Very true. Games went from a weird niche in the 80s to a pretty profitable golden age in the 90s and 2000s where juuust the right balance was struck between budget and profit-seeking and still having a small, passionate team that wanted to do something incredible. But by the mid 2010s devs and publishers just weren't competing to create the most fun or innovative products anymore: they were competing to create the most effective scams and life-style props. Games ceased being practical things to be ENJOYED and became a weird kind of status symbol of being in the cool "geek" crowd, a way to posture. Except that by the time this happened, the hobby had largely been murdered and these people were just wearing its skin.
This isn't to say all good games magically ceased in 2013 or something. They still happen. But they're much, MUCH rarer: an unqualified "amazing" game is nearly a unicorn now. And they're almost always from smaller teams largely outside the industry.
Makes sense. The last "modern" console I bought was a PS4, and I only ended up buying a handful of games for that. And obviously if they're just not your interest you're...not going to be interested. But I've been more curious where the people that HAVE enjoyed the series over the years were falling on this.
Oh hey, glad you finally finished it out! And no worries, I still enjoy hearing different people's takes and feedback on it, even if they overlap a bit.
Some good taste in endings too: I was definitely pretty proud with the whole video tape setup once it was finished, very much a fun idea. As for conditioning, I do enjoy "real" hypnosis as well, a lot more potential there than people realize, but it's just not a good fit for this kind of game, or at least what I'm trying to do here, so I tend to go with more fictionalized stuff. Too slow-paced of a build-up. For GT in particular though, it was important to the setup to actually have that initial scene with SOME kind of conditioning, even if it was a little vague and didn't have any visuals to go with it. Sets things up and all.
Genuinely, glad you enjoyed it though. And I'm always glad to see new people discovering it. Mind if I ask where you heard about the game?
"The mechanic of healing with energy outside of combat, while only being able to recover energy during combat, made me think strategically, and I liked that."
Excellent, and kudos to you for figuring that out on your own: a lot of people don't seem to realize you can heal out of combat with the ability instead of items and understandably struggle a bit. But I think it does add a nice bit of moderate challenge, because you have to think a little about which healing makes more sense in the moment, and have this little ritual of "bandaging up" after big fights, which I think pulls you in a little as a player.
And yes, I'd definitely recommend Gutter Trash if you enjoyed this. There's a LOT more to it, especially since it's been complete for a while now, and it's a bit more refined in terms of design too: this is literally the first game I ever made.
Oh definitely, how people relate to a character matters a lot. And in that case especially: as I'm sure you know by now, a lot of people feel VERY strongly one way or the other about NTR/cheating/stealing, perceived or real, especially when you're playing the other side of that relationship. Which is understandable: if you're playing a game to simulate a relationship and then get involuntarily cucked, that's going to be a problem if you're not into that kind of thing. But as you said, not something I've had to worry about yet with mine: CS is mostly for people who want to self-insert into a character that gets thrown around and manhandled. In a more general sense though yes, absolutely. Always important to consider what the experience of playing the game is going to be for most people, and try to anticipate that as best you can.
Some good points. Something additional I hadn't considered earlier: Two of the big three people responsible for the GTA series are gone, and HAVE been gone since 5 came out. The entire dev cycle of 6 has been minus a lot of what helped to make the series what it was, which doesn't bode well.
You're correct though, it is entirely possible to make money cannibalizing brand identity: the live-action Disney remakes did VERY well financially despite being some of the most god-awful slop ever made, because people just see "Disney" and take their kids to it. See also the process of "rebadging", where random Chinese companies buy up previously respected AV and appliance brands and release garbage under them to the unsuspecting public. The problem of course is that this is fundamentally a scam, and thus can only go on for so long before the brand is worthless. There is certainly money to be made in clear-cutting, it just isn't sustainable.
But yes, like I said I don't plan on making any changes to my own trajectory or plans for the games from this. I've been struggling this whole time to articulate exactly why this matters to me, and I think it's something like this: I want to have a sense for the mindset of my audience. Not in a direct way: this or that kink, this or that character design or story element (Well I DO, but that's not the purpose here). But more broadly. Do they care about quality and thought being put into games in the way that I do? Maybe that's insulting to even ask, and maybe the answer should have been obvious. But increasingly I find myself in a room full of people insisting, sometimes violently, that there are five lights, when as far as I can honestly see, there are very obviously four. So I suppose on some level this poll is just a self-sanity check, like that guy in A Beautiful Mind. GTA 6 looks like it's gonna suck right? I'm not the only one seeing this, right? There's actually a guy standing there, waving, right?
Sheer cultural and economic inertia in other words. "Why did you buy that thing?" "Because it's the thing you buy, and it was there, and I could buy it." I mean fair enough, that certainly might be it.
Could very well just be me being in a strange bubble. But I just haven't seen it. Not just on here, but in general. It's always people talking about how OTHER people will rush out and buy it, but never how excited they are themselves. Is the main target audience literally just too stupid to use a computer or a phone? What level of slop hell are we dealing with here?
I would more or less agree. I think 5 was mediocre, but succeeded because 4 was FRUSTRATING: it had a lot of potential, but it was just so, so botched on release. 5 was a chance to finally get a GTA game with "modern" tech that actually WORKED and flowed smoothly, and that was enough to carry it.
But GTA games have always been these intensely carefully constructed systems of systems, like a Swiss watch that you can walk around inside of and just marvel as you keep finding ANOTHER thing you didn't expect, another mechanic, another part of the world that feelt more alive that you thought a video game ever could. Some people have commented that Red Dead 2 may be the last Rockstar game to really embody that in a meaningful way, and from what I'm seeing currently, they may be right.
Also true, although to some extend an extension of the above. The people who buy a console at Best Buy or Amazon and just download and play whatever jingle-jangle-keys is new this month probably do not even know that Itch exists. But at the same time, I imagine a lot of the people here DO own consoles and DO play larger, more professional games sometimes, or at least have in the past and gladly would again if they were worth it.
But maybe this is yet another example of the economic and cultural balkanization and stratification that's been tearing things apart for a decade or more now. Culture used to be largely UNIFIED and MULTI-LAYERED. GTA is a perfect example of this, because there was something there for everyone. If you were a nerd, you could marvel at the craft, the scale, the technical achievements, how polished the gameplay and systems were. And if you had a dent in your head, you could start the game up and spend 4 hours just driving around and shooting things. To be fair, I did as well, because even that was a lot of fun. But the point is there was a broad appeal. Maybe the days of that are over. Maybe now we have slop for the hogs and nerd shit for the nerds, and not really much combination of the two. And maybe GTA 6 can survive PURELY on being that hogslop. But we'll see.
This is at least a reasonable theory, but my understanding, which may be lacking, is that CoD hasn't been doing great recently; not TERRIBLE, but nothing like it was, and certainly not a "shatter the earth" demographic. Even more so for sports games. This would at least make sense, as both genres have been pretty deep into the slop for a while now without really causing problems for their core audience, but I just don't see the numbers being there. To be reasonably successful, sure, maybe. But to make a decent return on six years of dev time? To be the best selling game of all time?
From a certain perspective, GTA was always "Mainstream": GTA III sold 14+ million copies; San Andreas 27. At the time, people would constantly refer to the fact that you could pick up hookers in the game and then drop them off and run them over (despite this being .1% of the gameplay). To some extent, the early GTA games even reached outside the ordinary "gamer" sphere, in the same way Tetris did, since the PS2 had a HUGE install base and the game was pretty simple to pick up and just start messing around with.
On the other hand, the point of the games was always to be a bit biting and sardonic. III couldn't afford a lot of licensed music, so they made a LOT of the tracks themselves, and one is literally a protest against the attempted censorship and rounding off of all the corners in culture that was happening at the time (and has only accelerated since):
"You're sweet, you're shy, you must admit You censor your life for your benefit But you lose all the taste, and you sit there and waste Your day, your month, your year"
Notably, it's also a protest against stagnation and being locked into the past:
"Nothing stays, they pass you by
If you don't change, if you don't change"
And fair enough, I can see the irony. But not all change is good. Sometimes, a seed becomes a might oak. Other times a house, abandoned, rots to ruin. Or is vandalized.
Regardless, I don't think it's a dramatic contrarian position to claim that the entire ethos of the GTA games was to be a dramatic contrarian, almost to the point of self-parody at times. That this too has been ruined by the usual forces isn't surprising, but it is sad. The game just became too big, and at a certain size cool people with cool ideas can't retain control, and every decision is made by the board room and the HR department.
For GTA 6 alone, I have seen just about every furry icon imaginable, female AND male, drawn into that promotional illustration of the female lead. Lots of OCs as well.
More broadly, furries are nerds, nerds like video games, and the GTA series is one of the most successful and culturally impactful video game series ever. Back in the day there was absolutely a lot of crossover. But also, things don't have to directly cater to the fandom (and really shouldn't, with a few exceptions), they can just be fun on their own.
I've heard, but not seen confirmation. Could actually be funny, and lord knows there's a lot to mock about the fandom, but I have no faith that any writers on the new game would be able to deliver good jokes.
Oh hey, well glad that you found your way here! Which post on Predation was that though? Must have been a while back. Consider yourself on notice though: you've now got six-ish months to finish them out in time for Chapter 3.
Hey, I'll take it if so. Was a fun little game, and I'm glad they've been able to have the success they have. Obviously I'm not getting any cross traffic here from Steam, but it is on Itch as well, so maybe CS has been showing up in the "you may as like" popup. You might be on to something. That said, if that IS the case, why is it only bumping downloads and, in the case of GT, sales, and having no effect on views?
This is exactly the kind of impassioned, deranged and utterly on-point rant *I* would post in reply if this was someone else's post. Love ya Fireplace.
"But It's gonna have a million players -1." We'll see. The reason for this poll is that the constant claims being made about the game's inevitable success have been at odds with both my own feelings towards it and, most jarringly, just about ever real, actual human I've spoken to about it. But I'll get more into that in the followup.
I will say that, bad behavior of the company aside, the game ITSELF just hasn't looked very interesting. But again, will get more into details in the followup.
As is tradition. Personally I like to ride the edge in games like this, trying to stay decent for a while before falling into ruin. But as they say, everyone eats a zebra bar differently.
I assume by your user name you may be in the fandom: do you have an FA account? If so, you can drop me a note there, I'm just "bitshift".
I will point out a few things as well that may be useful. First, my Substar page is under .art rather than .adult, as it contains no actual humans. This is a split substar did a while ago for various reasons. Second, in addition to the typical credit card payments, Substar also now has a "wallet" feature that can be be filled with various means, including crypto. I know this is a big hassle, and a lot of people don't want to mess with it or are unable to, and I'm also not sure if Substar is simply ip-banning Russian use at the moment, but I thought it might be worth pointing out. Regardless, drop me a note on FA if you can and we can talk further there.
But yes, obviously if people are literally unable to buy my games due to thoroughly enforced international sanctions, I have no problem with them pirating at that point.
Oh I'm aware. The reality is there isn't a lot I can do about it: I don't have tens of thousands of dollars I can shovel into a team of lawyers to constantly play wack-a-mole with these sites, and even if I did, that would only have a limited effect. But the reality is ALSO that games tend to make most of their money on release, and most people just buy it on release rather than waiting, even a little, for a pirated copy to come out. Buying is more convenient: you don't have to go looking for a good source, fuck around with shady download sites, and then repeat all that when new content comes out. You can just go to itch and hit download.
I would also say that at least in the US, this is a VERY affordable game, which helps. The $80+ price tags a lot of professional games have now are a huge pain point, and undoubtedly fuel increased piracy (or even worse, just total dis-interest), but if you're not homeless you can probably afford to drop $10 to get a couple days worth of horny entertainment.
The other advantage I have is that my work lies squarely in the furry fandom, and the fandom is crazy, in both good and bad ways. But one of the GOOD ways is that they are VERY willing to buy things and support creators, so if you give them something that's actually WORTH buying, even better. You're definitely going to have a market. A LOT of the people in the fandom both have money to spend (on non-essential stuff) and are happy to actually spend it, which is an increasingly rare thing in the current national and global situation.
And although it's almost cliche at this point, Gabe was right: what matters isn't how many people pirate a game, but how many people buy it. So far, enough have to allow my life to transform from horrible to manageable, and when 3 finally releases I may manage to reach "Kind of mostly alright."
I've always had kind of a lopsided way of approaching things when it comes to interest: either just not caring at all, or REALLY diving in. These games are the result of the latter. I started playing a bunch of explicit games many years ago and ended up being fascinated by just how much effort and thought and SINCERITY was put into them, instead of the usual whinging, apologetic "ha ha isn't it funny it's a game but also PORN?!" that the stuff I had seen up to that point tended to have.
So when I started trying to make my own it was in that model: I tried actually caring. Partially because it makes for a more enjoyable game, but also because it just makes it more fun to work on the game. So I try to have actual characters, some somewhat interesting mechanics, replayability, lore, etc. Maybe from a certain perspective this is silly, and most people would be happy with bland porn ducttaped to the most default gameplay possible, but *I* don't enjoy that, and my guiding principle with all this has been to try to make something I would want to play. I'm glad that continues to pay off and resonate with people.
I am surprised you're just playing through now: I remember that VERY vivid profile pic from a while back; I assumed you have gone through it quite a while ago. But I'm glad you finally did, and that you enjoyed it so much.
"This game deserves to be more popular."
I appreciate the kind words, and don't necessarily disagree, but given the state of things right now, I'm...content to stay in my own lane. By all means, tell your friends, spread the word around, but I'm not going to push TOO hard to get widely noticed. The cutesy Kotaku piece profiling a bunch of adult games on Itch came juuust before the massive censorship wave, here and elsewhere. I wonder where the pearl-clutching normies found out there were VILE PORN GAMES on the Internet? Somehow I don't think they were hanging out on 15-year-old anime torrent forums. "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down." I'm just gonna chill for now.
And of course, glad to help where I can. I have to balance responses here with actual dev time, which of course has to come first, but I'm glad to help in small ways where possible. And it's important to remember as a dev that event though *I* may have seen discussion of something game-related dozens of times, a brand-new player likely has no idea, it's all fresh to them. So I'm glad I was able help, and get things back on track.
And while we're here, what was your favorite scene/scenario?
OW. Yeah, yeah these games kind of need it. Did you know ctrl will fast-forward dialog and in-engine cut-scenes? Did you know you can hit ESC during a scene to temporarily hide the dialog box if you want to get a better view? Now you do.
This is a known issue with RPGMaker MV, and is harmless but annoying. Something about the way it stores certain files in the system causes issues if other RPGMaker games have previously been run on the same computer. Theoretically there are ways to force a game to use a LOCAL version of NW (I don't know why they didn't just make this the default), and I thought I had implemented them with some success in both games, but apparently the issues is still cropping up sometimes. Be sure you're using the most recent version just to give the best chance of avoiding this though.
The pics don't really merit their own gallery entry, as they're just snaps of the minigame itself. I MIGHT give the mini-game an entry at some point, but I probably won't mess with it for now. In the meantime of course, you can always just drop a save file right before and load that up whenever you want to enjoy it again.
"I hope I live to see the release of Part 3." I thought this was a joke about the pace of my work, but then I remembered the context. But me too man, me too, though the concern is obviously a bit more pressing for you. I'm glad you've been enjoying the games, and are still keeping an eye on them. I'll keep pushing forward. Oh, and what's the other Visual Novel?
1. Verify that the changes were saved correctly. 2. Where is the changed file located? Is it in www\js\plugins, as the instructions said? Changing the datacrystal.js file in the main directory of the game and failing to move it will not do anything. I tested the most recent release by directly modifying the file to exactly the contents you listed below, and it correctly triggered the start of the scene ("!" icon and crash sound, which you then have to investigate further.)
