Which art style and engine do you prefer?

[voidtail]

Greetings all,


I am currently in the early stages of planning and developing an adult game and would be interested on the communities input about what type of art assets to use and which engine. I'm a programmer and prefer to work in c# but I've seen a lot of people say they prefer renpy over a game engine like unity. I have to admit I've never worked in renpy before and I'm still looking into it so I'm not sure it can handle the things I want it to yet but I'd still be interested to see which people prefer. I'm also debating which art style to use between semi-realistic drawings or the 3d models a lot of renpy games seem to use which I believe are mostly done with DAZ.


To give a bit of background on the game it will be a slave trainer style game with a sandbox layout rather than linear branching story, though the progression of individual character stories will be somewhat linear so that scenes aren't skipped over in a way where players can accidentally miss them. I'm currently unsure if there will be generic characters to train or whether it will be limited to characters with actual storylines. There'll be a definite end to the stories of each character and the player but the end of the game will be open ended so you can keep training and progressing characters you haven't completed by the time the main story is finished.


Anyway, this is only advisory, obviously. I may well ignore you all and just do what I like. But I would be interested in seeing how people vote. I know this has been done in the past but I'd like a more up to date poll done.


Regards
Voidtail

 

[DaClown]

I actually like 3D anime style characters or what I'll call "rotoscoped" realistic characters. I like particularly when art styles play with ambiguities between 2D styles and 3D styles; you see this in manga a lot where characters and scenes will be rendered in different styles and degrees of detail based on what is being emotionally conveyed. Sometimes there will be hyper-realistic rendered parts of characters or items or parts of the scene contrasted with the very cartoony foreground characters, items, or parts of the scene.

2D is fine too. Though it is easier to model a 3D character then project them to a 2D animation than it is to model a 2D character and project them to a 3D animation or even to most 2D perspectives.

I'd love to see an adult game that does something stylistically similar to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Cool World, or Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse.

Real porn shots are very very limiting in a lot of ways. It is difficult to get wide character and body type diversity. It is difficult to get actors convincingly in all the fetishistic variations that are going to be demanded by many different porn, sex, or breeding games. Real porn styles don't mix well in general with violent game designs; there are few people who are going to want to see realistically rendered violence, and there are a lot of jurisdictions where using real people for rendering such things is going to take you into legally dubious conditions.

Getting proper license for likeness rights from real human models is also difficult which makes legal commercialization of any resulting development difficult to impossible.

 

[Guntag]

No love for real porn : (

I'd say real porn games (because they are rare nowadays) closely followed by 3d (but 3d doesn't really mean anything since there are huge differences in 3d models quality). Speaking of trainer, dare tell me that Wife Trainer isn't one of the best trainer games ! If not the best one... So, real porn can really work ! I don't mind about the engine unless maybe RPGMaker that I don't like, but in very rare exceptions, it can work.

 

[Fliptoynk]

I would've vote for 3d models wholly... if only some devs aren't making their models look ridiculous with silly poses and unnatural facial expressions.

 

[freedom.call]

Renpy is the only engine I play, with 3D models.

 

[M$hot]

For me I don't often see the benefit to Unity over Ren'py aside from maybe a better looking UI.
I'm partial to real porn games, ideally QSP Awesomium, but there are only like 3, all with kind of broken English, 2 by the same dev. QSP works for VN and Sandbox although I don't think I have actually seen a VN in QSP.

Anyway, from the choices you offered, after real porn would be 3D models in Ren'py.

 

[hewhocumsbynight]

I like the idea of real porn games, but I dislike the execution. The game is usually way too large, burdened by an excess of clips, and the clips are usually barely relevant to the situation at hand. Also, most of the time, the clips used in real porn games come from Brazzers or some other boring studio, so none of my fetishes are satisfied.

Some 3-d models look fairly good, but the good models seem to all look quite similar. If you can create distinctive quality designs, 3-d is definitely the way to go, but that's an easy mark to miss.

 

[KeypressingMonkey]

I like hand-drawn art best, something I could never pull off myself and so I'm always in awe of well-drawn backgrounds and characters.

 

[Amethyst Star]

Ultimately, for me I think the quality of the art is more important than the style. It's very easy to churn out low-effort crap with 3D engines and this site is full of such games, but it's also possible to make something very good if you pay attention to character design, posing, lighting, facial expressions, and have high-fidelity renders.

On the flip side, hand-drawn art is usually more of an art style question. Some hand-drawn art styles I'm just not interested in, and some I find very appealing. It's more forgiving of technical mistakes but requires that you have some actual drawing skill or an artist on payroll.

Real porn and stolen-art games are at the bottom of the pile for me. IMO The art needs to be cohesive as a whole for the game to work.

 

[Antman63995]

Though my favorite is the hand drawn or cartoony style (DBA), I'm never against the 3d model art if it's good quality like Treasure of Nadia. However 99% of the 3d games are just complete trash with 10 hours of reading and 3 not well animated sex scenes. I get that it's difficult, but we're just so cluttered with bad 3d rendered games.

 

[fitgirlbestgirl]

Not really into the Hentai stuff, but if done well I can go for either 2D art or renders.

But I fucking despise Unity. Everything that makes Ren'py games easy and intuitive to play is either bloated, laggy or it's absent altogether because to do things that come standard in Ren'py a dev has to actually do extra work and implement shit himself in Unity, which most people don't.

So in 9/10 cases Unity just turns out to be a substandard experience for players. And for what? So you can make the UI prettier? I'd rather take an unmodified ugly Ren'py UI with rollback and a working save system, thanks.

The only Unity game I ever thought actually used the engine to an extent that almost made it worth it was Long Story Short. The UI and presentation of that game is truly stunning and on par with professionally released games.

I'd still like the game more if it used Ren'py.

Edit: Just coming back a few hours later because I remembered more dumb shit about Unity. No fullscreen windowed mode, you either play in fullscreen mode or in a little window. I'm sure if you know what you're doing as a dev you could change that, but again, most people don't bother. FFFFFFFF just learn Ren'py, even a monkey can code a basic VN in Ren'py.

 

[PotatoNinja]

I'm pretty agnostic. I've seen stuff I like in every category except Real Porn, which I don't really care for in games.

Outside of h-games, I do some amatuer dev stuff and I'm working on an ARPG that utilizes a low-mid poly design which I intend to do a sort of 'flat' semi-cell shaded look on top of via render. Unreal is surprisingly flexible in its options in this arena.

 

[NukaCola]

Why can't you vote more than one option? I like both 3D model and Semi-realistic art, engine doesn't matter

 

[voidtail]

Thank you all for taking the time to vote and/or post your responses. I thought I'd post to give a small update of where my thinking is at and to address a few things raised here.


I've been spending the past few days researching more into Ren'py and I have to say that my research has put me off using it as an engine if I'm honest. From a programmer's perspective it doesn't seem very user friendly to me (on the design side) and everything going into one long script is very off-putting to me from a readability standpoint. It might be tolerable for a more linear game but for the style of game I'm currently building the concept around the fact that you can loop back on yourself, unlock events in no set order (individual character progressions will be fairly linear and while some characters may unlock events for other characters you'll be able to approach them in any order), repeat events etc. From that view it seems cleaner and easier to keep track of development and alter things when the various aspects are segregated to different classes.


I feel like a lot of the short comings of unity games probably stem from the fact that the people building these games may not be actual programmers and are likely using visual scripting which, has its place but for someone with actual c# coding knowledge, well, lets just say I find it easier to work with the actual scripts than visual editors. Honestly I'm not sure why some unity games do the only small window or fullscreen thing since there's almost nothing required programming side since the unity launcher should allow you to choose all valid resolutions for the window. In-game menus to resize require a little programming but aren't too complicated.


As for real porn. I'm trying to keep as much of it above board as possible and, as it has been said here, using real models would likely be a licensing nightmare and likely stupidly expensive. As it has also been said here you're very limited in what you can achieve with pre-existing real model images where as if you use drawn work it's easy to create or commission new content to fit what you need. I'll likely go down the patreon route for funding to bring on additional artists or whatnot, so I want everything to be above board (I'll have to look into the unity license a bit more to see if it allows adult games but I'm sure I can find another c# engine that would allow it if unity does not) though I really want to go down the free and donate if you like it route.


When it comes to RPG Maker, well, these days I avoid those games like the plague. I just don't like that engine when it comes to adult games. I don't feel like it ever adds anything constructive to the experience and in fact find it frustrates me more than anything else. Also honestly, even for RPGs I don't like working with it from a design perspective. I find it very limiting (having only 6? primary stats hardcoded on the engine frustrates me no end) and find it takes a lot of plug ins to produce the experience you're looking for. At that point you may as well just use an engine that is actually designed to be worked with on a programming level.


I'm a little disappointed that the semi-realistic art style is proving so unpopular as I feel it would much better fit the atmosphere of what I'm making. Though I'm wondering if it's because people never see it so they don't know what to expect from it because I'm hard pressed to think of any examples off the top of my head right now.

 

[recreation]

Renpy is good when you want to make a straight forward VN or KN, that's hat it's designed for and where it shines, if you have a more ambigous goal, then it's better to use Unreal or Unity, nothing beats these two on the usability and scaleability side.
If you prefer semi realistic style, look at Honey Select games, they're quite popular and could help you find a style you like.

 

[fitgirlbestgirl]

From a programmer's perspective it doesn't seem very user friendly to me (on the design side) and everything going into one long script is very off-putting to me from a readability standpoint. It might be tolerable for a more linear game but for the style of game I'm currently building the concept around the fact that you can loop back on yourself, unlock events in no set order (individual character progressions will be fairly linear and while some characters may unlock events for other characters you'll be able to approach them in any order), repeat events etc. From that view it seems cleaner and easier to keep track of development and alter things when the various aspects are segregated to different classes.

That's not the case actually. You don't have to cram all your code into one script file, that's just what most amateur devs do. Making a sandbox game in Ren'py is also completely viable, see popular games like Summertime Saga or Milfy City.