play the first 10 minutes. It's a mix of pre-rendered sprites and fully rendered scenes.

The other thing I would say is that 4 of the top 10 games (sorted using weighted rankings) here on F95 were all written using HoneySelect. The rendered images are nowhere near as pretty as Daz3D (but some are still damned impressive regardless) - but have been successful projects anyway. I'd put their relative success down to story and writing, but that's just my personal opinion. Objective fact though is that games can be successful without pixel perfect rendering.

 

[Deleted member 153294]

I think above all you need to play to the strengths of the visual style you choose. For example take text based games. Lilith's Throne uses the lack of graphics to explore mechanics that few erotic games out there can. Much the same way something like Dwarf Fortress does. But a text based game that is basically just a VN without the images is just lackluster and it doesn't really offer anything that a proper VN would.

A very good observation, this is something I will definitely think more about, what unique mechanics I can implement. I never intended to make a VN style game but now that I think about it all the mechanics I want to implement would be better if they have some visual elements.
Thank you for your insight!

Writing it in my own language.

Text only and massively textual adult games aren't bad by themselves, but few among the players are ready to read long bunches of text in a language that isn't their native one.
It's not just a question of knowledge and/or fluency, but a question of context. Unless you're fully bilingual, the text will have less impact on you if it's not in your native language. And since the text is what carry the information in your game, it make it way less interesting.
It become worse if you aren't yourself native English speaker, or totally fluent with it, since it will be "not this good English". What pass when you've around 50 words by dialog line, especially if you've the images to distract your attention, quickly become uncomfortable if you've blocks of many hundreds of words to read.

This is so interesting, I am very different from you. If I can choose between English and my native language I will always choose English. But I do get where you're coming from. When it comes to Japanese, which I am not very good at, I often find it hard to concentrate on long texts and every stimuli helps, be it visual or auditory (voice acting).
Taking this into consideration I will definitely look into making the text easier to follow (maybe color coded lines, more dialogue less narration). I'll also keep in mind not to overextend scenes. Thanks!

If you are still open to the idea of using Daz3D, another option is to write a game using a mix of sprites and fully rendered scenes.

Render the backgrounds once, without characters.
Then render each character at least once (maybe a couple of images per character, clothing, looking left/right, smiling, etc).
The technical difficulty is consistent lighting - but that's not something I can advise about.

Then overlay the character image(s) of your choice over the top of the background scene.

There will still be scenes (probably the sex scenes) which still need to be fully rendered. But if you can tell 85% of your story with the pre-rendered character sprites - that frees up a massive amount of time to spend on the remaining 15% that you need fully rendered images for.

If you can't imagine what that might look like, download Cuntswell Academy:
https://f95zone.to/threads/cuntswell-academy-ch-10-se-virtual-indecency.21573/
... and play the first 10 minutes. It's a mix of pre-rendered sprites and fully rendered scenes.

The other thing I would say is that 4 of the top 10 games (sorted using weighted rankings) here on F95 were all written using HoneySelect. The rendered images are nowhere near as pretty as Daz3D (but some are still damned impressive regardless) - but have been successful projects anyway. I'd put their relative success down to story and writing, but that's just my personal opinion. Objective fact though is that games can be successful without pixel perfect rendering.

I think I understand what you're talking about, and if that makes rendering easier and faster damn I'm even more inclined to try my hand at 3D rendering. Unfortunately there are still obstacles in the way. I'll be moving in with 2 of my friends in about a month and after that my schedule will get a lot busier.
But you guys convinced me, if I have enough time and privacy to create some visuals I will give it a go.

 

[Deleted member 167032]

It's not for us to convince you. This must be something you want to do on your own. If real life is too busy, trust me then this is not the thing for you to do if not for fun.

 

[Deleted member 153294]

You know that you don't have to have good renders to be "successful," right? Also, have you looked into kisekae (paper dolls) for making your characters? Probably the most well-known kisekae is the

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that

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uses. But it's not the only one. There's a

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which leaves something to be desired in terms of visual quality but is very customizable programmatically.

The art doesn't have to be impressive at all. Do you remember what Trap Quest started out with? CoC and TiTS had none or very little art but those games were big too. I'd also argue that Indivi is also doing well with Lust Doll Plus. There's obviously others too. Personally i only request that you don't resort to using real porn images. When people use real porn images, there's no abstraction and it's completely a matter of personal taste. With every game i've seen here using real porn images, those images turned me off.

You could also just make the game completely with placeholder images and then look for an aspiring artist to replace them when the game is well into development.

I will definitely not use real porn images, rest assured. I think I want my game to have an anime feel to it, so I'm a bit skeptical about using 3D renders. But I wouldn't mind dropping the anime theme if it means I can add some nice graphics to the game.

I have played games utilizing the paper dolls system but I did not think about implementing it myself. I was going to do something similar to Lilith's Throne, where you only see the items a character is wearing, not the actual model, but I'll look into paper doll systems too. If they are not very time consuming, this might be a very nice addition to the game.

With all the advice I've got from you guys, story assets are probably not going to be a problem if I do decide to add them. My biggest concern right now are gameplay visuals. I don't want an old school combat system, with tons of different actions and tens of buttons to press. I wanted to streamline the combat, have the player make more passive choices (itemization and class customization) and less active choices in combat. But this means a lot of time spent waiting to make those active decisions, and staring at a wall of text doesn't sound too appealing.

With that in mind, I wanted to ask you guys what are some ways to tackle combat assets? Other than hand drawing them, nothing comes to mind from personal experience. The reply section is probably not the best place to ask this question so I'll probably revisit this in a proper thread when I get to this part.

 

[Deleted member 153294]

Well, that's probably the route I'll take, just thought maybe there are other approaches. But anyway, thanks for all the info, now I am a lot more confident that I can make a decent game by myself!

 

[khumak]

For me the characters are the most important part, and I think most games don't measure up in that category. If I don't have an emotional connection of some sort with ALL of the major characters then the story is not going to matter because I don't care what happens to the characters. So I would say the story and the renders only have to be "good enough", but the characters have to be great.

If the characters are not great then I'm just going to skip to the sex scenes so in that case the renders are all that matters.

 

[JPS007]

Just another couple of cents, seeing that I am in almost exactly the same position as you! I had an idea for an erotic game for a while now, and I am comfortable with programming and the creative aspects of the project. However, I also had no idea on how to approach the visuals. So I decided to put the game development on hold for a while and started playing around in Daz3D, basically using the first couple of scenes in my game to learn Daz and test my artistic abilities.

Firstly, the basics if Daz3D is very easy to learn - the Daz3D 101 series by The WP Guru is a fantastic beginners tutorial. I've been at it for about a month now, and I can produce scenes and characters that I would describe as adequate, even if my work is still pretty generic. Just be prepared to Google and YouTube a lot, the basics of Daz3D might be easy, but there are a lot of little quirks and issues you have to sort out as you go along.

Now the question you originally asked was about the importance of visuals, and as others have commented it depends. My generic efforts would probably be good enough if I create a fantastic game full of great characters (although the visuals would certainly improve with repeated use). My advice would be to download Daz3D and some assets, then start building a scene and the main character for your game. After a month you would have a good idea if this is for you or not, and how important the visuals need to be for your game.

Good luck!

 

[Deleted member 153294]

Just another couple of cents, seeing that I am in almost exactly the same position as you! I had an idea for an erotic game for a while now, and I am comfortable with programming and the creative aspects of the project. However, I also had no idea on how to approach the visuals. So I decided to put the game development on hold for a while and started playing around in Daz3D, basically using the first couple of scenes in my game to learn Daz and test my artistic abilities.

Firstly, the basics if Daz3D is very easy to learn - the Daz3D 101 series by The WP Guru is a fantastic beginners tutorial. I've been at it for about a month now, and I can produce scenes and characters that I would describe as adequate, even if my work is still pretty generic. Just be prepared to Google and YouTube a lot, the basics of Daz3D might be easy, but there are a lot of little quirks and issues you have to sort out as you go along.

Now the question you originally asked was about the importance of visuals, and as others have commented it depends. My generic efforts would probably be good enough if I create a fantastic game full of great characters (although the visuals would certainly improve with repeated use). My advice would be to download Daz3D and some assets, then start building a scene and the main character for your game. After a month you would have a good idea if this is for you or not, and how important the visuals need to be for your game.

Good luck!

Yeah, I think Daz3D is the way to go for me as a solo developer, but for now I won't put to much effort into the visuals side. I have decided to work on a smaller game first, that would not require me to branch out too much into unknown territory. The main reasons are simple, a lack of spare time in the foreseeable future and lack of experience. I don't want to take on a project that is too big only to stop midway because the foundation is poor.

The smaller game will contain only the core mechanics (dialogue, exploration and combat). I will only use basic 2D sprites made with kisekae. This way, I can put out something playable in a shortish time (end of the year) and then I will hopefully get some feedback on my game and decide if I am good enough to tackle a big game.

 

[anne O'nymous]

[...] but for now I won't put to much effort into the visuals side.

It's a little aside in regard of your initial question, but there's an important point that need to be addressed regarding what you just wrote: People will more easily accept average visuals as illustration of an interesting story/game, than they would accept the opposite (average interest and amazing visuals).

Obviously, amazing visuals with the most interesting story ever would be the must. But write an interesting story, make sure that the CGs correspond to the actual situation (don't make the girl say that she have no panties if we clearly see it on the screen by example), and you have your chances even if you aren't this good with Daz.

 

[rainbowpunfz]

I don't think this has been mentioned before so let me add some of my opinion: Erotic games should be treated much the same as horror games as opposed to something like spectacle. Eroticisms happens in the head not on the screen, you're selling a fantasy.

If done skillfully you can even get away with showing some animated silhouettes, as long as you give the brain enough to fill in the gaps to sell the player on the fantasy though other means (good writing, sounds, movements of the silhouettes, etc.). Heck CoC was really popular in its time and it had zero visuals, just writing/mechanics that really sold you on the fantasy.

F95 happens to skew really far to the DAZ/renpy combo, but that is by far not the only successful thing out there (and mainly so prevalent due to the low barrier of entry), the most trending game on DLsites adult section right now for instance is using pixel animation. There are lots of different aesthetics out there, and if done skillfully and tastefully they all work.

 

[Selek]

zeboftw , have you decided on the approach you'd like to take?

I'm curious because I'm in a similar situation, except I have an even older card -- a GTX 980. I've been practicing Daz renders and I am slowly improving. But it's awfully slow. I'm ready to invest in a new PC and better video card (I have 3090 lust!), but the GPU market right now sure is terrible. Plus my computer room is kinda warm and I might need a watercooled CPU to boot.

The slow render times and bad GPU market make me think I should try drawing. I can draw nicely from life. I've spent lots of time in figure-drawing classes. I just don't have much experience with illustration - drawing figures from imagination or photo reference. To practice, I like a previous poster's suggestion of trying a comic. I might start with an 8-panel strip and see how it goes.