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syoeeb

best engines / frameworks for lewd games?

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thinking about making a (non-mlp) lewd game of some sort, and trying to map my options before committing to anything - the gameplay would be fairly standard for these types of things, in 2D, dialogue and image-heavy but no fancy animations or such, minor very simple minigamey stuff, mostly managing time and stats. my list right now is basically just:
- renpy
- rpgmaker
- unity
- flash
in order of my interest at the moment. i understand unity and flash would be the most powerful technically (barring actually starting fully from scratch) but i'm more of a scripter than a programmer and they'd require more work on getting just the basics running than i'm probably willing to put in. i know some unity but the 2d support isn't great, know zero flash.

any obvious options missing, or maybe like must-have expansions/assets for any of them? what would be the best version of rpg maker? i personally like the look of the one that does the native 320x240 res (it's likely what i'd go for anyway to speed up asset production and for the retro look even in other engines), which one was that? <<

renpy seems the best and easiest overall, but rpgmaker-style direct character control would be neat since i'd like exploring the environment to play some role ...

thanks! ^^

p.s. and you know how i've been with my release schedules and delivering on these little projects so don't expect anything to materialize, let alone quickly <<

p.p.s. the comic isn't abandoned, it's just gonna take a while ^^
Viewed: 133 times
Added: 4 years, 7 months ago
 
IsabelleUrsaga
4 years, 7 months ago
One big downside to using flash for your game is that, if you want people to play it in their browsers, there's effectively a time limit on how long people will be able to play it like that, since the major browsers are going to discontinue support for flash player next year.
As for the others... Sorry, dunno which would be best. I'm not a programmer. :(
Kavukamari
4 years, 7 months ago
i think renpy and unity are the two that come to mind immediately for those kinds of things, so i bet you're on the right track
TailBit
4 years, 7 months ago
If you use gamemaker then you just have to make sure you find a dialoge script.. you do not want to handcraft that part.

But the future for flash is grim looking atm, and for browsers there is mostly JavaScript stuff (but it is a maze of frameworks), and it leaves your resources pretty open.

Renpy is new to me, and I've never been a fan of rpgmaker, but then again, it was a decade ago since I followed it cloaely, unity is still good and I'm easily impressed by 3D xP
syoeeb
4 years, 7 months ago
flash was last on my list anyway, but thanks for the info! kind of good riddance imo <<
zyfer
4 years, 7 months ago
I think honestly.. the best thing you can do is to go sign up and browser stuff over at F95zone.com

It's a H game site that has a lot of different H games and they have several different engines. There might be some tutorials and assets over there along with other misc stuff. You could probably play around with some games and see what you like and dont like and maybe that would help ya in general. Everything as far as i know is free/pirated. I'd also suggest setting up a mega account if your interwebs is crap cause some of the games can be moderately big for an indie game. 30MB on the low to around 2-3GB on the higher end. A lot of the games/links have mega as an option. A handful do not. And most have multiple sites/backups.
Lloxie
4 years, 7 months ago
great suggestion here; there's also a few other similar sites out there. ULMF, LoversLab (mainly more oriented towards modding regular games to be lewd, but people still discuss lewd games and making them as well), Legend of Krystal forums, etc. F95 is probably your best bet, though. (Haven't been to ULMF in ages, so I have no idea how its dev support is these days)
Spiderbone
4 years, 7 months ago
Maybe Unity?
Lloxie
4 years, 7 months ago
When you say "no fancy animations", do you mean no animations at all, or just simple ones?

In any case, there are actually a lot more options out there, depending on what you want to do. If you want to make something that's largely text-based but still has graphics, I believe Twine can do that, as well as Adrift and Quest. And maybe Inform? And heck, HTML5 in general is pretty usable for all kinds of games, so anything based on that could work.

For RPGs, there's obviously the various versions of RPGmaker. :P

If you ever do want to do a platformer or something, there's GameMaker (though you have to buy it), or GDevelop (which is free).

In any case, I wish you luck and look forward to seeing what you come up with! :D
TheDemSoc
4 years, 7 months ago
Ren'Py might be your safest bet. It's free to use and Python isn't a very difficult language to pick up.

I would suggest avoiding Unity if you can since Unity games are programmed in C# and if you're going to need to learn a language for a future game project, it'd be best to stick with something easier if you're solely responsible for programming.
ezalias
4 years, 7 months ago
Godot seems like a decent free-software alternative to Unity. It supports 2D & 3D games and has some example projects for a few genres. Everything's MIT-licensed, which means "do whatever the hell you want."

The downside, from my very brief personal experience, is that it's a little bit janky. As in: I wanted to slap together a 3D platformer. There's a 3D platformer demo you can download right from inside Godot. But every time I changed something and ran the demo, it spent a solid minute showing one frozen frame, while repeating an annoying sound effect. Then it ran fine - smooth as butter - until it had to play a new sound effect, and the whole thing froze for another minute. I changed the names of the sound effects, hoping to just get rid of sounds, and Godot "helpfully" refactored all references to those files, so the sounds still worked. And still took ages to load. I removed the sound files from the project, and now my copy of the demo won't start. I chose to do something else with my time.

So if you have more patience than I do - which is to say, any at all - it's one 50MB executable that runs without installing. And it's very free. And it exports to anything that's like a computer. So... beyond maybe pissing you off, it can't hurt to try.
deitarion
4 years, 7 months ago
Which version of Godot? There's been a lot of work done in 2018 and 2019.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px...
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px...
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px...
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px...

Also, did you try anything 2D? I've heard various other people claim that it's now better than Unity for 2D but still catching up on the 3D side of things.
ezalias
4 years, 7 months ago
This was eight weeks ago.

I did not try anything 2D.

Rendering was not an issue.
deitarion
4 years, 7 months ago
Thanks for the clarification.

In that case, did you report the bug? There was an excellent blog post I read on Planet Mozilla a few years ago which really drove home the importance of doing that.

I can't remember what acronym it used, but it was something like "YEINR: Your Experience Is Not Representative" and the point it was making is that, far too often, bugs sit for ages without getting fixed because the developers never trigger them and everyone who IS experiencing them assumes that somebody else will report them, so they don't need to.
Linkgreen12
4 years, 7 months ago
Unity or Python???
deitarion
4 years, 7 months ago
Instead of Flash, consider Haxe with OpenFL and possibly Haxeflixel.

https://www.fortressofdoors.com/flash-is-dead-long-live...

Haxe is basically a statically typed ActionScript that compiles to your choice of Flash, HTML5+JS, or native binaries for Windows, Linux, Mac, Mobile, etc. and OpenFL is the Flash API for Haxe. Haxeflixel is a Haxe port of the Flixel framework.

https://haxe.org/
https://www.openfl.org/
https://haxeflixel.com/

Aside from that, I advise avoiding Game Maker since, last I checked, they charge extra if you want to output for Linux, which I DO NOT approve of. There was also an incident where the DRM for Game Maker Studio went on the fritz and burned watermarks into legitimate users' game resources.

Also, if you're going to use RPG Maker, use RPG Maker MV since it has native support for producing binaries for Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and HTML5.

Source: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/rpg-maker-mv-now...

...but I'd also try EasyRPG (https://easyrpg.org/). It's intended to be a compatible clone of RPG Maker 2000/2003.
deitarion
4 years, 7 months ago
...just to clarify since I ran up against the edit time limit, when I said "I'd also try EasyRPG", I meant as in "check whether you need any of the features on their 'still to be implemented' list."

RPG Maker MV is a professional, complete product, but it does cost. EasyRPG is a work-in-progress re-creation of RPG Maker 2000 and 2003 but it doesn't cost anything unless you run up against an unexpected problem and have to shell out cash for the original RPG Maker 2000.

(The regular price for RPG Maker 2000 is $25 US, but it goes on sale for $3.50 to $5 on Steam every month or two and, if you want a DRM-free download plus a Steam key, they put the Humble Store listing on sale for a similar price once or twice a year.)

https://isthereanydeal.com/game/rpgmakerii000/history/
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