Should I make Porn Games or regular games?

[bobdillan]

I got a diploma in Games Design (was doing bachelor but the certificate is useless so i dropped out to learn on my own) So i have basic skills in 3d modeling up to a little bit of coding which i have probably forgotten by now and would need to relearn.

My basic question for anyone who might know or have an opinion is, as the title suggests

Should I start making porn games, or stick with regular games?

My long term ideal would be to just make regular games, but since I already know this forum and its community I feel starting here with a porn game would be better since I would actually have ground to stand upon instead of diving into the deep water that is non-porn indie games. plus I think that porn games that are new get better support, and I don't mean just money, i also mean things like feedback, critique etc. aka the valuable shit for a new dev to listen to.

I don't really have any major passion for Porn games specifically (besides playing them that is) so if I were to make one the game itself wouldn't be majorly focused on that aspect, but it would have it, thinking like roundscape, where you have the main story and porn scenes here and there, but those scenes are the main focus of the game itself.

My passion is for just making games in general, and since I am a High functioning autistic I have a nasty habit of needing to finish something (unless it is utter shit then i just go nope try again with someone better) So I wouldn't be one of those starts a porn game and never finishes it, even if I do by some massive change (like get married or some shit) stop watching porn, I would make sure to be loyal and finish the game.

Either way I do want to eventually head into the normal gaming side of things at some point, maybe a year maybe 5 maybe 10 or maybe never, you never know what you might decide in the future.

And since I have pretty much free time all the time, i would have plenty of time to learn and get better and make good shit.. eventually XD

My initial plan would to just post on the forums here (porn game or not since this community is cool) progress shots etc. maybe make something in rpgmaker or renp'y but I prefer 3D games so maybe even unreal or unity, or still renp'y with my own models. if the non-porn route, i would most likely make a game in unreal or unity, since most of the non-porn ideas in my head are more 3rd person or first person type games. however i do have a few ideas that would work in renp'y as a visual novel.

So yeah that is a basic summary. I have a passion for games, don't care too much where I start I non-porn or porn, I would like to make my way into non-porn but who knows i might enough it too much, if you know what i mean either way I want to make games, not too picky on the genre.

So please vote and/or reply with your opinions/feedback and even ideas for me to steal
this is mainly just to get a grasp, the winning poll won't mean that is what i go for, will still be what I think is best for me. and atm that is starting here on this forum. but if you know of any great non-porn forum or other porn-dev forums link away, I am ready for this rabbit-hole.

Lastly you might be woundering why i make no mention of patreon, it isn't because I am against them or anything, just because I think it is too early to think about it, when I actually have something to offer I would set one up, but as a support me, with reward tiers the usual shit, but no locked content and pay to play shit. maybe the whole 1 week early thing, but i dunno not gonna give it too much thought yet as money isn't the motive for me, making games is. and i wanna try and keep it that way in my mind.

P.s. feel free keep making autistic jokes on the thread (if you do) or anywhere, it is just memes and comedy no harm intent no foul. but if you support/are with autism speaks, fuck you if you don't understand why here is a google search: "autism speaks criticism" should give enough articles to see why I loathe them.

 

[baneini]

Steam is over-saturated with games of all genres so it's a difficult way to make money in general, the average indie games selling 21k copies at 5-10€ price point, and patreon made it more difficult to make money from porn games in recent years.

If you want to get hired by a game company they would value both having released a game before and no connection to porn industry, at least having a non-porn portfolio.

Maybe the have your cake and eat it too is making something you could sell on steam with a porn patch. Personally I don't understand jap VN games with 3 lewd ending scenes in 20h of gameplay, but hey ho those exist as well.

 

[DarthSeduction]

Well, if I may, a bit selfishly, make a suggestion. Start making something really cool. I have some really high end plans for the future and it will require a ton of developers to come together, find the funding, and for us to take the time to really try to make something great, at least on the scale of Life is Strange, but even better if we can. I'm more of a writer, don't have much coding or art experience, but I have a lot of ideas that could easily guide great artists and developers to making something truly great.

 

[bobdillan]

Steam is over-saturated with games of all genres so it's a difficult way to make money in general, the average indie games selling 21k copies at 5-10€ price point, and patreon made it more difficult to make money from porn games in recent years.

If you want to get hired by a game company they would value both having released a game before and no connection to porn industry, at least having a non-porn portfolio.

Maybe the have your cake and eat it too is making something you could sell on steam with a porn patch. Personally I don't understand jap VN games with 3 lewd ending scenes in 20h of gameplay, but hey ho those exist as well.

true, I was always thinking that i could do what Mike Inel does, and have two seperate identities one for non porn one for porn. however like them I would let the porn peeps know i have a non porn, and vis versa but not advertise on the non-porn that i also make porn ones. the way around patreon bullshit is to just have a page that supports you as a creator and release the game on a blog or something.3

 

[bobdillan]

Well, if I may, a bit selfishly, make a suggestion. Start making something really cool. I have some really high end plans for the future and it will require a ton of developers to come together, find the funding, and for us to take the time to really try to make something great, at least on the scale of Life is Strange, but even better if we can. I'm more of a writer, don't have much coding or art experience, but I have a lot of ideas that could easily guide great artists and developers to making something truly great.

I would offer my help, but I have a lot of learning to do before i would be of any proper use, since i haven't really done my besides drawing now and then since i finished the course. however if I get to a point where i feel confident enough to do something for someone else i will keep it in mind

 

[kimoo]

why don't you make normal game but with adult scenes
the game doesn't have to be focused on sex only

 

[NandabaCanti]

Ultimately you should just work on whatever you feel most compelled to work on. Any sort of worthwhile creative pursuit is going to entail a lot of shitty boring work that you aren't going to want to do without proper motivation. You've got to have a certain level of unhealthy obsession to be successful at things like art, writing, coding, etc. Things just get worse with game development, especially if you want to go solo, as you end up multiplying your troubles by trying to master several disciplines at once. If you don't really love what you are doing, you will never make it. So my advice is follow your strongest passion and forget everything else or you're just setting yourself up for failure.

 

[bobdillan]

why don't you make normal game but with adult scenes
the game doesn't have to be focused on sex only

that is a porn game technically :| like i would class roundscape as that kind of game, as it has the game itself and then adult scenes aswell, sometimes in the story itself.

 

[bobdillan]

Ultimately you should just work on whatever you feel most compelled to work on. Any sort of worthwhile creative pursuit is going to entail a lot of shitty boring work that you aren't going to want to do without proper motivation. You've got to have a certain level of unhealthy obsession to be successful at things like art, writing, coding, etc. Things just get worse with game development, especially if you want to go solo, as you end up multiplying your troubles by trying to master several disciplines at once. If you don't really love what you are doing, you will never make it. So my advice is follow your strongest passion and forget everything else or you're just setting yourself up for failure.

hence why i focus on making my passion the act of making something, and not what I am making. e.g. a coder sometimes just loves to code they don't always care too much about what they are coding. I want to try and be like that. obviously there will always be things that i love to make more than others, but it would be counterproductive to only ever stick to what i already like and not experiment and find out something else i might like.

Basically my goal is to love the grind not getting a finished product, as a lot of the time there is no finished product as idea or wip get scrapped for so many different reason, which reminds me of one of the most important rules i was taught "don't be afraid to kill your babies" now obviously this is not literal, basically it means don't be afraid to throw away ideas or work in progress things if they just won't work, fit with the current game, or is just bad. e.g if the gameplay is shit doesn't matter how good the story is the game will be shit.

Like look at watchdogs 1, the story was all over the place because of rewrites the game has its issues, but it was still a fun and enjoyable game, that i myself remember fondly because a. it made me care about the main character and like him, and b. the gameplay despite its issues was fun and enjoyable. bonus c. it had a nice dark and gritty tone which i love in games, this was also the reason I didn't care for or ever buy watch dogs 2, as I didn't care if it was better gameplay wise I had no interest in its story as I want a dark and gritty sequel that continues from the 1st not a sequel reboot that completely changes the vibe of the game, and to be honest they should have either kept the protagonist from the 1st one or used someone in the story from the first that people already knew and cared about (they may have had the new guy in dlc though i don't know).

In my opinion watch dogs two is a good example of how not to continue the franchise, it would have been more successful if they simply ditched the 2 and called it watch dogs chicago or whatever city it takes place in, or some other name in big letters with watchdogs in smaller letter, like how infinity ward did with ModernWarfare 2 which caused people to call it MW2 instead of cod6 (which really pissed off activision btw, so they basically caused everyone in infinity ward to leave. a similar thing happened to bungie with the difference being bungie did it to themselves) best example of how not to do a game is Destiny, an okay shitty example of how to make your shitty game meh, is destiny's dlc, a good example of how to kill off all that earned back potential is destiny 2... okay thats enough shade thrown at Microtransaction game 2.

 

[groove888]

TBH I'm with the guys saying that you could/should make a game that's a good game on it's own and that happens to also have sex scenes (if they don't feel out of place/tacked on it would be perfect).
I feel like it's something that's missing and sometimes only one part of it is great (ie: Harem CG aren't great but game is) or somewhat lackluster (ie: Roundscape adorevia CG are OK but artist changing from scene to scene wasn't a good idea IMO).

The problem is that it ,IMO, limits you to : RPG,SIM and date-sim,VN,Story heavy F/TPS and STR. Possibly other but I lack imagination as you can see.

Edit: But if you want to post a normie game here I would be interested to try it.

 

[redknight00]

If you have a degree in Game Design and can do your own models, I'd say you're already cut above the average WEG developer, so I would like to see what you can do with game with porn.

Since you talked about Roundscape, it's the standard of gameplay+porn I have (along with Alchemy Meister) and something missing in the new games I see everyday.

 

[NandabaCanti]

@bobdillan You do what you want, but I'll tell you this - that isn't how passion works. You've got little control over what you get truly passionate about. You can hype up a job and try and convince yourself you're into it, but that isn't passion - that's delusion. I've been an artist and coder for over 30 years now. But up until recently I've only ever done them as hobbies because I never used to have any passion projects. I love doing all those things, at one point or another I've done all of them 60+ hours a week because of how much fun I was having with them, but they have all also experienced long dry spells of weeks or months where I haven't touched them because my interest just wasn't there at the time.

That all changed recently though. The past few years I've been coming up with random game ideas, playing tons of games, and finally I found an existing game that I was really loving but it lacked a lot of features and content and story line directions that I really want to see, to the point of mild obsession and it inspired me to create a new game. I spend most of my waking hours thinking about it. I put 60-80 hours a week into a combination of design doc development, writing story, designing models, creating mechanics prototypes, brainstorming ideas, and following tutorials on areas of my engine of choice I'm not up to speed with yet. I find myself having a hard time getting to sleep from all the thoughts about that project crowding my brain, then I wake up from dreams that often prominently feature things I was thinking about for the game such as characters and locations. That is what I mean when I say passion; it isn't something you can artificially manufacture - it's something you find that sparks a wild fire of creativity in you that you can't put out.

I'm also not entirely sure why you were bringing up a bunch of AAA games. You do realize they were all made by hundreds of people, most of whom specialize in one single area of development that they have worked their asses off to master and make their own, which flies in the face of that laissez-faire dabbling approach you've espoused. They're totally different from solo indie devs who have to be jack-of-all-trade types out of necessity. Though you can always just half-ass it, improvise, take advantage of readily available tools/assets geared towards non-professionals and cobble something together even without any passion and either little skill or a specialized skill in one area you really care about that becomes the selling point that pulls the weight for the other areas that are lacking. I'd say that's the direction most adult game devs take, though that usually just leads to games that are another bucket of water being tossed into a sea of mediocrity with only the occasional diamond in the rough games that garner most of the attention.

 

[bobdillan]

@uradamus I understand what you are saying, and I think I wasn't very clear what i meant, I agree that it is very true that you can't control what your passions are, e.g. drawing, climbing, etc. however you can direct them and focus your mind, like you might love drawing but have a job where you draw things you don't hate but you don't really love either, you can either focus on the fact you don't care for what you are drawing or focus on the fact you are drawing and doing something different might spark some knew ideas or improve your ability. hopefully that made sense, but yeah I am not talking about creating passion where there is none, more directing my passion so i actually do something with it.

Working with my mind not against it. and as others have already suggested it would more be a main game with a story i like and then porn scenes being in it, maybe lite maybe heavy but it won't be the driving force of the game. although i might do one that is just porn porn for fun at one point if I do take this anywhere. still gotta either get enough money to buy maya lt or learn blender (the joys of learning at a uni, you get taught the industry standard that are the paid products.

I get what you are trying to say about AAA and yeah they are a lot bigger but a lot of the rules that apply to them apply to indie games, just because the size and scale is different doesn't mean things like story and game mechanics and the dos and do nots of them are different, usually same basic principles apply.

 

[NandabaCanti]

You can basically rely on one of two things to get stuff done if you care about quality. I already spoke of passion, something that can be essential to get a project done when you are going to be up against a lot of troubles that would turn aside those who lack it. Passion is a great motivator to push through adversity, but it isn't the only option. The other is a strong work ethic, this one is easier to pull off if you specialize. If you get so good at something that you barely have to think about doing it, then you just have to have the perseverance and conviction to see it through. It requires a lot of time building up practical experience and mental stamina for a given task. It isn't easy to obtain, but anyone can eventually get there if they just stick with something long enough for it to become ingrained. This is the sort of thing that most have to work at for upwards of a decade or more to achieve for each thing they want to get good at, so it is a lot less reliable for those who want to do a bit of everything related to something like game design. It's why teams are so common, even among indies.

Don't get me wrong though, do what you like, I'm just telling you this as someone who spent decades letting myself flap about in the winds of my changing interests and have achieved very little because of it. I know all too well the path you are trying to set yourself upon and it isn't for the faint of heart. Since I've jumped around so much, I've never put in the consecutive time to really excel at any of the many things I am pretty darn good at. I'd work on something until I scratched my itch then move onto the next thing that interested me most, even if it was in a completely unrelated field to the last.

To add insult to injury, when you try to push beyond your limits - working harder and longer than you should in order to tackle several very different things at once - your own body will start to rebel against you. I've had to combat all too frequent spells of crippling depression since my teens, and I'm not talking about just the I feel sad nonsense people usually call depression, I mean full on hardcore chemical imbalance depression brought on from pushing myself beyond my limits and ignoring my need for adequate sleep, proper nutrition and regular exercise in order to get more work done. It comes on as a general malaise that turns into full on nausea if I attempt to force myself to work. I stop caring about anything, start to lose focus, and just end up wasting a lot of time in general for anywhere from a few weeks to a few months as I wait for my body and mind to recover. On the plus side I can read just fine while recovering, so those times are when I tend to binge on novels and manga I've been putting off, lol.

 

[kiteares]

You gotta do what you gotta do....
It's your story (assuming you have one) to tell. Is sex/porn an intrigal part of it? Can you slot in sex/porn without forcing it? If so fine, if not then don't as it will most likely ruin your story. I have a story developing in my head and on paper and while I could easily justify nudity, there is no where to slot in any form of sex, so it wouldn't happen.
On that note, I might be wrong, but I thought there were rules about 'normal' games being posted here, I thought they had to have at least some nudity. Maybe you can run it past one of the mods, sorry it's Sunday am and I can't be arsed to go hunting. That said, if it's allowed, post it here as you already have potentially a large opening exposure.
Good Luck

 

[bobdillan]

You gotta do what you gotta do....
It's your story (assuming you have one) to tell. Is sex/porn an intrigal part of it? Can you slot in sex/porn without forcing it? If so fine, if not then don't as it will most likely ruin your story. I have a story developing in my head and on paper and while I could easily justify nudity, there is no where to slot in any form of sex, so it wouldn't happen.
On that note, I might be wrong, but I thought there were rules about 'normal' games being posted here, I thought they had to have at least some nudity. Maybe you can run it past one of the mods, sorry it's Sunday am and I can't be arsed to go hunting. That said, if it's allowed, post it here as you already have potentially a large opening exposure.
Good Luck

I have a few stories that could be games in my head, one i think about a lot at the moment would be better as a tv show, but I am more thinking about just making games in general, haven't really chosen a story yet so yeah. However I wouldn't add it into a game where it doesn't fit.

 

[somebody28]

I will say that, probably, the biggest difference between a successful indie SFW game and a successful indie porn game is the graphics.

Put simply, if it's a porn game, it needs to look physically attractive. If it's not, then it doesn't (nobody's jacking off to base Undertale sprites, probably). To be honest, any decent programmer could probably make the backend for a porn game (or at least throw something passable together in RenPy).

The largest deciding factor, therefore, should be how hawt you can get your gurls. If you can make really attractive characters (whether they be 2D anime-style girls or 3D models), then I think that a porn game will be easier and probably more profitable. If you might have issues doing that, though, then I'd look into game development companies and studios, and potentially trying to throw something together which isn't porn-related.

 

[bobdillan]

I will say that, probably, the biggest difference between a successful indie SFW game and a successful indie porn game is the graphics.

Put simply, if it's a porn game, it needs to look physically attractive. If it's not, then it doesn't (nobody's jacking off to base Undertale sprites, probably). To be honest, any decent programmer could probably make the backend for a porn game (or at least throw something passable together in RenPy).

The largest deciding factor, therefore, should be how hawt you can get your gurls. If you can make really attractive characters (whether they be 2D anime-style girls or 3D models), then I think that a porn game will be easier and probably more profitable. If you might have issues doing that, though, then I'd look into game development companies and studios, and potentially trying to throw something together which isn't porn-related.

Well I can't really go work for a company because most want years of experience, and on top of that most companies of size left Australia by 2016, we only have mobile game devs and indie left. however it is very true the characters need to be appealing, but interesting characters is also a must, as unlike porn videos story and character development is very important to people who play porn games (it is part of the reason a lot of people move from video porn to porn games, at least i did anyway, by no means do they completely stop but all the time goes into the porn games, porn vids are just for a quick wank)