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Thanks, the same to you as well!

Hi D6rk

I think you're the first developer who says VAM is easier to learn than HS2... LOL but I guess that's a good thing. Frame rate is over-rated for normal action scenes, sex can only go so fast before it looks ridiculously unrealistic... I reckon a 20 - 30fps should be more than enough, I've seen some games boast of 60 fps animations and they make no perceivable difference.

^_^

1) Yea, sometimes the default stuff offered is a little lacking.

2) More angles are ok, but as a "director" you need to draw your players' attention to what you want them to focus on  and constant camera spinning is usually not a good idea except for rare situations ;-)

3) Sure you can just grab some professional porn on different positions for ahem... research, they are more or less the same because there are certain "industry best practices" for a good reason i.e. most viewers like them.

4a) LOL HS2 packaged animations is like a compendium of "what not to do" case studies - almost everything is wrong there and I suspect it is this way because the original HS2 assets had issues around the female genitalia. As a result it doesn't depict animations like fingering, thrusting, pussy eating well so most of their animations tend to adopt angles that defocus these deficiencies.

4b) I think animations wise it's good enough. Some purists will argue for high fps, but to me time is usually better spent on other areas of the game. The only thing I would emphasize which I cannot see from the sample is the looping part, just make sure it joins as seamlessly as possible because jarring is one of the top complaints for poorly done animations.

5) I'm sure there's a solution somewhere, you might wanna contact some developers who use VAM and see whether there are any insights.

Cheers and take care.

Hi Profundum Team, the models I have previously given detailed feedback on the possibility of moving to a softer / sweeter tone so won't repeat there.

Thanks for sharing the sample animation, so here's some quick observations I hope will be helpful:

1) MC's dick has a lighter color tone compared to the rest of his body esp. the legs, you might need to make some adjustments to harmonize.

2) In terms of camera movements, the general rule of thumb is to identify the focus areas and then hold them for at least 3 - 5 seconds before moving to the next focus area. The current presentation where the camera keeps moving without stopping is probably not ideal as it does not draw attention to anywhere in particular.

3) Taking reference from porn practices, the focus areas for a reverse cowgirl are usually i) a front shot that captures the entire female face-boobs-pussy action moving up and down (more common is to have the camera slightly below cock level inclining upwards slightly), ii) close up of genitals, iii) top down showing female face with bouncing boobs and iv) male POV of butt bouncing against stomach.

4) You don't need to do all 4 focus areas in one animation ( I think 2 or at most 3 will suffice), so an e.g. sequence would be start off with (i) hold for few seconds, close in on (ii) hold for few seconds and the move upwards and do (iii) for a few seconds before looping back to (i)

This is for one smooth animation with multiple focus areas. Alternative is to break down each angle into different animations and cycle them automatically or allow players to choose.

Alternatively you can go for a more innovative and "fap friendly" way like The Inn which players can change anytime but the story and dialogue will still continue.

5) One last thing is the lighting, although the shadow against the wall is indicating a single source of lighting angle at around 1 'clock from the characters, there are no shades on the characters themselves which makes the whole experience a little unrealistic.

Hope this helps.

Same to you as well. Cheers and best of luck in your animations =)

Hey D6rk, thanks for the explanation. Personally I think the trick is to make the LIs especially their facial features softer and sweeter, NOT younger like underaged lolis. It's hard to describe in words, hence I can only use two recent games Haunted University and Desirium as examples.

None of the characters in these two look underaged and can definitely pass off as adults, but they manage to avoid this very rugged and coarse look that plagues most Daz models.  Let me try to illustrate the point as best I can using Haunted as an example.

This is a typical character that looks  anywhere 18 - 22, she has facial features that look "normal" and somewhat sweet.

A blond character that has a more outgoing and confident feel.

This one looks older and perhaps closer to the "Daz feel".

This is obviously going for the kawaii fans, but most importantly doesn't look loli.

Just using these characters as an example to illustrate what I'm trying to say, naturally all rights belong to Axolotl Games here and screenshots were contributed by players in another forum.

Naturally you shouldn't follow them exactly as I'm sure you will have your own artistic style, I'm just saying your current screenshot is showing something too close to what most other games using Daz are doing. This means the art won't stick out, so you will need to lean on some other thing like a strong story, sex scenes, game mechanics etc to rise above the competition.

Hope this helps. I can't speak for the "community" so just my personal 2C here.

Cool, personally I prefer 3D anyway. What was used to render them? Doesn't look Daz, is it VAM or Blender?

Personally I feel the current style is a tad too close to the generic Daz assets in the market (very mature & rough looking) and doesn't really stand out... If you could just fine tune it to slant the general feel towards a sweeter tone it would be good.

Something closer to Desirum or Haunted University captures the qualities of both Daz and HS2  will stand out greatly in the field of competition.

Ah NextGen is getting really popular these days. Well this certainly looks promising and good luck on Myth, I'll be following it as well! Thanks.

I believe some sort of mod with shader has been used on top HS2? The renders look much better than MRD, quite similar to MBIML which is a big improvement.

Better to do it optional than remove it altogether, a lot of times it's more of a vocal minority giving the impression that "a lot" of feedback is happening.

If you do a Patreon poll or at least a IP controlled public one, you will likely get a different big picture result from reading comments.

You're welcome! I look forward to playing maybe a V0.3 or 0.4 ;-)

I think you need to strike a balance between giving out something to entice players and keeping your cards close. 

Right now I feel there's too little to go on and you'll probably miss out on a lot of players since many won't bother to download something they don't even have a clue in which direction the game is going. It would be a shame as there are not too many dark themed HS games out there.

The trick is to reveal a little enough to entice people to download to try and yet retaining flexibility by keeping things vague. Now your demo situation is more like totally no info rather than being vague. 

Hope this helps!

The lighting is a little off especially for the first two screenshots, the banner one is much better.

Anyway your story or at minimal the genre of your game should surface in a demo. Right now it's hard to even tell which genre this game belongs to. I strongly suggest you rewrite the introduction.

I am guessing it's some sort of horror / psycho thriller with perhaps some paranormal, I could be wrong but the main thing is players shouldn't be left guessing...

Still I'll give this a try when there are a few more updates, all the best in your development and good luck!

Ok, I respect your decision to do fully hand drawn and wish you all the best in you and your team's demo launch. =) 

Oh wow, carving a niche eh? Will you be going for a more western comic or eastern anime / dongman style? 

Don't know much about 2D, but from what I observe it seems to take more effort to do especially if there are animations. Some developers augment with AI, but that introduces a whole set of other problems...

I haven't come across a 2D adult game that carries the dark cyberpunk atmosphere well, many of the Sci-fi ones made with Koikatsu look too bright and chirpy. 

Something like this https://www.fiverr.com/hentai_custom/design-and-make-a-video-of-any-character-in... would be cool... Haha just me fantasizing.

You can try using VAM instead and with some tweaks the style is quite close to HS2. However VAM is apparently harder to pickup initially but has the potential to produce better renders than HS2.

From a commercial perspective, it's probably not a good idea to use Daz3D. There 3D adult gaming industry is flooded with games using Daz like 80% - 85% of them (rough guesstimate) and a Steam listing is often this elusive carrot that makes it all sound good in theory, but very little developers really profit much in the end.

I don't mean to sound rude, but so far based on your stated game numbers, it looks decent but doesn't really stand out. If you go the Daz3D route, you will be trying to compete in an avalanche of Daz titles that come and go.

This is surprisingly good! Was expecting a typical loser MC + tsundere sister + other ladies loving this loser MC for no reason type of porn game.

I couldn't have been more wrong, the story is interesting and all the characters (including the MC and tsundere sister) are not what the seem inititaly.

Please keep up the good work and hopefully development can speed up!

Holly molly, you have a way to do animations. Just from the screenshots I can tell the camera angles are really really hot!

Erm... So is this the same game as Harem Secrets? They screenshots look similar...

Yea! Glad to see another update, but sad to know we're just 1 update from the ending =(

Glad to hear we're gonna see more of Nyx, IMHO she's the most interesting character so far. Yea it would be good to cut down some of those random events on the spaceship that have nothing to do with advancing the story, too many of those currently...

Good luck in your development and thanks for the  game!

Man this is seriously kickass good! I hope this project can continue in earnest... Keep up the good work!

Excellent work! Thanks and always remember perfect is the enemy of the good, managing your mental health is part and parcel of development work as well.

It's a fair starting point, the definition of "kinetic" isn't well-defined anyway.

For first time developers, either a 100% kinetic novel or a singular storyline with options to reject certain LIs has the best chance for success.

Sandboxes and multi-storylines usually get implemented badly by inexperienced developers resulting in abandonment as frustration sets in.

Also don't get bamboozed by vocal minorities. Kinetic, branching VN, sandbox etc. each attract fans and haters. Some players go berserk and bomb the developer when they don't get what they want which can hide real feedback from silent majority.

Take reference from dependable data points like polling, number of downloads, aggregate rating scores, patreon supporters' interaction, word cloud of written reviews etc.

All the best!

The patch is already available at the usual place, for obvious reasons the developer cannot share it here on Itch.

Where did you get the idea it's gay? I'm not remotely aware of any scenes that even hint of that...

The banner girl looks like a real bad ass version of Eternum's Luna. :D

Nevertheless the previews look very promising, so I'll definitely keep this on the watchlist. Congrats on publishing your first game!

Excellent! This game has already received very high ratings at Itch and F95 for early version, so looking forward to greater heights!

May I suggest you expand your introduction on this page? 

This game has a very interesting theme that isn't commonly seen among AVNs, yet there is nothing on the game page which sells this idea...

Copied over from Discord....

Maidens of Power features one of the most successful implementation of a controlled sandbox format. I like how you allow players to choose distinct storylines and then converge them when the time is up as a linear story, not to mention some exploring for easter egg specials. 

The skip time to event is innovative and definitely beats senseless clicking often seen in other sandboxes. 

Somehow you've managed to avoid the usual pitfalls with sandboxes - e.g. Deviant Anomalies / Seeds of Chaos (story logical inconsistencies all over), Euranasia (mindless clicking waiting for something to happen), Wartribe Academy (drifting w/o a central theme) 

Keep up the good work and looking forward to the unveiling of the last 3 maiden. Thanks!

Yea same here. I thought Once Lifetime was the apex of adult VNs, then I started Eternum... Holy smokes.

I'm now forcing myself to slowly play through it so that I don't suffer withdrawal symptoms too long waiting for the next update.

Indeed I'm afraid this approach doesn't work too well for VNs, better to have consistent volume across.

Alternatively, you can go the same route as Eternum and tone down the BGM volumes only halfway through the 18+ scenes.

Cheers!

This is very impressive. I like how you have borrowed good elements from Eternum with acknowledgement, but also  injected your own flavor and interpretation into story telling.

The characters and background rendering is pleasing and more slanted towards surrealism than Eternum and combined together with good use of lighting, shadow and angles, create a unique ambience that I have not seen elsewhere in other VNs.

I've only started playing a couple of hours and so far the story shows potential. Only thing I would feedback is the background music volume is sometimes inconsistent. I found myself adjusting headphone volume time to time for a normalized experience.

Looking at the comments below, it seems like yourself and/or many of your audience is Chinese which  explains why the feel of this game is very East Asian. 

Please keep up the good work and hope to this game develops further and becomes another classic.

Got to comment you have an interesting concept, but a few very critical things I think is very important to fix in the next version:

1) You need some sort of trigger to announce to players they have reached the end of the current version. I didn't even know I have reached the end of this version. 

Wasted a lot of time grinding through the days to get enough money to buy a cell phone and information on Youko only to have nothing happen. I only found out this was the end after reading online. 

So here's a public service for everyone playing, version 1.0 will end after you have unlocked all the scenes in Raven, Ryouko, Mika and Youko.

2) There are a lot of grammatical errors throughout. While I understand English ain't native to everyone, many of these errors can be picked up by a basic grammar / spelling corrector. Perhaps you can consider running the script through them.

3) There's something weird with the animation rendering in Ryouko's sex scene. Pussy is much whiter than the rest of her body and looks like  a cut & paste job, might wanna correct that.

4) Try to provide an option for player to automatically use up all their remaining energy for strength when they choose sleep. It's pretty pointless to just keep clicking and watching MC do pull ups everyday.

5) You probably need some way to make more money in the next update, otherwise the game drags out for too long just to raise money to buy stuff. Maybe the pipe screwing workshop can generate more money, otherwise everyone will just skip.

Once again, thanks for the effort so far.