💌 Jamming for love and loving visual novels in Mr. Hands' Naughty List #12

Jan 17, 2021

Hello, lovelies!

I’ve been hard at work on my own game this week. Since this was the last week of me being funemployed, I tried to implement as many features as I could, including basic card game AI, incoming card animations, and a new color scheme. While I will still work on my game on the side, I’m afraid I won’t be able to give its development my full attention anymore.

But none of that will stop me from getting you the latest and greatest from the world of adult game development into your inbox every Sunday!

Speaking of which, are you a subscriber yet? 👀

Now let’s get into it!

Valentine’s Visual Novel Jam 2021

Love VN, the friendliest community for discussing all things visual novels, is hosting a game jam on Itch that will run for the entire month of February. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to build a visual novel in 28 days centered around the theme of “love”.

This is an excellent opportunity to hone your skills, meet new people, and try out new technologies! Besides signing up for the game jam, you should consider joining the Love VN Discord, which is filled with lovely people that can help you get started.

Happy jamming!

Intro to the visual novel genre

Borealis has produced an excellent video to both explain what makes a visual novel tick and introduce their own project, Venus: Improbable Dreams. I think this video makes for a great introduction to the genre, especially if you’ve never played one of these games before.

Oh, and you should definitely check out Venus: Improbable Dream as well, which I’ve written about before in a previous newsletter 💌

Don’t be a blockhead in Object Ward

Object Ward is an upcoming visual novel by @ThugzillaDev. Its intriguing premise is that the main character has schizophrenia and sees everyone he meets with an inanimate object for a head. He is sent to New York's most ill-managed psych ward for mandatory rehabilitation after a breakdown, but that won’t stop him from finding love and other misadventures while plotting his escape.

Try the free demo now on Itch!

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

According to Diana Chin, visual novels are just as hard to make as any other type of game, a statement I can only agree with:

I’ll be honest - I’ve had some folks who berated my projects since they believe that visual novel game development isn’t real development. And that’s because it falls under the assumed notion that anytime we think of game development, it’s easy and shouldn’t require a lot of brainpower.

The Daily Dot has put up an excellent interview with the creator of Crisis Point: Extinction, a revolutionary “Hentroidvania” game:

Most traditional action-adventure porn games place sex scenes as either reward for completing levels or as "death" sequences after running out of health. Crisis Point gets right to the fun by letting players activate their masturbation animation and watch sex play out mid-game (usually for a decent health bonus, too).

What makes for a good otome heroine? An excellent read from Blerdy Otome:

Heroine characters are more a reflection of feminine ideals and as women’s roles in society change so too do our expectations of how female characters should be portrayed in our media. So it’s important to keep abreast of changing norms when crafting female characters, especially those in media targeted at women.

In what does appear to be a pattern, Complex Relations has put up another great devlog about their writing process:

Why do so many romance-based visual novels star protagonists who’re bland and poorly defined? In many cases, this isn’t a failure of character writing, but a deliberate design feature.

LewdPixels has written a nice feature about problematic penises in visual novels:

This eighteen-inch size results in comically unrealistic animations and situations where ‘serious’ sexual interactions are just impossible, because inevitably the MC winds up hilt-deep in the love interest, tickling the bottom of her lungs with his colossal crotch club

The BBC has written about PornHub being blocked from receiving payments from several large credit card companies, which sex workers say puts their livelihood at risk:

“There's not a lot you can do about it, which makes you feel really helpless. I have friends who are considering leaving the business as a whole, just because Pornhub was such a big source of income.”

Over on Out, Harron Walker has written about how Google and Facebook’s restrictive adult content policies affect the kind of stories they can tell online:

As a 30-year-old woman, I can do a lot of things. I can vote. I can drink. I can drop hundreds of dollars on therapy to help me work through my deeply self-destructive attachment style and still let men treat me like shit. But there’s one thing I recently learned that I can’t do — put a naked woman on the internet.

Quickies 💦

Banking discrimination against sex workers may soon end according to the Adult Performance Artists Guild
An enterprising hacker has locked people’s privates over the Internet and is demanding a ransom in Bitcoin
Tuesday.js is an up-and-coming visual novel engine and has just released its last alpha before it goes into beta
Squeaker is a non-linear multi-language dialogue tree editor, very useful if you’re writing a branching narrative (like a visual novel)
Turns out that visual novels are just as hard to make as any other type of game