So many abandoned games before they even start?

[anne O'nymous]

Completely forgetting its a fucking porn game and 90%+ of the crowd couldn't care less. The story can be as goofy and silly, and as unrealistic as it wants, so long as it adds to the eroticism and porn its all good.

Hmm, looks like in fact 64% put the story as very important factor when it come to adult games, and less than 10% don't care about it. While a look at the recommendation section show that numerous are those who insist on the presence of an effective story.
If you take a look at the effectively successful games, most of them are clearly story driven, and almost all the others still rely on a coherent story telling. This even when their quality is at most average. The best example is probably WVM. A game totally average in all terms, but 100% story driven, that reached

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for 665 patrons, at the end of its first month.
Not only no other game had such start, but also 99% of the games without an effective story, or with a totally inconsistent one, never reached such numbers. In comparison, Chaixasgames, that is one of the most successful author when it come to storyless sex games, needed two years to reach the

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for 422 patrons.
Same when you looks at the quickly abandoned games. Most of them have a total lack of story, or inconsistent ones, and never really federate people around the game. This while story driven games, even when they just encounter a relative success, can count on a stable and solid fan base. And looking at the rating give the same overview ; there's more people giving a bad rating because of the lack of story, than because of the lack of sex.

Of course, it doesn't mean that everyone want a professional quality story. But still it's the story that make them play, instead of just looking at some porn movie. And for this, the story need to have a minimal level of coherence, constancy, quality and depth, because it's what make the difference with the said porn movies. If the goal is just to fap while playing, any modded The Elder Scrolls or Fallout title would be both more entertaining and more fun, while having more sex in it, and more diversity in this sex, that any games on the adult gaming scene.

There's, obviously, people on the scene who only care about sex, but they don't necessarily represent the majority, and definitively don't represent 90%+ of the scene. It's more a fifty/fifty scenario with no real majority.

 

[MrFriendly]

Yeah its perfectly fine to enjoy what you enjoy lol. Its just the policing that gets me. But I would also argue that some of these games, like the one's you mentioned with absolutely no sex scenes or erotic content in it, don't really belong on this site, or at least don't really deserve to be called adult/porn games. They're just regular games. (Unless they're exploring other adult themes, like violence etc. even then still not porn games).

Supposedly Summer's Gone will have sex in it... However, anyone who is waiting for that content is going to be disappointed since it still doesn't and has been in development for 2 years (Maybe, I can't be bothered to check). The other three I mentioned have sex scenes but I'm fairly sure you can avoid all of them if you are weird and like to see what happens when the MC doesn't get his "thing" on. I don't think that a developer should focus only on the story but I also don't think that they should only focus on the renders either. To me story makes the sex better, enhances it by exploring the relationships, giving the MC and his LI a common problem or interest that goes beyond simply fucking. But that's just me.

 

[Deleted member 1536527]

Hmm, looks like in fact 64% put the story as very important factor when it come to adult games, and less than 10% don't care about it. While a look at the recommendation section show that numerous are those who insist on the presence of an effective story.
If you take a look at the effectively successful games, most of them are clearly story driven, and almost all the others still rely on a coherent story telling. This even when their quality is at most average. The best example is probably WVM. A game totally average in all terms, but 100% story driven, that reached

You must be registered to see the links

for 665 patrons, at the end of its first month.
Not only no other game had such start, but also 99% of the games without an effective story, or with a totally inconsistent one, never reached such numbers. In comparison, Chaixasgames, that is one of the most successful author when it come to storyless sex games, needed two years to reach the

You must be registered to see the links

for 422 patrons.
Same when you looks at the quickly abandoned games. Most of them have a total lack of story, or inconsistent ones, and never really federate people around the game. This while story driven games, even when they just encounter a relative success, can count on a stable and solid fan base. And looking at the rating give the same overview ; there's more people giving a bad rating because of the lack of story, than because of the lack of sex.

Of course, it doesn't mean that everyone want a professional quality story. But still it's the story that make them play, instead of just looking at some porn movie. And for this, the story need to have a minimal level of coherence, constancy, quality and depth, because it's what make the difference with the said porn movies. If the goal is just to fap while playing, any modded The Elder Scrolls or Fallout title would be both more entertaining and more fun, while having more sex in it, and more diversity in this sex, that any games on the adult gaming scene.

There's, obviously, people on the scene who only care about sex, but they don't necessarily represent the majority, and definitively don't represent 90%+ of the scene. It's more a fifty/fifty scenario with no real majority.

No I agree. As I said before, its the content of the story, the story aids the porn. In the poll that you mentioned, I would've picked story too over just plain sex scenes. Because in my head, the story in a porn game is not just your vanilla story from a standard novel or movie, but actually a plot that would suite a porn game. So my arguments don't disagree with your findings. Even some of the best porn games, with coherent story, the story is erotic in nature. Look at some of the top performing games like Milfy City and BaD, or games form NLT, it has story, and the story is erotic at its core and intimately tied with the sex. There is teasing, implication, and erotic undertones (its not just platonic), and I like them, and so do most people it seems. And I completely disagree with games with no porn in it, just an "iNtErEsTiNg" story being called porn games or belonging on this site.

Spoiler: An Example

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To me story makes the sex better, enhances it by exploring the relationships, giving the MC and his LI a common problem or interest that goes beyond simply fucking.

Agreed, except for the last part. For me simply fucking should be inherently tied into it somehow.

 

[InCompleteController]

Throwing my hat into the ring.

I tried making a game, but I live in the rich part of the world so I never thought it would be more than a hobby project to begin with.

My first attempt was also overly ambitious by trying to simulate too many things. With everything being connected it meant that I couldn't really focus on one part of the idea without everything getting fucked up as soon as I added the next.
That said, I don't consider it a complete failure as my goal really was to get better at programming, which was the reason why chose such a complex project to begin with.

In short, the game was doomed to fail from the beginning because I wanted to experiment with coding more than I wanted to make a good game.

 

[Tompte]

One of the most valuable skills you can have in game development is one they don't (and can't) teach you in school, which is the ability to compartmentalize big ideas into small, well-defined tasks. This comes naturally with experience so don't get too discouraged. In fact, it's good to get a couple of games under your belt before swinging for the fences, even failed ones. Although this may not apply as much to narrative-driven games as it does to game development in general.

Basically, you set a goal and in order to reach it you ask yourself "so what do I need for that to happen?" and you can usually come up with a few things, like "ok, I need this and that". Then you quickly realize things are interdependent and need to happen in a certain order.

That means that when you start working on a new game, you can quickly formulate a rough plan and build a foundation on which to build the rest of the game. It's also a good way to avoid getting rat-holed in some flowery edge-case feature that can't stand on its own.

I've seen some examples of this where, for instance, someone wants to make a breeding game and immediately start coding up a gene blender and imagine special traits that has nothing to act on. Unless there's something for the player to do there's no game there. A better approach is to think about the overall game and where the breeding takes place in it, and build up towards that. It may sound boring but you'll find lots of interesting problems to solve along the way.

In my case, when I wanted to make a brothel sim, I knew I needed to have some kind of board and some characters to move around, so that was the first thing I started on. Then I needed a way to pass turns. After that, assigning actions to characters, etc., etc. and onward. Point is the actual sexy stuff didn't even become relevant until much later. I had some early proof of concept stuff, mostly placeholders to validate that my ideas would actually work in practice.

I'm not saying you have to do it this way, but it helps to stay focused and on track. I've learned the hard way how dangerous rat-holing can be. Once that curiosity is satisfied, it can be really hard to motivate yourself to work on a different part of the game.

In short, the game was doomed to fail from the beginning because I wanted to experiment with coding more than I wanted to make a good game.

I think that is perfectly reasonable.

 

[Vollezar]

I almost abandoned my project (had to suspend it for nearly 9 months) because our artist just walked off. Then I got sick. I had no money left to hire another artist. I can't do art at all. I am to art what Mariah Carey is to stock trading. So I had to have someone else to do all the artwork otherwise I have to abandon it.

 

[arimouse]

This is always a good one, and there's such a wide variety of reasons why a game may or may not ever be made.

1:
In the world of video games, there is a SUPER TINY amount of people actually CAPABLE of making a video game. For the most part, these people are programmers/developers.

On the flip side of that, there are a lot of other people who WANT to make a game but CAN'T because they lack some key skill. An artist can make art, but they can't make it "do stuff". A story writer can write a book and a million scenes that are all masterful, but they can't make characters say them in dialog during a video game cutscene.

Your "capable of making a video game" people are in such short supply... chances are they're either doing their own project or already tied to another project. They're in a minority. Also a lot of these people, like myself, may be programmers as a day job. Sometimes you just get burnt out and don't want to program anymore, so you slow down on projects or let some things go. That's life.

2:
Another big one is project management. This not only kills lots of projects, it also kills lots of non-video game projects and many start-up companies.

You got to know when to say "this is enough" and reign people in, and keep a deadline and milestones and make sure you hit dates. It can make things "less fun" but it's pretty absolutely critical to making any kind of product, video game or otherwise. You need to know what you want to do, and have a somewhat clear idea on how to get there. You can't just slap down a 200 page story, or some cool GURPS concept stats you dreamed up in your high school trapper keeper.

3:
Making a development project is huge. It's bigger than people first imagine. You can make some awesome progress at the start, but slowly get mired down over time. You get burnt out. Your team gets burnt out. You lose faith, they lose faith... it's not always huge progress and amazing happy faces.

Time is the ultimate killer. If you start to lose momentum, and DON'T have strong project management skills behind you... your project is probably doomed already.

4:
You aim too big for some reason.

I'm going to make an open world RPG!

I'm going to make GTA!

How hard can it be?!

--- really hard!!! You killed your project before it began probably!


And that's enough from me. Good luck and happy developing.

 

[arimouse]

One of the most valuable skills you can have in game development is one they don't (and can't) teach you in school, which is the ability to compartmentalize big ideas into small, well-defined tasks. This comes naturally with experience so don't get too discouraged. In fact, it's good to get a couple of games under your belt before swinging for the fences, even failed ones. Although this may not apply as much to narrative-driven games as it does to game development in general.

The methodology you're referring to here is iterative development, most often attributed in an agile framework. And while it's not taught in school, it is taught outside of school quite frequently, and you can even get certifications from several organizations in the techniques. You can even become good enough to bring this skill as a job, and work as a scrum master at companies.

Briefly, agile:
Each "sprint" the team selects enough tasks to fill whatever their sprint timeframe is with actionable and testable pieces that deliver functionality.

If something is too large, you break it up into smaller chunks.

You make sure your team can meet their promises and eventually you will develop a measurable velocity, so at the next sprint you will have a better idea of how much you can accomplish.

A well oiled agile team can move mountains tremendously effectively.

But it requires more players than just developers as well. You need people to help make sure your back log is prioritized and that you have tasks in that back log that make sense and are doable.

Hope this was semi-informative. Good luck.

 

[anne O'nymous]

One of the most valuable skills you can have in game development is one they don't (and can't) teach you in school, which is the ability to compartmentalize big ideas into small, well-defined tasks.

I want to disagree regarding the school part, but in the same time it also depend where you live, since each country have its own scholar program.
Teaching to proceed by order of priority and to split a big task into smaller ones, is/should be one of the goal of math classes. After, as I said, how this teaching is done depend of your country, and there's probably some that totally mess with this, but by nature arithmetic is the perfect support for this kind of notions ; operators have different priorities, and solving an equation (even the basic ones) start by splitting it, then simplifying each entities.
We all learned this and, depending how school works in your country, we normally all had our brain accustomed to works this way by the repetition of equation solving. After, understanding its importance, and that it should apply to all task, is something different ; something that also partly depend of the cognitive limitations/problems of each individual. But it's supposed to have been taught to us.

 

[Tompte]

I want to disagree regarding the school part, but in the same time it also depend where you live, since each country have its own scholar program.
Teaching to proceed by order of priority and to split a big task into smaller ones, is/should be one of the goal of math classes. After, as I said, how this teaching is done depend of your country, and there's probably some that totally mess with this, but by nature arithmetic is the perfect support for this kind of notions ; operators have different priorities, and solving an equation (even the basic ones) start by splitting it, then simplifying each entities.
We all learned this and, depending how school works in your country, we normally all had our brain accustomed to works this way by the repetition of equation solving. After, understanding its importance, and that it should apply to all task, is something different ; something that also partly depend of the cognitive limitations/problems of each individual. But it's supposed to have been taught to us.

Oh, I meant more as in: how would someone even know how to deconstruct a game if they've never made one before? A school can tell you deconstruct a problem as a good practice, but that requires knowing the shape of the problem. You could look at an existing game and say "I want to make that" but unless you knew how that game was made, you're still on square one.

I sneakily used the word 'well-defined' on purpose, because of course you could make educated guesses or follow tutorials but with experience you don't need to guess, is what I'm saying. Once you've built a bunch of different things, you can leverage those memories when you're building other similar things and work backwards to make a pretty darn accurate estimate of the work involved. Of course, things will happen along the way but you can at least rationalize about the scope of a project.

For instance, you can see the lack of that skill in people posting threads about how they want to make their own MMO and the presence of that skill in those who respond with polite laughter and consolidation.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Hmm, looks like in fact 64% put the story as very important factor when it come to adult games, and less than 10% don't care about it. While a look at the recommendation section show that numerous are those who insist on the presence of an effective story.

Outside the small sampling, kinda targets a small niche : hardcore players subscribing to a pirate site for playing renpy/daz kind of game. Not really fair to the porn game market imho (from puzzle sexy games or popularity of Illusion games and so on).

how would someone even know how to deconstruct a game if they've never made one before?

Don't make it like decompiling a renpy game is out of this world. When most of that genre is totally driven by amateurs.
If that kid want to make an mmo, it's fine. Let him fail. There is no laughter to have, ambition is great.

 

[ImperialD]

Thank you for the replies. It's nice to see what others think. I faced the same issue tbh, Got into it with a 'how hard could it be?' mindset which quickly changed to 'Oh...' . But it's pretty enjoyable for me. The coding part is fun because I'm working as a trainee in a software dev company(intermediate level) so Renpy coding isn't too hard. The only thing that frustrates me with Daz is the lighting but i'm starting to get the hang of that too.
I've also never been one for 'click n fuck' games and I've seen a lot of good looking games here but when I get them, there's no real story and that's a turn off for me (just my opinion. not dissing click n fucks)
I feel like 'came for the fap, stayed for the story' games do really well here.

But anyway enough of my ramble. Thanks again and I hope this little thread helps current/future small time devs set their expectations right

and then there are those games that start off great and then end abruptly ... leaving us players like WTF !!

 

[anne O'nymous]

Outside the small sampling, kinda targets a small niche : hardcore players subscribing to a pirate site for playing renpy/daz kind of game. Not really fair to the porn game market imho (from puzzle sexy games or popularity of Illusion games and so on).

Porn game market that is still dominated by story based games. Illusion games sell well because their studio addition make them target a double audience ; part of it not even interested by the porn side of the game. But in the same time, 95% of the professional studios are making story based games. This even if half of them tend to the date sim side.

This said, wasn't it you who pointed that Sakura Dungeon was one of the best sell for Winged Cloud ? The market don't really depict the attempt of the public, but the desire of the studios. As long as they can sell enough, they'll go for the easiest route. And puzzle games, or Illusion "puppet master"-like approach are the easiest route. In the same way that, in the 90's, "make your own POV porn movie" was the easiest route because the market was dominated by XXX studios, who already had tons of unused videos.
And not only it's the easiest route in terms of development time, but it also apply in terms of selling. Puzzle games will reach people that just want a little touch of kink in their entertainment, while "puppet master" games will also touch part time artist who want to put visual stories on their blog. Two different public that would probably never buy an effective adult game, nor an indie game since there's already professional studio to give them their dose.

But when you look where the players put their money, therefore when you look at graphteon, then you get a more accurate picture of what the public want. This because they'll obviously not give the few bucks they can put aside, to games that don't correspond to what they want to play.
And even if they perhaps aren't the majority, they are those who are to be targeted by an indie dev. Simply because they are the ones who'll give him some money, and therefore at least help him to payback his expense.

 

[CaramelCowboy]

Thank you again for making this discussion so informative.
You have all been deceived. This was an elaborate plan to advertise my upcoming game on a pirate website NEAR YOU.

CLICK N FUCC UR WAY TO THE TOP
SLAP ALL THE OTHER MALES IN THE DICK.
ONLY YOU ARE KING.
IMPREGNATE ANY OBJECT IN SIGHT!!1!

keep your eyes peeled and dicks unsheathed. it's coming soon~

Jokes aside though, I hope this thread helps amateurs like me stay motivated. I'm far from ready to post my game but I just got an epidemic music license done since music helps me picture the scene better. Goodluck everyone!

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Porn game market that is still dominated by story based games. Illusion games sell well because their studio addition make them target a double audience ; part of it not even interested by the porn side of the game. But in the same time, 95% of the professional studios are making story based games. This even if half of them tend to the date sim side.

This said, wasn't it you who pointed that Sakura Dungeon was one of the best sell for Winged Cloud ? The market don't really depict the attempt of the public, but the desire of the studios. As long as they can sell enough, they'll go for the easiest route. And puzzle games, or Illusion "puppet master"-like approach are the easiest route. In the same way that, in the 90's, "make your own POV porn movie" was the easiest route because the market was dominated by XXX studios, who already had tons of unused videos.
And not only it's the easiest route in terms of development time, but it also apply in terms of selling. Puzzle games will reach people that just want a little touch of kink in their entertainment, while "puppet master" games will also touch part time artist who want to put visual stories on their blog. Two different public that would probably never buy an effective adult game, nor an indie game since there's already professional studio to give them their dose.

But when you look where the players put their money, therefore when you look at graphteon, then you get a more accurate picture of what the public want. This because they'll obviously not give the few bucks they can put aside, to games that don't correspond to what they want to play.
And even if they perhaps aren't the majority, they are those who are to be targeted by an indie dev. Simply because they are the ones who'll give him some money, and therefore at least help him to payback his expense.

I think you are correct, just that poll is not really a strong argument and tried to ponder a bit (not me that made that Sakura Dungeon argument tho). If you look at Asia for exemple, I'm not sure what's the share between that sexy mah jong played mostly by dads in the train and that well made VN mostly played by otakus.

I think also fair shake of today market is mostly run by amateur or semi-amateur, which make path of least resistance a matter of survival. Thus making glorified slide-show/heavy story driven almost mandatory (nothing wrong about it tho). Could be wrong but I think there is quite a large untapped market between VNs & that sexy mah jong mobile game, but I disgress (I'm out, ain't gonna ruin that great thread ).

 

[Tompte]

Don't make it like decompiling a renpy game is out of this world. When most of that genre is totally driven by amateurs.
If that kid want to make an mmo, it's fine. Let him fail. There is no laughter to have, ambition is great.

I think the context of what I was saying got lost over multiple responses. My original point was that people need to fail in order to build up experience and that early struggles will pay off in the future. I'm not laughing at anyone. If that didn't come across, then let me correct myself here. The point I was making about people wanting to make MMOs is that when you're a beginner, you completely lack the ability to see the scope of a project. That's why everyone's first project fails. It's part of growth.

And I wasn't really talking about Ren'py games. I've never used Ren'py so I can't say anything about it.

Although this may not apply as much to narrative-driven games as it does to game development in general.

 

[Wer0]

Actually i just finished my VN after half a year of development (I change my alias of course) and i used to teach game develop classes specialized in Unity. And one thing that i always said to my students was that “You need to fail first so that you understand how hard is to make games”.

A lot of people come with ideas to make an open world like GTA or making a MMORPG with hookers, but they underestimated all the work that you need to actually make them.

So i think most people need a reality check in the sense that this is not as easy as they think or that sometimes you need to try a couple of times to actually make it and don’t give up if you are being serious about it.

 

[XposedGaming]

i hope i can become a good game dev, and not one of many

 

[Rafster]

I'm also a newbie on the process of making a game, and yeah, the process is really overwhelming. It doesn't help that my 3 direct influences are sandboxes. I've been working on this since Nov '20, and only have a very small alpha to show. I can see why many devs abandon even before they launch the game.

I should have abandoned this long ago...but I dunno if it's the stubborn on me, or if it's just I love coding but I never stopped the development since I started. I hope I stay motivated when I get to the official launch here.

 

[Deleted member 1684328]

I tried to do everything myself (except drawing, since I suck at that). Well, it turns out that both coding (which is what I do for a living, so that's not a problem) and writing took more time than I expected. The game started developing a lot quicker and is more enjoyable because of the writer who helps me with this project.

If you have to do it all (drawing/rendering, writing and coding) I have massive respect for you.