dailevy
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Final goal reached! Vote on the next game idea.
🕑 Added 2019-09-20 01:51:04 +0000 UTCHoly crap, we smashed that final goal. We hit it a while ago and I'm still in shock. I honestly can't believe how much support I've gotten over the years I've been doing this. Y’all are the fucking best.
In celebration, I want to use some Patreon funds to hire on a small team that will help me develop a new game. I will probably be doing all the programming, but art, writing, and (hopefully) some animation will be done by the team. This way, I can continue to focus my main efforts on Secret Horse Files 3.
The problem is, I have three game ideas that I'm equally excited about. They're codenamed SHF:Ink, SHF:Tales, and SHF:Factory. So let's put it to a vote! If you want to share your thoughts, please put them in the comments. I'll be considering the number of votes as well as points raised in the comments to decide which idea to work on. This poll is open to everyone :3
// Basic info
Builds will be available to higher tier patrons first, but public releases will only be one or two builds behind- much faster than SHF3 or Love Collector. I want the codebase to be public at some point.
Mobile support- My goal is to design the game for mobile browsers, and MAYBE have an Android app. Of course there'll be a desktop app and browser version as well.
Furry/Anthro content- Whichever game is chosen, I’ll probably eventually hire artists/writers to make an anthro furry spinoff. If you’re into anthro- I don't know when it'll happen, so don’t let this influence your decision. Just be aware that this is in the plans.
// A quick note on practicality
Since working on SHF3 by itself can sometimes be overwhelming, I'm wary of biting off more than I can chew with this project. Here's the reasoning- Content for the games will be fully delegated to the team. The games' core mechanics are either simple to program, or already exist in the game engine I'd be using... unlike SHF3 where I've had to invent basically everything from scratch. I'm hoping these factors prove to be a better formula for making faster content.
So I want to be super clear. My promise is to TRY to make the game you guys choose. My success depends on my own skill and time, my ability to run and delegate to a team, and the quality of the initial game concept. A lot of unknown variables in there. If you're considering becoming a Patron now because you're excited about one of these concepts, I'd advise caution- crowdfunded indie games have a reputation for crashing and burning. Maybe wait it out until you see some progress.
That being said, this whole plan is based on me taking what I've learned from Love Collector and SHF3 and trying to correct my initial mistakes. I have confidence in each of these concepts. So, you know, use your own judgment. :3
On to the games!
// SHF:Ink - Text-based game + engine.
This is the most different from my current stuff. It's a narrative-focused text game engine. Interactive, but NOT rpg combat-oriented. The game engine I make would be open source, and meant to be used by other writers looking to make games.
The current story concept:
Themes: body modification, gender bending, dubious consent, prostitution, and general fetish content.
Premise: You are a hybrid species -- half changeling and half a species of your choice. Also, you’re broke. Your form is unstable, so you must try to learn to control your form as you find work to make your way in the world. Emphasis on initial character customization and later body modification.
Gameplay: Sexual encounters are required to level up your skills, but can also lead to body-changing effects. You perform (sex) work to earn money, spend money on sexy skill training sessions, and travel to new areas to find better work/training. I'm also thinking there'd be options for extracurricular friend-making activities. The locations would probably start with the obvious ones in mlp canon, and expand to more exotic places.
Your character would have a physical body that changes, adding or removing body parts, enlargening them or adding fetishy traits to them as you go on. You also have mental characteristics- how much you like certain sex acts or characters, and how hard/easy it is for you to seduce, be seduced by, or resist other characters.
About the engine:
The main focus is the encounters- the sex scenes. A scene would probably progress through one or several sex positions/acts, depending on the stamina of you and your partner. What acts you can do, how good you are at them, and what your partner likes will depend on your skills and what kind of body you have at the moment. Your character might want to do these acts, or be forced into them, depending on your willpower and other traits. Being seduced, coaxed into new acts, and coerced into encounters would be part of this.
You progress through the encounter with dialogue or action options that either switch up the sex position, or add some flavor to the current position. The idea is that sex scenes are highly modular and meant to be played out multiple times without getting repetitive.
There’s a map with the main destinations where the player can stay for one "round" of game time. A round is like a few days or a week. You choose where to spend that time working/relaxing, and you run into encounters based on that. There's a set of varied encounters at each location, which expand and evolve as your character progresses. Also, random encounters during travel.
Inspired by great games like TiTS/CoCs, Flexible Survival, and others, but with some key differences. Encounters in TiTS/CoCs are usually a fight, followed by a prewritten scene with some modular changes based on your character’s anatomy. Encounters in Flexible Survival are these really cool traditional rpg fights that I just don’t have the patience for (no hate though). The difference with SHF:Ink being that this concept uses narrative actions rather than outright rpg mechanics. This is more interactive fiction with gameplay elements and lots of in-scene modularity.
// SHF:Tales - Short stories with interactive animated scenes.
This is basically an animated visual novel. It's similar to a lot of old Flash pony games, made in HTML5. The engine I build would eventually be made open source, once it's in a good spot. I'd want it to be approachable to artists and animators with minimal code experience.
I'd be reaching out to other artists to draw the art for this, and probably do a lot the animations myself.
Themes: range from vanilla to extreme kinks, since short stories could be made by different artists, and wouldn't necessarily be connected.
Gameplay: I did a basic test with this format a while ago. You can check it out here:
Drag the Play button at the bottom to change the speed/intensity of the animation.
So a short story would have a linear set of scenes like the one above, where you progress through different positions and sex acts. You might have a couple of minor stats that get tracked between scenes, but for the most part, this is a linear narrative experience. All the short stories would be accessible from the main menu.
// SHF:Factory - A lewd factory builder.
This one's the weirdest and most difficult code-wise. It will take longer to get to a playable state than the other two, as SHF3 will still take priority.
Themes: bondage, milking machines, fluid piping, inflation, and breeding (oviposition, preg).
Premise: build and run a changeling love factory. Ponies/creatures are milked for love juices. Those fluids can then be piped into other ponies’ bodies for refining and mixing, be used to impregnate each other to birth changeling workers and body-modifying parasites, or used to fuel more powerful milking machines.
The newly-industrialized changeling hive needs love at ever-increasing rates, and for some reason, this is the best way to produce it.
Gameplay: 2d, side-facing, simple factory builder. You place machines, place ponies in the machines, hook up fluid pipes to them, set up a breeding room, etc. My current idea for this is that you'd have multiple "rooms" which have a group of ponies/machines inside. Each room is kind of a closed system, and you link up the fluid pipes and machines between the ponies in that room. As you collect more love and breed more workers, you purchase more rooms and expand.
The plan would be to allow saving progress. Of course, there'd be a sandbox mode for those who don't want to bother with progression.
// Final thoughts
Ink will be the fastest to produce content for, since it's all text, but it'll take some time for me to get the engine ready for writers. Just because it’s text doesn’t mean it’s not complicated. It's guaranteed to be mobile-friendly though.
Tales will be faster to program since it's linear. And once it’s working, there won’t be much to add to the code. It can have multiple artists working on multiple stories at once. Still, animation and sound work are a lot slower than writing.
Both will allow for the exploration of a wide range of fetishes.
Factory will be the slowest programming-wise, and it'll take the most involvement from me. But since there'll be a lot on-screen at once, the art and animations will be simpler than Tales, and far simpler than SHF3. The scope of content will be smaller than Ink. My hope is to hire someone for scripting that'll ease the top-level game design/balance work.
So, what do y’all think? :3
edit: adding an FAQ ->
FAQ
Will you make all three?
Maybe! I won't 100% commit to making all three right now, because I don't know what will come up between now and when I finish the first winner. However, the immediate feedback I'm getting from y'all is that you'd be interested in seeing 2 or 3 of the options. So here's what I can say- if it's in the cards for me when I finish the first game, I'll run another poll and bring back the 2 losers of this one.
I want to help you make the game!
Yo, that's awesome. I'm pretty new to building a team and managing a project, so bear with me while I figure out what the heck I'm doing. After the poll concludes, I'll post some info about the scope and plans for the game, and I'll make a post specifically about hiring team members.
Note that I might not need to hire people right away! I'll need to scaffold out the project's code and then start filling team positions to complete needed content.
Right now, I don't know who I'll hire, how many team members there will be, and what capacity they'll serve in the project. So if you're interested, stay tuned as I figure this out! It fills me with joy seeing people interested in helping out. <3
Comments
Levy Dai
Yeah that's a good idea. I'll put in on my Ink notes, thank you!
Waldo
Hey, if you go with ink, maybe make some fetishes a toggle. I don't think you'd do guro or scat, but Idk some people are into bugs, but that would make me leave the game forever. It doesn't look like you'll be doing ink, but it's an idea.
Toksyuryel
Factory sounds amazing, and it looks like many people agree! I am very excited about it :D
Levy Dai
Yes! I want the next project to have localization, and I want to start with Russian and Spanish, probably. I'll make a post about this at some point. I think translation will be crowd-sourced, so anyone can help.
Levy Dai
Ink would definitely have some form of tickling content. Tales has a good chance, depending on the artists I can snag for it. For Factory though, it's not in the initial scope -- while tickling is great from a bdsm perspective, I don't see a way to fit it into core mechanics of the game concept.
Levy Dai
I don't know about x-ray or seeing the egg be fertilized yet. Maybe!
Can I help translate the game (projects in general) into my native Russian language?
Mirth
Which of the projects do you think will contain the most tickling content, if any? You see, I came to your patreon via the fact that your flagship game contains some amazingly done tickling content. Hence my interest in potentially ticklish scenarios.
i just cant wait for the latest version of shf3 to be public
Tell me and we can in the factory to see how the fertilization pony and even take part in this? And will it have X-RAY?
Levy Dai
My design for Factory right now tries to allow players to use purely males, or purely female/futa, or a mix. I don't want to force gay or straight content on players in this one. I think by default, you'll need males and females, at least at the start of the game. But if so, then there'll be options for all-male or all-female/futa play. This is a good question! I'll expand on this topic more if Factory does win :3
Annabelle Kotori
Hmm there is quite a lot of text based games and from playing them they never update at the speed you expect which can be surprisingly disappointing, the tales game would be the most action smut focused with that focus on the animation, rather than text or simulations but is not so free form so not much in the way of agency to see content you may like. I guess ill vote for the factory although i gotta ask, would their be options to have futas rather than males?
Mr. D
I'm not big on Text based games, I had enough of em back on DOS. I like Tales cause it sounds like substance. but I like Factory cause it looks like something you could just keep adding content, and characters to for a good while.
Silver Scroll
All of these sound like great ideas, though on first reading it seems like Ink is the one I'd get most invested in... unless Factory gets as much depth as I'm hoping it will, in which case I'll probably be optimizing kinky love extraction for a week straight once it comes out. Since it seems to be winning anyway, I voted for Ink to make sure it gets the support it deserves. I do love the idea of a platform for lewd stories from different artists too, though... so put me down as another voice in favour of "as many of these as you can, please!"
Levy Dai
haha yes, Factory is partly inspired by SpaceChem. Also I added an FAQ to this post with a bit of info for people who might want to help out in making the game!
Levy Dai
Yes, I'll be looking at patrons who want to join the team! They won't get special treatment though :3. Would need writers for Ink especially. Factory will be Lua-based and I'll probably need help with scripting. I can't promise anything right now, of course! I added a section to the FAQ at the end of the post with a little more info on this. Seriously, thanks so much for the interest~
Levy Dai
I didn't realize that TiTs had that problem. That's some really good advice to keep in mind - thank you!
LigerHorse
Consarnit you, I love all three ideas. Though I am would prefer to see Factory get built. I don't care how long it takes to make it playable, I love factory building games and the idea of a proper smut game where living creatures are treated as parts of the machine? Oh heck yes. Although, Ink also sounds awesome. I've never really enjoyed the combat mechanics in TiTs/CoC, very tedious at times. I would love to see something like those with a stronger bend towards story. Though if you do make ink, I HIGHLY recommend planning all the body part variants ahead of time. Something that really frustrates me about TiTs is how little support many of the body parts get. Example; there are a tiny number of scenes that actually react to the prescence of a penis with the ovipositor flag. They have stated this is because they prefer not to go back and add support for new stuff. So please, plan stuff in advance if you decide to work on Ink. I love the concept behind it and would enjoy seeing it become a great interactive story.
FurbasticFun
Will you be hiring anyone from Patreon? I'm interested in applying. I am currently a Computer Science and Writing double major in college. I am experienced with Java, Python, and Lua, and have recently started learning C (though I'm not sure what language you use to code). I have recently been learning to develop Android apps (which are written in Java), and have gotten pretty far, so I could be of some value there. Also, in my free time I do a lot of writing. I am currently in the process of editing a novel and a novella. I also am a very good editor according to my mother. She is a college professor and writes a newsletter for the Nursing department where she works that goes out to all the students and faculty, and she frequently comes to me for editing and revisions. I have documents and such that I can send to you, and I am prepared to fill out a proper application. I am excited about the upcoming project nonetheless. Your work is amazing!
Developer! Please make this game! Even if you are going to do it for a long time, don't be afraid, we will wait!!!! SHF:Factory - A lewd factory builder.
BeamierNate855
I would like to throw my hat into the Factory ring, but would be fine waiting on it to be finished after Tales
Levy Dai
great question. Added an FAQ at the bottom of the post addressing this!
R.TNT
If you do tales, maybe you can get fan-submitted suggestions, and even writing. I would GLADLY write a short lewd MLP thing to be animated.
Lemon Drop
I do like both the text adventure and factory one so it is a tricky choice between those, but something is just amusing about the thought of playing something like SpaceChem but lewd themed. Regardless if you do end up making the factory one and need some assistance I'd be happy to help as I know a thing or to about making games.
bannedspider
think it would be great if you would do the most voted first, then the second, then third, so it would be what would we like first
Jon Hayes
Not enough (if any) Pony Themed Text games out there, Think I will vote for that.
Austin Hanson
Ok I will admit that all 3 choices are excellent. But with how you described the timeframe of each project which thank you by the way, I can see you doing only one… At the moment. Though is it possible that these choices can become later projects after the current one is done? What I mean is can do the other two choices in the future after we do the winning choice?
