2 Guys 1 Laptop [Free] [Short] [Kinetic] [Furry] [NSFW BxB… sort of…?]

[TanteiSakana]

Well, while I'm here, I might as well try advertising the short visual novel I just finished :p

In an effort to completely destroy any chances of finding a target audience for my content, I've made a completely linear visual novel about two mostly straight furry guys experimenting and watching lesbian porn together.

Find the game here!
Find the teaser video here!

Nothing explicit is shown, but you can only be so SFW with a premise like this, and the game does talk about sexuality in depth. Since there's an adult content section, but 18+ games are also advertised here, I'm not quite sure if I've put this in the right place—if I haven't, please let me know.

Questions for Feedback

1. Does the art style work? Is the lack of color a dealbreaker, or the crosshatching an eyestrain problem?
2. If you aren't usually interested in furry stuff, was this enjoyable? What could a furry work do to catch your interest?
3. Was the story interesting or relatable at all? Were the alternate universe aspects introduced well enough for things to make sense?
4. Do you think the lack of explicit content works, or does it just awkwardly hold the game back?

[SashaMac]

I'm not very experienced with visual novels, so I have a question for you and everyone else. Are completely (or mostly) linear visual novels just as commercially viable as ones that have a bunch of different paths? I say this because I would like to use the VN format instead of writing a novel to tell stories, but I don't think I would be able to put much depth into different paths.

[TanteiSakana]

I'm likely not the right person to ask about commercial viability, but I do know that there have been at least a few very high-profile linear visual novels, with Higurashi and its various adaptions probably being one of the most well-known.

From an artistic standpoint… I do think linear visual novels can be very engaging, but that they need to sort of make up for their lack of interactivity to do this. With interactive games, it seems people are willing to forgive polish issues if the game mechanics are interesting—but I feel that with a linear visual novel, you're effectively making a long comic, and the quality of the writing, artwork, and music has to carry everything. Like a comic, this can be a zero-sum game where good writing can make up for odd looking artwork and such, but I think making this work requires a bit of a different frame of mind than developing branching games, and that hitting a good balance here is probably essential to commercial success.

With this game, I had trouble thinking of of good ways to make the narrative branch, and decided it would be better to make a good linear game instead of a mediocre branching one. This game probably could have worked as a short story in prose, but I tried to take advantage of the medium as much as I could. I think being able to use facial expressions to imply things about the characters added some things to the story, as did the visual irony of the game being about watching porn that the audience never gets to see—and that doing this in a visual novel instead of a comic let the amount of dialogue feel more natural, and reduced the amount of artwork I needed to draw.

Although, I'd probably need more feedback to determine whether I actually made the right calls there or not :p

Anyway, hope that helps.