Might do a 3D game

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Well, there was a big power outage after blizzard, so I had some time to think about a game premise. I really like the various brothel-sim games, so I think we could combine a brothel sim with beat 'em up.

So the idea is you play as a criminal overlord hiring fighters and strippers to do your dirty work. The main plot is to take over more and more territory.

Fighters can be hired to prowl the streets, raid enemy territories or defend your own territories. Each fighter has an individual "extra lives" count. If a fighter loses all of their lives, they are permanently dead, and you need to hire new ones. Prowling streets is low commitment combat, you go for a short time and can boost your fighters' stats or get money from people you beat up. A raid against a territory is serious business. You will have to fight stronger opponents, ending with a boss, and there will be less chances to escape if you get in over your head. Even if you do not reach the boss, a raid may allow you to kidnap enemy strippers or fighters and hold them for ransom or employ them yourself, or decrease the property value of the territory, allowing you to buy it "fair and square". Enemy syndicates can also send gangs to raid your territories, so you need to station fighters to defend them. Not sure if you should be able to control the defenders, or if they would calculate defense automatically. As you eliminate more and more territories, rival syndicates will be replaced with police agents, who are stronger.

Territories would mostly be strip clubs or brothels or whatever, but you may be able to capture something like a film studio and turn it into a porn studio, or capture the hospital and get a discount on your medical bills or get paid a cut of your rivals' medical bills. You can station strippers at your territories to make money, and you can check in on them to see them naked. The stripper's skill or popularity gives you more revenue. Territories have a property value which you can pay to upgrade to get more customers, or other bonuses if we think of any. Better property values and/or better strippers will give you access to more sex scenes. I feel like there should be a way to hook up fighters with strippers. Maybe you can assign a stripper to a fighter for a certain amount of time to give the fighter an extra life.

From this, we can add more interactions if the come to us.



I guess this would be kind of like Dynasty Warrior Empires, if you've ever played that version.

[Matpneumatos]

Well, that sounds quite nice, sounds like a complicated job on the programming side, but also sounds fun! so you decided to go with Unity? if that's the case this thread should be moved to another section, also is looks like all those concepts would require lots of assets, 3D models and stuff, i mean i could help with some 3D models too and even drawings since i'm also an artist, but do you think you can do all that stuff? i mean it sounds fun, but it also sounds like a lot of work, but if you already decided which concept would you like to use, then it would be nice to start and doing some work on it.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Yeah, Unity is fine. I would still accept future offers to work in Flash, but if you are ready to do Unity, then so am I.

I will use some techniques to try to reduce the total amount of work. Using randomization strategically can help make it seem like there is more work when it is just numbers. To start, I want to make some randomized character parts, similar to what they used in Corta's Splatformer and the two main brothel sim games. I think Unity supports shapekeys, so I want to try using it to do randomized breast size and maybe also hip, butt and waist size. It would be cool to have characters with randomized height, but I don't know how to make characters line up when they do something like grabs or sex. I'm not sure if I should make randomized clothing, or any clothing at all. If they are anthros, they don't really need to be clothed, and if the women are mostly strippers, there would be few contexts in which they should be clothed anyways. I could still give them some accessories, like hair ribbons or dog collars, if I can think of enough.

I don't yet have a clear image in my mind of how exactly the randomization should work, so I need to think it through a bit more before committing. Once my brain has settled in a little more, I can start pumping out characters.

[KiWolfGirl]

If you can think of a way to write that up as a game play document then ok but it sounds like a very complicated and ambitious idea. If its your first one with a new environment or media I would say to start much smaller.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

If you can think of a way to write that up as a game play document then ok but it sounds like a very complicated and ambitious idea. If its your first one with a new environment or media I would say to start much smaller.

True, but the problem is it is inherently complicated to combine a combat system and sex system and without complexity, beat 'em ups become boring to most people.

I guess I could tone it down a bit for a first try. Maybe just an exploration game where sometimes you fight, sometimes you fuck. I'd have to think more about what the characters are and what the scenes are. How do you feel about it?

Also, today I got to see the Unity WebGL in action, so I feel a little more satisfied that Unity games will not be hard for people to find.

[Matpneumatos]

Well, Unity WebGL is perfect for simple games, but if you want to make a complex game you might run into some troubles, it'll never run as smooth as the Unity webplayer used to run and i've found some weird issues with some of my builds, but if you want to give some preview of your game, then WebGL is decent.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Well, Unity WebGL is perfect for simple games, but if you want to make a complex game you might run into some troubles, it'll never run as smooth as the Unity webplayer used to run and i've found some weird issues with some of my builds, but if you want to give some preview of your game, then WebGL is decent.

What sort of complexity would be problematic? Object count? Pathfinding AI?

[KiWolfGirl]

beat 'em ups become boring to most people.

Yeah but those are beat 'em ups without sex, lol

[Matpneumatos]

Well, Unity WebGL is perfect for simple games, but if you want to make a complex game you might run into some troubles, it'll never run as smooth as the Unity webplayer used to run and i've found some weird issues with some of my builds, but if you want to give some preview of your game, then WebGL is decent.

What sort of complexity would be problematic? Object count? Pathfinding AI?

Well, some people tell me they have input lag in my game, and it might be because their devices are not powerful enough, but considering i kind of butchered the graphics in order to provide a better WebGL experience it limits your target audience a little bit, to people with good enough hardware, and if we are talking of a beat 'em up then input lag is a bad thing. You can test my game here http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/670115 it was published in WebGL and it has quite complex graphics, it works great on my laptop, but i'm not sure if it is the same for some other computers.

Some other random issue i had, was having a UnityScript and a C# script with the same name attached to an object, since both the editor and the desktop version were working fine i thought there wouldn't be a problem but my WebGL build was doing weird things, then i figured it out, and i changed the name of one of the scripts, this is not a big issue, just something i learned.

But still, it is a good way to give a preview of your game on a website.

[KiWolfGirl]

lol smash brothers control scheme. There was no lag for me, maybe people are confusing it with acceleration, since the character takes a second to get to full speed. Or maybe they just dont have good computers

[AcetheSuperVillain]

I'll have to test input lag on a less powerful machine, I have a pretty strong computer for making 3D graphics. I didn't notice any input lag when I played it, but the slippy physics give it a weird feeling, which might be what people are feeling.

Okay, so this seems like a good reason to do a very simple game first to test things out. Maybe something close to the complexity of my AxeQuest or Slime Fighters games to get an engine ready, then we can add to it later.