NSFW Development By The Numbers

The First Week

One of the various promotional images for Past Blasters

The past few months I have been working on my debut independent lewd/NSFW computer game, entitled Past Blasters. It’s the story of a young man who gets ensnared in a plot by his scientist/engineer mentor, Professor Braun, to travel back in time to recover one of her lost inventions (inspired in part by a popular film series). But this isn’t a pitch to download the game, but rather a record of development, distribution and dispersal as I analyze the various metrics I have available to me to measure how my game is doing.

Development Details

Past Blasters was originally conceived in mid-February 2018. I have been drawing dirty cartoons (and looking at them) since I was a kid, hiding them in between the pages of books and magazines so my parents wouldn’t find them, and having been working on some independent game development, felt that I should try my hand in this area. Much of the initial artwork and writing/plotting was done in March, along with some early coding work. The world was fleshed out during April and May, along with more coding and polishing, aiming towards a release that would act as a “Prologue” to what is a fairly ambitious-in-scope game.

The art-style is decidedly western, with a nod towards Sunday comic strip characters. Character art is done with a mix of pen-on-paper and digital techniques: rough drafting with a large clutch pencil, refined with Micron Pens and then scanned into GIMP, where coloring is done with a digital pen tablet. I purposefully avoided the popular DAZ 3D aesthetic, as I think it can be very creepy if not done well. Although it has been used to produce quality content, it’s difficult to create a distinguishing look with Daz (at least from what I have seen, personally) as many developer leverage the same base assets.

Early pen & ink artwork for the game

Part of the inspiration for the Past Blasters aesthetics

The writing of the game was done in spurts, mostly while showering and trying to sleep. While the beginning of the story is fairly derivative of the lewd visual novel/dating-sim scene (see Summertime Saga, A Town Uncovered, Taffy Tales, etc.), I ultimately want to take it into less trodden territory.

Development of the game was done using Ren’Py, a visual novel engine built with Python. Despite being a fairly experienced coder, having created complex game systems in Unity with C# and knowing Python quite well, Ren’Py actually had a steep learning curve. Ren’Py actually combines a few of its own proprietary DSLs (domain-specific languages) to ease development for people who are less experienced with programming, and incorporates a lot of shorthand and “hand-wavy” magic. However, if you’ve programmed before, the Ren’Py syntax can be unintuitive and limiting, though the incorporation of actual Python scripting makes it fairly extensible once you wrap your head around the relationship between Ren’Py code and Python code. Ren’Py also uses a proprietary Python build, so there are certain libraries that have been purposefully excluded. At the time, I chose Ren’Py because it was being used by many of the people in the “lewd game” space, and had also seen some success with more mainstream games as well (such as Doki Doki Literature Club, which has over 2,000,000 downloads according to SteamSpy). In retrospect, I could have easily built my own VN system in Unity (without the restrictions of Ren’Py) or used one of the existing ones from the asset store and been more productive. (SideNote: If Past Blasters ever achieves any semblance of sustainable funding, I would love to attempt a “Telltale” style adventure game approach to it using Unity with a combination of the existing illustrations and 3D modeling. I actually think it would be easier ). A lot of the time spent with Ren’Py was learning how to build custom UI elements, as I did not want Past Blasters to have any of the default options. I also built some tools that would help with regard to analytics once the game entered distribution.

The music for the game is all Creative Commons Attribution licensed, chosen to match specific scenes (for details, see the game credits). In the future, I would like to compose original music for the game using Fruity Loops, which I have previous experience with.

Towards the end of May, I started to become more comfortable with the state of the game, and decided I should start prepping for a release of the “Prologue”.

Patreon

A lot of current lewd games use Patreon as a funding model, and I followed suit. However, I see Patreon not only as a financial motivator, but also as an indicator of reception (if my game is not successful in what I set out to achieve, it will not garner any level of support). In order to prepare the Past Blasters Patreon, I did a brief survey of successful NSFW Patreon developers, and incorporated those ideas into my own. These highlights:

Screenshots of the game that show a variety of situations

Description of the plot and gameplay

Description of the development plan

Description of the sexual “proclivities” catered to in the game

I also set various goals and reward tiers to entice potential supporters. Rewards are fairly standard in this space, with spoiler posts and early builds set to entice supporters.

Distribution Channels

Before the games release, I did research for ways to distribute the game other than simply putting up a Patreon page and twiddling my thumbs. NSFW work on Patreon suffers from a lack of discoverability, so its important to get your work on other platforms for exposure. I identified two distribution channels/platforms that are friendly (or at least indifferent) to NSFW content. These two platforms are GameJolt and Itch.io.

Of the two, GameJolt strikes me as a more inherently social platform. Itch has similar capabilities, but GameJolt’s approach is more cohesive and polished in that regard. Both platforms have served as a distribution channel for popular lewd gaming content (Snow Daze on Itch, and A Town Uncovered on GameJolt).

In addition to these platforms, much of the dissemination of lewd games occurs on forums and specialized web sites. Popular forums include Fenoxo, which caters towards the Furry community, and F95Zone, which is more of a general purpose adult game community. Then there’s 4chan. 4chan is a hornet’s nest I do not wish to poke for now, but hopefully they will be receptive in the future.

Release

I spent Sunday, June 3rd putting some finishing touches on the “Prologue” and testing builds. Ren’Py has tooling included to build both a Mac compatible binary and a Windows/Linux build. (It can also build for Android, but certain features are not supported and I would have to make some changes to the code to support the platform). In the early evening, after preparing screenshots and game descriptions, I started uploading to GameJolt and Itch.io, as well as to Mega for a direct download. I made sure that the game platforms linked to the Patreon and vice versa (the game builds also contain the requisite links to Patreon internally). Between 8:00 and 9:00 PM, I published across all platforms simultaneously and went live on Patreon.

Later that evening, I had my first rating (a 5/5 on GameJolt) and I had my first supporter at the $5 level. I immediately sent them a thank you message, and explained that supporter content would be out soon. I noticed that this supporter was also pledging to similar projects. This small victory was short-lived, however, as this patron was seemingly erased on the platform. I figure they may have used a spurious credit card or something and made a mad dash to get as much supporter content as they could in a short amount of time.

The rest of the week played out fairly mundanely. The following stats were accurate as of midnight, Friday, June 8th (or Saturday, June 9th, depending on how you look at it):

Statistics for GameJolt platform

Statistics for Itch.io platform

At the end of the week, between the two platforms, I had about 550 views and roughly 100 downloads. GameJolt was, overall, much better for organic traffic, which I think may have been bolstered by the stronger social aspects of the platform and a more NSFW friendly atmosphere. This resulted in nearly five times the views compared to Itch.io. That said, Itch.io had a slightly higher attach rate, with a smidge over 1/5, while GameJolt had slightly under 1/5. If we compare this to the attach rate of A Town Uncovered (which I think is the most successful lewd game on GameJolt) which is slightly over 1/4, this seems fairly favorable for something so early in its life. If we compare the follower/view ratio, Past Blasters is actually higher (17/500, vs. 2272/213,000). This comparison is not meant to be competitive, but rather to give myself a gauge of what is “normal” or “successful” versus what could be seen as an abject failure.

My personal telemetry data (Session Count is inaccurate due to “test” users)

Though Past Blasters had approximately 100 downloads, that does not necessarily mean that 100 people played the game. In fact, according to my own telemetry data, only 53 people actually opened the game.

Geographic spread of the game

Geographically, the game is seeing the most downloads in the United States and Western Europe, with a handful in other countries.

I ended the week with a solitary $5 level Patreon subscriber, after I added some supporter content (which was completely absent at the beginning of the week).

Promotion

I purposefully did no real promotion in the first week. Though I identified those forums above, and have accounts on each, it feels a bit presumptuous to burst into these forums of which I am not a recognized community member to shill my game. I would like to see if the game can reach the forum audience more organically. So far, I have received very little feedback, besides that initial GameJolt rating and the follows (which indicates at least some interest in my game). In addition to the subscriber mentioned above, there is also a spiritual “Patreon” supporter, who has intimated that he cannot afford to contribute, but actively likes all of the public posts on the page. So it seems that at least some of my effort was not wasted, and there is some genuine interest in Past Blasters.

Insights

This has been an interesting journey so far; hopefully, a journey that will continue. I have learned a few things so far:

Getting feedback on a lewd game in development is difficult. On the one hand, it’s very unlikely that you can ask any of your meatspace friends for feedback, lest they get creeped out. On the other, you don’t want to put any ideas out onto the internet that are half-baked or malformed with the concern that you will forever be branded low-effort or a cash-grab.

Subsequently, you might work on things that nobody likes. I worked on this game for months, but I still have no real idea whether or not anybody thinks its a worthwhile effort. Numbers are no substitute for qualitative feedback.

Lewd gamers are a community, however diverse and far-reaching that community might be. I’m trying to be careful about engaging them in an honest and authentic way, as I want to earn my place as a member.

Conclusion

Now that I’ve shared my experience so far, I plan on continuing to do so on a regular basis. This will hopefully help to keep my development on track and shed some light on the evolution of a lewd gaming project. In addition to this, I will be making public devlog posts on Patreon (along with supporter-only NSFW content) regularly. If you’re interested:

PastBlasters Patreon Page

PastBlasters on GameJolt

PastBlasters on Itch.io