NerdGasm Update: September 2018

Due to popular demand here is a bit of a concept/work update for NerdGasm. For those of you who don't know NerdGasm is a project I've had on my mind for years, even since I started doing this whole erotic art thing. It was originally conceived as a comic but just became too ambitious to pull off in that format so I changed gears and decided to develop it as a Visual Novel Game.

The story is still ambitious, the hope is to tell a broad story over the course of 3 different games following three nerdy protagonists in their senior year of high school, but for now the focus is on putting together one solid first game. And yes it's basically a dating sim/porn game but with focus on a mostly linear story (sorry but I'm not a game dev). There will be a wide variety of characters to interact with and pursue, the main of which will be...

These are the primary girls that the player will interact with as they have the biggest impact on the story.  Many of you have seen these girls before, you're all probably most familiar with Tina. Fran & Izzie are OG characters from the first incarnation of NerdGasm, and Tina came much later and was actually not connected to NerdGasm at all, but she gained such popularity and she fit in so well with the story I felt like I had to induct her into the project. There are many other side characters that will also play some important roles.

Nerdgasm takes heavy influence from the teen sex romp/high school comedy genre so it will feature a lot of the same tropes and elements you've experienced from them. It being a high school setting you'll get range of nerdy, jock, cheerleader, teachers and etc characters to fill the world. The story will initially follow a protagonist who's father goes missing under mysterious circumstances which forces them to embark on a mystery solving journey that somehow unlocks a lot of sexy and sometimes scary adventures. And yes, that sounds weirdly similar to Summertime Saga (purely coincidence I assure you), but after playing that game I can safely say that the stories are very different based on where they end up.
If you've played any VN games before you'll know they're essentially point and click games that involve still art images and text, almost like an interactive comic. A lot of the game is planned to play out as such where you'll have character icons on screen in front of various backgrounds & environments.

I'm still in the early stages of designing locations, most of these will be simple but hopefully effective in grounding the characters and the player in the story. For the character icons there will be a lot of different versions for expressions and levels of clothing to help act out scenes.

(There's still a lot of work to be done on these for each character) But I would also implement specific illustrated scenes for interactions that give it more of a cinematic feel. Not everything will be just a first person view of a still standing character against a background.

I'm still determining the best way to play out these scenes and am playing with the idea of having large illustrations plus overlapping panels of details, kind of like a digital comic. As much as I want to make this game I don't want to give myself so much work that it never gets made, so figuring out ways to consolidate work or make the process more efficient is what I've been dealing with for a while.

As of right now I'm very much a novice when it comes to game design. I would love to learn Ren'Py and make a kick ass game with that program but it's very extensive and with my schedule and energy I'm not sure if that's realistic. So the chances are this will get developed with a simpler VN engine that's better for beginners to pick up. It won't give me a ton of design freedom but there are a lot of impressive simple VN makers/engines and I think they have plenty enough for what I'm looking to accomplish.

Once I get some more substantial content going with this thing I'll do another update though it probably won't be as big as this one. Let me know if the comments if you have any questions about characters or story or just if there's something you like, are looking forward to, or would want to see out of this. I'll reply as best as I can without giving away any spoilers I want to keep secret for players ; )