I recently made the final count on the number of CGs that will be in the final version of Opportunity once art for the very last scene is done - 390 total! Holy moly! Even if I were to use a far stingier metric and only count ones that have significantly different posing (cutting out all the ones that are just, like, two images, one of a dick being halfway out of a pussy and one of a dick being all the way in a pussy that I can toggle between to show sex happening) we would still have over 100. Piss! The final wordcount is going to be a healthy way northwards of 130,000, meaning that I've managed to surpass the wordcount of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion. Depending on how fast of a reader you are, it'll probably take somewhere from 6-10 hours to play, end to end.
By visual novel standards (and especially pornographic visual novel standards) this is Baby Bitch Hours. Just BARELY on the threshold of acceptability. There are a lot of pornographic visual novels that are twice, three times, FOUR times as long as mine, some that have actual branching stories and gameplay mechanics. Fucked.
An important thing to keep in mind with regards to content in porn games is that (ideally) it needs to fulfill a pretty stringent set of expectations:
- Sex scenes need to be plentiful enough that they can be doled out regularly to maintain interest
- Writing outside of sex scenes must forever necessarily grapple with the logistics of getting us into the NEXT sex scene (in addition to making time for plot advancement and characterization)
- This might sound obvious, but: you need to be able to masturbate to the sex scenes, which means that they need to attain a certain minimum length and level of quality
- As much as possible, you should avoid forcing players to repeatedly view sexual content they've seen before, because even the sexiest piece of sexual content becomes stale by the 3rd or 4th viewing (I know that a lot of porn games do this anyways. This is a stupid decision that makes their games worse). This means that meaningful asset reuse potential with sexual content is going to be basically nil
- The intensity of your sexual content needs to mount gradually. This can feel quite formulaic; you can set your watch by how some games will go Peeping -> Frottage -> Kissing -> Hand Stuff -> Mouth Stuff -> Now We Fuckin -> Now We Fuckin (Butthole Edition) -> Now We Fuckin (Group Sex Edition) -> Now We Fuckin (Developer's Specific Fetish Turbo DX). But even if you aren't following that playbook to the letter, you generally will want to start tame and finish depraved - the progression between the two extremes is one of the player's rewards for playing, after all. And all that means is that you need enough sexual content for the progression to feel natural
- On top of all that, you still need to create all the non-sexual content (character sprites, background art, UI art) that you would need to in a SFW visual novel
Fuck, man! I need a nap just THINKING about all that bullshit. All that work just so your players can blast out a thick nutt to a visual novel experience.
Anyways what I'm saying with this whole essay is that there's a reason people work for years and years on these things. There is so much fucking content that we have to make and usually it's not very many people making it and we have day jobs. It's for this reason that even though I make a lot of fun of porn games over at @zippity I would still bleed and die for every single dev of every single game I post about over there
So I actually did okay with a moushley game that had 30 images (sans alts) and around 7k words at $3 a pop that was hyper focused on a specific fetish (enf)
Not like enough to earn money forever or for a whole year or anything, but enough to pay rent for a month and a half or so, and it lasted around 5-15 minutes to play in total.
I think that there's room for shorter experiences in this space imo and I'm aiming to try again with my next few project attempts and see if it's both replicatable and has demand without turning into shovelware.
Do you think there's a reason a lot of nsfw devs decide to do stuff with a larger writing focus and as many words/images in it? Or is this more of a case of "most of the other ones do it and I'm competing in the same market so I have to do it to to be viable as a competitive product?"
Yeah, I do think the original post should come with some caveats/additional considerations that your experience highlights nicely:
- Approaching a project from a standpoint of "this needs to be able to compete with comparable products in a marketplace" absolutely comes with different content considerations than something you're making as a just-for-fun/experimental thing. There have definitely been some pretty notable small-scale adult games - Super Deepthroat is an eternal classic, Lewd Leaf Land, Onta's done a few adult microgames. That being said, taking a look at the first 100 games in Itch's "adult/popular" and "adult/top selling" tags, I would say that I saw fewer than 10 that I could call lower-content with a straight face. It's possible to pop off with less content, but by no means common.
- I think a sub-$5 price tag also wins you a decent amount of flexibility in terms of expectations from your audience. At that price point, I think it's considered "okay" to have something that's basically just a toy or a single scene, whereas getting higher than that and people start wanting something more comprehensive.
- The more niche the fetish you're catering to, the more forgiveness I think you'll get. When people are starved for ANY good-quality content relating to their fetish, they're less likely to get up in arms when said content lasts less than a half-hour.
- This is not to denigrate the work you did, but I don't think people are necessarily expecting a game based on an art meme to have hours of content. I'm sure they wouldn't COMPLAIN if that were the case, but if you're basing a game on something relatively ephemeral then I don't think it comes as much of a surprise if the amount of resources invested in it reflects that.
While I'm here I also wanted to ruminate a little more on the original post; specifically about one reason I think porn game content expectations (and pricing expectations) have gotten so out of wack: Patreon-model game development.
Monthly-crowdfunding-supported game dev is a double-edged sword. You can support yourself and a team with an unfinished product, but you also have to keep doing regular content updates in order to maintain subscriber investment. Once you've got the basic framework of your game laid out, it's (relatively) easy to push out a new chunk of content every couple months or so. When you're talking about games that have technically been in development for 3, 4, 5, 6 years... that's a lot of little chunks of content, all adding up!
And then, when the game's finished enough to actually put it up on retailers, it's easy to say "well, I don't actually have any costs to recoup, so I can put this game that's slowly accrued 30 hours of content over 6 years up for ten bucks and not worry about it". And, like, that's great for them and great for players but not so good for the 95% of developers who aren't lucky enough to have Patreon followings substantial enough to pay them a living wage for 6 years and instead have to just, like, do what they can with whatever resources they can scrape together. And that's not even getting into games with AI-generated art further skewing expectations.
Anyways. Monstrous Liberation available to wishlist on Steam, early access hopefully dropping Q4 2024. We're putting as much stuff as we can into it, but, you know, it's tough.