manyeyedhydra
patreon
Funding for House of Hellish Harlots Art
🕑 Added 2023-10-05 13:06:23 +0000 UTCI should have written this last month, but that ended up being one of my 'off' months where I went AWOL for a bit to recharge/mitigate burnout.
On the plus side, being delayed gives me a chance to show off an early sketch of harlot art WiP. This at least shows I've started the ball rolling on this front on the commissions side.
The initial plan for House of Hellish Harlots was to be a text-only project, mainly because I didn't think I'd be able to add art to Twine. Unfortunately, text-only hentai games don't really attract a lot of outside attention. Fortunately, I managed to get good enough with Twine, and hacking the underlying CSS and HTML that makes up the display, to customise it into getting closer in resemblance to an indie game. This now opens up the possibility of art for the harlots. Because there are so many (currently 75, with the eventual aim for ~100), it won't be feasible to have art, and animation, for the various scenes. I think a 'pinup' for each is doable, and will improve the look of the game considerably.
Now onto the finance side of things. Based on what I've negotiated, I estimate it will cost around $10-12K for the harlot pinup art. I would like to get HoHH to the point it can be released as a commercial H-game. A lot of this is uncharted waters for me, so any help from people with more experience on such things would be greatly appreciated.
However, if things don't work out, the core game loop ends up not being as engaging as I'd have hoped, I'll still have a bank of good character art to reuse elsewhere, advertise other projects, or just increase the amount of nice succubus/monster girl art on the internet in general (a noble goal in itself!).
I've put aside some funds to start the commissions process. I'd like to raise more funding to add to that so the project is a viable commercial concern rather than a vanity project that will leave me massively out of pocket and questioning the life choices that led me here. :D
The crux of this post is to brainstorm ideas on how to raise those funds.
I could raise subs, but I'm not keen on that. I keep mine low because I work on the mindset of what the value is to the subscriber rather than to me. I also don't want to be another one of those monster girl H-game patreon/subscribestar pages where people pay $10/month out of excitement over a good demo, only to be $400 out of pocket and still no final game to show for it 3 years down the line. There have been a few too many of those, and I don't want to join their ranks.
Another option is to add higher tiers. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. The main stumbling block is what I can add to justify the higher tiers. I don't want to move current benefits to higher tiers and leave the $1 as 'support me, but get nothing', as that feels fairly shitty. One possibility is maybe releasing the raw harlot scenario scripts and other WiP stuff as a higher tier benefit. The raw word docs are something people have asked for in the past.
Any suggestions there are welcome. I'd like to offer higher tiers, but only if I can provide something that justifies them.
Another idea I did think about, more in particular for the harlot pinup art, is a sort of Adopt-a-Harlot scheme. People in the past have gone and commissioned art of favourite characters (for which I'm profoundly grateful). This would formalise that with the aim of creating commissions that can be used by the game. It would be a one-time payment to go towards or even cover entirely the cost of commissioning art of that character.
I'd have to be a little careful here. Patreon doesn't have a one-time payment facility. I suspect they'd also take a dim view if I used their platform to advertise raising money somewhere else! So, some care and/or outright subterfuge might be called for. :)
Aside from the logistics of payment, there are other things to consider.
How do I assign backers to harlots?
What happens if two (or more) people want to back the same harlot? I definitely want to avoid fights here!
What benefits should 'Adopting' a harlot give? A credit in the game? A (reasonable) say in the eventual art? Freedom to show it off elsewhere?
Would people retroactively adopt a harlot that's already been done? As you can see from the sketch above, I've already started the commission process. (There are five characters currently being worked on). Would it bum people out if their favourite harlot was already queued up?
Anyway, this post has ended up slightly longer than I initially intended. :)
A lot of it is spitballing and brainstorming at the moment, so I'd really like your input.
I'm still trying to pluck up courage to set a discord up. In the meantime I'd love to see your thoughts and comments below, even if it might not be as ideal for discussion as say a discord.
On the plus side, the ruthlessly efficient machine side of me has already started the commissions process, so me prevaricating in other areas is not going to hold things up (but will likely work out rather expensive for me if I'm unable to secure additional outside funding! :D ).
Comments
Many-Eyed Hydra
I've seen other people voice the same opinions and can understand it. Unfortunately, the reality of it is text-only has a real struggle to attract attention nowadays. When I first started HoHH, I was hoping it would 'pop' like CoC. Once people are in, they seem to like it, but I've seen plenty of comments that just glance at the plain-text default Sugarcube layout and don't look any further. I'm hoping a UI redesign and the addition of art assets will overcome that.
jeveasy
I honestly don't much enjoy when text games use full art of the characters as I feel it takes away from the enjoyment of imagining their appearance. My preferred method is like what was done in CoC1, where characters are depicted using simple pixel sprites that succeed in giving the general idea of the character's appearance while leaving a lot of what they look like to the player's imagination and the writing. I wish more games would go the route of using more abstract methods of visually depicting their characters, as to me, using full art can be more of a tradeoff rather than an outright boon. There's also the cost involved, and often, you're forced to use multiple different artists, which can break immersion a bit due to the different styles.
Many-Eyed Hydra
I want to try avoiding taking away things if I can. I think the $1 tier should get a release every month (new HoHH release or story if not doing HoHH release). Maybe new stories or H-space rewrites can go up to the $5 tier, but I'd need to be careful as not every month gets one of those. Another option, as I'm getting into the area of needing to hire other people, is to have that work gated behind higher tiers. Art would be a good one, but I'd also like to use art to attract people to the project in the first place, so that might be the best thing to show off to non-subscribers. It's tough. :D Name credits is a definite possibility. I have an idea for the ending that would sneak in some special mentions. The charms were also originally going to feature backer names rather than made-up characters. That's still a possibility. Situation Succ is an odd situation. The guy behind that already has a youtube presence for political/cultural commentary. He just so happened to really like the naughty H-games like Succubus Prison/Monmusu Quest and wanted to make his own. The team (there's about 8 or 9 people working on it, I think) also opened with a bang with a good animated sex scene to attract eyeballs. I'm not surprised they immediately got a lot of funding through SubscribeStar. I'm hoping to learn from what they're doing for my own projects. I'm hoping that project is successful as it will also help attract attention to other creators like me. And more hot succubus games is always great!
Wakozi
I think you should simply go for higher sub tiers. Add a 5€ and 10€ tier. All the benefits we have right now go to the 5€ tier + a few extra stories out of your reserves from time to time. Dont forget that you still have the monthly releases for HoHH. That in itself shows people that the game is progressing and not just sitting there like many other games. Then, you have the 10€ tier. For that one, just copy paste the 5€ tier rewards. But also give them the option of choosing between the next harlots or whatever else comes to mind. And the 1€ tier is basically a tier where people get access to HoHH, but always one version behind. So not the most up-to-date one, but the one before that. Besides that, you could also add one of those 50€ tiers where you dont get any rewards, but are appreciated. Or your name shows up in the titles. Stuff like that. And with all of that, you can even raise your $10-12K limit. Better art = more exposure = more subs = better art and so on. Personally, I feel like the kind of art level you should aim for is that of Succubus Prison, MGQ, Succubus Academia or even SituationSucc. Also, keep in mind that, in my opinion, you are already known as the guy who writes the best succubus stories. Or at least you write them in a way that a lot of people prefer them: Deadly. So for you, it should be easier to get to higher funding compared to someone like the guy behind SituationSucc (tho, that game looks like it will blow away every succubus game so far... at least right now). Ofc, that also requires a bigger social media presence I guess. So, dunno... But the 5€ and 10€ is probably something you can do.
