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the more i dig into more complex game stuff the more it dawns on me just how expansive the field of 'game design' is. or like... one of the funniest comments i've seen about my work was some 4chan comment talking about hell game where they were like "wow this looks really polished i wonder why they stopped working on it in favor of less interesting stuff", when it's like, the easy parts of hell game were the 'game-like elements'; the hard parts were the pages and pages of text (& getting that text into game format). 'the new hive' is basically just a collection of game-toy elements that add padding between some very lengthy sex scenes, with only minimal 'mechanics'. and that's totally fine, but it's a totally different thing vs. something like a detective/mystery game, like in the werewolf detective game, or mechanics demos like the clicker game or the various gardening games.
that's really what kinda killed off the werewolf detective game -- i realized i was going to have to actually sketch out all the puzzles and solutions and figure out what the specific resolutions would be and how the clues would be placed & how they'd direct the player, and it's like, oh right, that's why games have titles like "puzzle designer" in their credits.
like even in the ff7 game i kind of had this impulsive decision to add litrpg-style health displays in sex scenes mostly because i thought it was funny and then i had to deal with the consequences of that, i.e., that implicitly branches and requires handling getting 'koed' any time those show up. plus there are plenty of sex acts that don't really map well to 'rough sex' equals 'taking damage', like, is getting throatfucked more damaging than just sucking dick? what if you have a throatfucking skill? is there any meaningful mechanical difference between a high throatfucking skill with low hp vs. a low throatfucking skill with high hp? these are mechanical questions that maybe you don't want to have to ask if you just want to write some throatfucking scenes and yet i kind of accidentally created that mechanical trap for myself because i thought it was funny. my understanding is 'game design' as a skill is about structuring things so the mechanical questions you end up having to ask are ones you actually care about answering.
also to add to that challenge, since i'm making porn games there's the question of how to balance the 'porn' with the 'game'. like i have concepts for like, complex tactics rpg mechanics -- and those wouldn't even be very difficult to implement!! -- but then there's the question of like, to what degree would that be engaging and fun to the detriment of the porn aspects. i mean i guess the ultimate solution here would just be to make games and see how people like them, but it turns out making an entire game is kind of a challenge.
so basically it's very funny when... like, a lot of porn games these days are twine games with limited mechanics, or holdovers from the CoC-dominant era of like, lite-rpg systems, and i guess hell game did have a big graphical map and a custom 'combat' system, so i guess that did make it stand out, but like... yeah that's not actually the hard part of gamedev for me, at all.
(i mean right now the biggest obstacle to porn gamedev i forsee is that it could easily soon be nearly impossible to host anything sexual on the internet without opening myself to massive liability, but that's a whole other post)
that's really what kinda killed off the werewolf detective game -- i realized i was going to have to actually sketch out all the puzzles and solutions and figure out what the specific resolutions would be and how the clues would be placed & how they'd direct the player, and it's like, oh right, that's why games have titles like "puzzle designer" in their credits.
like even in the ff7 game i kind of had this impulsive decision to add litrpg-style health displays in sex scenes mostly because i thought it was funny and then i had to deal with the consequences of that, i.e., that implicitly branches and requires handling getting 'koed' any time those show up. plus there are plenty of sex acts that don't really map well to 'rough sex' equals 'taking damage', like, is getting throatfucked more damaging than just sucking dick? what if you have a throatfucking skill? is there any meaningful mechanical difference between a high throatfucking skill with low hp vs. a low throatfucking skill with high hp? these are mechanical questions that maybe you don't want to have to ask if you just want to write some throatfucking scenes and yet i kind of accidentally created that mechanical trap for myself because i thought it was funny. my understanding is 'game design' as a skill is about structuring things so the mechanical questions you end up having to ask are ones you actually care about answering.
also to add to that challenge, since i'm making porn games there's the question of how to balance the 'porn' with the 'game'. like i have concepts for like, complex tactics rpg mechanics -- and those wouldn't even be very difficult to implement!! -- but then there's the question of like, to what degree would that be engaging and fun to the detriment of the porn aspects. i mean i guess the ultimate solution here would just be to make games and see how people like them, but it turns out making an entire game is kind of a challenge.
so basically it's very funny when... like, a lot of porn games these days are twine games with limited mechanics, or holdovers from the CoC-dominant era of like, lite-rpg systems, and i guess hell game did have a big graphical map and a custom 'combat' system, so i guess that did make it stand out, but like... yeah that's not actually the hard part of gamedev for me, at all.
(i mean right now the biggest obstacle to porn gamedev i forsee is that it could easily soon be nearly impossible to host anything sexual on the internet without opening myself to massive liability, but that's a whole other post)
