18+ Dating VN: How Important are Hentai CGs?

[Cosplay_Angel]

I am currently working on a medium-scaled high school dating VN. All characters are of legal age. How important is it to you that CGs feature explicit nudity (nipples and genitalia)?

Our current artist will draw up to implied nudity and the art would be inconsistent if we hired a second artist for those specific scenes. We will still have the smut scenes narrated in full detail.

[fleet]

Characters in CG's do not have to be identical to sprites. I recommend that youtry to find a CG artist whose style is very close to your current artist.

[parttimestorier]

I think it depends on what the focus of your story is, as well as what audience you're going for. If you're writing a romance story that includes scenes in which the characters have sex because that's relevant to the plot and their relationship, I think milder, less explicit CGs would be fine. I personally like it when VNs like that take a more "softcore" approach (like one of my favourites, Kindred Spirits on the Roof, which shows breasts but not genitals in CGs that always look nice and tasteful). But if your intention is to write an eroge with lots of porn, then an audience who's into that sort of game might be disappointed in a lack of full frontal nudity. In that case you might want to take fleet's advice and look for an additional artist to join the team.

[papillon]

Not all dating sims have to have naughty bits! Plenty of games don't.

However, if you're calling the game 18+, people will expect hentai. If you're only describing it and not showing it, I think a lot of the audience will be disappointed. While there is an audience for text-only erotica, you'd be up against a clash of expectations.

[Jackkel Dragon]

In response to the main topic, I don't think having "H-CGs" are required for a serious romance VN. In fact, there may well be people looking for games that don't feel the need to show nudity, as the Western VN environment has had a number of low-effort VNs in the last few years that promise nudity to boost sales of otherwise low-quality games. Even if you do show sex scenes, implied nudity or limited nudity may be enough for some people. (For instance, graphic genitalia is often really off-putting to me; I'd rather see toplessness and strongly implied lower nudity.)

That said, if you advertise the game as "18+" or as an eroge, then it will be expected to have at least some nudity. Especially in the latter case, where the label is pretty much there to mean "come here to see naked people".

To hijack a bit, I'm now curious about the reverse: a game that features sex scenes that isn't meant to be an eroge. Such a game would need to be marked with "adult content" as a warning label, so would that encourage the assumption that the game is an eroge? Is there any way to denote that a game is marked as "adult" as a warning against underage players, not as a marketing label for a hentai-focused work?

[dmasterxd]

In response to the main topic, I don't think having "H-CGs" are required for a serious romance VN. In fact, there may well be people looking for games that don't feel the need to show nudity, as the Western VN environment has had a number of low-effort VNs in the last few years that promise nudity to boost sales of otherwise low-quality games. Even if you do show sex scenes, implied nudity or limited nudity may be enough for some people. (For instance, graphic genitalia is often really off-putting to me; I'd rather see toplessness and strongly implied lower nudity.)

That said, if you advertise the game as "18+" or as an eroge, then it will be expected to have at least some nudity. Especially in the latter case, where the label is pretty much there to mean "come here to see naked people".

To hijack a bit, I'm now curious about the reverse: a game that features sex scenes that isn't meant to be an eroge. Such a game would need to be marked with "adult content" as a warning label, so would that encourage the assumption that the game is an eroge? Is there any way to denote that a game is marked as "adult" as a warning against underage players, not as a marketing label for a hentai-focused work?

A game with sex scenes is exactly what an eroge is, so no. “Come here to see naked people” would be a nukige.