Hey Phreaky,
Yeah, you wouldn't want to modify an existing working game with new tech. Better to use it on your next game.
Now, let's talk about the non-techie stuff in the Amy game.
First, I also like Amy's face. I didn't like Jen as much, though. Her face was a bit angular. Are you using V4? If so, check out
http://www.pixeluna.com/poser_stuff.html Assuming you've got the morph++ pack for V4, Pixeluna has a lot of free alternate faces you can use either as starting points or straight out. Maybe stick to your own faces for the primary characters but use some of the free ones for other characters, etc.
I also liked that we got to see part of the player for the sex scenes. That allowed you to provide better camera angles and showed off the acts better. Good idea.
Personally, prefer Chaotic's realistically sized breasts, but I appreciate that you didn't go overboard in that regard. Amy was extremely well endowed, but at least she still looked human. Contrast this to the meet'n'fuck games where the girls have beach balls for breasts. Those games are just stupid on so many levels.
I think you did a great job, especially for your first try at this sort of thing. I know you were working out the posing and the html more than the plot and story. I'm sure that as you do more of those things you'll be able to devote more time to the story and gameplay. Hopefully as you start to see what those Jscrïpt functions allow, they'll give you room to be really creative with the other parts.
So, while I'm about to give a lot of suggestions on things to do differently, please don't see them as criticisms. You're off to a great start. As with anything else, you'll get better with practice. Also, while I'll give examples from Amy, I'm not really suggesting you change the current game. I'm more talking about doing these kinds of things in future games.
I think these games would benefit from some interface consistency. I personally believe that you should always put things you SAY in the three boxes below the picture and things you DO as click targets on the picture. This isn’t as limiting as it may seem. Say the picture shows a room with a door. If you click on the door, the caption would be, “Suggest going through the door.” But if you wanted to do the same thing with the boxes below the picture, the text would be, “Let’s go through the door.” Similarly, when you first meet her, clicking on her body might say, “Complement her athletic body,” while the text box might say, “Do you work out, because you’ve got a great body.” With that concept, you can still do pretty much anything you want.
But consider the truth or dare scene when Amy told you to slap her. In the box below you’d have, “There’s no way I’d slap you!” but in the picture you’d have a hit target on her face that says, “Slap her face.” Then you’d have another hit target on her rear end that says, “Spank her.” And, maybe you’d have a hit target on her breasts that says, “Gently hit her breasts.” She’d most likely react negatively to being slapped in the face, but could react positively to the other situations, depending on previous things you’d done on the date. And, maybe you’d have another text box that says, “Where do you want to be slapped?” which could result in her saying something really provocative and sexy.
In your game, many of the things you say don’t really apply to the hit target you have to find to say them. For instance, if I remember right, the, “There’s no way I’d slap you” is a hit target on her belly. Why there and not her face? Or the palm tree behind her? Etc. No target makes sense because it’s something you say. That’s why you should put it in the text boxes at the bottom. If you do that consistently, and you also make the hit targets always be an action on that thing, the game will make much more sense to the player. Right now it’s “Sweep my mouse around to figure out my options.” What you want is the player to say, “She told me to slap her??? Hymm, I can see her butt, maybe I can spank her instead.” The game’s challenge shouldn’t come from searching for hit targets. It should come from needing to think about what to do next. I believe that having words below the picture and actions on the picture will help.
Next suggestion: Be a little more forgiving. I LIKE that these games are hard. That’s where most of the fun comes from (contrast again to the meet’n’fuck games). But they’re currently hard for the wrong reason. It’s nigh on impossible to figure these games out by thinking through the challenges. You pretty much need to do a lot of trial and error.
The main problem is all the arbitrary dead ends. For instance, if you go for a walk on the beach, the ONLY option you have is “ask her to show some skin” and that’ll fail if you didn’t happen to buy her a swimsuit first. But when you see the option to go for a walk, there’s really no way to know that you have to do other things first. So you’re almost guaranteed to fail. Another example, you get her into the bedroom after a lot of steps, and she takes a shower and comes out in underwear, but if you ask her to dance, the game is going to end unless you bought a dildo 25 turns ago? How could anyone know that?
I suggest the following design principle. At the beginning and middle of any path, there are few “dead ends.” I say “few” because some things should stop the game regardless (slapping her face, for instance). But walking on the beach should, minimally, have an option to walk back to the pool. It shouldn’t be that making a rude suggestion 2 minutes after you met her is your ONLY option. Especially when doing something as innocuous as walking on a beach. I mean, if you were suggesting going into a strip club, that would be one thing. But no reasonable player would realize that going on the beach is a short trip to a game restart. Let the player figure out he’s missed something and let him go back and rectify that.
Next, every negative end should have SOME sort of hint at what you should have done instead. For instance, on the beach, when you suggest she shows more skin, she could say, “But I don’t have a bathing suit.” Then, whether you end the game there or not, the player has some idea what he needs to do differently. Similarly, rather than, “You’re making Jen uncomfortable” when kissing Amy was the only option, she could say, “We’re not nearly drunk enough to be doing that.” Etc. And, ideally, on many of the early ones, don’t end the game there. Don’t end the game when she says “I don’t have a bathing suit.” Let it continue and have the player go get her one. The game will get easier, but that will allow you to make it harder for the RIGHT reasons. If it’s hard because the girl is complicated and you have to work at figuring her out, that’s COOL. If it’s hard because you keep needing to redo the start to blindly walk down dead end paths until you stumble across the right one, it’s not cool.
Even though this is a sex game, and you’re going for titillation, you can get your players to be hugely invested if you give them the thrill of figuring something out. On a very small scale, that’s her saying, “but I don’t have a bathing suit” and you saying, “Aha! I need to buy her one.” On a bigger scale it’s her being proud of her workout ethic when you compliment her body, so you take her to the gym to impress her with your work out regimen. While that’s going on, she says that she likes working out with you and complains that her previous boyfriend hated to work out with her because he didn’t like being near sweaty people. (Depending on how hard you want to be, you might have her add that wouldn’t go near her after a workout unless she showered first.) So you figure out that you’ll score big points by kissing her when she’s sweaty. It does, and leads to her inviting you into the shower with her. There’s a huge thrill in reading something and saying, “Oh! That probably means I should do this.” There’s no thrill in figuring things out by brute force.
I could go on, but this is a lot to digest. So I’ll leave it at this for now. I’m looking forward to your next game.
Tlaero