I wrote a lot of words (specifically on why original Rainy Skies and Lust Brave were cancelled)

I've finally started to get back onto H game forums and on one of them, people were irate about my having to cancel the original Rainy Skies and Lust Brave. I don't think I ever properly explained why I made those decisions, so I spent several hours writing this huge rant for them. Maybe it'll be enlightening?

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Why was the original Rainy Skies (and later Lust Brave) cancelled? It was because of over ambition and trying to do something that I really just can't.

Firstly, the original Rainy Skies was envisioned as a corruption game, where the main character Mable, who starts off as innocent and pure, has to learn to survive in a cruel and unforgiving world by any means necessary, even if it meant selling herself, or selling out others. It was meant to be a very dark and unsettling game, which would've made for a really cool idea, if I wasn't also writing it for titillation purposes.

Problem 1: it was too rapey

The roadblock I immediately ran into, was having to write sex scenes that were way too serious, way too rapey and just not fun at all. My general philosophy when it comes to sex stuff is that everyone involved should enjoy or want it to some capacity (even if they know it's a bad idea,) and that it should be fun, and even weird and silly at times. Original Rainy Skies had way too many instances where that wasn't the case, and it got to the point where I couldn't stand to write any of the scenes I had to do (Ironically, drawing the CG for them was fine, though CG's themselves presented a problem that I'll get into later.)

Problem 2: it was too complicated

The other major problem was the idea of having numerous methods of completing a mission. In the Nui rescue mission (Mable's pet) at the beginning of the game, I presented the player with several means of getting through it, from buying her back, to fighting the gang that kidnapped her, to sneaking in and stealing her back yourself. Some of these methods would lead to sex scenes, so it should incentivize players to try experimenting in order to find them.

There's a reason why even most AAA title games flop at this. It's ridiculous, the amount of work that needs to be done to make that kind of thing be meaningful. It means that one mission can take three or four times as long to build, and then I'm also running into the risk of having players not actually be interested in doing any experimentation, getting through that mission in one go, and then asking me "hey, where's the rest of the update?"

(Furthermore, the game actually kept track of what method was used to finish missions, which would potentially factor into future missions. Which sounds cool, but was again something that I just don't have in me to maintain for an entire game. At least not at the scale that I was aiming for with Rainy Skies.)

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Those two factors combined chipped away at my drive and willpower, until finally I accepted that there was no way Rainy Skies was going to come together the way it's suppose to. So I cancelled the game, and in order to minimize the amount of downtime, repurposed the engine with a quick and cheap hud rehaul, and started Lust Brave, a monster girl game that's meant to be way sillier and funny/weird compared to Rainy Skies (and is sort of a spiritual successor to Monster Girl Attack!, my first failed h-game project before Lust Doll.)

At the time, I identified those two issues above as being the main culprits for my failure to make Rainy Skies work out. As it turns out, there was another issue, and without the other two clouding matters, it very quickly came to light.

Problem 3: CG's take too long and are too restricting, plus there's no actual demand for it

So I pride myself as being while not necessarily an amazing artist, still a decently competent one. If I want to draw something for my games, usually I can get it done and have it look feasibly good.

The thing is, there's tons and tons of amazing artists out there that can draw way better and/or way more stylishly than I can. What does my fairly standard, cute art have to offer that hundreds of other artists can't do better?

The answer is context. CG, outside of how good it looks, becomes meaningful from spending time with the characters and developing an emotional attachment to them. Hence why rule 34 is such a huge thing. So theoretically, all I should need to do is just keep it up.

That brings me to the real problem: it takes me around 2-4 days to draw up and colour a CG and all of its variations, obviously dependent on how complicated it is. And then, I also need to write the scene and how to get to it, and implement it all into the game. When it's all said and done, I'm basically looking at roughly one scene per week, maybe two if I push it.

I've been told often by people that they look to my games for the variety in fetishes that they offer. At the current pace Lust Brave was getting scenes added, there was no way I'd be able to do more than 1-3 fetishes per month.

There was another problem too. The scenes I were doing felt really stiff. It's a problem of the medium, where if I want something to happen to a character, I need to draw that. If the current camera angle doesn't allow for what I want to happen, I need to draw an extra CG to show the new angle. Basically, it really encourages the idea of keeping CG changes to a minimum by limiting what happens to a character during a scene, in order to save yourself work (and as I mentioned above, speed was a huge problem, so it's a very tempting incentive.)

Solution one would be to hire someone to do the art for me. For what I would've needed though, there's far too much risk for me to do that (it IS something I want to do eventually: hire others to help me out, but, let's just say doing so opens up a huge can of worms that I don't have the confidence or capacity to handle just yet.)

Solution two would be to dumb down the art so that I can increase my drawing speed and more easily allow for variations. It's not necessarily a bad solution, but it's not exactly ideal either. And it would mean having to go back and redraw everything into a new, more basic style.

In any case, while I was mulling over what to do about this problem, it occurred to me to look at the game and ask myself, 'is this really better than Lust Doll'? What does it really offer, other than being just a fairly generic H game with slightly better polish? Japan churns games like this out all the time. Sure, there's something to be said about a fully Western developed H game, but looking at how Lust Brave would've panned out, it didn't feel innovative or even really all that interesting, compared to the amount of time and work that it would've taken to get it finished. And at this point, there's enough western H game developers working on projects just like it.

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The unfortunate thing about being an independent game developer (and why so many developers stall out or give up) is that you really do have to be extremely careful about what you work on. A properly done game is an investment counted in months to years, and it's nigh-impossible to foresee what could go wrong with it (I can certainly say that I've never started a project that I expected to fail.) Often times, problems won't become evident until long after you've announced the project to public, and sent out demos everywhere, a.k.a. after people are invested and you've already put in hundreds of hours of work into it.

For a big studio, it's not as big of an issue since they generally have other projects in active development. For an independent developer, you really only have the capacity for one major project at a time, and if you find out along the way that it's not what you should be working on, you'll be in a truly miserable place. Do you keep going with a project that is going to cost you half a year or more and potentially only make a small splash? Do you cancel and risk the ire of your player base in order to get another chance at a project that you 'know' will be worth it? Trust me, having to make that decision sucks major ass, nevermind having to do it twice in a row (and it actually being my second and third time doing so, since I did cancel my first H game too.)

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So that's more or less what's brought me to this point, and why for a while, I was avoiding H game forums, and even my own discord. I knew I had to cancel them and move on to more promising projects if I'm to make this work, but that doesn't mean I feel any less ashamed of having to do so (watching my livelihood drop each month as more and more people lose faith in me has certainly been a heart wretching experience.)

At least one thing that's keeping me from giving up, is knowing I can turn things around. And that despite the failures, there's an enormous number of you that do still believe in me. I'm taking solace in the fact that very few ever become successful without having failed countless times. And it's still very much my continued dream to work on my own projects for a living. So that's why I'll do my best to learn from my mistakes and not fall into the same traps with my next projects.

TLDR; Don't get into indie game development