Cockwork Industries [18+]

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Since we are about to release our first game, I decided to share few thoughts with VS community.

I guess technically it's our 1 and 1/3 game. Our very first VS project, developed under B grade movie title („The Cuntess”) was scraped (and yes, we are aware that our current project has Z grade movie title).

We learned about existence of VS around two years ago. For us – two humanists to the bone with zero programming knowledge but background in gfx – it looked like a perfect tool. We started developing our project in VS 4.X and let me tell you – it was the worst piece of s...oftware I saw in my whole life. Adding a 7 frame long animation could take up to two hours of struggle - „add animation sequence” resulted in instant crash, „add frame” resulted in „delayed crash” („blessed be Nvidia users as they...”). So it was race against time – will I be able to hit Ctrl+S before engine crashes? Despite those problems and due to the fact that we had zero knowledge of programming (and zero will to learn) we decided to endure. When our first game was approx 30% completed we couldn't take it any more. We had better things to do with our lives than fighting with unstable and buggy as hell software and scrapped the project for good.

When VS 5.X was released we decided to give it another try. To our surprise, it wasn't a mere step forward – it was a giant leap. VS 5.X turned out to be rock solid stable, intuitive (thanks to redesigned interface) and best of all – it totally lived up to it premise.

Within eight months we managed to create (with action parts only)*:
- a quite long (I guess around 2,5h for first playthrought) point&click adventure game
- 100% custom dialogue system, supporting random characters animations, characters portraits and multiple dialogue choices
- basic „dating-sim” alike system of reputation building, gifts, and so on
- interactive sex-scenes
- simple mini games (entering the code on keypad, mixing some potions and so on)
- QTE system

Since it's an eroge, I don't expect a lot of comments under that post, but I still like to use that opportunity to acknowledge that last incarnation of VS totally lived up to it's promise. I'd also like to thank all the community gathered here on forums – while I don't post often, I' m a high-level lurker and many of your posts turned out to be very useful to me. Thank you.

Game trailer (warning: explicit scenes, 18+ only): LINK

I thought I was going to get to swing my ban hammer again when I glanced at your forum title - I assumed that it was either a typo & you had actually meant to type "clockwork industries" or that you were another spammer, as the latest spam craze has been various different escort services.

Anyway, this is not my cup-of-tea (game-wise), but I have watched the trailer & I have to say that you have done an excellent job on the visuals & UI side of the game (can't speak for the gameplay itself). The trailer is really well made too.

Do you plan on releasing on Steam/other stores or are you going down the Patreon/donation route like most of the other developers who make adult games?

As for VS 4.x & before... the issue was likely to do with the wxWidget framework that Visionaire was built around - it was an unstable buggy mess, from all accounts. Simon ripped that out for 5.x & built a custom gui/framework - you should still back up regularly though as some of the features are still a work in progress & can easily crash the editor (audio system, visual scripting system, etc).

Thank you.

As for trailer - we didn't really have time to produce it starting from the scratch, so videohive.net FTW. 20-40$ buys you a nice and customizable trailer template, sparring a lot of work.

Recent Steam's "everything goes" policy seems to be odd&unpredictable (stuff banned in some countries for no aparent reason, allowed in others) and Valve's erratic behaviour in the matter makes Steam a no-go route for us.

We operate few paysites, so game will be available for our members and sold in partner stores that deal with that kind of content (nutaku.net, renderotica.com and so on). As for Patreon - we missed an opportunity to jump on the bandwagon when it would made sense. Nowadays, with adult creators being excluded from search results on their site it's kinda pointless to setup an account there.

I don't believe that's true in regards to Patreon. At least 2 adult content game developers using VS to develop their games use it & are doing quite well. You would need to self-advertise on forums, facebooks, reddits or whatever, if what you say is true about the search results.

Here are the accounts of the other 2 developers....

As for Steam, you are probably correct. There's always posts on steamgifts in regards to games & developers that have been removed from the store - mostly seems to be adult content visual novels & shovelware.

Well, if you know how to manage money & taxes & all that, then I guess that's ok.

Not heard anything about bans. Patreon do keep changing things a little bit, but it's mostly fine tuning on the pledge money & fees.

I had a hard time getting people to donate to a music production & promotion forum & website I used to run years ago - it's hard getting people to fork over money, but for some reason it's easier & people seem more willing when you go through some kind of self-funding site like Patreon or crowdfunding site like Kickstarter. Maybe it's because you are using a well know brand, so they tend to trust it more; I don't know.

Thank you. And just in case, since I've heard it alot - apaprently when I'm writing in english for many people I turn out as passive-aggresive, so just to be clear - I'm not

Maybe starting a separate "$ side of gamedev" topic would be a good idea? I would gladly read about forum users experiences with different platforms or ways of fundrising money for project fullfilement.

But here, if possible I would like to get some feedback regarding either our project (if there is another brave souls like you here on forums that will dare to comment) or user experiences with the engine

I think you will be hard pressed to find people on here who play adult content games, but hey you never know. I only know of 3 users on here - besides yourself - that develop porn games. Most of us just develop vanilla third or first person point & click games.

I'm not shy in regards to posting in threads - you only have to look at my total post count. Same on Discord. I write/post a lot.

 I saw trailer for your game it really looks great. I am also making adult game with visionaire and I do use patreon. Bans on patreon have nothing to do with games that has legal "porn" they mostly banned ones that had characters look like too young and similar. Other then that patreon only have clear rule of not posting and porn related pictures or nudity on their page. However game may be full hard core and they have no problem with that.

You may still make patreon and post there and if your game is good enough people will anyway find you and support you. You may also set "pay per creation" and even sell your game (not only as monthly sub). Just do your profile page clever and give your game demo or anything for preview to people, and if people like it they will find it. Once few people find it they will talk on forums about your game and there you go, publicity without even spending time or money

As far as I could see quality of your game is superb and I am sure you would find many people on patreon as well. I linked your page to my discord where I have more then 500 members who follow my game, and already many reacted and asked "What is his patreon page, I wanna give this game a try"

Anyway, in short, you may try make patreon page, it really cost you just to set up profile and you may still sell your game there and even get support for future projects.

Good luck with your game.