Friday 31 January 2014

The Open Thread About Open Threads

We've had an awesome array of posts in just the short time this blog has been open. To keep the discussion moving forward, and allow it to expand into some areas that might be hard for a single author to write about, I'm going to be adding some open threads to encourage discussion. This way we can get fans, prospective/new writers, and established writers discussing ideas (hopefully).

In each thread I'll start with a short introduction about an AIF related issue and then leave it open to comments. I'll also likely post the first comment if it is an issue about which I have something to say. If things go well, multiple people will chime in with their thoughts and we can work on/with each others ideas. After the post has been up for awhile, I might summarize the various ideas presented into a post of their own.

While I already have quite a few open thread ideas jotted down, I might limit myself to doing it as a monthly occurrence. I'd rather let the issues sit and be discussed instead of rushing through topics.

Other than just communicating this idea, I'm throwing the floor open to general discussion. Are there any improvements you think can be made to the blog? Are there any type of topics you want to see discussed? Just want to talk about how awesome AIF is? The floor is yours if you want it.

Wednesday 29 January 2014

Inform 7 for AIF pt. 1: The Logic of I7

Though I'd like to write a tutorial for writing AIF with I7, this starts off as sort of an essay/rant that only relates peripherally to AIF, so bear with me.

Why I Use Inform 7

Inform 7 is a programming system that uses natural language. You can download Inform 7 here.

I've always liked programming but I've never been particularly good at it. I7 is the only programming language I've mastered to a degree (that is, I'm better than the majority of its users, but not quite as good as those people who really get dirty into I6). When I reflect on why, I think it's partly because I'm a language oriented person. Some people can look at E=MC^2 and think, "Oh, energy and matter are the same thing how interesting." Others, like me, need to be illustrated with lavishly complex examples before it "clicks". It's not because I'm less smart (at least, I hope so), but it simply needs to be spelled out for me: "The amount of energy in the universe is equal to the mass of the universe times the speed of light squared." Oh, right.

So, basically, Inform 7 allows me the use of the verbal part of my noggin, because my math side is shriveled and decaying.


First impressions last

by BBBen

First impressions are a major factor in whether an AIF game is a success with the audience. When a player first starts up a game they are extremely easy to put off. It will be rare that a player sits down with any dedication at all to really stick with a free porn game and see it through to the end. They'll almost always be thinking, "I'll give this a try for a minute and see if it interests me." Therefore you need to get them interested in that first minute or two and not push them away. This might be the most under-appreciated element of good AIF game design.

Show some leg

You don't need to do a full sex scene right away, but you want to signal to the audience that this is a sexy game. That's what they're there for. Even if you feel the main appeal of your game will ultimately be the story and characters, you need to accept that initially your audience primarily wants some sex. You can draw them in to your writing gradually as you go, and you don't have to make an out-and-out sex romp, you just need to get the player's engine running.


This early 'showing some leg' doesn't actually have to take any particularly specific form. Maybe you've got a shortish game and all you do is show an attractive character and maybe hint at what kind of sex might be coming up (like if you feature a dominatrix in some capacity at the beginning, you are probably going to have an S&M scene later). Judge based on how you want to pace the sexual content throughout your game - how much do you think you would want early in the game if you still haven't made up your mind to keep playing?


It's probably also best not to have the early sexual content be completely satisfying. If the player is... erm... "satisfied" then they will probably stop playing, at least for a while. Oh, and it's better to have no sex at the beginning rather than boring sex - if you don't have anything good to include then don't include it, because like I say, this is your first impression.


Establish the look of your characters

This is strongly connected to the above principal of 'show some leg' and is probably generally good writing practice anyway, but it is particularly important for AIF.

A surprising number of authors fail to strongly establish the physical descriptions of their characters early in the game. This is always one of the first things I look for - do the characters interest me physically? Not to put to fine a point on it, is this girl hot? This is offset somewhat if you are using graphics, because I might be able to just look and see for myself, but in that case you must a) make sure the pictures do a good job of establishing the look of the character, and b) still make sure you describe them clearly anyway.

When painting a picture for the reader throughout the game you want them to automatically have a sense of what your characters look like. Personality is a more subtle thing and can be built over time. It's worth mentioning here that you should consistently reinforce the description of the character throughout the game as well, don't just describe them once and forget about it. There's more about this in the discussion below in the comments section.


Don't overload your intro with exposition, back-story or just too much text

Try to get into the flow of the game as quickly as possible. You have time to flesh out your setting and characters - the player doesn't assume they know everything when they first start typing commands. You'll find opportunities to introduce stuff - exposition and back-story will most likely come out organically as you write. You don't need to tell the player right away that the PC was a star high school baseball pitcher if they're going to be throwing a baseball a short way into the game. You can just tell them when it comes up.

It can even be a good way to give your audience a nice early surprise; let them think your game is doing one thing, then after a little while reveal what's really happening - but only when you have to. Say the game starts in the middle of a dinner party, everyone is being polite and you have an attractive date that you would like to impress. The player doesn't need to know right away that you're also having an affair with a married person at the same party - they can find that out when the two characters briefly get some time alone and the married person suddenly jumps them.

You don't want to leave the exposition until really late, either. Raiders of the Lost Ark is the only case I can think of where a major, out of the blue plot change is revealed at the end and it still works (What? The Ark really does have magic powers?) If you can, try to move early exposition into small early scenes instead.


Give your player some freedom or control early

Further to the last point: the player doesn't want to be reading a lot of text the moment they get into the game. They want to be in control - they want to be playing the game as soon as possible. Not reading the game. This means a bit of interactivity. Some of this interactivity can, (and probably should) be introductions to game mechanics (explored more below), but you also should give your players some meaningful interaction. Some kind of puzzle or some kind of choice early on is a very good thing.

Maybe the choice is "do you want to be respectful of this nice girl, or be smooth to the easy girl?" Or maybe it's "do you want a bit of money or a chance to see a naughty picture?" Or perhaps it's an interesting little puzzle where you can get a cool bonus if you complete it quickly. Just give your player some agency and the chance to do something other than just 'push the story button' to watch your story play out. If this means introducing some small extra bonus content on top of your story to have some kind of reward to dole out, then you might have to do that.


Teach the player the basics of how your game plays

It's important that your players understand roughly what is expected of them. You don't have to start at the absolute basics for most AIF games, although if you think you might be attracting first time AIF players then it's actually not a terrible idea to let them know about movement commands and 'x' for examine, etc. What's important for most AIF games are certain things like what conversation system you're using ("ask", "greet", "talk to"?) and how important it is. Are you using any unusual game mechanics? That kind of thing.

And try to demonstrate their use by actually having the player use it in some simple situation. I'm sure you've seen this kind of thing done in game design before - big professional games do it all the time these days. "Here's a log in your path - press space bar to jump over it." It's in some ways a tedious trope but AIF is a niche form of game design that many players will not know very well, and thus you need to do a little bit of hand-holding.

Broader acceptance of this kind of stuff might actually help the community as a whole by making the genre a bit more widely accessible.


Give your players a goal

It might be obvious enough to you what the player should do next, but it may not be obvious to them. Sticking players in a room and assuming they'll go out and explore may have worked fairly well in many good games before, but that does not make it good practice. If you want your game to be well received give your player a reasonably clear goal at the start. It doesn't have to be the player's end goal. In fact if it is then you've probably just had to unload a wall of text on them to explain the entire plot at the start. Instead, give them a simple goal explained by the circumstances.

I much prefer it if not very much is expected of me at this point. That is, I don't have to efficiently discover some item hidden in my bedroom within the first four turns of the game or miss out on later content. What makes a good opener is an early setup that fulfills several of the tasks described here at once: say in a superhero game, if you start out in a very easy battle you could give the player a goal (defeat your enemy) introduce some basic gameplay mechanics, give your player some limited control (maybe they could choose whether to save a bystander or arrest the bad guy at the end of the fight?) and explain quite a bit of the story concept just by implication, without having to write a long passage about the fact that you have superpowers, blah, blah.


Have unanswered questions

This is a well established writing principle. You want the early part of your story to be simple and leave the audience with the impression that they'd like to work out what's going on. This isn't rocket science: a man walks into a room, where his workmate is working away at his desks. He asks a few boring questions about how his work is going, how his wife is, etc. Then he pulls out a gun and shoots his workmate dead. Why did he do that? Read on to find out...

It's best if you don't answer those questions right away, either. This gives a story a "page turner" quality. It really doesn't have to be that intense, either. If you've played Pervert Action: Future (sorry to cite my own games, it's all I can think of right now) then you'll know I start off with a bit of a prologue about Kenji being recruited for a mysterious "unit program", and then the opening scene has he and his friend Ami setting off on a shuttle ride to the space station. I was trying to set up a bunch of little hooks here: why has Kenji been recruited and why is he so special? What is this "unit program"? What is this space station going to be like? Can Kenji get anywhere with this cold but sexy military woman? And so on.

In some respects this principle is actually slightly less important in writing AIF than in writing, say, a novel. The reason is that as I stated above, the player is initially mostly there for the sex. So long as the game looks like it's going to have some hot action the player may well be fine getting through a relatively slow start to a story (Crossworlds, I'm looking at you). But it nonetheless still helps, and it's worth respecting this basic element of writing craft.


Conclusions

I think there are quite a number of AIF games out there that have not been accorded their due because they don't grab players from the start. I've also been frustrated before by games that I wanted to enjoy, but which made me struggle through them at the beginning. While good games in AIF have consistently bent or broken these guidelines I don't think that means they are unimportant - just that we don't have much of an 'industry standard' and players interested in AIF will endure a slow opening for the chance to enjoy an AIF game.

To emphasise the point, here's another article by ExLibris on the topic of the importance of how your game opens. He explores some other stuff like spelling errors in the opening (that is important), the title and what the player will do when first starting a game, so it's worth a read.


Is a first impression as important as I think it is? Did I leave anything out? Can you suggest good examples of games that demonstrate the principles listed above?

Monday 27 January 2014

3D images in AIF games – Yes? No? Maybe?

by BBBen

NOTE: This article still feels like a bit of a draft version to me, but I wanted to get it out there before the conversation had completely dried up.

Minami from Pervert Action: Future. I didn't want to use images
from someone else's game to illustrate the article without their
permission, so here's one from my game.

My attitude toward 3D design programs such as Daz Studio and Poser is a complex one. On the one hand I really like the purity of a text-based AIF; we're adults, we don't need illustrations in our novels, do we? At the same time I have to admit some hypocrisy on this as I used Daz Studio for Pervert Action: Future, and I really couldn't imagine the game without it. 

When playing a game with 3D pictures I sometimes find them distracting, and if I don't like what the author has tried to do with the pics then I will be turned off a game I might otherwise have liked. Still, the pictures do seem to be popular in the community, which has really responded to the emergence of 3D pictures in games.

The first appearance of 3D images in our community was when ~3~ started doing his "O Erin" comic strip. At the time many of us were blown away that it could be done, and it wasn't until some time later when Goblinboy started using it that I realised that it was not a total from-scratch 3D design system, and was not just something experts would use. I've been interested to see that though images are slowly becoming more common, we haven't had a total explosion and take-over... at least not yet. Maybe that's partly because we've been getting only a modest number of releases, and many of them are mini-comp entries.

Using a 3D image program

Some people probably have the impression that using Daz is either really easy or really hard. I'd say it comes in somewhere between those two poles. The most problematic things are the initial learning curve (you'll need to practice and play around with it for a while, emulating what others have done before you start to churn out anything good) and also the need to acquire content. As an aside, if you're looking to side-step the issue altogether and use some easier and cheaper alternatives to this kind of image designer, check out some suggestions in this post.

Without good content you can't do anything, and getting it can be expensive. That alone could prevent it being used by just everyone, although it is possible (naturally) to pirate most of what you'd want (I'm not advocating that approach). There are sales, and it helps if the kind of stuff you want is not particularly new or popular, as it's likely to be cheaper. Being a little clever and restrained in what you actually show will also help you get past the hurdle of not being able to get what you want for pictures. I was also able to be patient, as it was quite a while between first taking an interest in Daz for my project and actually needing to use it to make pictures. Furthermore there are some great websites that offer a lot of free stuff; the best is probably sharecg, which contains loads of content. Oh, one other thing: the program Daz Studio Pro is actually free (they make their money on selling the content).

I've found the most time consuming part of making 3D pictures is designing the characters. Once you have the characters done it's relatively easy to just pose them in new positions. It does depend, however, on how ambitious you are. If you aren't willing to get in there and tamper with the posing, the subtleties of facial expressions and such things as props, lighting effects and camera angles then you will not produce good pictures. You'll sometimes need to go back and try an idea over again, or scrap it altogether if you can't get it right or if the content you've got just isn't going to look right. You'll also need a decent sense of visual composition.

An issue I haven't run into much, but one that can be a big deal if you're making animations or have an old computer, is rendering time. When I'm generating a lot of frames with complex lighting and shadows sometimes I just have to walk away from my computer and let it do its thing for half and hour. My computer is reasonably powerful (if a couple of years old now) so if you don't have something with a good graphics processor you may find rendering is very slow. Incidentally, I'll do a separate post on the subject of animations.

Another thing I've discovered is that Daz is almost never the last stop for a picture. Photoshop (or some equivalent) is an essential second stage for picture design. That means that there's a second learning curve if you don't know Photoshop, and of course you will have to acquire the program, which is another significant expense (I lucked out there – already had a registered copy). Rather than buying Photoshop you may prefer to use one of the free alternatives out there; I have heard good things about GIMP. You can make pictures without Photoshop, I suppose, but that will mean that you can't do a lot of cool stuff. Perhaps more importantly, 3D images often have flaws in them when you render them, such as a body part clipping through a piece of clothing or a weird-looking part of a pose that you need to include in the frame in order to get the good bit in. In these situations Photoshop is one answer, as it allows you to correct mistakes that you just can't fix conveniently in Daz Studio or Poser. Tools such as smudge, blur and clone stamp are of tremendous utility for that kind of correction.

Evaluating 3D images in AIF

I've seen a lot of 3D pictures out there in recent years, and I have to say I don't like very many of them. It seems to me as if most people using the system for porn are unimaginative in their picture composition, use often mediocre or inconsistent content (and they mostly use the same stuff as everyone else) and aren't particularly meticulous in the design process. Now, I grant you, looking back on the images in PAF I already see them as underdeveloped, and I feel like I could do a much better job on them now. Some shots I still quite like, but generally the work is quite unskilled. That's fine, as it was my first shot with the software, although I should point out that creating that stuff wasn't especially easy or quick – there was quite a learning curve involved.

I really hope new authors don't all feel the need or even necessarily the desire to use Daz or other 3D image programs to make pictures for their games. I accept that things are drifting that way and that by making PAF with pictures I've furthered the trend, but I still hope that it won't go too far. At the least keeping the tight multimedia restrictions in the mini-comp seems like a good idea to me. This is fundamentally a writing community and you can't tell me that there isn't something kind of awesome about being able to entertain and enthrall people with just words to fire their imaginations. Remember that as an AIF writer fundamentally words are your medium, and they still do most of the work in a game.

And another thing! With words you aren't limited in the way you are with 3D design programs. You aren't restricted to only showing the stuff that's available in Daz Studio content; with writing, as Neil Gaimen points out, there are no rules. You can write whatever the hell you want, so long as it's good, and as a consequence you can do some amazing things. I'd strongly recommend that even if you plan to use 3D images you should write first, then see what you can illustrate. You might want to adjust what you have later, or just design the ideas but not actually write the prose until you've done the pictures, but I really don't think you should start by looking at Daz and then write what you see. Let your imagination create the game, then try to illustrate what you see in your head. Yes, it's harder that way, but your games will be better. Of course, you can go back and tweak things later if your images are good and you can come up with something cool from Daz that you hadn't thought of before – it may well stimulate your imagination – but don't let your writing suffer from using 3D design programs or your game will probably suck.

Well, that's my appraisal. I hope I didn't sound too arrogant or superior in my judgements of 3D image use on the Internet – I know I don't personally have a long track record on the issue and as I say, I think I can do better than I have done. It just seems to me that AIF is faced with a situation similar to what we've seen with other technical developments such as new IF platforms before; namely that a lot of people are going to use the new medium poorly. 

This is an issue of a lot of interest to the community these days so go ahead and comment below. Are all games going to have images in the future? Should the mini-comp ban pictures outright? Are images a great thing or a terrible thing for AIF? Are the increased demands on authors reducing the output of new games?

Friday 24 January 2014

Game Announcement: Erin's Rescue

So, due to the lack of time on my part, it's taken me a little bit of time to get this post up. I also intend to start doing some game reviews in the near future, but meantime, I have some exciting news. After several years of being a phantom in the wings of the AIF community, I have deided to make a game of my own. The platform will be ADRIFT 5, primarily because despite my longings, I am not a coder and likely never will be. However, looking over the engine and playtesting what I have built so far, I am comfortable that the engine will more than adequately serve my needs as a developer, at least for now. A small demo should be available for people to play within a month or two, but I will keep updating this post as new things develop; for all I know at this juncture, I might have the entire game finished by then, or I might not have made nearly as much progress as I would like.

When the demo goes up, I will share a download link here, so that everyone who is interested can give it a try. If you download and play the game, please send any feedback you might have to scionoferos2014@gmail.com. If you choose to send feedback, whether it is praise or criticism, PLEASE PROVIDE DETAIL. It will make it much easier for me to learn if I have more to work with than "Great game", or "Dude, you suck". If you liked the game, tell me what features, scenes, etc you liked the most, and why. If you didn't, please tell me specifically what you didn't like, for example, "Badly handled transitions between areas", "Lots of bugs, including...", "I didn't like the writing style/pacing..." You get the idea.

An early warning to all potential players: This is a game first, and a piece of erotic fiction second. There will be many difficult challenges, and the sex that occurs in game will make sense as part of the overarching story. Also, there are only three sexual partners possible in the game (three major ones, that is... lots of minor ones hidden away as easter eggs for the dutiful player, and to help whet their appetite for the real encounters), each of whom is VASTLY different from the others physically, and each of whom also has multiple possible ways by which you might possibly engage with them. However, you CANNOT encounter all three partners sexually within the same game; depending upon the path you choose, one or more encounters will be closed off to you by the time it is possible to start having sexual encounters with the primary NPCs.

Sexual themes encountered within the game are many and varied, but you will almost always experience certain things as a result of natural progression along a specific story path; it is VERY unlikely that a player will encounter anything in a sex scene that they weren't actively pursuing (there is exactly one glaring exception to this rule, but it too makes sense within the context of that story arc, and you will have plenty of warning available to you, to enable you to avoid this scene).

The basic premise of the story is as follows... I will post the full introductory scene to the game when I get the chance to finish the re-write I am currently doing on it. Basically, you are a recent high school graduate, valedictorian of your class, and as a reward for your academic excellence, your parents have decided to give you a trip to Ireland. However, you propose making it a family vacation, and so your mother, your father, and your sister come along. While you are there, you meet a girl who becomes a romantic interest for you... until one day, in the wilds of Ulster after an afternoon hike, you wake from your nap beneath an ash tree to discover that both your sister and your girlfriend (both of whom fell asleep on either side of you) are missing. It's up to you to find them...

Be on the lookout for the demo of Erin's Rescue by ScionOfEros, link to be placed below when the demo is available, and another for when the full game is available to be downloaded.

Wednesday 22 January 2014

Overlooked AIF Games 1

by BBBen

In the past I used to do the occasional brief article highlighting a few (generally small) AIF games that most players have probably overlooked, but which can give you a fun diversion for a while. In that spirit, here's three for you now. These are all from the 2006 AIF mini-comp (it was a good year), though none of these won the competition. Links to the games are included.

Shamelessly Slutty: Teacher by Rip CPU

This was a mini-comp entry that suffered from the issue many such good entries do: it didn't actually win its year and thus got largely forgotten. I'm sure I'm not the only one who enjoys the scenario of a sexy high school teacher seducing one of her students. In this game you play as one such teacher. You don't have to be looking for a female POV game to enjoy this one, either. I was a little disappointed we never saw a sequel like, "Shamelessly Slutty: Nurse", or "Shamelessly Slutty: Babysitter".

The Clairvoyant by Priapus Rex

Another mini-comp entry suffering from the "didn't win, thus forgotten" syndrome, this was (when it came out) a bit of an old style mini-comp game, in that it didn't try to reinvent the wheel and push the rules to the absolute limit. Instead this has a small, fun, erotic scenario in which you go with a hot girl to a clairvoyant and try to use the situation to your advantage.

A Dream Come True by Purple Dragon

My third honourable mention from the 2006 mini-comp should go to Purple Dragon's A Dream Come True - Purple Dragon's stuff doesn't usually feature in my "overlooked" category because he was so prominent in the community for quite a while, but he never really got all that much formal recognition so perhaps this is appropriate. This game sees a young couple trying to get together on a school trip. I kind of felt that the scenario for this game put the guy and girl together a bit too easily, but it's a Purple Dragon game so I had high expectations. It's well written and the staging of the first scene on the bus is was an innovative scenario for its time, breaking away from more conventional, full-sex-scene staging.

A point of academic interest, the winner of the comp that year was A. Bomire's WWE – RAW’s New GM which is included in the link with the rest of the comp. There are a few others in there you might check out as well.

What do you think of these selections? Did you enjoy them? Do you have any other suggestions for overlooked AIF that I could feature in the future? Let me know in the comments below.

Monday 20 January 2014

AIF Toolkit v0.5.0 with Adult CYOA

EDIT: The new version is AIF Toolkit v 0.5.1. It fixes a pretty embarrassing and major bug. You should download it here.

AIF Toolkit v0.5.0 is released. There are a couple of major changes that break compatibility in a serious way, so it's recommended you save a backup of the prior version of Simpler AIF and Advanced Layered Clothing. Overall, it's worth it. Sex toys and non-standard body parts are now fully supported, in addition to tribadism, frotting, and other things. Read the documentation for more details.

As there are some major changes, I do expect some bugs and I ask that people submit bug reports if they find anything.

A few people have asked me for the extension I used to make Bad Sister with. I have released Adult CYOA with this extension that will allow you to make Bad Sister style games (meaning that it is CYOA with AIF commands). In truth, this extension is a lot better than what I used to make Bad Sister, so you will have a much easier time of it than I did.

To Twine users, you might consider using Adult CYOA. It's only marginally less user friendly, and in exchange, you get a far more flexible parser with tools that are a lot more powerful. You can simulate inventories and add special commands. You can even compile to a browser-friendly interpreter.

In the future, I'm going to try to publish a few tutorials on writing with Adult CYOA. Wait and see.

Anyways, you can download the new version here. [EDIT: Use the link above.]

Easy 3D images: Alternatives to Daz Studio and Poser

by BBBen

AIF players are increasingly expecting images in AIF games. I don't personally think you need images to make a good AIF game even now, but a lot of aspiring authors might wish to do so but be put off by the challenge. While the creation of such images can be difficult, time consuming and expensive, there are some alternatives options out there that are actually very viable and (so far) not widely used. These are a few tips to get you started designing (hopefully good quality) 3D images for games without the trouble or potential expenses of making them in a 3D image design program like Daz Studio or Poser.

3D Sexvilla 2 or The Klub
The Klub

3D Sexvilla 2 is a game that allows the custom design of male and female sexual partners, and then putting them in scenes and situations that allow an extensive array of positions, outfits and certain other variables. The game allows you to take pictures, so you can use it to custom design characters for your AIF and then illustrate your game. The Klub is an illegally hacked and then extensively modded version of the game, which is distributed freely. I have to be honest – for the sake of your game you're probably better off going for the Klub, as it's got more content available and is more up to date. I will not, however, provide a link here to a pirated product, so if you want it you'll have to find it yourself. In addition to the Klub itself you'll want the additional content packs – at time of writing there was a mega content pack available that should give a lot of options.

I won't bother going into the process of using these programs as they are actually very easy to use, and you might as well play around with them and have some fun while you learn the ins and outs, so to speak.

Pros:
  • The biggest advantages to using one of these programs is that they are fundamentally designed to show sex. They come built in with a wide array of sexual positions, slutty clothing and...
  • The content works relatively well with unrealistically proportioned people. Note in the image above how the bikini tops actually fit the enormous breasts – it's actually hard to make that happen in a lot of programs.
  • Easy to use and quite fun.
  • Quick to get started.

Cons:
  • The program is quite limited in some respects. You're not going to have massive freedom of art design, and you can't create anything that looks truly spectacular.
  • It's great for designing pictures of busty bimbos getting pounded, but not so great for subtle storytelling.
  • Not all the pics look as good as the screenshots I've included – those are unusually good.
  • People might just say, "hey, that's a screenshot from 3D Sexvilla!" and then go off to play it themselves.
Also from the Klub – note that the character models are clipping through each other at a few points.

Skyrim and Oblivion
From Skyrim, with Caliente's Female Body Mod Big Bottom Edition -CBBE-

For fantasy settings, believe it or not your best bet might be to actually set up scenes inside The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion or The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. You'll have to mod the games first, of course, but that's relatively easy and you'll find there's a whole range of pornographic mods for the games, as well as substantial graphical enhancements for Oblivion. It may seem odd that I include Oblivion here, as it's quite an old game now, but in fact there is so much high quality (and recent) content available for it in the modding community that it might actually be the better choice, at least for now. If you need further persuading that these games can be turned to the purpose of porn, take a look at this Oblivion video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hreiOJ8M9Ms (Note: you need a number of mods to make that kind of thing happen). There's lots of this on Youtube if you just search for "oblivion bbb".

Pros:
  • Great for fantasy as there's lots of content already built in, and still all right for non-fantasy, as Oblivion in particular has a lot of outfits and some mods that suit a more modern setting.
  • Mods are free and not too hard to install.
  • Standards of quality can be quite high.

Cons:
  • Even more than the Klub, using these programs saps you of a lot of your own originality and railroads you along certain predefined lines.
  • Mods can still be hard to make work in the way you want.
  • You have to have the games, of course.
  • Not really suited to a non-fantasy setting, despite what I noted above.
  • People might just say "hey, that's a screenshot from Skyrim!"

From Oblivion, with HG EyeCandy Body

Mods you will need:
  • Naked character models for both males and females (presuming you want both).
  • Facial models (the base faces in Oblivion in particular were hideous).
  • Sexual poses/interactions (if we're doing this the easy way).
  • Outfits.
  • Hi-res textures (optional – watch out, some of these can be surprisingly demanding on your computer).

Where do you find these mods? http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/
Note that you will need to sign up to the site in order to access the adult mods section, but you won't be disappointed with the number of adult mods available.

From Oblivion, the DMRA BBB Cardigan and One-piece mod, this shot also demonstrates some of the drastic character design changes you can make. Characters do not have to look like this, of course.

The process:

Conclusion:

One last tip – the most time consuming stages in the process are generally going to be setting up your programs/content, learning to use them and then designing your characters. Actually posing them and taking pictures is quite quick and easy.

Anyway, I hope this has given you some ideas and encouragement on what can be done in 3D image design without any particular technical skill or resources. The truth is that the ability to create impressive, illustrated AIF is within just about everyone's grasp these days. You just need to take the time and effort to do it.

I've been considering making a small project using the Klub myself. Do you think you'd use these methods for image design? Or do you have anything you can add? If you've got any further suggestions for other alternative picture creators, or just on ways to best use the ones outlined here, go ahead and post them in the comments below!

Friday 17 January 2014

Open for business

AIF Blog (suggestions for a proper name would be welcome) is now open for business!

What is it?

AIF Blog is a multi-user blog that is intended to be a successor to the original AIF newsletter, Inside Erin, but with a more interactive format and without the tyranny of deadlines. As such it is a place to post any article or news item that is relevant to AIF. This includes discussion of AIF design, reviews, announcements of new games, coding tutorials, reports on games in progress, fiction, and so on.

It is not intended to replace any of the handful of already existing AIF-related blogs (some of which are listed on the right).

What is AIF?

AIF stands for Adult Interactive Fiction. When the genre got started in the mid-90s that meant adult text adventures. However, since then AIF has appeared in many other formats, including CYOA, Flash, HTML, RAGS, etc. For that reason I would enlarge the definition to include any adult game that has a narrative with which the player can interact in a meaningful way.

Who can contribute?

Anyone who's not a spambot.

Anonymous commenting is enabled, so you don't need to sign up to anything in order to comment on a post (however, it's polite to sign your posts so that others can tell all the anonymous comments apart).

If you want to become a regular contributor send an email to editor.aifblog@gmail.com requesting Author access. You will be prompted to create a Google Account if you don't already have one (NB. a Google Account does not require a Gmail address). Alternatively, if you only have a single item you want to contribute, it might be more convenient to send it to the above address and have it posted on your behalf.

If you have your own AIF-related blog or website that you would like this blog to link to (or not link to in the case of the blogs already added), send an email to editor.aifblog@gmail.com.