deepinteractivity
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Future goals: Animations and spin-off game
🕑 Added 2021-08-25 09:19:14 +0000 UTCHello, everyone! I'd like to read your feedback on a couple of topics. If you've taken the time to check, you'll have noticed the 4th and 5th Patreon goals "Short spin-off game" and "Animated sprites for scenes". With the natural growth that time and experience provoke on ideas, I have far more insight than when I devised them over a year ago, which is why I've been considering some modifications.
Short spin-off game
The idea of starting to make a spin-off game in the middle of the development of Unholy Arts might sound strange to some. The initial logic was the following: the core code of Unholy Arts required a vast amount of work that didn't offer immediate gameplay, and its specific implementation offers a limited range of experiences when compared to what could be done with it with relatively small modifications.
Taking Unholy Arts' story, lore and most specific mechanics away, what could you do with it? Remove infamy and special relationship duration limitations, add some configuration options to which kind of characters you may meet, and you easily get a build-your-harem through sex battles games. Remove combat and add some house building features that appeal to your inner diogenes syndrome, and you've got a life & dating simulator. Add special rules where some characters are permanently allowed to punish some other characters, and you have a sex and bondage jail game.
My initial idea of this goal involved modifying the game rules a bit to fit the preferences of some community polls. However, I'm more inclined now towards a "game of games" with a lot of character configuration options where you may choose one of these scenarios. From time to time, I'd take a break from my usual 5-day workweek (plus two extra days of obsessively checking Discord and other platforms to check if anyone is reporting bugs after new releases), and dedicate 4 weekly days to work on Unholy Arts, and 2 weekly days to work on adding new scenarios to this side game.
There are a few advantages to this: a decent amount of work would be shared between boths games, such as the coding for new actions and generic dialogues; the new game would attract other players who aren't interested in the specific settings of Unholy Arts, which will provide me with extra funds to outsource art; and a side game which has no fixed end to its development would be a good bridge once I finish Unholy Arts, as it would allow me to keep providing monthly playable content while my next main project is not yet ready for its initial release. The downside is that I'm not sure how well I'll handle increase of my workweek, but I want to keep that point in the deal to make sure no one feels let down due to a drop too big in the development speed of Unholy Arts.
I'll be including a file at the bottom of the post with some ideas for the scenarios. Keep in mind that discussion and suggestions about them are open. If I go with this restructuring of the new side-game, one initial scenario will be decided by popular vote among supporters, and one or two others will be partially chosen between my judgement and popular demand. This is in order to prevent the leanings and preferences of one sector of the supporters from choosing too similar scenarios, while the preferences of other players go unattended. To illustrate this with an extreme example: 60% of players may only want scenarios with combat and dominance play, and vote for all initial scenarios to revolve around these concepts, but the remaining 40% of players may want a relaxed dating sim with no combat and lose all the polls: this is the reason why polls alone will not determine all the chosen scenarios.
New animations
The initial plan for this goal was dedicating an extra amount of money to commissioning sprites to self-employed artists, but I'm growing increasingly opposed to this, one of the main reasons being that this model disincentives long-term collaboration, which may lead to switching artists, which would provoke the consistency of the art style to suffer.
My ideal choice would be hiring someone full time to work on the art of the game, but a quick look at my income will throw salt at the idea. Hiring someone part time is a risky move, it's far from guaranteeing the motivation to keep working on the game long term, and could put my net income back at red numbers, but its advantages still overweight its cons, even if it puts my finances in a complicated position.
The initial animations would be relatively simple figures that represent humans, leiriens/dryads, aiishen, and other races on different sex positions, and divided by body parts. Depending on the resources available, the goals would increase to: making specific hairs and accesories, increasing the detail of the animations, including variants for locked body parts, eventually adding clothes, etc. This modularity would make the animations useful for both Unholy Arts and the side game.
Other considerations
I don't mind being flexible with how I approach these goals, regarding both starting before the earnings milestones are reached and changing their order. Animations is the fifth goal, rather than the fourth, which is backed by the logic that such an expense will suppose a smaller challenge if my income is bigger, however, animations might potentially attract a large number of players who would otherwise not play an erotic game solely based on text. On this line, the side game has a far larger potential to draw new players if it already has animations on release. On the opposite direction, I'd be less inclined to decide that the investment of bringing a new dev to the team isn't financially justified after a few months if I already had enough earnings to keep on living despite having hired someone on a loss. In both cases, I'd also be living with the pressure than I'd no longer be in a marathon to sustain myself, but on a race to both get enough money to live, and become able to pay a second competitive wage for a full time job.
If you have read this far, I have to thank you, and I also have to ask you on your opinions: Do you agree with the changes to the goals, and would you agree to switching their order? Is there any scenario for the side game (whether it is on the attached file or in your mind) that appeals to you? Which one, and what would you add or modify? How much do you think Unholy Arts would gain with animations for sex scenes? If there's people in your circles of friends and acquaintances who play adult games, how much do you think animations would increase the reach of both Unholy Arts and the side game? Do you have any insightful financial advice? And finally, thanks yet again!
Comments
CriticalExistenceFailure
Honestly would like a battle fuck side game in the vein of ladies sex bout, though I would prefer that to be in the main game (maybe as like a normal sex scene but with some additional actions/different dialogue and the first to reach mind blowing orgasm loses). For the scenarios I'm leaning more towards the monsters and villagers tbh. Unholy arts would gain a lot from animations imo, would be a nice touch (though arguably for now different facial expressions for dialogue I'd say would be a better investment rn). You might want to ask the night games dev how they employ artists and the degrees of lewdity dev how they handle the finanaces of having animations for a text based game.
PassingbyPosts
personally if i look at reference games and believe simple body references that are easily edited to have addtional clothes, hairs etc allow for more content and art without alot of resources. This is often represented as an evolving character avatar first as it connect the player to the avatar
