Top down action RPG style game vs traditional adult games

[LadyLilith-3D]

So I'm racking my brain trying to decide the direction I want to take my game. Most "adult" games made are made for one specific reason. To show or tell a lot of sex so the user can get off, simple as that. I started down that route with a player-driven text adventure game with a deep plot, lots of choices, ample sex, 3D visuals, and a very simplistic 2d combat system (turn-based you go I go). The further I went the more I thought, what if I turned this into an actual rpg. A top-down diablo/torchlight esk game where you are battling enemies, inventory system, items, stats, abilities, etc. Then then you talking with NPS, or at the end of main battles or at specific trigger points you will get a story-driven text with sex scenes and images/animation. Kind of intertwining two worlds. It's not a full-fledged porn game but also not a full RPG although the game would certainly be targeting "adult game" players for sure as thats what it will be at its core.

My main concern is, are people going to be interested in something like that. Do they actually WANT to do something other than seeing/reading the smut aspects of the game or would they just get annoyed with the RPG aspects of it? Happy to hear anyone's options on the matter.

 

[HopesGaming]

There is a market for anything. Yours can go and become a huge success if its implemented well. I have yet to see a genre or style which couldn't work if done well.

 

[LadyLilith-3D]

There is a market for anything. Yours can go and become a huge success if its implemented well. I have yet to see a genre or style which couldn't work if done well.

I 100% agree with what you're saying. It's just doing it one way will probably take 10x as long as doing it another. So I'm trying to figure out if it's worth spending the extra time or not. Let me also premise that by saying I'm not trying to make the biggest, badest adult game there is by any stretch. Just something I would enjoy creating and others would enjoy playing.

 

[Kinderalpha]

I'll go ahead and share some pillars of my development process because you about word-for-word described what I'm currently working on alone. Take it for what it is, I'm not a professional. I have no published games on my rap sheet. I just spend way too much time doing this.

Artwork: For me, and probably yourself, will be your biggest limitation. Having a sprawling world of inventories, characters, and all these goodies is pretty boring without artwork. What's your pipeline look like? Are you going to have drawn art, rendered art, overlay art? That's going to be a huge contributing factor to the atmosphere of your game, development time, and sanity.

Ambiguity: A big obstacle in what you're going to create is ambiguity. Almost every step of the way, you're more than likely not going to be entirely sure how a specific system might interact with others, how certain artwork will coincide with engine features, how to implement something to expand on later. Ambiguity is bad. I think one mistake I made earlier on was mistaking ambiguity for "large scope". They're entirely two different beasts.

Design: How big is your vision, and how steady is it? When you're in the development process. You don't want to get in this vicious cycle of re-programming systems because you keep changing it up. This is inherently part of the process, but you have to watch yourself. This is also commonly referred to as feature creep.

At the end of the day, make something that interests you that will develop your skills and make you happy. Yes we all want the attention of publishing a game, possibly the money, and to share our love for what we made. There's nothing wrong with that. However, two of those three things are very weak motivators in the long run. At the end of the day, the only thing that's going to get your through this is yourself.

edit: I didn't make it clear, but for the record; I've made every mistake mentioned plus more in the span of three months. It's a learning process.

 

[xoxo]

RPGs take much longer to make and make less money. You'll often see devs transitioning/remaking their games from RPG to VN but never the other way around. You can make a successful game no matter what, specially if you're having fun developing it, but if you want to live of it, my recommendation is save yourself some trouble (specially with bugs and complaints) and make a basic VN.

 

[HopesGaming]

I 100% agree with what you're saying. It's just doing it one way will probably take 10x as long as doing it another. So I'm trying to figure out if it's worth spending the extra time or not. Let me also premise that by saying I'm not trying to make the biggest, badest adult game there is by any stretch. Just something I would enjoy creating and others would enjoy playing.

I mean, it is a given that the more stuff a game has the more work it requires but not always more profitable.
Purely from a success standpoint it can work. Looking at it more as effort vs gains then, like the others has said, vn is the direction to go.

 

[LadyLilith-3D]

Artwork: For me, and probably yourself, will be your biggest limitation. Having a sprawling world of inventories, characters, and all these goodies is pretty boring without artwork. What's your pipeline look like? Are you going to have drawn art, rendered art, overlay art? That's going to be a huge contributing factor to the atmosphere of your game, development time, and sanity.

Yeah, for sure. I've been toying with Daz Studio and since I'm able to make half-decent renders at this point, that will be what I use for "artwork". It's something that looks pleasing and I can do on my own.

Ambiguity: A big obstacle in what you're going to create is ambiguity. Almost every step of the way, you're more than likely not going to be entirely sure how a specific system might interact with others, how certain artwork will coincide with engine features, how to implement something to expand on later. Ambiguity is bad. I think one mistake I made earlier on was mistaking ambiguity for "large scope". They're entirely two different beasts.

Already running into this and it's definitely at the forefront of my mind. I'm learning as I do but game design is a passion of mine that I've gotten into recently so it's all fun at this point.

Design: How big is your vision, and how steady is it? When you're in the development process. You don't want to get in this vicious cycle of re-programming systems because you keep changing it up. This is inherently part of the process, but you have to watch yourself. This is also commonly referred to as feature creep.

THIS!! this is why I'm asking the questions now and trying to sketch out the design process. I've already restarted and redesigned a few things because I had "another vision" for my game and everything had to be reworked.

 

[Laikhent]

In the past I tried to create an adult game that joined the mechanics of Heroes of Might & Magic and Civilization. I mean, I liked those 2 games and, if I joined them and added smut stuff to it, it would make a great adult game right?

Well, after some months of development, I reached a playable state and it was actually fun to play (at least for me, since I made it based on games I found fun after all). The problem was that good part of it could not be linked well with the smut stuff. While you could say it was fun, it was not exactly arousing, and for me that was not acceptable. All the scripts are still on the project I'm working on, but I will probably not use them, so you could say that it was months of wasted time (and this is not the first time something like this happens). The good thing is that, even if I lost my work done, the things I learned while doing it are not lost.

What I do now to decrease the chances of this happening:
1- Work first on things that you know that will be on your game for sure, no matter what your game is (for me, this is the character creation screen, animations, etc)
2- As you already know, making mechanics takes time, and a lot of it. If they are not going to help you make the player aroused or are not essential for the game, you might want to think twice about using your time on it ( I'm not saying don't do it, just be REALLY very careful here)
3- If you are unsure if a certain mechanic will be useful for you to reach your objective with the game, make a prototype version first. That would be a version with the barely minimum for it to work. You can just put a cube without animations in place of the actual model, with a stripped version of the scripts just for you to get a general feel of how it will be when it's finished. For my Civilization+HoMM game, I put different characters, animations, particles, various different skill mechanics and so on, just to notice that it would not serve my objective at the end, which was a terrible mistake.

Note that these are just guidelines that I created for myself. In the end, if I didn't do that Civilization+HoMM thing I think my life would be missing something so I don't fully regret it. There are things that you just want to create. If that's your case for your rpg I think you should do it.

 

[Crimson Delight Games]

LadyLilith-3D

Interesting thread. Gonna chime in because the game you're describing is similar to what we're currently making: a full-fledged (fantasy) RPG, where the lewd content is an additional reward for players that serves as an extra hook to immerse them into the world and setting. The only difference between your project and ours is 3D vs 2D (and real-time vs. turn-based combat).

As to whether you should develop that type of game? Honestly, only you can answer that...

But there's no reason why you shouldn't try, and make something unique and fun along the way! Especially since the way you write about it is so similar to what we started out with. We wanted our game to be able to stand on its own legs, without using lewds as a crutch for bad gameplay and poor storytelling. To that end, we did about 7 months of pre-production for our project. This included everything from story/setting to characters to gameplay systems to art style, and a bunch of other stuff I'm not going to bore you with (mainly how to squeeze an additional 3-4 hours of labor from each team member after coming back from work every night, and do it without burning out).

There's 3 of us on the project (artist, writer, scripter), and we're IRL friends which helps a lot, but we still made mistakes along the way and 'wasted' time doing things which we either had to discard as the game evolved, or which ended up costing us way too much time or effort to be worth it in the long run. We got better at production as time went on, but we're still learning, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The main points to take into account -- and always keep in mind as a developer -- is that your time is precious; that real life will always get in your way when you least expect it; and that you'll get frustrated with inevitable setbacks, as well as your inability to faithfully translate the beautiful and amazing vision in your head to something that actually runs and plays the way you want it to.

Dealing with those issues is, IMHO, much more difficult than producing content for your game. Game development is easy and fun if you love doing it - it's all the other stuff around it that makes it hard and challenging! It's a time sink, sure, and you'll probably have to cut down on your social life and weekend pub crawls with the crew, but seeing your vision come to life more than makes up for it in the end! And from your opening post, you sound like you're very enthusiastic about your project. That's good; hold on to that flame because you'll need it, as it'll be the only guiding light once you get into the guts of production, and the inevitable doubts start creeping in (as they should, if you're self-critical, and care about the quality of your game).

So to spare you the same hangups which nagged us when we started out, here's a bunch of friendly advice:

• RPGs lean heavily on their setting, story, and characters... develop these in detail before you start scripting/writing
• dedicate at least 2-3 months to pre-production and brainstorming... take notes, write down ideas... you'll need them!
• produce a detailed and iron-clad design document... fill it with everything from area descriptions to art/map concepts
• settle on the art style early, and once you do don't change it... we went through a bunch, and it ate up a lot of time
• proof-read your writing... nothing screams amateur like poorly written and structured dialogue... don't neglect this!
• borrow systems and mechanics from established games... there's no point re-inventing the wheel if it works already
• build on and improve design elements or mechanics you disliked or were frustrated by while playing 'regular' RPGs
• build a mental map of the core gameplay loop before you commit resources/time to crafting it... reiterate until fun!
• sex content should be drip-fed to players in steady increments... space it out over time, but don't make it too grindy
• your character roster should cover all the 'vanilla' kinks and fetishes... once this is done, add the exotic stuff atop it
• watch a few post-mortems on YouTube... since you like RPGs, check out the ones for games by Obsidian and Larian
• religiously back up your work, ideally once a week... we lost about 2 weeks of art a few months back (laptop died)
• lurk 4chan's /vrpg/, and take notes... anons there like to argue a lot, but most are intelligent, veteran gamers...
• plan out your weekly development schedule... tell your friends/family/partner that you'll be unavailable for X hours
• when working, shut yourself in your room or office, and turn off your phone... that thing is the bane of productivity!
• use commute time to 'work' on your game... you'd be amazed what your brain can do while thinking in the background
• make the game for yourself! (you'll never be able to please everyone anyway; create the game that you want to play!)

That's about all I can think of at the moment... Damn, this reply came out much longer than intended, lol.

Good luck with your project! RPGs are amazing, and here's to hoping yours becomes a success!

 

[hgameartman]

A great game that got a huge cult following with a top-down action style is Violated Heroine, which isn't available here due to one of the characters breaking the rules.

My game, Horny Mage Academy: Dark Tower, was directly inspired by Violated Heroine, and I combine top-down action gameplay with a school-simulation layer (magic school, so you learn fun spells!) where you can attend class, date, go to clubs or ptjs, etc etc to get stronger for dungeons!

Original scope was 3 years, new scope shows that it will likely take closer to 5 years. An RPG is a lot of work! (And a sandbox rpg, like I'm doing, is double that easily!)

Here's a quick GIF from my game's combat as it was a few months ago. (It's fast-paced!) I like to feel that it got better once I stopped trying to make procedurally generated dungeons that could pile enemies up too tight. Essentially, spawning you in took so long that enemies could crowd around you then immediately box you in, so I added a knockback while spawning (which shows as the twitching when the gif starts).

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[Doorknob22]

I voted "If I wanted to play a RPG I would go play a real one".

My two Shekels: go for smut and aim to make it the best, most intelligent, fun and thrilling smut you possibly can. You'll never be able to beat studios (and not even big studios) in their own game but you might make some hot chicks (or dudes) fans will really want to see get nailed.

 

[LadyLilith-3D]

Absolutely LOVE the comments/tips/suggestions you all are making!!

Laikhent

Civilization and HoMM are a few of my top games as well, especially HoMM V. I think that the learning experience and passion for general game design will be a win for me, even if the game falls flat on its face. Like you said, that months of work benefited you even though you didn't go through with it.

Crimson Delight

Wow, what a post! Appreciate the thought and time you put into it. I'll for sure take heed to your advice. I think if the story, plot, and world are done right it can be a success. I'm using Unity as that's what my background is so I plan on taking from existing systems so I don't have to recreate everything. That way I can still focus on creating the story and art and still keep my sanity by not having to code everything myself. I agree one of the biggest hurdles is TIME for sure. After getting home from work all day and getting some other daily stuff done it only leaves a few hours a day. You really have to be dedicated and push yourself to keep working and make progress. Already learning and adapting to that.

hgameartman

Never heard of Violated Heroine. I do however like where you're going with your game. It's for sure a lot of work that's why I've been mulling it over to see if that route is even something I want to pursue. The more I think about it though the more I think "why not". The experience of jumping in and trying it out would be beneficial, even if it's just a basic prototype to see how things would work to get a feel for it.