Building Sutton #1 - The Concept

This is the first part of the 'Building Sutton' series, which delves into the how and why of the game and some tips for game development. The rest of this series will be available for all Patrons at the $5 tier. 

I'd always wanted to make a game. That dream only grew when I first played Female Agent. At the time I'd been writing smut on CHYOA for a year or so. Something like Female Agent seemed doable. It was a text based game, which was basically what I was doing on CHYOA for free.

Of course, it took me a lot longer to actually get there. In hindsight, I wish I hadn't wasted so much time, but it is what it is. If you take anything away from my ramblings, is that you should do whatever 'it' is NOW.  

Anyway, I had spent time working on projects way before SiS. My first project was rather complicated. There were going to be all sorts of backgrounds and modifiers and it simply got too much. This taught me that I needed to simplify things. Truth be told, a part of me wishes I'd made something even simpler than SiS, but I feel it worked out well in the end.

As you can tell, I wanted my first game to be something I could complete. This indie adult game scene is filled with pipe dreams, never ending betas, and empty promises. I wasn't going have big tiddy anime waifus or renders that require a graphics card that costs more than a used car, so I felt I had to give a reason for people to support me. A part of that was frequent game updates and a game that's compelling. At worst I figured I'd end up with a work sample for those who might be interested in me joining a project.

Going text based was out of necessity more than anything. I don't have the artistic skills to create great art. Real porn is not allowed on Patreon and I feel AI art is of dubious quality. Making a text based game also gave me flexibility in creating my game I also didn't have to worry about commissioning art (barring the cover art).

As for the theme, I'd always wanted to do a roadtrip themed story on CHYOA. In fact, there are forum posts from me talking about the very idea. That story was going to have a male lead who would explore various towns. This is obviously very different from Stuck in Sutton.

I lwent with a female protagonist due to my influences. As mentioned above, Female Agent was a big influence on me, and so was the game Newlife. Both games have the player controlling female characters so I decided to follow suit.

As for the title, I came up with the name of Sutton with the help of a story creator 'story' on CHYOA with town names and their meanings. I already had the 'Stuck in' suffix, so all I needed was a town name. I felt Stuck in Sutton had a nice ring to it so it stuck.

The first part of the game took me about a month to create. v0.1 was about 40,000 words, which is about the size of the average update. I'm pretty happy with that build as I feel it gave players plenty to chew on and introduced the main concepts of the game.

I feel a lot of first time devs get a bit nervous around their first build and that's understandable. It's a big step. My advice would be to do the following:

• Introduce the main mechanics. Players should have an idea what your game is about.

• Have a hook for players to come back for. Whether that be a cliffhanger ending to a chapter or hints at bigger things to come.

• Give a reasonable amount of content. Sure, you might be far off from a finished product, but you want people to be interested.

• Make sure it's well polished. Not only is your first build a first impression, but it is your foundation. You wouldn't want to lose someone's interest just because

That's all for now. As mentioned above, the rest of these posts will be exclusive to my $5 Patreons.