Poll results- SHF:Factory is the next game project! (Patreon)

The poll has concluded with a clear winner - SHF:Factory

Factory wins by a large margin at 185 votes. Ink and Tales finish within a reasonable margin of error of each other. There's significant interest for all three games, so for now I'll tentatively plan to bring back the Ink and Tales concepts when Factory is finished. A lot could happen between now and then, but if things go well, I'd love to make all three.

One minor takeaway from the poll- I think the odds were stacked against Ink and Tales, which had to contend with the more ambitious, exciting mental image of Factory's concept. I'll try to make sure the options are on more equal footing in future polls. 

Factory won. Now it's time to build it.

If you're looking to get hyped for the game -- it'll be a minute. I'll share all WIP stuff with you guys as soon as it's ready! And check out the description of the game idea from the poll if you missed it (near the bottom). 

The rest of this post will be a somewhat dry discussion on the game's concept, managing expectations, and the early development process. If that drivel interests you, then read on! :3

How are we getting this train started?

I'm working hard to iron out the game mechanics design for Factory. It's a surprisingly intense process! 

A difference between SHF3 and Factory is that SHF3's lewdness comes directly- you touch the characters and they react. Factory's lewd elements are abstracted by one level- they come as a result of you placing and tinkering with machines and pipes. This, plus the fact that you'll be gathering and spending resources to expand the factory, means that there's a lot more "game" to the game.

This is inherently dangerous. The risk is creating a game that only appeals to a specific niche of player- fans of the factory/management game genre. Instead, I want a game that is engaging for my target audience- fans of lewdness. The factory-building elements need to provide a fun way for all players to explore the lewd content, even if they just want a quick lil' session >.>

So I hope everyone will help me hold myself this philosophy:

• Lewdness is the POINT of the game. 
• Factory-building is the TOOL to deliver it. The minute the tool gets in the way of the point, I've fucked up. 

It's easy to get this backwards and end up frustrating players when the game elements are in the way of the lewdness. I learned this first-hand with some of my attempts to gamify Love Collector a while back. I think most of us have played lewd games with annoying minigames or grind that gets in the way of the actual juicy content.

I'm working on a design document that attempts to thoroughly address every facet of this, as well as some other major risks for this game concept. It's not presentable yet, so in the meantime I'd like to share some brief(ish) thoughts to give you a better look at what's coming: 

What will the game look like?

There's no art yet, but I have a general idea for the aesthetic. There's a couple of great artists already expressing their interest in getting involved, so I'm excited to explore this with them!

Going for industrial and simplistic. Individual rooms would be fairly minimal, just giving you the grid layout to place machines and pipes. I'm hoping to get a bit of concept art done to communicate it to you guys better.

When you zoom out, you can see your whole underground factory, and connect rooms with fluid pipes. 

Think a simplified Fallout: Shelter-

Or X-Com's base building- 

Rooms will be more spaced out than in those games to allow for fluid piping. The visuals will of course be simpler >.<'

Gameplay

Here's a couple of dumb sketches to convey the idea in its simplest form:

You'll spend most of your time zoomed in and tinkering with machines and pipes, then watching the fluids run through the system you made. Then zoom out to use those fluids in other places in your factory.

An analogous game- SpaceChem (see how it plays here) is similar in terms of the gameplay loop when zoomed in. In SpaceChem you set up your circuit with a specific goal in mind, then you run it to see what goes wrong, then you adjust the circuit and repeat. 

SHF:Factory is WAY simpler, obviously. But the main gameplay loop is similar- place machine/npc/pipes, "run" your fluid circuit to see what breaks, tinker and repeat.

Unlike SpaceChem, your goals are more open-ended than solving a puzzle.

And in the current concept, a fluid circuit breaking/failing isn't a bad thing- if you fill an npc with too much fluid and it splatters everywhere, you may be able to use that mistake as part of the circuit's design. A chaotic sequence of spills, intermittent power surges on milking machines, etc, could end up being a working production line. Or you could spend time optimizing the circuit to run at peak efficiency.

The full scope of the game concept includes a set of different rooms/machines, all using the same mechanics in distinctive ways:

• milking various fluids out of npcs - the fluids have to come from somewhere.
• refining fluids inside npcs - pump them full, wait for the fluid to refine, then drain.
• automated breeding - done in a breeding room, using a couple of breeding methods. 
• research - a big, room-sized machine that uses various fluids to conduct research on an npc. 
• storage - there is no fluid bank. You want to store fluids, it'll have to be inside npcs. 

I think it'd be awesome to allow any or all of these to be a factory's specialty. E.g. a factory with a ton of breeding rooms could make you lots of higher-stat npcs to meet your fluid production needs without spending time optimizing your milking machines. A factory with a ton of research rooms could compensate for your lack of other machines by giving you quicker access to upgrades. Etc etc.

What kinds of NPCs?

Adding new NPC rigs will be a process delegated to the team, hopefully not requiring any code except some simple scripting. Unlike SHF3, where rigging and animating is a complicated and drawn-out process, this is something simple in execution, it just requires some man-hours. So my hope is to have the team working down a list of most major character body types, sizes, and species.

You'll hear more specifics once this process gets underway!

When can we play it?

I really don't know! 

Luckily the core game loop is something pretty basic, and is in little danger of needing to be rewritten due to design changes in the future. That means I can hopefully get a prototype of the core functions working before too long. But then I'll need to start filling it with content. 

The project will go in phases, starting with the most simple gameplay loop and adding machine types and features one at a time.

Will you have a nervous breakdown trying to build this thing and vanish from the internet forever, abandoning the lewd gaming world, and leaving us all disappointed and wishing we'd never been naive enough to put our money and emotional investment into yet another doomed indie game?

I don't think so.

While the concept sounds ambitious (which is a SCARY word for an indie game), it's specifically designed to be easier for me to program than SHF3 or Love Collector. Filling the game with content - art and animations especially - would present a challenge for a solo dev, which is why I've spent time planning out how I can delegate the entire process of npc and machine concept->vectoring->rigging->animating->scripting to a team that won't need me micromanaging each step.

I also have the game's entire scope written out. All cool ideas that aren't already in that scope are vacuum-sealed and stored in a separate, secure facility. They'll be unsealed after we hit version 1.0

Also, to make sure I'm being smart about taking on two games at once, I enrolled in a project management course last month. I've been amazed at how much it's helped me break my work for SHF3 and for Factory into realistic, quantifiable chunks. I never learned this shit in school and have been paying for it my whole life. 

BUT... 

I do recognize the very real potential for failure. It's frightening and it happens to a lot of awesome projects. All I can do is stay true to my plans, and be open with you guys about how the development is going, especially when it gets hard. If worst comes to worst, and it's clear that the game will never work, then I'll back off and try something simpler. 

That said, I feel pretty good about the concept's feasibility right now :3

Technical details

I'm using the free engine Defold to build Factory. It's a modern, lua-based engine that exports to desktop, mobile, and browsers, and it's still alive and receiving updates (unlike SHF3's engine).

This means I'll need to spend some time getting comfortable with Lua's quirks (1-based indexing? arrays are maps? ew...) and Defold's structure. On the upside, there are a lot of libraries available: fluid rendering, UI design, camera motions, tilemaps, etc. Since Factory doesn't break conventional game designs nearly as much as SHF3, I can make heavy use of high-level libraries to save a lot of time. No need to code my own janky UI framework for this thing.

It'll use Spine2D for rigging and bone-based animation. DragonBones might substitute as a buggy but free alternative for some tasks. 

My go-to for storing game object data is CastleDB, a json-based spreadsheet editor. Not 100% sure yet, but I may use CastleDB or Tiled for making the tile-based map, which will make the grid that machines and pipes are placed along.

The plan is to code the core machine, npc, and pipes as their most basic game objects. Then, a script will define the object and toggle on its needed functions and define its stats. That way, I can get someone else to do the high-level scripting to make new machines, fine-tune them, make them feel good, and keep them distinctive, while I just work on the engine.

Assembling the team

Some awesome people have expressed interest in helping already. Thank you, and sit tight for now! 

I'm going to wait to hire team members until I have a working, ugly prototype. Since part of my concept is a streamlined asset creation process, I want to make sure that the process is ready before dropping in artists, animators, translators, etc. 

Also, I want to be sure that I won't need to rewrite the basic game functions and undo a bunch of the team's work. 

#ProjectManagementSavesLives

Final notes

A reminder that SHF3 is my main project, and this is the side project! Hence all the effort to allow me to delegate the work to a team. 

The game will release with early access to patrons, and public builds will be only one or two updates behind. 

I'm open to ideas and criticism toward any aspect of this. 

That's all for now, thanks for reading! <3