Saturday, September 30, 2017

Many-Eyed Hydra’s thoughts on how to make the perfect Monster Girl H-game

For the last few weeks I’ve been running a playthrough of Dieselmine’s Monmusu Conquered World, which seems to be a spiritual successor of sorts to their previous series: Violated Hero.  As is typical for Dieselmine’s releases, the game is a mix of nice, sexy stuff, and frustratingly bone-headed/lazy design choices.  Frustrating, because I think the pieces are there to make a really good game, if assembled correctly.

To deal with that frustration, I thought I’d follow-up with this: my thoughts on how to make a really good Violated Hero game.  I switched the title to “Monster Girl” rather than “Violated Hero” to hopefully attract more general interest.

(As for adding my own pseudonym to the title, yeah, that’s pure self-indulgence.  Feel free to mock.)

For convenience, I am going to restrict this to a Violated Hero-type game; i.e. a Visual Novel/JRPG with a male protagonist having sexy stuff done to him by sexually dominant monster girls.  This is not the only or best way to make a monster girl game (check out Eroico for a 2D platformer and any of camel’s stuff for games with female protagonists), just the one I decided to focus on after playing through Monmusu Conquered World.

To be honest, I think the basic Violated Hero formula is a good foundation to start with – create 15 or so sexy monster girl characters and have the player run through sexy encounters with them.  Once you have those in place, the next steps are to determine how to handle the encounters and what to use as “filler” between them.

(Historically, this is where games like Violated Hero have been weak and games like Monster Girl Quest have been strong.)

I’m not going to go too much into creation of the monster girls.  Generally, you’ll want to cover a variety of types and sex acts.  Monster Musume’s harem of lamia, harpy, slime girl, centaur, mermaid, arachne and dullahan is a fairly straightforward roster.  You can choose to lean more vanilla with only humanoid monsters (elves, succubi, cat girls) or go full Monster Girl Quest weirdness (anything drawn by Delphinus or Xelvy).  I prefer the latter because additional entertainment can be derived from seeing just how fucked up a sexy Bad End can go.

As for the protagonist, I’m not sure on this.  Jude Duval has some interesting comments on my last post.  My thinking is, if you make them a blank, it’s easier for the player to project themselves onto the character, but the character likely won’t be very memorable.  I don’t know what’s best here.  It probably depends on writing skill.  I’d love to create a Geralt or Conan, but it’s not exactly easy.  The only hard rule is your protagonist should be at least 18.  Japanese games tend to be a little more flexible on this, but it’s pretty much a big no-no to go younger in any kind of Western erotica.

The most basic implementation of the Violated Hero model is a Visual Novel where the protagonist is “on rails” and proceeds through each sexy H-scene one by one.  Each scene is represented by one or more static pieces of art backed up by a text description.  This can work if the quality of the writing and artwork is high enough, but the resulting product is unlikely to make any “best of” lists.

We want more of a game, so let’s look at the separate elements.

First we have the character.  I’m going to borrow Slime from Monmusu Conquered World as an example.

Say hi to Slime

The artwork is usually a single standing pose with variations in facial expression to indicate her mood.  While it might be cool to add animation here, improving the other sections of the game are a higher priority.

Those other sections can be divided into “H-scene”, “fight” and “filler”.  “H-scene” is the sex scene, and what most people will be initially buying the game for.  “Fight” is sort of self-explanatory.  “Filler” refers to the segments between each monster girl encounter.

H-Scene

The most basic implementation is a piece of sexy artwork with some text describing what’s going on.  Here’s Slime from MCW having her wicked way with the protagonist.

A typical sexy Bad End

These scenes usually have one main piece of artwork with several variations as the scene progresses.  With Slime it’s going to be show semen spurts inside her translucent body as well as her wrapping more of her amorphous body around the hero (usually a good time to start getting very concerned in MGQ-world).

Sexy Bad End scene art progression

This is your standard monster girl Bad End scene and how both the VH and MGQ series have implemented them in the past.  Nowadays, I think these games need to do more.  Animation adds so much to the scenes I think games should try to work it in where they can.  It doesn’t have to be fantastic animation either.  Even simple distortions/manipulations of a static piece of artwork add a ton to the scene.

This is where Monmusu Conquered World cocked up, in my opinion.  MCW has some nice animated snippets, but it doesn’t use them in any of the Bad End scenes, even though most of them are derived from the same base artwork.

The next step from a simple animated snippet is some variation.  A change of speed or change in the background squelchy sex fx is simple, but very effective.  Currently, I think the benchmark for sexy monster girl Bad End scenes might be the succubi in Succubus Prison.

Start with some gentle paizuri and then...

The animations, aren’t exactly complex, but there are enough variations and screen effects that by the end of it you really feel like a succubus has ridden the fuck out of you.

...time to give that cock a proper squeeze...

I think this is what monster girl H-games should be aiming for, at minimum, in their Bad End H-scenes.

Of course, if you want to go all out, there’s no reason not to take it further.  Play the demo for Monster Girl Island, lie back and watch as demon slime Eris fucks the absolute shit out of your player avatar.  It’s not exactly surprising that Redamz is making $30K a month on Patreon.

Now imagine 10-15 scenes just like that in your monster girl H-game…

(excuse me, just off for a quick… ahem… break)

Fight

This is the interactive portion of the monster girl encounter.  In your typical monster girl RPG, the hero has to beat the monster girl “boss” to continue.  Lose and they get the sexy Bad End.

Yes, it is kind of weird that the sexy stuff is only unlocked by losing, but it makes sense for games where the monster girls are sexually dominant/femdom-ish.  The incentive is still there for the player to “win” as they don’t get to see the next girl’s sexy content until they do.

The most basic “fight” is a dialogue option asking the player if they want to fuck the hawt succubus.

Most games do a little more than that.  I’m sticking with the VH/MGQ archetype, so we’re looking at turn-based RPG combat.  This usually takes the form of:

1) Normal vs Normal (the early Violated Hero games)
2) Normal vs Sex (Monster Girl Quest)
3) Sex vs Sex (“battlefuck”, e.g. ROBF)

Personally, I think the games that drag the sexy into the fight segment are hotter than the ones that follow the blueprint of “bog-standard RPG fight followed by non-interactive sex scene”.

The main reason is interactivity, and – stemming from that – unpredictability.  The Bad End scenes generally don’t have any interactivity aside from clicking enter for the next line of text.  The fights do and it’s way more fun to see exactly how the succubus or other monster girl overpowers the main character to get them to that Bad End in the first place.  Extra bonus hotness if it’s some kind of special sex move that leaves the protagonist empty of energy.

The Dieselmine games have been traditionally lacklustre here, although the recent Monmusu Conquered World gives each encounter a nice animated sex attack.

Slime's special attack - boobs

The original Monster Girl Quest did better, with various attacks that bind the hero and hold them helpless while the monster girl sexily sucks out their HP.  MGQ was also pretty good with the unpredictability.  Sometimes the game would change the rules and the player would find themselves fucked (literally) whether they were trying to win the fight or not – a simple and very effective way to reinforce the femdom theme of the game.

"What, you thought you were supposed to select struggle?  Fu fu fu."

The VH/MCW fights were always too predictable to get across that “lack of control” angle.

I don’t know what a perfect interactive battlefuck system would look like.  It’s something I’ve been tinkering with for years without ever landing on something I like.  I think it wants a variety of pics/animations to represent the various sex attacks.  The better fights in the original Monster Girl Quest series had multiple artworks depending on what was being done to Luka at the time (Sexy Automata Girl and most of the later Succubi being good examples).  Add a little tweak of animation to their scenes and hawtness intensifies.

The shame of it is that Monmusu Conquered World already had elements of this in place.

Along with the animated slime girl titjob scene, they also had the following scene kicking around in the random filler sections.

Do not ask a Slime girl to "get creative"

I think this would have been better used as an alternate sex attack in the battle with Slime.  Throw in a couple more snippets of similar quality and suddenly those turn-based RPG battles become less of a chore and more a portion of the game to look forward to.

How to work them in is a harder question.  I like MGQ’s bind attacks and think some kind of system where the player gradually gets enmeshed in deeper and more explicit sex attacks would be as hot as fuck, but how to implement that, and produce all the art assets to effectively depict it is not a trivial task.  ROBF probably gets it closest in art/animation and Succubus Rhapsodia in text description (If that game could more accurately depict what was happening in art form, it would be amazing.  Unfortunately, creating art assets for all the various combinations would likely be way too time consuming).

These sprites do not accurately convey what this trio is about to do to you...

The Filler

These are the segments that link each of the sexy monster girl encounters.  The game part of the game unless you want it to be just a boss rush of the various monster girls (which is also fine, but requires putting a lot more detail on those boss fights).

Personally, I think this is lower priority depending on how much gameplay you want to add to your sex game.  Most of the time it’s just padding anyway, and exists to stop players blasting through the game in under an hour and then thinking it’s too short.

Dieselmine, with both the Violated Hero series and Monmusu Conquered World, have traditionally been comedicly terrible on this.

VH1 and 2 sent the player through a Dungeon Master-type pseudo-3D maze (Lightning Warrior Raidy also does the same).  They switched that to a branching path abstraction for VHs 3 to 5.  MCW has the player playing a very simple game of JRPG “tag”.  None of these segments really added anything to the games.

To be honest, there’s nothing wrong with taking the Visual Novel approach and filling the gaps with an interesting story.  This is what the original Monster Girl Quest series did and most monster girl H-game fans love that game.

The standard expansion to that is to use RPGmaker software and spread the story out across an overworld map.  This a more interactive option to get the story across, but suffers in that there are a lot of cheap RPGMaker games out there already (but as the focus should really be on the monster girl characters, this is not a substantial handicap).

The RPGmaker approach also moves the game more into being an RPG rather than just a Visual Novel.  The temptation then is to fill the map with random encounters (either normal critters, or more sexy monster girls).  It does add padding, but can also be tedious and grindy (especially if using conventional RPG critters rather than sexy monster girls).

On the surface Succubus Prison looks like an RPGmaker game, but while those games are about having the player explore a large world, Succubus Prison subverts it by confining the player to a small house.  It’s really a puzzle game with an emphasis on finding and combining the right key items while avoiding the succubi.  It’s good as it adds a fresh twist to a well-worn genre (and it also helps that the Bad End scenes are gorgeous).

To be honest, there are a lot of approaches that can be taken here.  The bad ones are those that feel pointless, boring and tacked on.  The good ones advance an interesting plot or give the player interesting character advancement options (or add sex content in a way that avoids being repetitive).

Anyway, it goes without saying that these are my thoughts, and might not hold for the target audience overall.  So, I would like you, the people reading this, and likely target audience for this type of game, to add your thoughts and comments below.  I’d like this web page/post to be a useful resource for anyone considering developing a monster-girl-themed eroge.  Maybe it will.  Maybe it will sink without a trace.  The internet being a big ocean and all that.

Next week we are going deep into the world of Monmusu Quest: Paradox, and I mean deep.

11 comments:

  1. To be honest, as a reader of erotic horror (and player of erotic horror games,) my preference is for my favorite kinks (honestly? Breasts. I also have a strange aversion in that I prefer not to see dicks in my erotic content. Easier to imagine myself in there I guess that way.)

    That said though... If a game only contains a little bit of my preferred content but said ‘little bit,’ is of a high enough quality (or sometimes if it’s been long enough... ) i’ll pick the game up regardless of what the other content is; if I find the ‘other content’ enough against my tastes I’ll try to skip past it or just not pay much attention to it.

    Lately, I’ve found most of my enjoyment in interactive text erotic games like Fenoxo games, and one I found on Fenoxo’s forum called ‘Lilith’s Throne.’ You get what you can find, I guess.

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    1. Do you have any Erotic Horror text games that you recommend it? Also ones that works on Android phones?

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    2. I think there's a variation of each of Fenoxo's games (Corruption of Champions / CoC and Trials in Tainted Space / TiTS) on Android, but you'll have to check his website to be sure. Fenoxo dot com.

      Fenoxo's forum has a sub-forum named 'Other Adult Games' where anyone can recommend games. Probably the best fit for Erotic Horror that I've found there is "The Allure of Wanton Cove." Which is like a lewd version of Lovecraft in a lot of ways.

      https://forum.fenoxo.com/threads/gatekeepers-games-the-allure-of-wanton-cove-updated-9-29-17.548/

      The author has 2 other games recommended in the post but I've never played them, s'why I didn't just post his Patreon, not sure they'd be listed. Their links are to tfgamesite.

      I tend to lurk through Fenoxo's forum every now and then looking for new entries, Erotic Horror is somewhat rare there but they do tend to come up.

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    3. I need to check those out. I know the big games (CoC, TiTS), but I haven't looked at the others. It might give me inspiration for trying to make a CYOA of my own.

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  2. Thank you for the excellent article(and the links😉)! But I have a question though. Isn't Echidna Wars DX a good example of what you wrote? https://youtu.be/TopUtVT8Ulo. Granted it not a VAN or a RPGmaker,and it doesn't have a bad end.

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    1. Pretty much. It leans more vore than monster girl sex, but it's really good. Queen Bee is gorgeous in that game.

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  3. Personally, MGQ Paradox fit my game desires perfectly. I'm under the impression that porn/hentai/ecchi makes anything better as long as it's not ugly as hell.

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  4. I read through your DramaraQuest V playthrough recently and had an idea. You mentioned how games often use palette swapping to produce many enemy types from a few basic models. I think the same principle could be applied to give every single monster girl, even in games with massive casts like Monster Girl Quest, a variety of animated sex attacks.
    Taking MGQ as an example, many enemies do have cut-ins illustrating their attacks, but few have more than one and none of the art is animated. Trying to produce individual animated cut-ins for each enemy's attacks would be far too expensive. Instead, developers could look at creating a basic set of animations, representing sex techniques like blowjobs, handjobs, titjobs etc. They could then palette swap these to create variations for every individual enemy. For further variety, the speed of the animation (and accompanying sound effects) could be changed, e.g. slowing it down to represent a monster that prefers gentle sex. The animated cut-ins could also be included in H-scenes, to supplement the static images.
    The main problem I can think of would be the difficulty of differentiating animations that include the head, since this is the most recognizable part of the body. At a minimum, it would be necessary to change the hair and often the eyes and ears, and add or remove horns.
    Disclaimer: I have no expertise in art, animation or game design, so I have no idea how feasible this would be.

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    1. I had another idea that I thought was worth sharing. Basically, the Bad End images could be "cut up" to produce images of different sex attacks.

      As an example, let's imagine a Bad End involving a generic succubus raping a guy in reverse missionary position, while kissing him, rubbing her breasts against his chest and penetrating his ass with her tail. By cutting out portions of this image, you would have illustrations for four different sex attacks: kissing, chest rubbing, vaginal sex and tail penetration. Add animations and sound effects to each one and battles with even generic enemies become something to look forward to.

      The main advantage of this approach is cost, since you don't need to commission any more art beyond the initial Bad End scene.

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    2. I had a third idea. Basically, this is simulating movement without actual animation by cycling between two slightly different CGs. I got the idea from a game called "Apostle" by kamichichi (it's not a monster girl game, though it does have big breasts and great artwork).

      As an example, imagine a succubus riding a man in the cowgirl position. This would be the base CG. Then imagine a second similar CG in which the succubus' body is shifted down slightly, showing that she's bringing her hips down, while her breasts are moved up to represent bounce. As a final touch, the second CG would be slightly blurred. By cycling between the two, the succubus appears to be moving up and down.

      The advantages of this approach are that it requires no additional programming skills and it looks less stilted than poorly-done animation. The disadvantages are due to it requiring more artwork, so it would be more costly and result in a larger game file.

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  5. One idea I had is the idea of enemies losing their clothes during battle. This is already present in a number of games. The examples I've seen so far have it occur after the enemy loses a certain proportion of health, but an alternative would be to have a player skill to strip the enemy. By itself, this adds more depth to fights, especially if being naked has actual gameplay consequences (the enemy using more advanced sexual techniques, for example). It could be taken further by having two different H-scenes, one with clothes and one without, depending on the enemy's state when they defeat you. This adds further interactivity to the game, satisfies both players who prefer sex with clothes and those who prefer sex without them, and is a cheap(er) way of adding more H-scenes.

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