Postmortem 4: Some stuff I've learned.

This is the fourth and penultimate entry in a series of postmortem posts I'm making for Succubus Stories. You can see the previous posts here, here, and here! In this post, I want to reflect a bit on what I've learned while making this game: about writing, about game development, and even about myself as a creator.

I’ve already described how some of my mistakes are (hopefully) making Hex a better game, but there are things I just kind of learned along the way, too. For example, I learned that even in a fairly silly porn game, I have a desire on some level to take my story, characters, and world seriously. It doesn’t matter too much if it deserves to be taken seriously, but I found that I should at least be earnest with my storytelling if I want to be creatively fulfilled. I love writing fap material, but I also want to express myself in other small ways too, and I feel that I can and did do that without compromising my erotic content as SS went on.

I also learned a lot about my limitations. Early on in SS’s development I was running such tight deadlines that if anything in my life went wrong, even like an unusual amount of traffic on the way home from work on one day in a month, it would literally cut into my sleep. I suffered, and paid a price too, for trying to do monthly releases (at the scale I was making those updates, at least) through the first 18 months or so of development. Hex will have a 3 month update cycle, with one or two small patches or live events in between, and I think that's something I can actually manage. But even then, I'm not gonna kill myself to meet deadlines. I'll be up-front and adjust billing if things get out of control, which I've always done. I just want to be able to enjoy making Hex, rather than feeling the crushing weight of an overstuffed task list. Not that I didn't enjoy making SS, of course, I just want to lean into what I believe is a healthier working style. 

A lot of the naivete that I had in how to design a game is gone. As SS’s development went on, activities slowly but surely replaced random events, and more interesting traits and potions slowly replaced boring stat checks as a means of problem solving. These were decisions and changes in philosophy that were inspired by experience and reflection, and those lessons will be employed in the future. 

I became a much better designer and developer over the time I made SS. I also came to value different things more or less as time went on. If you asked me in 2021 if SS would have any sort of combat, I'd have told you combat is annoying in erotic games and should be left out. Now it's a part of SS and a key feature in Hex. 

It wasn't ever combat that was the problem, and I was naïve to see it that way. Implementation and execution are everything. Boring-ass, RPGM-ass canned combat is of course going to feel boring in an erotic game that’s just using it as a hoop for you to jump through to see titties. But crafting can be like that too, and yet I put that system in SS without even realizing that it was the same as combat in that regard. 

The key is to always center the erotic content as an actual gameplay feature, not as a reward for “dealing with” other gameplay systems. I did do that from the start in SS but it was literally out of pure dumb luck that I did, not because I actually truly understood why that mattered. 

This is a bit of a weird one, but I wanted to talk about it, so at the risk of boring you, I'll get a little into broadly talking about creative philosophy for a moment. I've learned to embrace intentionality in a way that I never really realized was possible before undertaking a project of this size and scale. What I mean is that everything is a decision. The hair color of an NPC, the name of a random stranger who’s in a single scene, the description of a field in a forest, et cetera. Everything can be used to further your goals and vision. I guess I used to think these sorts of things happened by accident. 

Take the “curtains are blue” meme, where an English teacher thinks this tiny detail means something major and significant, but it just means “the curtains are blue.” 

I always thought that this meme was reductive, but now I know its stupid and wrong, as well. If the curtains are being described in a novel, that's an intentional choice--it's not like they just happen to be "in the camera shot" in a fucking novel, and if the author is 1% as neurotic as I am, which I bet most creative people are, they absolutely over-considered the color of the curtains even though no one else on earth will care about it. 

I find myself not so much paralyzed by these small decisions, but super cognizant of them. I don't want to miss an opportunity to create meaning or to weave in something like lore or characterization, or even a joke. So I think about them, and I'm intentional about them. I think in this way, I grew a bit as a writer, too.

Question: "Who is your favorite romance partner?"

If you want to ask me something, go ahead and message me or leave the question in the comments and I'll throw it in a postmortem if it seems interesting!

You'd probably assume my favorite is Priscilla, but it's actually Charlotte. To be clear, I like them all, and Priscilla did end up being sort of a deuteragonist in the game, so I feel like she ended up with the most screen time due to that. I also really like Rais as a character, and I think his romance path has a very sweet feel to it overall, but I do think he ended up a little too vanilla/traditional for our gal. If I could do it again, I would make him just a bit edgier in certain ways--like maybe making him a bit more prone to jealousy similar to Priscilla--while still maintaining the overall sweetness of the relationship.

I think Charlotte just wound up having the most personality, and it shines through in almost every interaction. She's got gap moe on her side, too, which I find really appealing in spite of it being a bit of a cliche, so I feel like some of her stuff just wrote itself. I also think Charlotte is just a fun character even outside her romance, and the sleep minigame is my favorite, though all the romance activities (Rais's under-desk minigame, "feeding" Priscilla in various ways, and Charlotte's sleeping minigame) are good imo. I think these romance activities, alongside the "teaching" activities with Carol and Gray, are the best activities in the entire game.

[Spoilers in this paragraph!] That said, my favorite ending in the game requires you to romance Priscilla, as I'm a big fan of the girls' night endings where you end up with her. I think those endings are especially cute if you manage to spare Rachel, as well. The girls' night endings are as close to secret endings as SS has, so I guess it makes sense that I had to put a little extra oomph into them to make it feel worth it, though I think all the endings are pretty equal and could be someone's favorite. Except if you romance Priscilla and she dies, those endings are genuinely sad and unfulfilling, but you almost have to be trying to let that happen to see them.

Coming Next in Part 5: Chatting about inspiration.

In the final part, part 5, I want to talk about some of my (adult) gaming inspirations, both before I started making SS, and inspirations that informed the ongoing development of the game. A lot of great adult games influenced me!