Benefitship Game

Living Room: It's All In The Colours

I've previously shown the various sketches that went into designing the living room in Benefitship. Even upon finalizing the layout, however, I found that the living room was not quite what I wanted.

As you may be able to see for yourself, the living room leaned into some rather bluish tones, which ended up making it look and feel very cold. It almost made me mildly uncomfortable to look at, and I couldn't picture the comforting, wholesome story I'd written in such a location. Thus, I ...

Amy's Sprite: A Strand Of Hair Makes All The Difference

This now incredibly cursed illustration is the initial version of Amy's sprite. Her hair was much lighter, and Sulcate had highlighted a strand of hair directly over her face. I saw potential in the hair strand, and asked to move it to the long hair to the left, so it better framed her face. At the same time, we darkened her hair, which lead to the iconic design you see today.

Amy's Sprite: An Absolute Cutie

This is one of the earliest - if not the earliest - sketches for Benefitship.
As you can tell, it's Amy!

She's looking adorable as ever with her lightly freckled face and inviting smile. I'm glad I thought to save it early on because Sulcate and I have had over 400 emails since then, and it's nearly impossible to find again.

This illustration, perhaps more than any other, reassures me that I made the right call in choosing Sulcate as the artist. I can't imagi...

Fun Facts: Names

Fun fact! For a long time during the development of Benefitship, neither myself nor Sulcate had any idea what the characters' names were. Internally, we referred to Amy and Chloe as "Roomie" and "Futa," respectively. Creative, right?

It wasn't until a few hours before I posted the first public in-game screenshot, that I decided on the names.

Another potential name for Chloe was Sophia.

Amy was derived from Amelia, which was one of her potential names, along with Lily and Emi...

SFX: Shower

Benefitship doesn't really have sound effects. This is mainly because I thought that sudden footsteps and slamming doors would be pretty unnerving for people while playing a porn game.

That said, I did include just one sound effect: the shower.

This is just because there's a certain sound that everybody expects to hear when turning on a shower, and not having the sound made the entire bathroom scene feel empty. Though, I wasn't exactly going to pay for a sound library, just to get...

Problem Solving: Text Boxes

Before arriving at the anime subtitle look in Benefitship, we made several attempts at coming up with a nice textbox for the game. We took inspiration from several other visual novels, such as Doki Doki Literature Club and Katawa Shoujo.

Ultimately, though, we felt that our attempts interfered with the overall vibe of the game (not to mention, it covered up Chloe's and Amy's genitals, which is a big no-no).

We eventually tried a basic gradient, both a black one and a blue/purple g...

Problem Solving: Lighting

Benefitship contains several different backgrounds, each with variations for day, night, and night with lights off. The thing is, the character sprites were designed for day, and are illustrated in such a light. This means that putting them on the unlit night background makes them look way too bright, and feel out of place.

Luckily, Ren'Py (the engine we used to make Benefitship) comes with a way to tint characters! So we used that to tint the characters in a colour that made them blend...

Problem Solving: Who's Talking??

While developing the Benefitship demo, the only thing distinguishing who was talking was the name above their dialogue. I sometimes found that I had trouble telling who was talking, but it was pretty rare, so I decided to release the demo as it was.

However, we quickly received feedback from players, noting that several people had trouble with it, too. As a matter of fact, it was the most common criticism we had.

But how do we solve that problem?

Well, some visual...

Layout: "Toy"

This is one of the earliest layout sketches for a cutscene. It shows... well, you can tell what it shows.

This layout went unused, however, as I directed Sulcate toward a breeding mount toy instead of a pocket pussy.

(As an aside, it wasn't even until writing this post that I noticed that the outline of Chloe's cock head is visible during the deep thrust in the bottom image.)

Layout: Living Room

While most of the backgrounds Benefitship were illustrated without any layouts, the living room is an exception. As the first room to be illustrated, Sulcate drew an entire top-down blueprint layout for it. There we barely any changes between it and the final illustration.

The blueprint shows the general layout of the area surrounding the living room. The red lines show where the final illustration is shot from.

Also, apparently this means that Amy and Chloe's apartment has a Room...

Fun Facts: Music

Fun fact! All the music in Benefitship was composed by yours truly! The music in the demo is as follows:

- Summertime Sunset (Main theme)

- Shower Thoughts (Bathroom theme)

- Very Chill (Night theme)

- Dumper (The - *ahem* - naughty theme)

I composed several other pieces for Benefitship, too, though many of them go unused. That said, a few more pieces may appear in the full game, including my personal favorite! So look forward to that!

Amy's Yoga Sprite: The Longest Journey

Out of all the sprites in Benefitship, Amy's yoga sprite is the one that went through the most revisions. It went from "incredibly sexy" to "realistic," and eventually transitioned into what we have today.

You'll notice a colour change from white to red between the last sprites, which I suggested to Sulcate (our artist) to help make it more aggressive (see colour theory).

You'll also notice that the rim of her shorts changed height slightly. I suggested that one because I was pick...