Spanking videogame: communitary project

[nyarth]

Let me copypaste what I wrote on another thread here:

Well, that's probably just wishful thinking, because I don't think we can expect someone doing something like this just on spare time, but here we go:

- Art. Not pixel art; actual drawing.
- Animation. Simple animation is ok, but with lots of different details. Facial expression; butt's reddening and/or showing marks according to the implement; movement (squirming).
- Roles. The player's character can be a spanker, a spankee or a switch with adventures releated to its role. If spankee, decision on how to react (to a certain extent). If spanker, decision about how and with what to punish.
- Personalization. Possibility to choose gender for the player's character, and gender for its encounters. If all F/F, F/M, M/M or M/F, or mixed. Possibility to choose to a certain extent some physical traits and clothing.
- Personalized punishments; if bare or not, if first underwear then bare. If one implement or several.
- Full frontal nudity.
- Good plot, good dialogue, good characters; different outcomes according to how you react to certain situations.
- Extended "world"; possibility to remain in game after the end.

I know, it's all too much. But the question was what I want to see, not what I think it's possible :d Although I would say I do think it's impossible if it's just something someone does on spare time; but if funded with patreon or similars, maybe is not that impossible.
I only talk without any real knowledge about how creating a videogame, much less one such as what I describe, works; and I don't even draw.

So, just as a sign of admiration, just say that so far the best one I played is "peachy springs". So good, and so much potential to be even better ^^

After writing it, I've had been thinking. I've been a member of this forum since about 2008 or so. A passive member, since I can't draw, english is not my first language, and I can't code either.
I realized something it was obvious for all of you for a long; it seems to be easier to create spanking videogames now than it was years ago. And we have here many examples. Great ones. But even having literally zero idea about how hard it is to code a game, to create the art, etc... I do think that it could be easier if the task was split between many.

So how about that. I defined what's for me a great spanking game. How about work to define what's a great spanking game for everyone. What will be needed in order to be better, more appealing, than any of the individual ones. And once it has been defined, could we explore the possibility of doing it? By splitting it into more or less doable pieces.

Someone could work in the art. Maybe not only one person. Others on the animation.
For those who know how to code, code will be their part.
Others will be in charge of the narrative. Main plot and characters, side stories.
etc.

To me all of this will be free, and open to all the community here.
It's easy to say so when I don't have usable abilities on a work like this. And that's also true. What I do for a living is reviewing fiction. That's the only thing I can offer; work on the narrative, help to create it, same with the characters. I could also translate it to spanish.

I know it sounds just as a delirium and for those who actually know what they are talking about, maybe the answer will be just "what you're saying may sound good but it can't be done". But I wanted to try and ask the question.

[nyarth]

Ok, I'll answer myself: I'm delusional XD got it haha

[SnarkFu]

Going to chime in here as someone who has worked on (non-commercial) games.

You aren't delusional, nothing you've put forward in your post is *that* difficult... if you have a team who know what they're doing and someone to coordinate them.

That's not going to happen so if you actually want to do this, and you manage to get people who want to work with you, you're going to need to compensate for the lack of experience.

You'll do that through planning.

You need to plan EVERYTHING.

With a team that have varying levels of experience and no actual ties to the game you need to have everything planned out from beginning to end, you need to be able to swap out developers at a moments notice and be able to say "We are here, this is a list of what needs to happen and what order it needs to happen in".

You'll need to know every programming task that needs to be completed, every art asset that needs to be created, what the storyline is, how the branching is going to work, how big a difference the player can actually make to the game, a basic lay-out of every encounter and how they effect every other encounter, win and loss states, on and on and on.

This is BEFORE you actually start making the game proper.

Usually you could cut a few bits of that and work some stuff out on the fly but if you cannot rely on your team to have experience or to remain the same you NEED to have everything nailed down early.

This is also a bit much for one person to draw up on their own if they haven't got experience in every area or they aren't creating a passion project that they've been playing over in their heads for years anyway so it's going to be a team effort.

So what is the next step?

Build your party.

What you'll need:

Designer - Someone to decide what the game is going to be about.
Artist - Someone to make the art.
Programmer - Someone to write the code.
Project Manager - Someone to keep the other three on task.

Now as most (all?) the games on this forum have shown this can all be on one person but obviously that's not quite what you're after.

So, get these people together and *plan*.

Plan what engine you're going to use, look at what might go wrong, figure out what you will do if it does go wrong, look up design documents and write one.

Get it to the point where you can picture a play-through of your game in your head from start to finish.

Now you can look at making the actual game, I'd suggest looking up agile development at this point, kanban boards are useful (you can use trello for this).

Now, making games isn't easy but it's not as difficult as it sounds when you lay it out in writing like this, you're not expected to be able to come up with a fully formed idea that will definitely work in five minutes.

You come up with a game idea, you break it down into parts, you build the parts and put them together.

[milf]

And the time factors in huge. If you want to team do it.... You all must find the time to get each part done. You all must mesh. You all must communicate somehow and send your parts in to the actual coder to put together... ON HIS TIME... And your doing this all for free mostly. Think about all of that before recruiting.

[Bagool]

This is an interesting idea, one that I myself have thought about to a small degree in the past.

Like the others have said and you yourself admit, this kind of idea isn't impossible. In fact, there are many fetish/porn games made by teams of people working efficiently together. The quality of their products can be up for debate, but the point is that it CAN work. Whether or not this site, or any one site has the people that are not only capable, but also willing, and skilled enough to lend their time and work toward one project is another question. Like Masamune said, you can break up the roles pretty easily, but I would go a step further. Designer could be broken into someone who thinks up the setting, someone who thinks up the gameplay, and someone who thinks up the characters/minute details. The artist could be split up to the actual artist, the audio designer, and the animator if there will be involved animations. The artist can be split into a traditional artist and a pixel artist as well. The programmer would also definitely have to be split up. As someone who has done this as long as I have, I can say with utmost certainty that programming took up 90+% of the time I spent on my game, even after everything was figured out and planned. Having that be one guy's responsibility would leave the other 3 positions with a LOT of leisure time.

Unfortunately, if you don't have any experience directing a large scale project like this, the chance of it failing is pretty damn high. But I'd be interested to see what comes of it, and I'd be the first to volunteer if I wasn't doing my own thing.

[SnarkFu]

If you're doing your planning properly nobody should be have any actual down-time waiting for others unless you have an individual that isn't the programmer doing the actual assembly.

You'd also want to have one programmer at the start to setup the underlying framework of your custom systems so that everything can work together easily, once that's done you can hand-off other aspects of the coding knowing that they will work.

I may be biased, every project I've done with other programmers has ended up being... interesting.

[nyarth]

Well, that's a lot to think about. Thanks to all, that's interesting feedback for sure.
I mean, I have no experience at all on this field. At all. So I'm totally honest if I say I was just kind of asking "why not". I mean, to me (with my total lack of knowledge) may sound like a good idea. What does a videogame need? A coder. An artist. A writer. Here many people is doing all of that. The art, the code, the writing.... plus all the other stuff I had no idea about. To me, that means his personal project will take longer to be developed, and may or may not be as great as it could be if it was a collaborative effort.

Now I see the problem: collaborative effort doesn't equal less time (first of all), if so the opposite, and even more important, requires coordination and... patience.

I should have thought of that because I coordinated other kind of projects; magazines, and it's a nightmare when you are waiting for an article, a single review, and it never arrives in time: and yours is ready. I think you can bare with it if it's paid, but to expect it from people who is working on their free time and just for the sake of it is too much.

The issue is, porn videogames? Sure they exist. Good ones? I dont know. Fetish oriented videogames? sure. Good ones? again, no idea. Specifically spanking ones, beeing as it is not such a common one? it seems unlikely. Particularly if we are talking about inclusive ones who embrace all the different aspects spanking has (gender pairings, disciplinary or erotic, etc). I feel that the first spanking videogame will be born on a community such as ours, and I guess I was testing the waters to see if now was the moment.

That beeing said, it's also true my post was the result of beeing overexcited with the idea, something that happens to me very frecuently. To be honest, when I wrote it I hadn't even played most of the videogames in offer here, in this forum.

Now I did. And I realise my post could be read as dismissive. I'm talking about creating a Spanking videogame as there isn't a lot here that are actually REALLY good. I'm enjoying yours, Bagool, so much, for example.
So I should have said: RPG videogames, pixel art, etc, is good; it's great. What I have in mind, in my mind that has no idea about how any kind of videogame is created, was more (to be a bit hyperbolic) as "The Sims".... but with spanking. That is delusional.

That beeing said, I hope I didn't ofended anyone. If I did, sorry, wasn't my intention. I hope it was at least useful as a brainstorming or something like that.

[SnarkFu]

The ponit of collaborative effort isn't so much to reduce the time taken (though it can do that to a huge degree if everyone works together well), the issue faced by many of the games on here is that the creator has one particular skill and they're bodging together the other aspects as well as they can.

There's nothing wrong with that, it's just unlikely to end up with a great game.

The vast majority of spanking games that aren't the old flash style "spank the booty" games come from here, I can only think of one that centers around spanking that came from anywhere else to be honest.

A Sims like game may be beyond the scope of a community project here, most people seem to be using RPGMaker and I have no idea if it's capable of supporting that sort of game.

[Psyclone]

Originally Posted by Bagool

...I can say with utmost certainty that programming took up 90+% of the time I spent on my game, even after everything was figured out and planned.

This.

One hurdle with having multiple programmers, especially in RPG Maker, is that is is very difficult and time consuming to move switches, variables and Common Events around to keep things structured. Once you have anything of substance, shuffling these around is a huge, massive effort. This would probably be one of my biggest complaints with the platform, the other being unable to collapse/expand a section of code in an event (some of those events can become quite massive).

Another hurdle, as pointed out by Masamune, is that multiple programmers on the same project tends to be...weird. I'm not sure why, but this has also been my experience in the past as a programmer. Granted, something like RPG Maker limits the number of ways you can do something, but it would still be a minor concern, because everyone does things a little differently. Look at the different projects here, for example. They're all themed similarly with a focus on spanking, but they're all very different in execution, mechanics, etc.

As for The Sims in RPG Maker, while I don't think it can be done to that level, I do think that something between the JRPG and the Sims could be achieved. One of the things I'm working on now is creating some sort of "schedule" for NPCs. I've got one that is working, though very basic: goes to bed, turns off lights, wakes up, turns on lights, moves into standard location.

[Zeradar]

As we can tell from a few patreons, there are people in this community willing to commit money for a good rpgmaker game. maybe some of the teething problems crowd sourced games have could be solved by having essential main staff, and then patreon funding tiers being tied to commissioning known artists for aspects such as: images, animations, sounds, etc. (mo money, mo asses/panties/implements and sad/happy faces).

Other commissionable roles could be story writers for quests/sidequests and character dialogue trees, and then maybe some jr./volunteer devs for mundane stuff that really adds life into a game, like increasing how many objects have examine texts, and copy pastaing code for similar side quests.

my $.02