Game Flow, or: Why Putting Fetish Scenes in Failure States is a Bad Idea

Game Design Discussion
21

A modern save file system wouldn’t change anything. Hell, I could actually event a really simple retry system for boss fights in RPG maker right now. It’s not hard. But it also doesn’t fix anything. Refer to my previous posts for why. The save file aspect just really isn’t that relevant. However, I do agree that typical JRPG systems aren’t well suited for fetish games. But you also don’t need to make a typical JRPG in RPGmaker.

If every bad end in an rpgmaker style game was the result of a dialog prompt choice and every dialog prompt choice autosaved? And you had infinitely many save slots? Problem instantly goes away and is solved. The fact that rpgmaker doesn’t offer this is just a flaw in the engine.

As for this, RPGmaker does let you do this. I can boot up RPG maker right now and make a simple story where you just make choices and those choices let you see different fetish scenes in the story as it goes along. RPG maker does offer this, and there are actually a fair amount of famous RPG maker games that do exactly this.

And honestly, yes, this doesn’t have the same problem. At that point the game just becomes a visual novel made in RPG maker that’s about exploring different endings for one story, and that’s totally, 100% fine. You can even mess around with it and make a really interesting game. However, it’s worth noting that you don’t have to do this. You can make an interesting fetish game in RPG maker while still keeping the JRPG aspects. It’s difficult, but definitely possible.

2 Likes
22

I see nowhere mentioned, but why not a game with the goal to making the main character (can be a party) to fell?

Like a reversed Darkest Dungeon but more like a towers defense.
The character or party moves and attacks automatically with an AI, with the goal to beat all enemies on series of dungeon and kill every time the boss until reaching the last one (you).

The goal would be to send creatures/traps to him for lower his hp and put on his path cake, stuffing machine and other fat temptation.
At the beginning the hero wouldn’t be interested to that fat stuff because of his high hp bar and maybe because he got heal from other manner, potion or spell. But at the end wouldn’t have the choice to consume the treats you let on his path.

The game would be balanced between not kill the hero, because thank to a relic he come back full HP, but injure him enough for making the fat trap working.

3 Likes
23

I don’t think I explained myself clearly, my point was that if the bad ends themselves were always something that autosaved and let you load and redo the problem is lessened. The non-bad-end non-fetish content could still be a normal rpgmaker JRPG.

It doesn’t have to just become a visual novel, but it definitely needs to find a way to steal visual novels simplistic and functional save game system.

Also, yes, the ability to submit to a boss in combat to get a bad end and then have an automatic re-try boss battle option would be great. Most games don’t have this though. If you’ve got it implemented, that’s great, I’d love to play through an rpgmaker game that worked that way.

1 Like
24

A little off topic but ChairInTheRoom actually made a game exactly like you’re describing for the last gainjam in RPG Maker: The Hero will be Mine (temp name) - A prototype for the 9/2021 Gain Jam.

Fair warning, it has a ton of bugs, being a gamejam game and all…

1 Like
25

In the lose scenario. The player just waits until the slime kills them. No challenge has been overcome, and the player doesn’t interact with the game system beyond picking some menu options.

I see this as a problem that can be overcome with the elimination of bad ends, but doesn’t need to be. A technical improvement you could make to improve this experience would be a Surrender button. In RPGmaker games, combat tends to be a weak point in general (especially with fetish content); fetish content is often driven by story milestones and not a direct result of the gameplay. So I think that’s a carryover from RPGmaker’s default combat system, and I think there’s lots of innovative ways to repurpose / avoid it which has been discussed in some other threads and here, in some of your posts.

  1. If an idea causes a problem with the game, that doesn’t mean you should just do it anyway. One of the core parts of any creative pursuit is to know when something doesn’t work and throw those things out in favor of better ideas. “It has to be this way” is not an excuse.
  2. I don’t even agree that this is even true. You can definitely have a game where you play as an unwilling gainer that doesn’t have this sort of system. Refer back to some of the suggestions I made earlier. All of my suggestions were fundamental restructurings that have potential to create games that fix this problem entirely.

I think we’re arguing cross-purposes here. My counterpoints weren’t about keeping bad ends the way they are, they were about keeping bad ends around and improving them. Bad ends don’t inherently break immersion or game mechanics - how they are implemented does, as you’ve elucidated in your own post. For instance, your #4 point is a good solution that keeps the bad end style - just make players work for it - and is one of the solutions I was referencing. And, although your #1 point is more evocative of a Bad End Theatre-style mixed with RPG elements and might be different from an author’s vision, it is also an improvement over clunkier systems. I was replying to the general thread to defend ways we can still employ fetish scenes in failure states. I wrote in the same post:

I echo the sentiment that bad ends, as they have been implemented in past titles, can and should be improved (although I would like them to stick around).

1 Like
26

I think I sorta understand what you’re saying now. The way I was reading your earlier comment was that simply introducing quality of life improvements would solve everything. I was exclusively referring to bad ends as they are now, not that the concept of having a bad end at all is bunk.

However, I do disagree with one of the details of what you’re saying. I still think we aren’t quite seeing eye to eye on the specific issues with how bad ends are currently implemented. This in particular is what I’m talking about:

A technical improvement you could make to improve this experience would be a Surrender button.

This sort of thing is actually exactly what my slime boss example was advocating against. A button to skip the combat, the core of the gameplay in this case, and jump to a bad end isn’t a solution to the problem. It’s a patchwork thing that improves quality of life but doesn’t solve fundamental design issues. You’re still creating a situation where the choice that takes effort and plays into the game’s mechanics doesn’t give the player what they want, while the option that takes no effort and has nothing to do with the mechanics rewards the player with exactly what they want. It’s basically just as bad of a design as the existing bad ends we get, just with less menus and less chance of screwing the player over. Whether you’re just standing there letting the boss hit you, or skipping it with an option beforehand, it’s basically the same thing.

Now, to give you an example of the specific things I’m talking about, here’s how I would fix this slime fight to keep the bad end:

Add a requirement for the bad end to trigger. This could be something as simple as finding a secret item beforehand. In this example, let’s say it’s a slime queen’s crown. The scene could play out so that if you find the slime queens crown (maybe by fighting a harder boss and/or doing a quest) and put it on, you would be given the option to enter into a bad end scenario. Then, the player would be rewarded with a bad end for their efforts, and then, for quality-of-life purposes they would be returned to before the option was given, and let’s say the scene would be added to a gallery of unlocked bad end events.

Optionally, you could also add a fattening event to the end of the win condition as well. However, we’re talking about bad ends specifically here, and I wouldn’t say doing this on its own is much better. Having both options give you something, but only one requiring effort is the same problem, but to a lesser extent. Again, the whole point of this is that the player is rewarded for interacting with the game’s mechanics, not bypassing them.

The rest of your post I don’t really take issue with though. I just wanted to highlight that part 'cause I think it’s the main point where we might not see eye to eye on this. let me know what you think.

5 Likes
27

I agree that these games don’t need to become visual novels either. I have multiple examples of how you don’t have to do that. However, it’s worth asking that if the main content of the game isn’t the combat, but random fat scenes that have nothing to do with the combat, then why is the combat in the game even there? Just to fill time? If that’s the case, you might as well just cut out the middle man and make a visual novel, or an RPG without much of any combat similar to Disco Elysium (In fact, there are a lot of RPG maker games in this community that do exactly this. Feeder Fantasy, Princess Goblin, Saving Money in Town, ect.).

If the game has combat, especially a large amount of it, then it needs to be used in tandem with the experience that fits what the game’s about, which should fall in line with what the player is there for. That doesn’t necessarily mean there needs to be WG in the combat itself, but the player should be rewarded for interacting with the gameplay systems, not for ignoring the systems. If the best way to play the game is to ignore the gameplay, then you’ve failed in designing the gameplay and/or how the game is structured.

1 Like
28

Funnily enough, a little while ago I played a BDSM-themed RPG Maker called No Escape. Despite using RPGM, it still remembered bad ends I had experienced even when I had reloaded a save. This let me view bad ends in the built-in gallery without me technically ever having actually seen it chronologically in that game save yet. I don’t know if this is a feature added in MV or something, but it was a great addition.

Really, No Escape did a pretty good job when it came to balancing fetish content for bad ends vs. the rest of the game. The bondage aspects are intertwined within the very combat system itself, with avoiding grabs and escaping from restraints. It does still have most of the really kinky stuff behind game overs, but many of them include you having to deliberately fail at something numerous times. Hell, one “bad end” is technically a reward for obeying the player’s master diligently. While it is a bad end, it’s still a good 30+ minutes of content to reach that point. The game made me work for my fuckup.

1 Like
29

Although I do prefer mechanics to be tightly bound to theme/goal, as ChairInTheRoom so beautifully articulates, I’m not convinced it is so destructive to these gamss not to be. I think a lot about Robert Yang’s essay on ludonarrative dissonance, and how “core” audience members are so used to certain genre mechanical tropes that they don’t see them as dissonant at all:

"Faced with a locked door, which arbitrary leap of logic are you supposed to make? Maybe encountering a locked door means you need to find a key to open it – unless it’s a post Half-Life 1 game and there’s a nearby hallway or crevice to go around it – or unless it’s a fake un-unlockable locked door intended as set-dressing – or maybe a scripted event / monster closet that broke? – and you can tell it’s a fake door because there’s no 3D doorknob model there? – but wait the door just turned red, that means we need to sprint into it to knock it down! – oh but that door has a gold padlock on it, made of unbreakable metal? – but since it doesn’t require any lockpicks to pick it, we know it’s probably a critical-path door, since the game would never put me into an unwinnable situation that required lockpicks without any to be found – oh wait there’s a crumbling wall, I can probably just stab these bricks with my knife to knock it down – and hey, the apples in that nearby tree resemble the positions of the bricks, I have to stab the bricks in that specific order…

Game logic is frequently illogical. When is that okay and not okay? When should we do better?"

I don’t like gating content behind bad endings and counter-goal activites, but it’s definitely a trope in fetish games. Is this actually read as dissonant by most players?

3 Likes
30

I don’t think the example really works to be honest, mostly because “locked door” isn’t really a major mechanic or theme in most games.
Are you a scientist thrust into a massive facility, trying to get out by any path you can? Just going around the door makes sense. Are you an intrepid explorer looking for items that allow you to forge through obstacles? Finding a key makes sense. Are you a stranger in a strange land, trying to uncover the mysteries of this place and figure out what’s going on? Solving a puzzle to open the door makes sense.
The dissonance comes from the fact that there’s a mechanical goal to the game (fight enemies, get stronger), and a narrative goal to the game (look at fetish stuff), that aren’t just unrelated, but directly opposed to one another. Granted, this can be used as another tool (I see it a lot with morality systems, making it harder to do the right thing). It all comes back to whether that clash is used well as something that adds to the game, or whether it’s just kinda there as something that’s annoying to deal with.

5 Likes
31

Yeah, we’re at an understanding ^

About the Surrender button: at the risk of derailing the conversation a bit, obviously not all RPGmaker devs are that versed in code. That being said, an overwhelming target of the topic of bad ends in failure states is about RPGmaker products. Although it can be modified (more easily than newcomers may think) with a game design more befitting of fetish bad ends, the RPGmaker framework does exist for devs to use.

Let there be no misunderstanding that your solutions are all possible in RPGmaker and are all examples of better game design, but I think that - in a conversation like this - it pays to be practical and acknowledge that not all RPGmaker devs will want to learn the system’s ins and outs or innovate their game’s design in a distinctive way. A Surrender option, clear foreshadowing to a bad end, and a convenient way to save (if applicable) are all ways RPGmaker devs can reduce the inconvenience that archetypal bad ends have on the player experience and are within any dev’s capabilities and setting. It doesn’t have to be perfect, essentially. Still, I concede that a Surrender button does not fundamentally solve the problem of game flow disruption.

To be honest, my hope is that a new or returning RPGmaker author (or any dev) can browse this discussion, read the suggestions, and choose a solution that they feel like they can comfortably implement based on their skill level and familiarity with the system. That may be a long shot - and maybe a derail, my apologies - but that’s my only input on that.

2 Likes
32

I’m brainstorming a secret side project where the player character becomes more powerful the fatter they get. That seems like one way to subvert this trope.

3 Likes
33

In that the “bad ends” aren’t actually bad ends, and still allow you to continue playing? That’ll definitely work. It allows for the “unwilling growth” kink and still doesn’t force the player to reset.

3 Likes
34

More like “the kink functions like a power-up.”

2 Likes
35

In my opinion, this isn’t a problem as much as it is a missed oportunity. People give more value to a reward when they earn it.

Instead of fattening the main character after she loses we could fatten the side-characters. If we lose, these characters get vanilla fat sprite. However, if we win, we can fatten them to immobility.

The main advantage of this is that permits the creation of challenging battles that most players would lose in the first playthrough, but, would come back to win in a replay.

Besides, most rpg games have lots of fat side-characters sprites anyway. Then, making longer scenes with these sprites sounds easier than drawing a different version of the fat main character sprite everytime you want to do a bad ending.

2 Likes
36

This has been something that always bothered me too. As a player it always feels weird to purposely lose or play poorly because getting fat or inflating is a gameplay punishment, but at the same time as a developer I have noticed how difficult it can be to not do that.

I generally do more gameplay oriented stuff (not a big rpg guy myself), and from a pure game-design perspective, it’s just not as fun to play a character that’s slower, less responsive, and takes up more space on the screen. Fat and inflation directly go against what generally makes for fun gameplay most the time, and so as developers we have to put in effort and intent to get around that if we want the kink stuff to be a part of the gameplay.
There’s a couple ways of doing it (making it an inherent part of the game’s difficulty curve rather than an optional mechanic that punishes the player, having it affect characters that you don’t play as, etc.), but the one I’ve gone for in my most recent game is having weight gain and inflation provide gameplay benefits that balance out the natural downsides of playing as a larger character. The game itself is a platformer so inflation was pretty straightfoward (just give players temporary flight), but for fat I opted to add in an entirely new ability in the form of belly bouncing. In both cases, the kink is this interesting new gameplay mechanic that players playing a platformer would naturally seek out.

3 Likes
37

Reading through this thread again I realize that there’s actually one genre that could incorporate bad ends really fluidly, and that’s roguelikes. Since losing is an integral part of the game and considered an eventuality, there’s no fear of interrupting the main gameplay loop or feeling like a separate goal from the rest of the game, it just happens naturally. Plus you get to see additional bad ends as you progress to later areas without having to specifically seek them out.

6 Likes