Debt Retrospective

While working on Cursed I'd get messages from people saying they really like my games but they weren't very interested in a RPG with a female protag. So, wanting to give my supporters something more along the lines of my older games I decided to start a side project... also, I was kinda getting burnt out on Cursed at the time, so I figured alternating between it and a more simple game would help me out.

Debt was a game concept I came up with years ago, saved inside a .txt file along with a ton of other ideas for game concepts. Originally the concept was more of a life-sim like Cohabitation and SWAK, wherein you'd actually have to do various jobs to get money while also keeping up your grades (unlike the released version, this one would've taken place during school). I ditched the sim elements for a couple of reasons:

A) After having worked on Cohabitation and SWAK I just wasn't very interested in doing another similar game so soon; B) I ultimately felt like they didn't really add much to the game and were just busy work (perhaps in a larger game I could've done something like have female coworkers you could pursue and/or male coworkers that'd want to NTR you, thus adding more purpose to the work elements); C) This was meant to be a small game that shouldn't take a lot of effort or time.

How do I feel about the final result? Well, I'm actually pretty mixed on it. To be honest, I've always thought kinetic novels were lazy -- to me, a game should have mechanics and possible failstates, and I never really wanted to do a kinetic novel. After completing Debt, well... my opinion on kinetic novels is still largely the same, but people seem to like them, so if there's a demand for it maybe I'll do more in the future -- I have a few ideas that would work well in the format. Outside of the KN stuff, though, I think it turned out decently.

The renders, I think, turned out really well. I made a really attractive model for Debra -- typically I try to go for a sort of 'idealized realism' wherein the girls have big boobs but not beach balls, are curvy but still have an actual waist, and have good looking faces that actually have a jaw, nose, and chin rather than the anime triangle head I see a lot of people do. I tried making her look mature / older via wrinkles and some stretchmarks but they weren't really visible in the renders. I also feel Lucas turned out well, though I got the usual complaints that he wasn't a 7-foot tall super chad with a 20-foot long dick. I try to make the male fit the context of the story; so if they need to use coercion or similar to get the girl I'll usually make them look at least a bit unappealing, whereas if the girl is meant to fall for him normally then I'll make him attractive. The one definite sore spot for the renders was the nighttime ones in Debra's room, they were extremely slow to render and since I didn't want to render for an entire day they'd end up grainy. Even with my new GPU I tried out one and it still took two hours just to get to 25% convergence.

As for the writing / story, there were definitely places I could've improved on but overall I was satisfied with it. Lucas was meant to gain more confidence the more Debra submitted to him, which I feel came across well. I was maybe a little less successful with portraying Debra's embracing of her inner whore while not wanting to potentially ruin her family by cheating on her husband with her own son... but I also think that short of some 100-hour epic with very incremental corruption that that's not something you can really illustrate naturally. The pacing could've been better, which would've helped with the aforementioned development of the characters. In particular there are two spots I could have changed: split the HJ story update into two parts - one for groping and one for the handjob, and the second place was the sex update, which I could have also split into two parts - one for Lucas pleasuring Debra plus them 69'ing and a second part for the sex. Ultimately I didn't want to string the player along too much and it was meant to be a shorter game, so I don't fully regret the decision of not splitting those events.

Overall, it isn't my favorite game that I've worked on but I did like Debra and the players of it seem to have enjoyed it.

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Right now I'm working on the first release of Reunion. I don't have a date for its release but it should be somewhat soonish. I'm currently struggling with a roadblock -- Daz3D doesn't seem to like scenes with more than four unique characters and some of the scenes for the intro has five characters, so I'm currently working my way around that. I occasionally post updates and renders in my discord.