My quest to make the gameplay in my niche porn RPG not crap

With the recent 1.0.0 release of Slime Girl Caverns, I think it’s a good idea to talk about the design process a bit and how the game was made.

The game was made with Twine 2 (sugarcube 2 language selected), a text-adventure making platform that I had some experience with. There were premade combat systems for Twine, but I didn’t look into them too much; this may have been a mistake, but it may have paid off since the very basic combat interface and reliance on pure text rather than buttons or images had some unintended consequences that I’ll go into later.

I was motivated to make this game by 1) the desire to have some kind of finished project, even if it wasn’t very good, and 2) horny. shameless horny. why else do you think i made a porn game lmao

The horny became less of a motivator over time, but the desire for a finished project became more and more of a motivator as the project got closer to 1.0.

When I sat down to make the game, I decided that the very first thing I needed was a functioning combat system. I didn’t think about the pre-existing Twine combat systems people made at the time, partly out of ignorance, but partly because I also wanted to make it myself since my RPG was going to have restraint/arousal systems and I didn’t know if those could be easily added to other systems.

While I originally wanted art for the game, that never actually happened since 1) i cant draw, 2) art’s expensive, and 3) my patreon budget isn’t very high (pls don8)

Eventually, I made a tiny Twine game: you entered combat with a generic slime girl (now used as the Blue Slime in the starting area). You could attack or dodge, and you could take damage or get restrained for an instant loss.

Like in the current version, attacks were guaranteed to hit, and the damage was randomized in this system. I wondered, “hey, why not let the player know how much damage their attack will do ahead of time”? This turned out to be an excellent decision. It made me actually consider taking the dodge action every now and then rather than just mindlessly spamming attack. If I didn’t know what my attack damage would be ahead of time, I’d just only attack in this two-action prototype.

Compare this with games like Final Fantasy 2: I like Final Fantasy 2, but there’s not really any reason to take any sort of “dodge” action. You’ve got weapon users and spell users, and the optimal thing to do is easy to figure out. Blast enemies with your most reliably good spells, stab them with your best attacks, and then use healing items or spells when party members take damage. As good as Final Fantasy 2 was, someone experienced with the game eventually found that the “right” combat decisions were easy to make.

But when playtesting, I often had tough moments. Attack the wounded enemy with my excellent damage attack, or heal since I’m close to death? Now seems like a good moment to heal, but I also have this wonderful damage opportunity that I don’t want to pass up… Doing damage might end the fight a few turns earlier and save me, but maybe their attack might do more damage than I’m willing to take… or maybe I even need that health for future fights! Even in routine fights, bad RNG could force me into a set of tough choices.

And what’s more, you’re able to see what attack the enemy can use ahead of time, so even on the first fight, you have a rough idea of what that enemy is about to do, and on future fights, you know exactly what those attacks will do. Combine knowledge of enemy attacks (which can miss) with randomized attack damage (which always hit) and a simple fight can have a wide array of choices in it! If the enemy is using an attack that damages you, and you’re at low health, that’s not good and you might want to heal. But if you’re at low health and the enemy is about to use their lust beam attack that makes your character super horny and lose a bit of willpower, but your willpower is still great at the moment, you might consider attacking instead if you have a good damage roll lined up!

On a larger scale, the dungeons of Slime Girl Caverns are basically one-way conveyor belts that push you forward, and you get a full heal/psi point regen (sort of like a checkpoint) every 6 encounters or so depending on area. This was inspired by the Dungeons & Dragons 5e rest system: a few encounters between every rest means that attrition is a real thing. Of course, in Dungeons & Dragons players have a lot more freedom and might take long/short rests at unusual intervals, either making combats harder for them or making them easier depending on rest frequency.

There are some RPGs where attrition isn’t a concern at all: if you have enough money, and can buy healing items, and can use healing items out of combat, you can basically get a full heal after every battle at a negligible cost. As good as Final Fantasy 2 was, I wound up having TONS of money by the end of the game and could carry around all the healing items I needed. All sense of attrition was gone, but to be fair, the game DID seem to be balanced around starting at full HP before fighting bosses. While this allowed for epic boss fights that were extremely powerful and which required all your strength to face, it also made a lot of normal encounters into filler. You could always just heal back up afterward and normal monsters could rarely defeat you, so they often felt like wastes of time. There’s always a tradeoff when figuring out how the player is allowed to heal, and Final Fantasy 2 was forced to make it.

There is no inventory space limit in Slime Girl Caverns, but you don’t get out of combat healing. At the same time, healing items aren’t super strong either (many enemies can do more damage than a honey bottle or a root beer can heal), so you have to use them at a good time when you’re sure it’s worth it, leading to more interesting choices when combined with the randomized and forecasted attack damage. The tradeoff is that it makes absolutely NO sense as to why you can’t use healing items out of combat, and a few people have (justifiably) complained about this; my headcanon was that the protagonist was a master procrastinator and always thought “yeah one more room then I’ll sit down to drink a root beer”.

Either way, I guess I had to make tradeoffs here too.

Given how the player knew the results of their attack ahead of time, and how I wanted to add a player magic system that is acquired in later zones, the result seemed obvious: psychic powers! How else do you think the player can see into the future? By having a sort of psionic awakening in the second zone, I could slowly introduce more and more psychic abilities that gradually made combat more complex as the player progressed.

As I developed the game and started getting feedback, people wanted to bang the slime girls and see the loss cutscenes, but unfortunately, just taking the dodge action every round to get whittled down to 0 HP/100% grappled was really slow. So, I added the Primordial’s Curse, a sort of “instant lose” button which makes you slip on a banana peel and drop to 0 hit points, allowing players to see those wacky game over sex scenes without having to screw around with nonstop dodging. However, there IS also an unlockable ingame theater where you can view scenes for every enemy you beat, so you will still be able to see game over scenes for one-time boss fights.

One final note: this was a complete accident, but the extremely simple text-based nature of the game makes it very easy to use with screen readers. I ended up getting a small fanbase of people reliant on screen reader software to use the internet effectively, and in fact, one post on the audiogames forums had a lot of really good feedback, and showed me all sorts of strong and weak points of the game! It even encouraged me to make an easily downloadable version of the game since people wanted a direct download link. So I guess making my game accessible was a really, REALLY good move, even if it was mostly an accident.

By trying a few things to make my combat slightly different than standard RPG combat, HOPEFULLY I was able to make a porn game with combat that didn’t suck too hard.