Hey! You know, I didn't even doubt that this particular topic would be chosen for the this devlog. But it probably won't be what you expect.

I'll start a little from afar, but this is to make the topic of NSFW Development clearer.

All games that devs develop have the main goal of development and for most of them it's making money on game sales. In fact, although I love development, I'm not ready to develop games for free, so most of the projects that I develop I plan to sell when they are funished. Therefore, when game development begins, a lot of ... problems arise.

Selling games, even ordinary ones, is quite a problematic thing, since you need to develop a game for a selected audience, be able to advertise it, etc. NSFW games in addition ... have a very limited way of selling. There is a Dlsite from which I started to earn my first money from sales, and it seems that Itch.io and Steam now also allow such games but... only "correct" NSFW games.

Here we come to the topic of NSFW development. I have a lot of ideas for NSFW content, but when development starts I have to limit myself. I am currently developing a game [ Demonette Playtime ], and the main character, as you might have noticed, has small breasts :

And as funny as it may be, THIS ALREADY IS ENOUGH to completely block sales on Steam and Itch.io, and also limit the visibility of the game from abroad on Dlsite (only Japanese people will be able to see the game). Of course, sometimes such a game can slip through the moderation and be visible until someone with "moral principles" files a complaint.

So I've already prepared a version of the main character with bigger breasts (Patreon will no longer be able to receive the version with small breasts, as it is limited by Patreon rules):

By the way, this is one of the main reasons why [Life with the tribe] hasn't been released on Steam yet. Since I need to change the main character and all the "short characters" and I've already done some of that (although I honestly don't like it very much, so maybe i will redraw older version):

And if you thought this only applies to "short women" or "shota" content, you're wrong. If you have a cute male character and he has a cute face, it won't pass moderation, since cute men don't exist, forget about it. Also, there are no short adult women with small breasts, that's also impossible, so drawing NSFW stuff with such characters is prohibited. If you draw a monster and it has, God forbid, NOT HUMAN DICK, it's impossible, forget it, don't draw like that, don't sell that.

You'll say, "that's not true, you're making it up!". Unfortunately, that's how it is now and the further the censorship increases, the more problems there will be with the sales of NSFW games. There is free content that has such things, but don't forget that most of them are not games and they are "free", which goes against mine development rule.
Also, even the subscription development format that I have now is also under threat. The recent news about changing the rules for content publicationsin SubscribeStar is proof of that, although it's good that they were able to get around these problems, it's not known how long they will be able to hold out.

All this greatly limits the development of NSFW games, honestly I have to think more about whether I will get banned for this or that. I also have to make several versions of the character/censorship, limit my imagination when I draw or  whem I invent some situations (for example, the little sheep from [ Life with the tribe ], who never got their H-animations). I can't just make something I came up with, I always have to keep in mind that it can cause problems.

Of course, you can ignore all this! Make the project the way you want, and then start censoring what you've done to pass moderation for sale.
Well, I tried to do this with [ Life with the tribe ], although in the later stages I still started to limit myself. Anyway, the game is currently in shadowban from Itch.io and is still not on Steam, and it will take quite a while to change things to make them more acceptable (since even the main character's face didn't fit, because it was cute in CGs). Also [Life with the tribe] didn't have code for easy asset changes, and this caused a lot of problems when I started changing characters.

So now when developing [ Demonette Playtime ] I'm trying to make it easy to change assets and censorship if necessary. From the next version of the game I plan to add a special menu that will display some things for viewing (like breast changes, censorship, NSFW-lite mode). In this way, I plan to create some basis for future games to understand how exactly I can limit content on different platforms.

NSFW development that goes beyond the boundaries of "reality" is quite difficult now. All platforms are against it and there is no understanding among the masses that FICTION DOES NOT EQUAL REALITY. This limits my crazy imagination and sets the boundaries of "normality" that unfortunately there is no point in crossing, since it is not profitable.

But is there a way out of this situation? Well ... there is one, and it's Japanese services, since they only limit the display of what you created. That is mosaic. And as far as I know, right now the Japanese parliament is reviewing the censorship law, and maybe there's a chance that they'll repeal it (although the hope is quite small).

And to confirm my statement: if you look at my sales of  [ Life with the tribe ], most of my earnings came from the Japanese service DLsite, while Itch.io earned about half of that and has rather strange withdrawal rules, not to mention shadowban. Also, the game [ Life with the tribe ] is a shota game and has a lot of different women, and "short" ones too, so Steam needs additional work to change the main character to a more adult one, and destroy all the "short women". When Dlsite only needed censorship and nothing else, other sales services needed "dancing with a tambourine". I really believe that if Japanese services can create a global platform for NSFW game developers, we will see a boom in quality content. Of course, this is my dream, but a good one.

I wrote a lot of text, but I hope that I was still able to show you what the PROBLEMS of developing NSFW games are.
To summarize: if you enjoy regular NSFW games that lack "short characters", no monsters, and do not have a tougher "scenario" than NTR, I'm happy for you. But there are many such games (although they are mostly visual novels), and I really want to draw a futanari with a horse dick who fucksn a "short" woman, while a "short" man next to her drowns in the huge breasts of "short" goblin-girls. Unfortunately, such content is prohibited, so all you will see is futanari on a woman.

This devlog was more of a cry from the soul than an explanation of the principles of game development, so the next one will be more about the development itself. You can vote below for the next topic!

Hi, today I want to start a series of devlogs and this is my first attempt at this format of posts. So I hope you like it.

As the name suggests, today I will write about the basics of any game development, namely the game engine. I use the Godot game engine (the latest stable versions) and you may have a question, why Godot?

Well, besides the basic reasons that this engine is free and open source, its advantages are its lightness (game file size) and multiplatform. Unlike the same Unity or GameMaker, it is much easier to master and create 2D games. But that's where its advantages end.

Although Godot has everything for development, it has nothing at the same time. There is good documentation for the engine, but when you try to use something without development knowledge, it usually leads to errors. Of course there are tutorials on YouTube but...

I have been in the so-called "tutorial hell" for a long time, which is very painful for any developer who is learning to develop games on their own. And Godot unfortunately has a VERY low number of quality tutorials. I'm not exaggerating, you can find a large number of tutorials on how to make a game, but the quality of the code and the structure of how the scene is built is very poor for completing projects. Of course, through tutorials you can build a simple game, like I did, but if you want to expand the game, make DLC, or add more content ... you will regret doing everything according to the tutorials.

Godot is built in a modular way. And understanding this opens your eyes to how to build a game in this engine.

Here is an example of how the NPC scene was built in Life with the Tribe in the release version:

And here is also the updated look of the character scene :

Before the update, everything looks more compact, but in the updated version it is more expanded. Why did I do it? To add modularity. The fact is that for customization in the old version I used a resource with textures that looked like this:

And this resource with textures was hardcoded, since each customization option was tied to an enum and an Array with boolean values, it looked like this:

It looks scary, right? But that's not all, the problem is that if I don't add the exact number of textures to the array (for example, I had two variations of tails), it will cause a texture search error and everything will break. And what if I want to add another customization? Then I need to do the following steps: update the enum, check if the boolean is added to the default and current array, break the save file (since I didn't do an empty check, and the save file will have a missing value in the used textures array), add a new texture to EVERY resource, and don't forget to check it.

A bit tedious. But all this could have been done much easier as I did for the updated version.
What exactly was done? I added a separate module purely for customizations. It can be used in any game, and controls itself. Want to add a new customization? Just add another node and name it. Want to add a special customization option for only ONE character (this is not possible in the old version)? Just add another node and give it a unique name.

Controlling texture changes is also done in a new and easier way. Instead of loading a texture every time an NPC appears in a scene (this involves checking, loading and changing textures right at the beginning of the scene), now I just load the NPC and change only the visibility value of a particular customization:

Everything is much easier, there is no lot of enum and hardcode. Everything is clean and clear, and everything is also clearly visible in the editor (since before i had to run the game to check if the customization was displayed correctly).

This is the principle of modularity, when some part of your game is separated from everything else. Godot is the engine that promotes this approach to development, and many people in YouTube tutorials forget/don't know about it. I don't want to say that I'm much better than them, no, I still learned a lot from tutorials, but most of such tutorials only give a base and understanding of how the engine works, and none of the tutorials will teach you the full-fledged development.

Thanks to Godot, I was able to master this concept of modularity a little, and I still have a lot to learn to use it as correctly as possible in my projects. And I think, seeing the development of the engine, that I am unlikely to change it in the near future.

I hope this devlog will clarify the backend of my game development a little, although what I described is only a small part of how the development actually happens.

You can ask your questions in the comments, and I also made a small poll about the topic of the next devlog, please vote!