Hello! Writer starting out with game design

[SoED]

Hello!

I lurked around several independent 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 here to see what people are up to in game-making these days. :)

I don't really know what to talk about, so I guess I'll talk about my idea. Oh, and I know that posting 18+ content isn't ok here. I won't be trying to post that kind of stuff, beg for someone to do things for me, or advertise my game. :)



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.


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! :)



If anyone has any recommendations for tilesets, sprites, or faces, please let me know!

Also, if you think there's an engine that I should use instead of RPG Maker VX Ace, please let me know about the software and why you think I should use it!

[E-Man]

Well, welcome to this forum all the same, but maybe you could look into creating a less erotic game instead?

[puggsoy]

Well, welcome to this forum all the same, but maybe you could look into creating a less erotic game instead?

There's nothing wrong with making an erotic game. It's up to the forum staff to decide whether it's fit for posting here (if there aren't any 18+ pictures or descriptions I assume it's fine), but SoED can still make this kind of game if they want.

In any case, welcome to the Resource! I sorta skimmed the idea, I would recommend making a thread in Gaming Development for it, and just keeping this thread for your intro. From what I can tell it seems like a bit ambitious, although that's not necessarily a bad thing if you're determined enough. Although I personally don't play these sort of games, it does seem like an interesting idea for those who do.

Hope you enjoy your time here!

[E-Man]

Sorry about that, Puggsoy. I just wasn't certain if a game like that is allowed or not. When I saw the part about how he wants to make an erotic game, I instantly remembered how some members aren't all that keen on fetishes and some sexual situations.

[Maxpphire]

Well, provided you don't post actual sex scenes or overly graphic things then its fine.

We allow nudity behind a spoiler tag, but again, we'd prefer if nothing overly sexual in nature was posted.

(Basically don't post sex and/or fetish scenes. Artistic nudity is fine. If you're not sure what the difference is, just ask and I'll go farther in detail.)

Honestly I'm not sure if Providing a download link here is such a good idea. I mean if you had a link to your website that was showcasing your game and it so happened to have a download link on that site, by all means we can't touch that or get in trouble with that, but linking a download here directly is kinda sketchy. A lot of our member base is younger then 18 so we wouldn't want to be legally responsible for them downloading something that was linked on our site if it wasn't legal for them to download.

[Xander]

Yeah, i definitely think you've hit the wrong demographic for this game. other indie dev sites might be better suited for this kind of content.

But hey, if you love sprites, models, textures and sounds, there's no reason you can't share at least some of what you end up making.

[Kosheh]

Welcome! I haven't given it a full read, but

Well, welcome to this forum all the same, but maybe you could look into creating a less erotic game instead?

pffffffffft bahahahaa

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

yo meet and fuck kingdom was one of 2000's greatest gifts to the internet don't be hatin' on meet and fuck kingdom )':

In all seriousness, you might want to look into Ren'py if you're looking into making something that's more like a visual novel. It'll take a little bit of custom scripting in Python to do the actual things you want - but if you're just more comfortable in RPG Maker that's fine too. I have a friend who's a writer and doesn't know jack about programming, but he and his pal were able to scrounge up a short VN with little to no knowledge at all of Python.



Skimming and just realized, though. You know what'd be awesome? A really awkward erotic adventure that chronicles several characters' sexual escapades, but instead of explicitly having sex scenes/onscreen sex, having boss battle/scale fights but abstract symbols represent your team members and the enemy, with Latin names to describe the archetypes of those characters.
So like, people who are squeamish like E-Man and other people could play it too and be fully aware of the sexual undertones and complexities the game is presenting.
Kinda like Earthbound, but about one-night stands and casual meetups.


...yeah.

I'll read this again later with a little more concrete input tho. :V

EDIT: Read it a little more. I'm not sure if there's any content that's really criticizable at this point. You might still wanna look into Ren'py if you're hunting for a visual novel engine - and chances are you could write a basic executable that serves as a "hub" for your network of games if your game gets to that point.

Unless you've got a steady team of 10+ people, I wouldn't think about the "what if the game becomes successful" aspect - I'd probably focus more on the actual content and shaping/carving things out.

That said, I think going with a modern theme would be pretty neat. One thing I've got to admit - I'm pretty sick of every erotic VN not being "real" enough. It's always a dopey cast of characters, and, while lovable in their own right, none of the stuff particularly feels like it'd ever happen to me. I mean, I get the whole "I play games to escape from reality, why would I play a game about realistic love" - but I'd love a game that really throws a wrench into conventional VNs, and really allows you to live a fantasy opposite of the Silky Waifu bullshit. Issues that make you actually think. Like, for example:

- One of the girls, while charming and a real socialite, also has a child at home. The child was born when she was in her middle teens, and the boy's biological father, and girl's ex-boyfriend, was originally a great guy until be became an alcoholic. The unstable home relationship due to the boyfriend's alcoholism forced the girl to move out. And the child, who's not an infant, has unusually enough experience to cause some tension when you're around as he's not really keen on the idea of you replacing his father, and is sick of the men that his mother would bring home during one-night stands who'd pretend to be nice to get in his mother's pants.

- A kind woman whose husband is stationed overseas. He's injured in the call of duty, receives a Purple Heart award, comes home, and finds that she's been seeing someone else: You. The story revolves around the shitstorm clouds that form over the couple and the tangled webs of marriage, all with the constant fear of a musclebound hulk is going to knock down your door and beat the shit out of you when you're sleeping.

- Another real straightedge girl who suffered from a rare disease when she was a child. From a well-off family, they forked over the cash for a blood transfusion, but due to the lack of knowledge of the disease, ends up being diagnosed as HIV positive. The main plot in this storyline deals with the MC's naivete and risk of possible contraction of HIV and the social situations he faces from his peers.

- A childhood friend you haven't seen in years who's a transitioning MTF.

Like, you know, a visual novel. But on hard mode.
Sorry if I just spilled all my fantasies out into a post on the interwebs - but like, a Really Real VN that isn't a platter of buttercups but not trying super-hard to be XxEDGYxASxFUCKxX would be pretty fuckin sweet.

I'm Just Saiyan