Flash Touch the Girl! [v1.08] [Sawatex]

[Zwart]

...

Agree.

But what "specific fetishes"? It's bondage, nothing exotic.

 

[Deederoni]

The way both Touch The Girl! and Feel The Flash! were developed is very confounding, and I think Sawatex could have done a lot more/better if he started from the ground up.

Both the games cater to very specific fetishes, the gameplay itself is very intuitive and simple, but the way the game was built is incredibly complicated, almost needlessly so. Making any additional content, both made by the developer or community is practically impossible to implement.

With the right game engine and art assets (that would be a lot more modular) modding and DLC content could be a lot easier to implement and a lot less time consuming, especially since Sawatex seems to have a day job unrelated to the development of this project, and can't work 8h-12h on the game daily throughout the week.

I assume there's a steep learning curve to teaching yourself a new game engine, but treating these games like a decent road-map could help with deciding what sort of new knowledge/skills need to be acquired for a similar end result.

This is my favorite game in this genre, there's very few of them as is- since most budding developers seem to get discouraged at the idea of building many assets that have many layers each, and then dealing with a facial/body animation system on top of that, not even mentioning something like voice acting and new or extra game mechanics. I've only come across something marginally similar in Super DeepThroat (SDT), and it had a very active community modding scene for quite some time after it's release, mainly due to how editing it's core and assets was made relatively simple. (Playing Sawatex games also reminds me of The Imperial Gatekeeper, as well as a few much smaller in scope pixel-art games with some similar fetish mechanics, but I can't recall their names at this moment, although they're worth mentioning.)

Every time I play this game I have a lot of fun for a very short time, but I'm also left wondering if there are ways to recreate some of the games systems in a different engine and approach asset and animation creation with a more productive philosophy.

Oh 100%, he would have a much easier time if he just recreated the game in another engine.
It also doesn't help that even with Flash, he sometimes overcomplicate things, to make it more thorough; but by making it so overly thorough, he makes it a nightmare to mod or even for himself to add new things. It also doesn't help that he's not consistant, for example, the legs and arms just use the same texture fliped over, while each side of the chest have seperate textures. He also sometimes have shading split into its own layer on top of the texture, then in other times he doesn't (specially in outfits).
Even if you just wanted to merg 2 hairstyles, you'd still be looking at editing over 100 files.

My guess is, that while it could be that he simply doesn't want to learn a new engine; he have raised concerns in the past about that the last 2 games stoped bringing him any money, and that he will try to "combat" this by releasing outfit DLCs (like the maid one), so one possability is that he's simply sticking to this method beacuse it's extremly annoying to mod, to keep people dependent on him to add new outfits.

 

[tocksickray]

But what "specific fetishes"? It's bondage, nothing exotic.

I used the term in a general sense, not specifying exotic interests. Bondage, as well as violation/rape, or mind-break are all niches within the broader general fetish porn genre. There are many other games that steer away from some of these to cater to other fetishes.

My guess is, that while it could be that he simply doesn't want to learn a new engine; he have raised concerns in the past about that the last 2 games stoped bringing him any money, and that he will try to "combat" this by releasing outfit DLCs (like the maid one), so one possability is that he's simply sticking to this method beacuse it's extremly annoying to mod, to keep people dependent on him to add new outfits.

Your guess very well could be correct, although I won't make that assumption. Even if he did approach the development of the game in this way- focusing on making the game easier to modify early on would have made it so much simpler for even himself to add new content, I imagine this would make his additions a lot more frequent while still upholding some sense of quality.

While there is a barrier-of-entry for game development I think game modding (in most cases) can be easier to understand and learn (if implemented properly) by non-developers, therefore it would open up the possibility of many passionate fans of the game to create additional content alongside Sawatex himself (like in the case of SDT), instead of hoping that some intrepid fan takes it upon themselves to go through a game development course and become a solo developer before they can attempt recreating the game entirely with a different framework.

 

[Deederoni]

Your guess very well could be correct, although I won't make that assumption. Even if he did approach the development of the game in this way- focusing on making the game easier to modify early on would have made it so much simpler for even himself to add new content, I imagine this would make his additions a lot more frequent while still upholding some sense of quality.

Yeah, I don't actually think he does it to make it hard to mod, it doesn't quite fit the theme of the... "awkwardness", for a lack of a better word, of how he've build and make the game, in ways that just makes it overly complicated for himself as well.

As example, it's odd how he choose to spend time seperating the different hues of the shades on some of the textures in TTG, like hair and skincolour, just so that you can change the colour of the shading; a feature that is extremly niche, but adds hours to the creation proccess on those parts; and even then he've taken the time to actually split the origional textures, when he could just have made the orginal be a "base", with the recoloured shades be an overlaping masking texture, which would have given the same end result, and saved time.

I do think that he might have had help with the coding at some point in the past, with parts he found difficult.
Now, he might just have replied like this, so that people would quit asking him; but someone asked him a while back on Patreon if he could make it so that the "discharge" would remain even after clicking out of that menu, and his answer was that it isn't possible with how the game is made.
I don't know anything about coding, but just looking at the DoAction files, it feels like it shouldn't be very hard to just... copy-paste the "Swelling" action, which have a progresive appearence, triggered by another action, add that trigger to "Discharge Outside", swap the texture and line it up with the discharge, and you'd end up with a "Discharge" layer that slowly fades.

I don't know, I just feel like nothing about him makes sense.