i'll admit i haven't been really tuned into the smutgame scene, but most of the ones i see don't really manage to mix the sex and gameplay well at all - it feels like they often fall into this trap of treating sex as just a carrot to dangle in front of the player.

like, the sex is something that happens in between bits of gameplay as a reward for the player doing well, rather than a thing that happens as part of the gameplay; it's always like "win this match 3 and you get to see a tity" or "after you defeat the boss you can press a button to see a gif of her bouncing on it"

or put a different way, sex is the goal, not something you can do to get to the goal.

and i'm thinking about how you'd make a game that successfully marries sex and gameplay, and coming up blank

one game i saw that i think might actually achieve this is Dominatrix Simulator, a vr game about getting dommed by monster girls and such. the game uses pose tracking to tell whether you're following their commands. tbh i have bought it but i haven't played it (bc nothing kills the mood like realizing i'd have to move all the furniture in my vr play space out to the living room first lmao)

and obviously there's also visual novels - i think they're one of the only game genres where sex kinda seamlessly slots in, so it almost feels like cheating to list them tho

but outside of those, idk if I've really seen any games that manage to make this work (recs appreciated tho )

sex and kink are play so it's surprising how hard of a design challenge it is to make them gameplay - where would you even start?

part of the problem i think is that games definitionally need to have goals, but play doesn't; with sex, the goal is just like, "i wanna feel good and also share that feeling with one or more beings i happen to love a lot, or maybe just kinda like a bit, or maybe just tolerate" or something.

so when you try to shoehorn goals into it, they necessarily would feel unsexy (ie, "if you're good at this titty fucking quicktime event you get more Romance Points") and the more palatable alternative is separating the sex elements from the gameplay

so what would a sexgame that successfully married sex & gameplay look like?

man i don't fuckin' know!

anyways, idk if any of this makes sense, it's way past my bed time and idk whether this is even anything or not

@eclairwolf barges through the door uninvited yes hello are we talking about one of my favorite intersections of things

if this topic isn’t anything then i spend a lot of my time wasted because i actually think about this a fair bit. disclaimer: i don’t find the vast majority of sex games sexy, and i very often find many of them silly, gross, boring, or some combination.

deliberately setting aside your very good point of “how do i add an inherently objectiveless act into my goal oriented game” for now, there’s also a few other things i’ve noticed that are difficult to handle correctly. how do we make a game which…

• meaningfully models/signals consent? we can, of course, have noncon/dubcon games but i think this only goes so far and undercuts letting the player feel desirable (i also am personally not into noncon lmao)
• avoids feeling transactional? buy 10x of your victim Crush’s favorite thing and you get one (1) tity flash
• meaningfully integrates smut with gameplay? this covers both “win this romhack of tetris to get a low res hentai pic” and “get an SSS+ score on this tity fucking minigame for 20 romance points”

i think putting it this way kinda explains why so many porn games are that type of “avoid the monster or get raped” game. it leans on well-developed gameplay mechanics, integrates smut in an extremely minimally meaningful way, and it’s not transactional. unfortunately for this design, it’s flawed from the start because this just creates a perverse incentive: players just run directly into the enemies to see the sex scenes i would bet that most players don’t get past the first 10% of the first level in these.

so how do we make a game which meets all the above criteria, doesn’t make sex a goal, but also is enough of a game to encourage the player to keep going? the games that i feel do this the best are ones that focus on the player’s relationship with other game characters… which, honestly is not all that surprising to me. this actually goes directly back to your point of “sex is to feel good and also maybe to share with others that i want to share it with.” i think this is why VNs are so good at this particular thing and every other game is awful. they often focus on a player’s relationships with others which gives a vehicle to include smut in a way that doesn’t have to be gamified. it’s also possible to (relatively) easily meet the other criteria listed above

other ways i’ve tried thinking about it:

• games as a power fantasy / wish fulfillment

this seems like a model that would be naturally suited to making smut games but i think it actually poses more problems than solutions. foremost, again, is consent and desirability – giving power to the player is to give them absolute freedom in choice (at the expense of others). this works well in games where you’re brutalizing a cave full of creatures but this can feel kinda bad if we also want to feel desired. we can try to marry this with “well your character has 100000 Desirability stat and used the Seduce skill” but idk i just hate that.

• start from what works and move back toward other game types

if we know that text games and visual novels work, maybe there’s some gap in game design knowledge, player expectation, or both that we’ve yet to deal with. it might be worthwhile to explore what works and what doesn’t by making games that are one step removed from a successful example. can we introduce gameplay mechanics to VNs/text games until we ship of theseus a porn game?

@eclairwolf of the porn games i’ve worked on, they often tried extremely novel things that worked to varying degrees. i’m not comfortable listing which ones in public but i’ll talk about what i think worked at a high level and what didn’t

• pet management games

this one is surprising to me but this one seemed to work pretty well. i am extremely uncomfortable with the dubcon elements that these have, but these same issues are present in pokemon games too so i guess most players don’t care? i wasn’t really into the games personally but they seemed to be pretty well liked so maybe there are things to take away here? from what i could tell, it had one major thing going for it: there was an objective associated with sex which was plausible enough to roll with.

• correct pacing

for some reason, it’s always appreciated when the player can control the pace and speed at which things happen in the game. i wonder why

• stats

stats / attributes in smut games always seem frustrating. i’m not sure if this is an unpopular opinion but it overly gamifies the experience for me. i think there is a way to incorporate stats/rpg stuff into smut games but stat gating player experience just feels bad. maybe it’s because rpg mechanics are from the perspective of “my character is passing/failing this action” but if there’s any level of wish fulfillment, this just gets in the way.

• minigames

these seem extremely hit/miss whether they work or not. i’m pretty sure “move your mouse up and down really fast to masturbate” never works but there might be something to a subtler approach, especially if the player is already invested in the experience and not racing toward the next sex scene.

• platformers

stop

@rowan @eclairwolf I wonder if this involves the game having one kind of gameplay for both sex and nonsex; but that wouldn't be like a JRPG with much different exploration and battle mechanics that still seem to make a fun game.

VNs and Twine games like Course of Temptation seem the most ok; but there is something missing if CoT has both scripted sex and the simulator.

Stats are underutilized and usually not fun.

@lukyan ah,, yeah sorry! i was specifically talking about smutgame mechanics! stats/attributes are pretty well-defined for combat/nonsmut stuff so i think we can be reasonably sure it works there. i think in any case where there’s a dual-genre separation, you can apply typical game design stuff. though, it does come back to the discussion of “are these mechanics well-integrated into the overall gameplay” when doing something like that

@eclairwolf

@rowan @eclairwolf I think of stats in sex mechanics mostly as representing what the player character is comfortable with/skilled at, which can mismatch the game and what the player feels; and ones describing physical attributes which are usually irrelevant or make things physically very implausible.

A level one D&D character already can do more than me in anything they attempt.

Some more cool game design can be done.

@rowan "platformers: stop" yeah my sentiments exactly on that one skjjsjds (although i do have to hand it to that one dev that has done a bunch of Titty Castlevanias)

also yeah, i think certain types of kink may be well suited to smutgaming because there's an objective - this is also why the domme simulator works, you're essentially playing pervert simon says (positive)

@eclairwolf omg okay I’m pretty passionate about this and I’ve found two separate games that I think do a great job of having lewdness be a form of gameplay

first is Fleshcult, in which you play as a succubus who seduces humans by maximizing their arousal without letting them cum - making them as suggestible as possible so that you can corrupt them more each time. the gameplay is essentially a turn-based “combat” game, but because the goal isn’t “empty the HP bar” but instead “forcibly keep your victims on the brink of orgasmic bliss” it plays completely differently

CWs for Fleshcult: body horror, dubious consent, erotic horror

the second is Lilith’s Throne which has two separate kinds of gameplay: one is a turn-based sex… minigame? (similar, but much deeper than Fleshcult), and the second is a slave management system where you train the disobedience out of slaves and can then use them for Various Purposes, each of which gives you different benefits. Lilith’s Throne is extremely open-ended and sandboxy, and I think this fits really well because instead of giving you a goal that happens to result in lewdness, it gives you a whole slew of lewd mechanics and lets you run wild with them

one thing that I really appreciate about Lilith’s Throne is that it has mechanics for submitting and dominating - and in fact you’re essentially just seeing two sides of the same mechanics depending on whether you get the upper hand in an encounter or not

this game is extremely deep and I can’t do justice to all of it. although it’s very furry-oriented and also very transformation/corruption-oriented too, there’s a lot more to do than just that

CWs for Lilith’s Throne: non-consent (rape), dubious consent, forced transformations, slavery, public humiliation, forced pregnancy, there’s a lot, but you can turn some of it off in the options. also by default it uses problematic terms like “trap” but this is also configurable

unfortunately for both of these games, the sexiness wears thin pretty quickly and it essentially just becomes a grind where you’re going through the motions. I’m not sure how to fix this, or even if it’s possible to fix it. I think that arousal just might be an emotion that is inherently harder to capture in the long-term than {the amusement you feel from playing a fun game} or {the feeling of fear you get from playing a horror game}

also, honorable mention to Rack by fek. it’s just a really hot and good lewd game, and IIRC you unlock more features of the game by completing objectives along the lines of “deny someone orgasm for 60 seconds” or “give someone a new fetish” (though it’s been a while and I might be a little off)

CWs for Rack: extreme submission that could be interpreted as noncon or dubcon

@eclairwolf there’s a few of the platformer ones that i thought were pretty funny and glad they exist (but not from a “wau this is hot” kind of way)

there’s a video that @kasdeya sent me a long time ago about how game design has spent significant amounts of time researching and honing gameplay mechanics which center violence and i can’t help but wonder if we simply don’t understand what mechanics lend themselves to smut games because it’s just Different in every possible way. violence is often a tool for achieving a goal which makes it well-suited for our current model of gameplay loop design. violence/combat is our short-term goal and is very easy to explain (kill or die). we’ve seen more non-violent options added to games that center violence and combat, but this is still centering combat even if we offer a way to circumvent or subvert it.

much like you pointed out, sex isn’t a tool to achieve a goal (…, well, it can be but that’s something else). however, when we think of sex this way, it works perfectly well in our current game design models as a gameplay mechanic… unfortunately, i feel that we lose the reason we wanted it in the game in the first place.

@eclairwolf galaxy take: sex is an open world game

@aisling (todd howard voice) see that mountain? you can fuck it

@eclairwolf

I think that arousal just might be an emotion that is inherently harder to capture in the long-term than {the amusement you feel from playing a fun game} or {the feeling of fear you get from playing a horror game}

I’ve been thinking about this more and I think that the problem that I have with games like Lilith’s Throne and Fleshcult is exactly the same problem that I have with modded Skyrim: at first I am extremely immersed in the story and world. it feels like I can do anything, and anything can happen, and I’m excited to tell my story in this world

and for a decent amount of time (it varies) I’m able to have an amazing time expressing my character’s story through the game’s mechanics, immersing myself deeply in the world and enjoying everything I find as I explore. but sooner or later, no matter how hard I try to avoid it, patterns in the gameplay start to emerge and the game starts to become less of a wide open simulated world for my character to have adventures in, and more of a grind where I do the same few things over and over in order to achieve some kind of long-term goal. and once it becomes a grind, I’m no longer immersing myself in the world, because I no longer want to spare the energy to add context and spice to every encounter. I just want to get through the encounters quickly so that I can finally accomplish my larger goal

and around that point is when I have to step away from the game and take a several-months-long break before I can pick it up again

@eclairwolf I wonder if a good solution to this problem might be for me to limit how long I can play the game every day/week? because I don’t think? there’s anything inherent in the gameplay that shifts my mentality from “I can do anything and this world is real” to “I need to make number go up so I can get the Ultra Sword +300”. I think it might just be me getting too excited to play the game, and overdoing it until everything loses meaning. because after a certain point the gameplay is no longer special to me, so I gloss over the details