What kind of protagonist do you prefer?

Figured I may as well just ask, kind of interested to see.


Content of each option

To give more information; this question assumes that a game would be spending the same amount of time on H content regardless of the type. A female protagonist would have 100% of the time spent on animations that include that female character. A game in which you can choose your gender would have that time split between the two.

In the case of my games, a male protagonist implies 100% of the enemies are female, with few body altering mechanics applying to the protagonist. Mechanics such as romance/affection or pregnancy are available for this type of game, involving enemies or other characters.

A female protagonist can involve mechanics like pregnancy, and while mind altering mechanics (lust, lewidity) are possible on a male protagonist, they are more common with a female one. Enemies can be male or female. Romance/affection mechanics are less appealing on male enemies, but would still be possible with either gender.

I'm also more willing to have a female character turn into a male as a mechanic, rather than vice-versa. That said, in a male/female choice game I would be able to add gender bending mechanics in either direction, as at that point it's basically just up to the player what they want, and the distinction isn't something I have to make.

Viability of each option

Gender bending and futa options assume that the majority of the animations would use the default female character, and roughly 25%, a little more, or a little less, would use the secondary form or attribute.

The easiest options are to have either 100% male, 100% female, or a 25% futa attribute, as none of these require extra sprites.

25% male gender bent requires only sligtly more work, as it would likely be a special "form" in which not all gameplay mechanics are applicable (moveset may be different, items may be different, etc).

Male/Female choice requires the most work, or limits the mechanics without further development time, as if there are sets of clothing, action animations, etc, each gender must have a sprite set for them. If these mechanics are not present, then the work would not be drastically different.

Oh hai money

Hwelp, looks like I may have missed a Nutaku payment so I got two at once. Turns out I have plenty of cash at the moment.

For now, I'll get the dental stuff done and go back to working on the game. Will work on the current Patreon animation here and there, but there's no huge rush since I'll be fine for now.

After the final two animations are done, if I still need the Patreon for income I'll switch to a weekly or bi-weekly game. However, I do want to clarify a few things regarding patreon and what I will and wont do;

1. I will not, and will never do any sort of pay-per-month patreon. I will only do pay-per-release models.

2. I will not do any patreon wherein I'm being supported to work on full commercial games (games I'll sell).

What I would do is a pay-per-update game designed solely to be a patreon project. That is, the game would be free to everyone, with patrons getting the updates early along with some kind of voting power. After the game is complete or I stop working on it, it would not be sold.

After Noaika is released, I will likely not do Patreon stuff anymore, as at that point I'll have 3-4 in-progress games to work on and sell. Though if I'm doing a game patreon at that point, I may tie it up into a finished state over the course of a few months and give it closure.

Anyway, all that out of the way, I do need to start thinking a bit more seriously about what I'll actually do for a weekly updated game.

I think that for it to work well, it should be something that is replayable. I've seen projects like Guilty Hell and Unholy Sanctuary that grow over time into a traditional game, but I find that at a certain point it isn't really the same as playing a normal game if you're either replaying the entire game every time an update is released, or experiencing the one new thing and waiting for the next one.

I think that something with some degree of procedural generation and simulation would probably be my best bet. Either a Rogue-Lite meant to be played in sessions, or something in which success comes and goes, even if you slowly progress. Either way it would be a platformer though.

An initial state for the game would probably be a home location, a procedural generated area outside of that home, with the initial goal just being survival

Each update would contain some kind of H content + game content. For example one update would be a new enemy + an animation, while another update might be new items/mechanics + an animation for an existing enemy, or simply an environmental animation.

The main thing I haven't figured out is whether to focus on long term progression or not. A world you "live in" and come back to each day, VS a game where you're meant to play and win or lose within 20 minutes to an hour. Simple pleasures of farming or befriending monsters doesn't really work if none of it is long-term.

A combination of the two might work, wherein there is long term progression, but also the risk of losing progress or assets, either losing aspects of your character, or encountering situations in which the status quo must be taken back over time. Perhaps with leveling your character to further levels requiring you to start from 0 in order to slowly build your persistent base stats, or losing your home location and needing to take it back. Will have to think about it.

Tell me what you guys would like to see from such a game. There's also the matter of the gender of the protagonist, since chances are it wouldn't be viable to do both genders and two sets of enemies, unless the graphics are low res.

Goings ons

Still working on stuff. Frustrating delay-of-the-day is the need to get some expensive dental work done.

Unfortunately, Aster didn't really sell much on DLsite. They stuck it away in a nebulous shooter section, so it doesn't get the exposure of other action games. While I think that if it were a better game it wouldn't have mattered, it is somewhat frustrating to see it not get a normal chance. Might sell it on Nutaku, but man I really don't want to go through the process of preparing promotional stuff again.

So, I'm currently figuring out what to do. Probably Patreon animations. The dental stuff is time sensitive, so I can't simply wait until a game is finished; which is what I would do if that wasn't the case. Every situation like this kinda just widdles down my patience; I just want to work on games have nothing else to worry about.

After I finish what Patreon animations I need to do, if I need money again I'll probably switch from animations to a patreon game. Even an initial week or two of getting something to a "build on" state would be wasting less time than I do spinning my tires on some of these animations.

Next project

I've decided to work on the mario/sonic style game. Once it's done, I'll go back to Noaika full-time. and stop the patreon animations.

To give some context, this game was more or less started because I made some sprites for fun, and added basic controls to test gamepad settings while I was working on Noaika. Stuff slowly got added after that whenever I was bored.

Once GMS2 came out, I used it as a guinea pig for testing the new Tile-based collisions, the benefit of which is that tiles dont slow down the game, which makes things like this possible with little performance impact.

https://i.gyazo.com/d32c8ddedbdd29bcce0f78ba7dca0da5.png

It also speeds up collisions quite a lot, which is why I'll be converting Noaika to GMS2 as a first order of buisness, after this game is done.

As for the game itself, as you can probably tell by the fact that I keep calling it mario/sonic, it's an attempt at a movement based game, with some inspiration taken from each. It will include an  rpg style world map, with some metroidvania elements.

There have been a few snags here and there in finding the game's identity, which I guess is to be expected when you rip stuff from two entirely different games. Luckily I "think" I've mostly sorted those out for now. The two main problems were basically "what happens when you roll into an enemy" and "what the hell are coins going to be used for", both of which conveniently had the same solution which was "depends what item you have equipped".

At the moment, messing with moves is still an active process. Many enemies and level mechanics are done, however they will be changed as the player's moveset gets refined and added to. Being about movement, it's important that I have most of the elements complete before finalizing levels or even a demo.

Anyhow, that's all for now.