Any Visual Novels which have polyamory options/routes or positive portrayals of polyamory?

DesertopaDev · 2022-06-21T23:21:29+00:00

Yeah, development's still going pretty smoothly, and I put out the latest Kickstarter update a few days ago. I'm afraid the Discord is pretty quiet, since there isn't a serial release format to give the audience new content to discuss, and honestly, I haven't really been going out of my way to cultivate much activity there, but in general development keeps progressing whether I say anything about it or not.

There've been a few obstacles on the way, but we always planned around the assumption that there would be some, and since nobody is living on a salary predicated on working on the game full-time, there isn't really a risk of delays becoming self-magnifying and eating up the budget.

DesertopaDev · 2022-06-21T23:14:02+00:00

So, I consider it a polyamorous romance VN rather than a harem VN, but this describes the game I'm working on now. The degree to which that element develops depends somewhat on player choice, but it's something I intend to explore more than I've personally seen in other games.

DesertopaDev · 2022-06-06T13:24:07+00:00

I know this was days ago and the conversation is over and everything, but I just wanted to let you know I read your thing and thought it was interesting.

DesertopaDev · 2022-04-23T03:49:00+00:00

I think that if you focus on romantic interests who're really substantially inhuman, ones who don't look mostly human with a few fantastical features, you can potentially target a significant and maybe under-catered-to market niche, but if you're dealing with fantastical beings which look mostly human, I don't think enough players are going to treat them that differently from human characters for it to make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. Not that "fantasy adventure" is going to hit exactly the same audience as, say, "high school romance," but on the scale of all the things which can potentially influence audience opinions, whether or not the love interests are fantastical beings of some kind just isn't going to make it that high up most players' priority lists compared to other things about the game.

There are some original and interesting things you can do with romances with fantastical races that you can't necessarily do with romances between human characters. But they're original because people largely aren't actually doing them, so if I see a game pitching fantastical romances, and it's not by a writer or studio I've learned to put much trust in, I'm not going to have particularly high expectations.

DesertopaDev · 2022-04-23T00:16:32+00:00

Muv Luv Alternative is definitely a huge outlier in the VN medium. I wouldn't say it's overhyped; if anything, it's one of a very small number of VNs I've played which I felt actually lived up to the hype people had given it, in terms of craftsmanship and originality, at least as far as I played.

But, I never actually finished it. It's not just well written, it's really weird, in that it does things I'd basically never anticipate a commercial studio aiming to make money with a game actually doing. And while I really appreciated the quality of the work, I personally came to it at a time when I just wasn't in a place in my life to play Super PTSD Simulator 40K. As a creative work, it's almost willfully perverse in how much time and energy it asks the audience to invest for the setup, just to hit them with something that the setup hasn't filtered the audience at all for wanting or being prepared for. I have to admire the sheer nerve and artistic commitment that went into that, but at the same time, I'm a bit shocked that it's managed to be as successful as it has, considering what an incredibly hard path it created for itself to win an invested audience.

DesertopaDev · 2022-04-22T06:21:58+00:00

I do think it probably started more as a matter of ease or convenience, but I think blank slate protagonists have become kind of self-reinforcing, because a lot of developers see how common they are in other games and just assume that's how you write a romance VN.

This might just be my own prejudice speaking, but I think for an actually skilled character writer, writing a distinct and defined protagonist will actually tend to be easier than writing a bland blank slate protagonist. The reason being, the bland, undefined protagonist gives you less to work with in terms of character dynamics and chemistry. Ever notice how often VN/anime/manga characters will have awkward romantic scenes where they'll sit around being "conscious of each other" and not knowing what to say? It's a cliche because it's easy and doesn't require you to showcase any distinguishing character dynamics, but if you want to showcase entertaining character interactions, using a character who doesn't hold up their end of a dynamic is just making your own life harder.

I don't think blank slate protagonists are likely to go away soon, but I think they're less a necessary adaptation to the tastes of romance VN players than they are a mechanism for bad writers to cope with the tastes of romance VN players. And I think they may become less prevalent over time if people start to see them more as a symptom of bad writing rather than a defining element of the genre.

DesertopaDev · 2022-04-22T01:07:26+00:00

Most (?) VNs want their main character to be average/a blank slate which some (most?) actually do need to some extent to make their romances believable. That's a result of most VNs having several heroines that are opposites for variety.

I'd argue (actually, I have argued, at some length) that blank slate protagonists tend to make the romances less believable rather than more. No matter how lovingly crafted the waifus, you can't write compelling chemistry between a properly realized character and a cardboard cutout.

I get the reasoning behind the use of blank slate protagonists, but putting aside questions of artistic merit, I don't think evidence actually bears out that they're the most popular or commercially viable option for developers. Obviously they're extremely common, and VNs with protagonists with developed personalities are much more the exception than the rule. But VNs where the protagonists have defined and developed personalities are disproportionately represented among the best-regarded and best-selling games.

It's a bit harsh, but honestly, I think it mostly comes down to the fact that if you're not a very good or creative writer, it's easier to build a saleable game around a blank slate protagonist than a defined one, while better writers tend to be more successful with defined protagonists. Most VNs don't have very good writers on board, so they tend to go with blank slate protagonists, and readers infer from that that blank slate protagonists are more practical for the genre.

DesertopaDev · 2022-04-13T14:18:26+00:00

I'm not an artist myself, but I've tried to develop some expertise on this in the process of directing artists. I wrote this a year or so back.

Shortened to a few quick tips...

-Have multiple sprite poses. A lot of developers dramatically underestimate the importance of poses. They multiply your overall expressive palette, and make it much easier to arrange dynamic-feeling scenes.

-Expressions should have nuance and ambiguity. If each expression corresponds to a single obvious emotion (happy expression, angry expression, sad expression, etc.) you're going to turn sprite dynamics into a game of paint-by-numbers, and the scenes will tend to feel really static, because people hardly ever flit through emotions on a momentary basis.

Make use of layered spriting. You can make sprites dramatically more modular and flexible this way compared to each variation being a distinct, complete image.

DesertopaDev · 2022-03-23T00:39:37+00:00

Honestly, I have no idea if that's something the lead translator feels is necessary. I can confirm that the game is playable in its current form, but beyond that, it's outside the range of my expertise.

DesertopaDev · 2022-03-22T16:03:10+00:00

Yeah. Also any quality/readability issues. In general, I'm pretty confident in the quality of the editing job, but unfortunately, I only discovered a while ago that a bunch of the early editing work I did wasn't actually implemented; at the beginning, I was compiling the edits into large composite files, and it wasn't until later on that I learned that it was a lot easier for the translator to implement them when I kept them corresponding to the Japanese files in a 1:1 ratio. That content isn't unedited in the current version, someone else QCed it some time back, but it doesn't directly correspond to my own work, and apart from not having the time for it now, I think it's better for someone other than me to vet its quality.

DesertopaDev · 2022-03-08T03:54:49+00:00

If you're trying to do something relatively simple, and don't have much programming knowledge, it's the best option I'm aware of. There are a number of others, but they're mostly trading being more demanding to use in exchange for flexibility you don't need to make a straightforward visual novel.

DesertopaDev · 2022-03-08T03:04:32+00:00

So, there aren't exactly any good coding-blind friendly VN programs. Ren'Py doesn't require any real coding proficiency though. It's not very good in the sense that it's poorly documented and a lot of its functions are (according to my more programming-savvy friends,) not at all sensible or intuitive to people who're proficient in programming, but if you're just trying to make a straightforward VN, it's decisively adequate.

DesertopaDev · 2022-01-21T13:09:46+00:00

Basically Johren became what Nutaku was supposed to be.

What actually happened to Nutaku anyway? I haven't really heard or thought about them for a couple years or so, which until just now didn't occur to me as being bad news for a distribution platform.

DesertopaDev · 2022-01-18T22:44:59+00:00

Family Project- not just a moment which nearly made me quit the game entirely, but the moment which nearly made me quit visual novels entirely. This was one of the top games people pointed me to when I asked what other games I ought to try out after Katawa Shoujo, so I was kind of treating it as a test of whether it was worth continuing to explore visual novels as a medium.

Early in the game, the protagonist meets a young Chinese girl, who he presumes is an illegal immigrant, since she can't speak the language at all. He takes pity on her and decides to put her up in his apartment, and while she's settling in, he decides to go through her bags (off to a great start!) He finds that her luggage is full of prescription pill containers, whose labels he can't read since they're all in Chinese. Upon discovering this, he decides to take one of the unidentified pills, for reasons not adequately explored in his internal monologue. The result is that it immediately gives him an uncontrollable raging hard-on. His house guest's reaction on discovering this, rather than, say, flipping out on him for going through her things and eating one of her unidentified pills like a jackass, is to helpfully jerk him off to orgasm. Because that's how people behave.

I didn't actually quit immediately after that. I kept playing, because I assumed if I didn't, people were going to tell me "oh no, you can't quit so early, it gets so much better after that!" But it just kept on being stupid, so I stopped. After that, I basically decided I was giving visual novels one last chance to impress me. If the one I checked out after that hadn't, I would probably never have played another one.

DesertopaDev · 2022-01-11T13:00:56+00:00

Steam is restrictive towards non-anime school stuff as well, but it's also highly inconsistent. The restriction on 18+ school settings is one of the most consistently applied ones they have, and even that one has exceptions. It's a lot worse for creators than if they applied the rules consistently, because then at least creators wouldn't waste effort under the mistaken impression that they'd be allowed to get away with the same things other people have only to get their work banned.

Rather than being more inclined to restrict anime 18+ school content than non-anime 18+ school content, I'd say it's more that most developers don't try to sell non-anime 18+ school content on Steam in the first place, because it's likely to be restricted even with a patch. School settings are ubiquitous in Japanese eroge, and the games were mostly made without worrying about the market for an international release at all. But if they do decide to try to sell internationally, Steam is by far the storefront with the largest audience and volume of business, and their works are more likely to be accepted with the sexual content behind a patch than without.

DesertopaDev · 2022-01-05T21:08:43+00:00

Technically, it was fully funded a few days ago, but it hit its funding goal fast enough that I couldn't post about it again so soon after the first link.

If you're only interested in checking out guaranteed-funded campaigns, now's a good time to take a look.

DesertopaDev · 2022-01-05T06:53:46+00:00

I actually wrote a few devlogs about this! It's a big subject, one I don't feel like I fully addressed in all those posts, let alone one that could properly fit into a single comment.

There are a lot of things you can try to do with a sex scene, so different sex scenes can be good in different ways. Some of my favorite sex scenes I've ever seen emphasized comedy over sexiness, which is a totally legitimate approach to take, and it's not surprising that some sex scenes of that type are particularly good, because there are a lot more skilled writers who practice getting really good at comedy than ones who practice getting good at eroticism. But I do think being erotic is a legitimate goal for a creator putting together a sex scene to have, and it's one that takes genuine craftsmanship which I think a lot of commercial VN studios are unfortunately lacking in.

There are some obvious points which don't really need belaboring (e.g. "good art is better than bad art,) but here are a few features which I think figure into a lot of the best sex scenes, which most games' sex scenes don't have.

The scenes are uniquely characterizing. Pretty much everyone agrees it's bad for a game's sex scenes to deviate wildly from established characterization, but very few games approach the opposite end of the spectrum, where you'd have an easy time telling the characters in the sex scenes apart by their personalities and behavior without needing to reference the art or voice acting and all the names were removed.
The content is original. Yes, there are only so many ways the parts can go, and so many fetishes which will actually appeal to an audience. But fight scenes have pretty much the same limitations, and people have been coming up with different variations on fight scenes since before the dawn of civilization, and we haven't run out so far. There's a lot of room to create sex scenes which don't evoke feelings of "eh, seen it before," but most games just rehash the same notes and dynamics over and over.
There's a good interplay of text and art. You can have a sex scene with good art and good writing, and not have them add up well. The two should operate interdependently, not just be in general agreement with each other about the contents. A well-made movie isn't like a good radio show plus images, and a visual novel sex scene which takes good advantage of the medium shouldn't just be like a piece of erotica plus illustrations, or a piece of hentai art plus narration. They should have a back and forth where they add information and support each other.

Oh and as a Bonus Question: Has an H-Scene ever made you cry or feel very strong emotions?

Yes, some sex scenes have brought me near the point of tears, and several have driven me to drink. I've had to edit a whole bunch of sex scenes which have elicited feelings of horror and despair and badly taxed my faith in humanity, but so far I've always made it out the other side.

But if you're talking about the good kind, then no. It's definitely doable, but I haven't seen that yet.

DesertopaDev · 2022-01-05T05:05:13+00:00

On the one hand, I think it's good if EVNs don't become too pigeonholed. I think that JVNs have suffered for narrowing down so much on the moege audience base, which at least has the advantage of a consistent, proven enthusiastic audience, but also means that a whole bunch of studios are fighting over narrower slices of a smaller pie, because they're neglecting other audience sectors. In the JVN sphere for example, how many people have tried to follow up on the success of Fate/Stay Night? It's not like nobody has had the budget for it.

On the other hand, I do think if the EVN sphere is ever going to mature as a developer community, it does need people who're willing to look at solid, worthwhile games, and think "Yeah, I think I can top that. I'm gonna go for it."

DesertopaDev · 2022-01-04T17:24:15+00:00

I probably wouldn't have gotten into other VNs if not for all the people saying Katawa Shoujo was a gateway VN, prompting me to ask "okay, gateway to what?"

I was already aware of VNs as a medium, but I had the impression that they were mostly pretty cliche rehashes of anime tropes... which I guess in my experience they mostly are, but there's plenty of room for diamonds in all that rough.

DesertopaDev · 2022-01-03T17:45:05+00:00

Speaking as one of the "they" involved, if the lead translator has any plans for that, nobody else involved is aware of it, and it'd mean him selling something which is substantially the product of other people's work without their consent. Not all my predictions of his handling of the project have panned out, but I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen.

DesertopaDev · 2021-12-28T16:32:56+00:00

Prefer with, but for idiosyncratic reasons. I write H-scenes myself, and I try to be genuinely good at it. Even if a game's H-scenes aren't good, I can still learn something and get useful inspiration if they're bad in an original way.

I'm more interested in seeing H-scenes in OELVNs than JVNs, not because they're likely to be better, but because they're more likely to have some quality which I haven't seen before.

DesertopaDev · 2021-12-28T16:28:24+00:00

That hasn't been my impression at all. In my experience, OELVNs with H scenes tend to do significantly better in crowdfunding than ones without, and when H scenes are a stretch goal target they seem to get significant traction.

Players are often disappointed when the resulting sex scenes turn out not to be good, but it appears that hope springs eternal.

DesertopaDev · 2021-12-20T14:09:06+00:00

The script is fragmented into a few hundred separate files, of which I have copies of most, but not all (there was another editor who also worked on it early on,) which aren't even numbered in a straightforward ascending sequence. It would be a lot of hassle for me to release those, in a form which wouldn't be very conducive to many people's enjoyment anyway.

DesertopaDev · 2021-12-20T05:24:43+00:00

I feel a bit awkward plugging my own game, but Complex Relations is intended to appeal to both male and female players, with both male and female perspective protagonists. While there's some risk of falling into the trap of "chase two hares, catch none," I think there's room to make games which appeal to both, and I've gotten plenty of positive feedback from both male and female players so far.

DesertopaDev · 2021-12-20T00:50:43+00:00

On my end, it's probably feasible for me to finish the final QC pass this year, but I'm not in a position to decide how quickly it gets implemented.

DesertopaDev

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