Soft Serve postmortem

But here are my lessons learned, which I hope is valuable to you. If not, no problem and sorry, I wish the best to you in your ventures.

1) Don't do what I did. Keep everything much simpler. Avoid 3D engines unless you absolutely need it. From market research, after I made this game I found a huge amount of people won't even try a visual novel if it's not in Renpy so you're really just shooting yourself in the foot if you go with another engine.

In addition to me realizing this from talking to people, and seeing many comments... I also looked through many games and found many devs that did their first project in another engine realized this, and now only use Renpy. The reason for this, is the people who play VN's regularly have learned to associate other engines such as Unity, and Unreal with very long loading times, more bugs, and less standard VN functionality because those devs had to split up their time in too many ways. So lots of people will not even look at your game if they don't see Renpy in the title. It automatically reduces the eyeballs on it.

2) if your goal is to make something that many people will enjoy, and might become popular enough to help you live, then don't do a real time 3D adult visual novel. The net gains from spinning the camera don't outweighed the reduced quality of having it be real time as well as the loss in Development time trying to optimize everything that could have been used more effectively elsewhere. You can get a bigger emotional punch if instead of spending time trying to manage such complexity you put more time and energy into creating intense moments in the your story.

3) Real time 3D interactive porn games may be interesting but can get boring quick (an earlier experiment I spent a lot of time on that I don't have any more). Procedurally generating characters as I did, or a character creator as I also did adds some novelty but it wears off fast. The most time efficient way to produce novel content is quality story, but if you're caught up in 3D mechanics you may not have time to produce enough of it to hold people's interests for long. If you really want to go that route, it seems like adult VR games often do well but rely on impressive unique interactive tech to succeed.

4) So to sum up these lessons learned: Everything humans do is for emotions. But in trying to create emotional experiences with incredible quality and depth we unfortunately have to keep in our calculations the time costs and yields (ROI) for all possible ways of doing things and the exponential increase in the costs of maintaining additional complexity. By using simpler methods that have been proven to be cost effective, to elicit those emotions we can spend more time to craft their breadth and depth.

Anyways, these are just my opinions from my failures and analysis afterwards. You'll probably do whatever you were going to do anyways... just like I didn't listen to anybody when they told me to spend a huge amount of time doing market research and surveys before I spent several thousand hours creating a bunch of messy tech that was too complex to maintain or be useful as anything other than an interesting experiment... haha.