I once again return to this topic. I’ve discussed this before, so I won’t repeat too much. That blog post is a year and a half old now(!), and discussion with friends has drawn me to discussing this again.
It’s no secret that visual novels are the most popular porn games, as well as the most numerous, and especially for yiff. A quick browse through itch.io shows an almost oversaturated market of visual novels where you date one or more characters, usually progressing through some linear story or event.
There’s a good reason why it is this way - from the developer’s side, visual novels can be rapidly produced, requiring few art assets, and little to no gameplay / scripting. Then, from the player’s side, where the intention of the game is to arouse you and probably masturbate, a game that waits for you to be ready is exactly what you need. After your two-and-a-half hours of romancing a character, one still image of your character and them boning is exactly the climax (pun intended) you’ve been building up to.
I am a documented Danganronpa enjoyer, so I’m not against visual novels as a concept, but I liked Danganronpa so much because it had the gameplay, which supplemented the visual novel story delivery. HuniePop had challenging gameplay (well, the second one was challenging, anyway), though the gameplay didn’t mesh with the visual novel elements much. The other visual novels I’ve played offered either no gameplay at all, or something token, like a Dance Dance Revolution section.
I think this is an effective way to blend porn and games. Last time I wrote about this, I had eight game design documents for porn games. Now, I’m up to fourteen. Unfortunately, I’ve written off all but two as “not worth it”; either the scope is too big, and ensmallening it would take away from the fun; or the gameplay itself doesn’t mesh with the porn. Of those two, one of them is admittedly more like a HuniePop, and the other has the yiff and gameplay completely separated.
A year and a half ago, I mentioned wanting to try all these different wacky fusions of porn and game design. Today, I’ve found no fusion that satisfies me. It boils down to the reward system of games versus porn, and the fundamental identity of a porn game as an interactive gallery.
Action and porn necessarily oppose each other. Action games demand quick reflexes and mechanical understanding. Porn requires you taking 100% control of the situation and quitting when you’re done. Action games ask you to perform, whereas you ask porn to perform. Okay then, a puzzle game? But no, a puzzle game requires you to intuit, which is time your brain isn’t spending on those jiggling jubblies. The anticipation of completing a puzzle might be enough for you - if not, the slider puzzles that reveal hentai wouldn’t exist - otherwise you’d need a profoundly easy puzzle. Games with puzzles that take legitimate intuition and skill (Monster Mind) require you to switch gears from horny coomer mode into puzzle-solving detective brain. And despite certain Japanese media saying otherwise, most detectives are not on the case and horny simultaneously.
As I mentioned in the previous post, games reward the player by giving them more. The puzzle game gives you new puzzles with new restrictions or bigger boards, the action game gives you more enemies or more complicated enemy types, etc. Porn games can technically reward you with these things, yes, but the thing the player actually wants is porn. At best, this leads to games where the porn and the gameplay sit in separate rooms (Monster Mind, Hole Dweller), and at worst, this leads to games where the porn is so obtrusive that the gameplay negatively suffers. (For the record, I’d put Wrangler somewhere in the middle. You could rename the skills and stats to remove the porn element from it without much fuss. My solution wasn’t great either, but it was the best I could think of at the time.)
Having novel porn animations for the length of an entire game is not feasible, or at least not wise. Animations take a long time to create. Even if you only provided still images, you’d still have to create an obscene amount of them to hit a reasonable length, provided the porn is the game. The old guard of Rack, Rouse the Charmeleon, etc. are the purest examples of a game that is the porn. And, though they have varying levels of interactivity (Rack being a marvel to this day), neither of them have any story, characters in a true sense, etc. Rack has a rewards system in its unlocks, as well as an “unlock everything” cheat for those who just want to jack & jill off.
And there we see my point once again - even Rack, where the porn is the game, has a button to let the impatient in. I would hazard a good number of players did the game properly for a while, then hit “unlock all” and finished up. Players are here for the porn, not for the game.
Now. This section might come off as a bit harsh or judgemental. I should clarify this section comes from being both a porn game dev and porn game player, as well as the general porn consumer that you become if you’re a furry. My glass house looks fantastic in the morning sun, and I’d prefer to keep my stones in their display cases. However, as I alluded to in the previous paragraph, the audience of porn games is here for porn, not games. Visual novels being the thinnest layer of interactivity to qualify as a game is a good example. The continued popularity of HeatVR is an even better example. HeatVR is more of a sandbox than a game, and it’s doing gangbusters. HeatVR is a game where you boot it up and just go to town on the characters. It is probably the last word in interactive furry porn, and for good reason.
Sandbox porn games provide one more layer of control to the player over a visual novel. Sure, the opportunity for narrative or character is removed, but in truth, players don’t really care. “Rule34” depictions of established characters come to mind; Renamon was never a big-titted slut, Fox McCloud and Falco Lombardi would never actually fuck each other, and Rouge the Bat is not a thick-thighed shortstack with a dick the size of a curtain rod. But these characters persist in pornography, not as themselves, but as filtered versions of themselves. They are the reinterpretation of the character through the coomer brain. Is that immoral? Not necessarily. Although there are certainly people who want character and narrative in their porn, statistically, most people just want a 4-second loop of buttsex. Of course, a 4-second loop of buttsex with characters you recognize tends to grab your attention more than a 4-second loop of OCs, hence big titty Renamon getting fucked by headless SFM man being inescapable. A couple lines of dialogue to establish the “vibe” of a character is usually enough for porn - that mouth’s gonna be full of genitals soon enough anyway.
So with this understanding of the audience, what do you as a game developer do? “Fan games”, i.e. porn games using copyrighted characters, can either get you popular, or get you a letter in the mail saying Nintendo is gonna use your kneecaps as breakfast plates. If you intend to sell your game, that becomes a lawsuit, so now you’re back to OCs. How do you get Joe Schmoe to play your game over Super Gardevoir Pussy Clicker 2? Well, you either have a unique gameplay idea, or you write a story to pique people’s interest. But, action games and porn games fundamentally oppose each other. So now you have four paths: action game with the porn interrupting the gameplay (BareBack Streets, Fox Feast, etc.); action game where the porn and action never happen simultaneously (HuniePop); player-paced puzzle game with porn either part of or separate from the puzzle (Monster Mind); or a visual novel with porn in it (pick any).
I personally look at porn games on a scale from “video game” to “interactive gallery”. Porn games are a gallery of yiff with extra steps. The audience doesn’t actually want gameplay, they want to watch a nutsack swing like a clock pendulum. Gameplay as a concept fights the porn game every step of the way. And creating all the assets necessary to make a game in the first place is a huge timesink. With all the time it takes to create the art assets, it’s not a surprise developers opt to go with a gameplay style that not only is widely accepted, but takes much less additional work.
A form of interactive media that’s not a visual novel is the “walkaround game”. Crowjob in Space by Das is probably the most polished example. The game is in the same style as point-and-click adventure games. This type of game has the advantages of a visual novel (a narrative structure, character development, somewhat easy to develop), porn (taking it at your own pace), and enough gameplay (minigames or just exploration of the space). Typically these games have a swathe of NPCs who can be sexed immediately, then moved on from - a real shame for the person who spent all the time drawing and animating those NPCs, but as I say, porn games are simply a gallery. CiS itself has been in development for about a decade, and has been burned to the ground and re-built so many times that it hasn’t had a chance to develop the narrative - but I digress. It was and continues to be the most cohesive form of porn video game, and it used to be more widespread. I’m not saying we should all start making Crowjoblikes, but I am saying I have yet to see a porn game genre that blend of advantages.
I am not saying designing a porn game is impossible. I am saying, however, that new developers that want to “make it” doing yiff should seriously consider their options. If the compromises I mentioned are OK to you, then godspeed. But if you, like me, think all elements of a game should fit together to create a cohesive body, then you might be shit out of luck. I’m not sure if I intend to do much more in the way of yiff games myself.
As always, if you have thoughts or opinions on this blog post, feel free to reach out to me on FA, itaku, or email (regentenxing [at] protonmail [dot] com).