Cohabitation Development Retrospective

History

Starting out as a personal project, I first began working on Cohabitation roughly three years ago, maybe more. A fan of trainers and general corruption sims there wasn't really a lot of games that met my tastes back then, let alone ones that focused on incest, and pretty much none that featured a good, slow build-up. So, already having experience with RPG Maker and Illusion's posers I decided to make my own.

I created the characters in HoneySelect, made a general outline of how I wanted the events to flow and unfold, created the maps, came up with the game's core mechanics (lust, lewdness, suspicion, affect, and all that), did the intro and some early events, and then... lost interest in it. Not the first time that's happened -- one of the bigger games I was messing around with that I actually posted and even got help with was called Duality, a much more traditional RPG about a mage that gets transformed into a woman and tries to find a way to reverse it. I completed maybe the first hour of that game, which got everything set up and all the characters to the big city the game would mostly take place in.

Anyway, six or so months later I picked Cohabitation back up. I can't remember why I did, probably just out of boredom; this was still well before the current deluge of patreon-backed games and being the captious player that I am, there still wasn't many hentai games that interested me. I made a thread for the game on a couple of forums I was on, the biggest one being on ULMF, for feedback and to help keep my interest in the game afloat.

From there the game went from v0.05 to v0.35 (or something like that) over the course of I think two months. During this period is also when the Dating my Daughter pateron went up and met with a lot of success. Following that a lot of other people jumped on the bandwagon hoping for the same success. A couple of people messaged me telling me how much they liked the game and if I started a patreon that they'd support me on it.

I was reluctant to go forward with the idea. Due to not really wanting to be like a lot of the people who started patreons with a v0.000001 pre-alpha, plus my awful history of not completing projects, I originally didn't want to do it until I at least had a complete game to show off. Unfortunately my interest began to wane yet again but I was still getting a ton of support for the game, so that mixed with me being a typical greedy American that likes money, I eventually decided to start up my own patreon, with the idea that it'd force me to eventually get the game to a somewhat semi-complete state. Now two years later Cohabitation is finally at v1.0. I really can't stress enough how likely it is that Cohabitation would've forever remained at v0.45 without everyone's support here.

Problems & (Possible) Solutions

I think a lot of the problems I ran into with Cohabitation can be traced back to the fact that it began as a personal project. When you're working on something in your free time with no commitments to others for its completion then there's really no limit to what you can think-up to put in the game. For example I originally wanted to have a low, medium, high, and max lewdness variation for every sex scene in the game. Back when I first started the project when I could work on it whenever I wanted with months of inactivity it sounded like a good idea -- by the time of v0.50, however, the idea of doing four different versions of the blowjob event and having to come up with a myriad of ways of describing Megan blowing Calvin so they wouldn't become repetitive made me consider drinking bleach.

The solution to this is pretty obvious: set realistic goals and expectations. This, of course, results in smaller games but it also allows for quicker development and for the games to feel more complete and polished. By 'complete' I mean having less cut corners and truncated content just to finally finish it.

Another problem with it starting as a personal project caused was the lack of planning when it came to the mechanics and stat progression. Planning out the creative content of Megan's progression from a shy girl to a nympho was fun, so I did a lot of that. From almost the beginning I knew how I wanted Megan's corruption to proceed - from reluctant kissing to craving Calvin's cock. However, I didn't plan out how much affection and lewdness you'd need for each new event or the stat gains from events. This unfortunately led to grinding and stat bloat with me usually just doubling the requirements for the previous event in order to unlock the next one.

Again, the solution for this one is pretty obvious: plan out the requirements for each event early on so that there's a smooth, steady progression from one to the next. Normalizing stat gains is also something I'm going to try. By this I mean instead of each event giving you unique (and often poorly thought out) stat gains you'll instead get a small gain (5 points), a medium gain (12), or a large gain (20). For example an event might give you a small gain to affection and a large gain to lewdness instead of 127 points towards affection and 283 towards lewdness. 

This won't eliminate all grinding, though largely because I like there to be a small amount of grind in life sims, making it feel like you're actually living day-to-day and building up relationships rather than just going from one event to the next making it feel more like a CYOA. I also really suck at math, and numbers in general are almost hieroglyphics to me.

Other Stuff

Something that surprised me when working on the game was the utter contempt people had for playing as ugly, fat, bloated Calvin. No, he wasn't a self-insert (I'm nowhere near looking like a male model but I'm also far from being a nearly obese, balding middle aged guy) and, no, I don't have a fetish for fat guys. When it comes to hentai where the girl is manipulated or otherwise forced into sex the stuff where the guy doing it is some bronzed skin, muscular young guy has never done anything for me. Instead I prefer for it to be with a guy who's old or 'noticeably younger' (/ss/), fat, ugly, or even homeless, making it as degrading as possible. So, no, not a fetish for fat guys but rather I guess one for degradation.

Then there was Susan, who was kinda the opposite in that I was surprised by how many people wanted content for her. Originally all I had planned for her was a blowjob scene and then a sex one, and her content was pretty far down the list of stuff I planned on putting in. I know some people are disappointed that you never really completely break her but her reluctance and the venomous back-and-forth between her and Calvin were the reasons why I ended up giving her as much content as she got since I enjoyed writing that stuff.

That about wraps up this rambling mess. If anyone has any questions or anything then post below and I'll try to respond.

Lastly, if there's enough interest in it I could upload my character and scene files from HoneySelect for anyone interested in doing their own scenes. I haven't updated my version of HoneySelect in years, so if you're playing the latest version of it my scenes might not work.