by tlaero » Wed, 19Oct23 05:07
Hi Duck and Wolf,
I played your game and thought it was a good first effort.
I think it's fantastic that you two are able to work on this together. It's rare enough for married couples to even play these sorts of games together. Going so far as to make them together is really special, and I seriously appreciate the strength of your relationship.
As you said, this is mostly a quick "learn Daz and Renpy" effort, but it's a compelling one. It's clean, it works well, and it's nicely erotic. If you continued it, I would play more. Or, if you wrote a new one, I'd play it.
Making games is a skill, like any other, and the more you practice, the better you'll get. One place to practice is on facial expressions, especially non-sexual ones where the model has her mouth open. I suggest spending time looking at a bunch of real life pictures of people in various emotional states and really focusing on the mechanics of what their faces do. "Oh, when they're angry, their eyebrows do this, and their eyelids do this, and their lips look like this," etc. As humans our "interpret facial expressions" wiring goes deep. That means we do it subconsciously, which makes it really hard to consciously create those expressions. Our minds say, "That doesn't look right" but can't tell us what to change. The best way to fix that is to study it consciously. In general, though, it's rare for people to open their mouths so much that you see both sets of their teeth. So the images where the woman is laughing look wrong, etc.
I don't know if you've ever played any of my games, but when Mortze approached me and offered to be my artist, it was the subtly of the facial expressions on the images he sent that made me take notice.
The second bit of feedback is that I'm going to challenge you to put more effort into the story. Yes, the point of these games is the sex scene, and yours is really good, but the thing that differentiates these games from actual porn is the story. Spend time thinking about why these two people are having sex. Throw out the first 3 things that come to your mind and look for something better. Brainstorm ideas together, etc.
The story that the hot cheerleader has sex with the class nerd to convince him to tutor her has been done a bunch of times. Yeah, it plays to the fantasies of some percentage of your audience, but there are millions of other stories you could tell. This one also seemed a bit confused as the cheerleader started by saying that she needed a tutor but later on said that she had been waiting for this for a long time. Maybe she just said that as dirty talk and didn't mean it, but, if so, she didn't need to. She had him at taking off her dress. And if she HAD been waiting for this for a long time, she didn't need to make up the "tutor" excuse.
You two are in a great position to make characters that are complex and believable. You can write both from the male perspective and the female one. Even if you're aiming for the "horny teenager" market, don't settle for characterizations that seem to have been written by one. I'm not saying that you need to write a bunch of exposition. You don't need any more words than you used here. You just need more compelling ones. Think through who you want the attractive woman to be, and go deeper than, "Head cheerleader." Think through her motivations, and try to go deeper than, "She's dumb but pretty and is needs to use sex to get help." Etc.
T
