Thursday 29 June 2017

Well Damn, That's Just a Big Sex Scene...

I was recently inspired to try and write a game related to a wife-swap type scenario. I thought the social and mental aspects would be interesting, and I started working on a game where you were the (initially) reluctant husband in the scenario. Narrativly, it focuses on you slowly giving in to the desires - or deciding to walk away - and includes a lot of stuff relating to not only your hesitance, but the knowledge that your wife and best friend are nearby, and showing no such reluctance (including some voyeuristic aspects).

And, I was pretty jazzed! Lots of dialog, lots of new stuff to try (fuses, scripts, demons, etc)...

But I realized that, as I have it written (probably 2/3rds of the way done) it dumps you RIGHT into the intimacy, and concludes when you eventually leave.

BUT - though there is a lot of depth (I think), there is no puzzle, etc. Advancing the scene is just a matter of making choices that advance the scene logically (talking, touching eventually, etc).

Do people think such a thing is 'playable', or is it too flat to add much real value? What thoughts or advice do you have?

5 comments:

  1. Personally I enjoy AIF mostly for a choice based story, than for any puzzles. I actually dislike puzzles unless they add to the story, or have some element of choice in them, like the shows in Magician's Nephew.

    If it's a matter of getting to the good stuff too soon, maybe add more tease to the beginning? Or add some more difficult to view endings or scenes to add a puzzle element.

    So far from your description, I'd play it. :)

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  2. That sounds fun. There's nothing wrong with a pure sex game. You should minicomp it if you decide it's too small for a separate release.

    The wifeswap fantasy has different aspects depending on the particular fetish. You might want to offer different endings depending on the fetish. For a cuckold fetish, you want to pile on the humiliation. You don't have sex or have horrible sex. Your best friend is "bigger" than you. Your wife yells out how much better he is than you and becomes pregnant afterwards. For more of a player fetish, your wife shouldn't have sex but you should seduce your friend's wife, and she should love the sex and fall in love with you afterwards. For a libertine fetish, you and your wife should both have sex and there should be a foursome afterwards. For the hotwife fetish, the wife will want to have sex with many other guys afterwards. There might be a temptation fetish where you and your wife only soft-swing and play around but not actually have sex with anyone else in the end. Then the two of you reaffirm your love for each other afterwards. I'm sure there are other fetishes too. Having different endings means people can have fun exploring the game and discovering them.

    Different fetishes also have different set-ups. Do you and your wife collude to seduce the other couple? Does the other couple collude to seduce you? Maybe you collude with your friend to seduce the women? Or the women collude against the men? Maybe everyone is a little high and the wife swap just happens spontaneously?

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    Replies
    1. Sheesh - you are WAY more insightful than I am. Clearly, I should have researched my fetishes more before starting. Ha!

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    2. Suddenly realizes how much of his life he's spent reading erotica online.

      Hangs head in shame. :-)

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  3. Since I don't have a smart way to say this I'll try the dumb way: follow your heart.

    AIF games simply don't have to have puzzles in the traditional IF sense. You don't have to have your player find a key or pour the alcohol into the coke bottle or empower the sword of Penicles with the souls of the four whoresmen of the cockpocalypse before doing battle with your possessed daughter's vagina to make a good game.

    But what you DO have to do, at least in my opinion, is introduce the player properly to the characters and the situation. I find that that is what a puzzle does best.

    Imagine that Gretchen is a slutty popular girl who you want to bang in some AIF game. As a player, no matter how big you make her tits (and I love me some big tits), I'm not invested in her character unless I know something about her, her motivations, her relationship with the player character, and her reasons to or not to bang him/her. The puzzle is there to explain their relationship and provide some sort of dynamic to that relationship.

    Believe it or not, I tend to find the dialogue/touching system a MORE clunky way to do this than to bring in external elements (like doing Gretchen's French homework rather than just talking her out of her panties), because it gives the characters more dimension and gets me out of the mode of just reading line after line of a story in which, if I make the wrong choice, I have to restart the same story wherever I remembered to save last.

    So I would say that you absolutely CAN make a good game out of the sort of material you've described, but the real question is whether or not you actually have. Maybe just send somebody a beta version and see if it's fun or not, or whether they'd prefer a new puzzle. Otherwise, I'd rather not talk out of school about how an AIF game MUST work.

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