Cute Demon Crashers - Post Mortem

Hi there! This is Pudding Fluff (aka dejinyucu​ ), your resident character artist.
I’m also the one managing the SugarScript Tumblr and Twitter accounts (and yes, it’s weird to talk about myself in third person when I have to write about what “the artist” is doing, haha).

I’m here today to do a little post mortem on our game :) (Warning: I tend to ramble a lot, so apologies for the walls of text ahead!)

What is a post mortem?

Literally, an autopsy xD But in game development, a post mortem is a reflection, evaluation or discussion after a game is done and released.

Before NaNo

So this game basically started as a random idea of having an 18+ otome game where the female main character had complete control over what to do with a bunch of male love interests. Most of the 18+ otome games we knew at the time had the MC be submissive and with no control on what was done to her, including being pressured for sex, coerced, “seduced”, ignored when she said no (because it’s not a real no and it means yes) or outright raped.
We initially thought about a woman in a position of power with a bunch of servant males, but it morphed into a reluctant college virgin summoning a bunch of demons because anime and silly and hey, we needed an excuse for some characters that would be willing to jump into bed right away, so sex demons! xD

We were going to make a Sex Positive Jam for it, but we realized we didn’t have the time to do it and said “hey, let’s do it for NaNoRenO instead!”. And we set ourselves to get a team and do something fun in one Month.

NaNo Start!

We managed to get ahold of a team of talented people that wanted to work with us and that liked our idea! We were thrilled <3

So we planned for 2-3 days of getting to know this bunch of silly demons (who turned more dorky by the second, while Claire morphed from a shy virgin to a lazy one), and planned to have one sex scene for each character and that was it. The idea was basically to make a short game that would be some sort of “proof of concept” for what we’d like to see more of in 18+ games aimed at women. We realized we may not have been able to finish all the game in time, but we wanted to at least release the “common” route of the game by the end of NaNo.

So we had a talented team of people and one month to do this. What could go wrong, right?

First Release: Akki and Mirari

What went right:

- We got most of the art done, and we managed to do Akki and Mirari’s routes and not just the common stuff!

- We got a bunch of cool Python/Ren’py custom code for our game!

- People loved our silly game and wanted more!

So our talented team was awesome. I (the char artist) worked hard; Silver (the chibi artist) worked hard and made hilarious chibis; Lani (our BG artist) was fast and awesome, even though she was working on other stuff at the time at the same time! KingV (our GUI artist) did an awesome job with the GUI and made it all diabetes-inducing pink and full of hearts and we loved it xD

Quil (our programmer) customised A LOT OF STUFF we don’t even understand, but the result was amazing. Marc was itching to compose music and frankly did an amazing job and was also super fast! Our lovely writer got drunk writing all the sex scenes (she mentions one bottle of wine per scene, haha), since it was her first time writing smut for a VN and she is asexual! But she came through and did an awesome job <3. And Shadow, our editor, sneakily went and edited and polished everything our writer wrote, and checked all my important Tumblr posts and forum posts (for the record, I can’t English, I’m ESL :’D, so all the typos and grammar errors you see here or on twitter are 100% my fault :’D) and also made sure to hunt for all the sound effects we needed!

What Didn’t Go as Planned:

- Art took a lot more than expected.

- Artist and writer had to take time off freelance paid projects to get the game done in time.

- Programmer was busy and had some of the stuff done at the last minute, so the release got delayed for some time after the end of NaNo.

Personal sob story time: my family cat was very sick at the time and I had to run back and forth vet appointments and the poor thing eventually died. So I took time off work, and time off CDC too, and got behind schedule with everything.

Both the writer and I got behind with bills after March and had to ask for extra work hours or get early payments from clients to make up for what we didn’t work on during March. It was hard, but hey, we loved working on CDC, so it was okay.

Our programmer was busier than she expected to be and she took her time with the coding. We were pretty lost with all the customization she was doing and couldn’t touch the code ourselves. Even when she tried to explain how the new functions worked and how to use them, for us it was alienspeak :’D

In the end, once I figured out how things worked, I had to go and direct (put all the sprite movements and expressions) in the scene files myself, since we were late already and our programmer was busy. At that point, I wished I had that time to devote to art instead, but the game needed to be out and we each did all we could do to see it released.
Art-wise, AKKI’S FOREPLAY CG WITH THOSE 27+ VARIATIONS WAS A PAIN. I’m never doing that kind of thing again :’D
I wasn’t completely satisfied with the uncolored cut-ins but I had to move on :’)

After Release

So after our first release, we were thrilled by the response we got! We honestly didn’t expect our dumb game to do so well with the Tumblr crowd.

Of course, we got some nasty comments on other places and both constructive and not very constructive criticism.
Beside the nice and the constructive, people also said this: the game was too short, too vanilla, there’s no appeal in consent, too sanitised, not porny enough to fap to, sparkly vampire bastardisation of incubus/succubus, lacking passion/lust, lacking love/romance, asking to throw some for-male-audience sexy fanservice in too, and somebody asking for a version of the game without Mirari.
We listened to (and read) all of it, good and not. In the end we decided to revise some things for the full game, keep some in mind for our future individual projects, and some we just ignored, since we felt it didn’t apply to what we had in mind for the game anyway. We did and still do appreciate people taking their time to give us our opinion about the game.

And then we stared getting messages from people about their personal experiences, girls afraid of experiencing sex, girls that had bad sexual experiences and wish they knew more about consent when they were younger, people CRYING from playing our game… We were speechless. We knew we wanted to do something positive and kind of sex-ed when we set ourselves to make this game, but this was more than what we expected. We were extremely moved. I’d reply to some of the messages over here and others I wouldn’t, but copied and pasted every single one of them to our dev group chatroom and we’d all feel uplifted and motivated. We wanted to do this right, so we set ourselves to do our best for the rest of the game.

So… we soon started getting people wanting to donate money to us so we could work on the game easily. We didn’t want to accept donations for two reasons:
1) This was a spare time project we wanted to do for NaNoRenO, and in the spirit of the jam we wanted to keep it free, even if some of us were taking time off from work.
2) We wouldn’t know how to split the money anyway, since we thought we’d get like $100 and it was 8 of us. Also, giving all the money to only one or some members of the team would be unfair.
But we kept getting messages about it, so we had a meeting and decided to spend the fans’ money not on ourselves but maybe some sort of special treat? That’s when we voted for partial voice acting, since I had commissioned Penni (Akki’s VA) for some Akki lines from my own pocket on a whim and we thought it was cool :)
So we went ahead, opened donations and contacted Penni to cast some of her friends as VAs :)
And that’s how we were set for the rest of the development!

Full Release

What went right:
- We finished all routes!
- We managed to get lovely voice acting!
- We got extra art (more chibis and the food/items)!
- We got animated emotes! And human disguise sprites!
- We got a cool gallery with completion marking!
- Fans were again extremely supportive during development and after release!

I (the artist) became completely desensitized to porn photos looking for references (before this game, I’d only tolerate hentai art for 18+ stuff, hahaha :’D ). Our writer would often forget what she had written the night before when I asked about clarification to draw something (so much lack of sleep), but she was a champ again and did a great job! We went over Kael’s route a few times before we were both comfortable with it as well (originally, Claire was gonna be on top, but we ended changing it for personal reasons).
Lani made the delicious-looking food items and Silver did some fun extra chibis before disappearing to work on her own projects. KingV did some GUI work as well before falling ill (she returned to us recently).
And Quil fixed all the bugs and made an amazing custom gallery and scene replay system <3 We could not be prouder!

What Didn’t Go as Planned:
- Art took forever and a day to get done now that I was back to working freelance fulltime (and catching up with pendings I kicked forward during March).
- Voice acting was a hassle and a half. We waited forever for the lines because the VAs were busy, then it was con season and they were traveling and busy, and then they ran into personal problems.
- We kept giving out potential release dates based on the deadlines our VAs would give us, but they’d fall behind schedule and our fans started to get antsy and plainly disappointed.
- Long and tedious scene directing would again eat time from art and other things.
- When we finally got the voice files, they were on different volumes and we had to ask our lord and saviour Ziassan (bless him) to help us equalise.
- After equalizing, we still had to go and tweak some of the voices a bit more (I learned how to use Audacity just for that. Yay new skill! xD )
- Playtesting TOOK FOREVER. Variables were all over the place with 3 people touching the code and it took us a while to get the sex scenes to work as intended.
- SCENE REPLAY WAS A HEADACHE.
- CHECKING THAT EVERY CG WAS UNLOCKABLE ON THE GALLERY WAS ANOTHER NIGHTMARE. (Why did we do this to ourselves?)

So what this taught us was that free games take forever, even if you don’t manage to do all the things you want to do. At some point you’re so tired and you just want the game out and to stop suffering.
Voice acting takes a lot of work! We though it’d be pretty straightforward, but we had to cut lines and edit volume, and some of the lines we got didn’t match what we had in mind when we handed the script over (some were missing completely as well). We have mad respect now towards voice acting directors and sound engineerings that we didn’t have before; it was really eye-opening.

After all this, we decided this was fun but we don’t want to do this again anytime soon. Me and the writer in particular are pretty behind schedule after this and we need to catch up!

We are very happy and proud of what we did, though.
Could we have done it differently? Sure, but this is pretty much what we had in mind when we decided to do this, so we feel we did the job nicely.
Could we have had MORE stuff? Absolutely! But we were tired and we devoted enough time and love to the project as it is, and we didn’t want to keep delaying things forever (or missing sleep or getting even more behind on projects and bills).
I’m particularly sad I couldn’t give second arm positions to the characters, polish Akki’s foreplay CG and clean up some of the others, and not being able to make a colored cut-in for each of the long endings.

What’s Next For Us?

Keeping in touch with you guys, maybe making a little special something after the favorite character poll is over, and, in a couple of months after we’re well rested from this and we’ve caught up with our work and life, make that digital artbook we promised you.

Speaking of artbook, I’m going to make an official announcement later on about it with the specifics, but here’s a heads up: we want to include your fanart and some of your short fics about the characters! So if you can draw and/or write, we’d be thrilled to have your take on our characters <3 (this is just a heads up, btw, do not start doing things until we have the specifics we’ll need, just in case xD )

And finally… I’ve said this many many times over at twitter and here at tumblr, but it’s never too many times to say it again:
Thank you.
Thank you for reading this long wall of text, for all your support during and after development, for sharing your thoughts with us and your personal stories, and for playing and liking our silly game.
We love you all very much.

Pudding Fluff (Deji)
SugarScript Team