Succubus Stories 2020 Postmortem

Congratulations on surviving 2020! It’s been a brutal year, but if you’re reading this, you made it. For me, like for a lot of people, I’m sure, 2020 has been a mixed bag. As tough as it has been, launching Succubus Stories has been a highlight for sure, and being able to get this game out and work on it has been a privilege. Thank you for your support!

I thought it would be a good exercise for me to look back on this year and analyze and critique my work so far. I thought it might make for interesting content as well, to show you all where I’m at and what my thoughts are. This is not intended to be any sort of objective analysis. Think of it as a postmortem. The primary beneficiary of this exercise will probably be me, as it’s a good way to organize my thoughts, but I hope it is interesting for you, too.

Before we start, a brief note: if I didn’t like the game I was making, I’d probably be making another game, so let’s establish first that I think SS is pretty good. I think I’m probably more critical in some ways and less critical in others than a normal player, but overall I think I’ve done a good job and I’m happy with the game. I say this because I don’t want you to think of this as some sort of value judgment on the game. It’s an analysis geared toward direct improvement of the game, not a critical review.

So let’s get started. I’ll analyze the game in a number of areas, acknowledge what I think works, and reveal what I believe needs improvement.

Art and Interface

Starting with the basic interface, I think it’s pretty decent. I prize readability and accessibility more highly than style, and I think that the interface achieves the goals I had for it. I do think it could afford to be more stylish or have more flair and color in places. I think some improvements to scenes and encounters which involve background art and to the layout of options to avoid some movement of buttons are in order over the long-haul. For right now, though, I see these  improvements as unimportant.

My feelings on the art are more mixed. So let’s start with what I do like. I think the models, materials, and textures, most of which were purchased and made by other people, are of high quality. I think the general look of the characters is good. I think the player character in particular is just stylized enough to avoid falling into the uncanny valley, but realistic enough to not appear cartoony. The poses and such as well are largely built on purchased assets, though it is rare that I don’t make fairly significant adjustments, both to account for the fact that my models are a bit different than the more standard ones these poses tend to be made for, but also for aesthetic reasons.

I decided to totally avoid any sort of backgrounds to improve rendering speed, reduce scene complexity, and to allow most CGs to be used wherever and whenever appropriate without heed to setting and angles. I’m happy with this choice, but also I can understand how it could be seen as a cop-out. Still, I’m unlikely to ever add backgrounds.

The issues I have with my CGs are the lighting and framing. These are things I find incredibly difficult to get right. It feels like no matter what I do, I am always unhappy with the shot. I think this comes from just a lack of knowledge on my part. I don’t like the shots I’m getting, but I’m just blindly changing things trying to hopefully find a combination I like more and never really finding it. I don’t know how to actually construct the scene in a way that would appear better, so I’m just randomly moving things until I give up. This makes my relatively simple CGs probably take a lot longer than they should to create.

At any rate, I tend to approach the artwork in my game in a similar way to the music. I think of it as more of a way to communicate tone and theme than an accurate representation of the exact sex act being described in the text. For this reason, I think it’s probably okay if I’m not totally happy with the art. As long as it’s setting the right tone and invoking the correct idea, it doesn’t need to be perfect. Still, I hope to improve my skill and generate better CGs as time goes on.

Sandbox, Mechanics, and Character Development

I think of SS as being a mechanics-driven game at its core. Those mechanics being status, money, and item management, with some secondary mechanics like social stats, reputation, character and faction affinity, and character development providing additional depth. There are some more bespoke game systems too, like the expedition system and potion bounties. Overall, I think there’s an interesting blend of mechanics at play in most situations, and I think that helps keep things interesting.

The game’s core sandbox gameplay is also pretty fun, in my opinion, if somewhat repetitive. I hope to address the repetitive aspects through the hiring of additional content writers, and through some sort of repeat-event protection system in the future to help ensure that you don’t get back-to-back random events.

I’m really happy overall with the sexual encounter system. It’s actually a point of contention among some users who find it a bit too long and boring, but I think the fact that you can skip most of these encounters is a valid middle-ground for those players who find it trying. Compared to other text games with turn-based sex, like Lillith’s Throne and Degrees of Lewdity, SS represents what I consider to be an improvement. I’m obviously biased, but I think SS streamlines and simplifies the unnecessarily complex mechanics these games utilize. There is some argument that the increased customization and options in these games improves their depth, and that’s true, but I think SS finds a good middle-ground between the on-rails sex scenes of a VN and the more complicated, gamified turn-based systems like these. I'm not here to throw stones, though; I don't think that the comparison between either of these games and SS is particularly favorable to my game in other areas, so don't misunderstand. It's just that the relative simplicity of encounter sequences is by design and reflects my own preferences.

The biggest problem with SS’s approach is that it has some significant limitations. You can’t, for example, switch between “types” of sex as easily. Also, you aren’t given perfect 1:1 control, so you more pick a type of action than anything specific, and it’s possible you could perform some action you really didn’t want to. Still, I feel that the trade-offs are worth it. I do hope to increase the depth of some elements of the encounter system, particularly with regard to the preferences of partners for various actions, something not really present in the game right now.

Finally, I think character development is really important to SS. I think it’s a bit of a grind, and I know some people hate basically any grind at all. But SS is a gentle hill not a mountain. There’s tons of stuff to unlock and tons of different directions to go in right from the start. Instead of, for example, a single, universal corruption meter that gates progress, you earn perks at a rapid rate. If you want to unlock more exhibitionism content, you can focus on exhibitionist behaviors and activities to grind for perks to grant you more activities and actions related to that fetish. While I want to continue to expand perks and add more actions and activities, I am actually pretty proud of the perk system in particular even as it exists now.

As far as the other advancement systems go, traits and social skills are fine, if a bit boring. They do their job. I’d like to improve them and readjust them to make them feel a bit more interesting, but I have no idea how to do that right now. I think alchemy needs a total revamp some day. I don’t want to detail all my thoughts on this now, but I imagine a system where the player has to make certain potions in certain quantities to make “discoveries.” Or maybe a system in which the player must find or buy recipes that are gated by an overall alchemy level. I’m not sure and I have no ETA on these changes, but I’m not super happy with alchemy progression as it is  right now and I’d like to make it more interesting and strategic in some way.

Requests and Story Content

Requests and story content make up the bulk of the non-repeatable content in the game. I think both of these content types are fun opportunities to challenge the player with problem solving, confront them with mutually exclusive choices, and let them express themselves a bit. I mentioned this in my year-end post, but requests to me are probably one of the bigger deals in SS. I think by the time the game is done, requests will make up most of the game’s content.

Some requests are short and simple, some are complicated and involved. Some are sexy, some are almost totally chaste. I think, in general, it’s okay for an individual request to not appeal to everyone. They’re fairly small and generally over soon, and that also lets me explore certain themes and content more thoroughly. In short, I find them fun to write and I think they’re variety is a great boon to the game as a whole. I call them “requests” because they are always character driven, usually by one of the major secondary characters or by a faction, though occasionally by a one-off character. I also wanted to avoid the term “side quest” because I was worried some players wouldn’t do them and some pretty nice gameplay features and abilities are tied to these. They’re optional, sure, but I don’t intend for them to be totally frivolous in the way you might expect. The rewards make almost all of them worth doing, I won’t render a judgment on whether their content is worth experiencing.

The game’s story is told in chapters. I don’t have a lot to say about the story itself, other than that I think it will surprise and interest players. It’s not perfect and it’s not gonna go down as an incredible feat of storytelling, but I think it’s better than the typical excuse plot of many lewd games. It is intended to be more character-focused than anything else. Your relationships with various characters will have a dramatic effect on the way things unfold, and the plot is driven by the clashing of various personalities and motives.

Finally, I try to walk a fine line with the player character. The game is written in third person because she’s meant to be an established character on some level, but you are able to pull her personality in a few different directions and make decisions within that framework. I don’t want to prevent players from being able to role-play, but I do intentionally place a bit of space in there for the character to breathe. Ultimately, I want the player character to be a bit ambiguous to provide the player with some agency, but I also want her to feel like a strong character. This is a tall order even for an incredibly skilled writer (for reference, I consider myself an acceptable, if in no way remarkable, writer). I feel like I’ve been doing an okay job, but I hope to do better as we move forward.

Conclusions

So let’s condense this into a series of places where I feel improvements can be made:

• The encounter interface could be improved, particularly the placement of buttons.
• The interface lacks color and texture, though is very readable and clean.
• The game’s art could be improved through better lighting and framing, but these are skills I need to develop.
• Random events and scene content in encounters can grow repetitive. The brute force solution is to have more content by hiring additional content writers. I can also make system-level improvements to prevent some repetition.
• Partners in sexual encounters should have more personality and uniqueness in their preferences and actions. Some dynamic elements could also help spice up encounters.
• Character progression for traits and social skills is a bit boring and maybe a bit too under-the-hood. Possible solutions are to improve the UI for traits and lay them out like a proper tree. For social skills, I could let the player have more direct control and input on their development.
• Character progression with regard to alchemy needs a total redesign. I may make a post dedicated to just this topic to collect feedback sometime in the future (probably for $10+ tier patrons).
• I want to improve the presentation of the player character in the story to walk the line between acting as an established character and providing player agency. I think right now the player is leaning a bit too hard toward the former, with too many stretches of content with little interactivity in some more recent story segments and requests.

These are the points of improvement I hope to slowly work toward throughout 2021 as I continue to develop the game. I can’t provide specific time tables for any of them, but I do hope that most of them can at least be addressed in the coming months. I welcome and encourage feedback on these points and anything else!

Thanks a lot for reading, and feel free to ask questions or provide your own input in the comments or over on the discord.