The illusion game engines (3d shaded: Artificial Girl and all the descendants such as Honey Select, and Cel Shaded: School Mate and descendants such as Koikatsu) are relatively easy to work with, so there have been quite a large number of games made with them.
Due to the quick turn around when making images they can be quite prolific in story progress / interval of releases.
However, as R1ko so eloquently (/s) explained, the more you play Illusion graphic games, or even just see them in the new releases list, the more you realize that they suffer badly from "same face syndrome". The characters looks the same (especially the males), the environments look the same, the animations look the same.
This leads to a bifurcation:
Some people really get into one of these game because it might be the first such engine game they have encountered, and it has a long/deep amount of gameplay due to the high productivity of the dev.
Whereas others tend to avoid or generally dislike games made with the illusion engines - or at least grow to dislike them, due to the lack of a feeling of novelty. I think this is a tendency that shows up more in the "old-timers", who've seen dozens of promising 2d art / daz art games start and flake out and disappear as the developer realizes just how much work it is to keep going. Seeing so much of what they love die in their arms, these old timers get grumpy about the copious flow of long-content illu-games.
Interestingly, many of the games built with illusion engine tend to have an "anime-style" storyline (what does that mean? hard to say, but like the US Supreme court decision regarding porn, "you know it when you see it"). Whether this is due to the attraction by such developers towards the anime-ish graphics style, or what, I don't know.
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I also wanted to respond to the prominent "software engineer" callout, based on my own experience.
When it comes to game dev, having some background in programming can both help and hinder.
It's good if you already know how to keep your work organised, both in the code itself and in your assets / folder structure / source control. You can hopefully avoid falling into the traps of disorganization that curse so many game developers, who end up painting themselves into a complexity hole, either with the code or the asset handling.. or even worse, manage to lose everything to a simple disk crash.
But being a competent software engineeer absolutely does not guarantee the prescence of the two most important qualities for a game dev:
- having the force of will and commitment to keep pushing forward for months and years to keep producing content, even when receiving little income/positive feedback in return.
- and having a spark of artisitic creativity... and sadly, all too many of us do not have it. So many games are just rehashes of the same old stuff.
