by SoED » Sat Feb 14, 2015 9:07 am
Hello!
I lurked around several independent adult game maker boards a few years ago. I recently was considering making a book series, and then decided that my goals were better suited to making an erotic game. That's why I've made a new username (one that I'm using all over the place now) and why I came back here to see what people are interested in as content for erotic games these days. :)
I've spent the last few months working on ideas for stories, characters, settings, and so on, and I'm finally getting things adapted and narrowed down for the scope of an RPG-style game.
I'm going to look around and see what my options are, but right now I think that RPG Maker VX Ace is going to be the simplest way for me to realize my idea. I wish that it could be more easily played on non-Windows systems, but I think that my lack of code knowledge means that I need to stick to something easy.
I played around with some unprotected project files in my old copy of VX Ace to get a feel for the basics and try to start understanding scripting. Scripts are still over my head, but I've got some basic mechanics planned and I'm gathering resources like tilesets, sprites, and music.
My plan is for the game to have little combat or no combat at all, and be more like a lot of overlapping visual novel games instead of a "fantasy adventure" or "meet and fuck" style game. I'm thinking I'll have more than 10 playable "main characters" by the time that I have everything sketched out, and each character will have a few relationships and goals that they can pursue - and a lot of optional side-content ministories and scenes.
I think it's a pretty ambitious idea, and it's not like any other game that I've seen before, so I'm going to take things step-by-step and not try to develop everything all at once or at the same time.
The foundation of the game will be the setting itself, how it came to be, and how the characters are dealing with it. That's the reason why there will be several playable characters, and why their goals and stories can be somewhat separate from the others' if the player wants to focus on a particular character.
It will take me quite some time to build up enough stories for each playable character to have a lot of content that isn't related to the characters that I designed first for the series, but I hope to reach that point by continuing to develop the game month by month for a long time. Having a limited number of locations and not having battles should help with that - because it will let me focus my time on story-related content.
One of the characters that I'll focus on the most early on was/is at the epicenter of the setting's origin, so a lot of the early content will be about that character, the story, and sex scenes that involve that character.
While the game will have a lot of erotic content, I want to balance the content between sex scenes, erotic non-sex scenes, general gameplay and dialogue, and nonsexual scenes. I want as little to be mutually exclusive between stories as possible - so that a player can experience a large majority of the content in the game without having to start from scratch.
I also want players that don't like a certain kind of content to be able to avoid or skip as much of that kind of content as possible. Everyone is going to have to get a little bit of everything, but I hope to make the game like a bunch of games that can all be played from the same .exe file. Think of it like Starcraft. You can stick to just the custom maps, play against computers, do player vs player ladder matches, or do a mix of those things.
I want players who come just for the sex to be able to avoid or skip as much of the nonsexual content as possible. I want players who come for the "Sims"/"Civilization" kinds of gameplay elements to be able to avoid or skip as much of the sexual and non-sexual scenes as they want to. I want players who want to explore the nonsexual stories and the longer and more detailed sexual scenes to be able to find those events and avoid or skip the others as much as possible.
Speaking of skipping; my plan is to pack as many scenes into grouped events as possible - so that players who have seen them before can skip them entirely, and players who want to revisit certain scenes can do so from an in-game menu. I'm not sure what RPG Maker VX Ace's limits are on the number of Common Events and how much content they can include, but I hope to discover that they're open enough to let me have several hundred scenes (grouped content triggered by a switch or variable) like that.
Part of the reason for that is that I sometimes want to play games that I enjoy differently, or sometimes just want erotic content or only content that has depth of character or story. Make what you want to see and hope it becomes popular, right?
I don't plan to have images other than character faces at this point. I don't want to get slowed down by trying to make or find artwork. I want to dedicate my time to using the sprites well to set scenes, and using dialogue and descriptive text. I won't be trying to cram a novel into the game's message boxes, though. I want to have several paragraphs be the maximum length for any mini-scene. That might be at most a page or two of paragraphs in Microsoft Word. I expect most scenes to have less text than that.
If people like the game a lot and get inspired by some of the scenes or characters, I think it would be cool to add some fan-submitted, self-made art into the game. But that would only be optional bonus content that would probably only appear when a player uses the "Replay Scene" option from the menu. I don't want there to be an imbalance in any of the scenes during a first play-through.
I haven't yet decided on a tileset. I'm thinking that I'd like to go with a mostly "modern" theme with some fantasy elements, but finding modern tilesets has been a bit difficult, and I'd want the sprites to match the tileset I choose - so I'd have to find those and matching faces for them, as well. If I don't go with a modern tileset, then I'll choose a fantasy tileset and fantasy sprites that look as close to modern as possible.
If anyone has any recommendations for tilesets, sprites, or faces, please let me know!
So, that's my game concept. I'll be lurking around here and occasionally posting while I keep working on setting the game up and looking at options for game engines and materials.
Glad to be here in a non-lurker capacity now! :)
