Re: punishment sex vs reward sex discussion (discussion)
I excuse myself before hand for the wall of text.
My reply might shoot over the scope you were expecting, but most games do a horrible job at including sex. Too often it feels tacked on and just strange and wrong.
Skimming through the thread, I read several replies about persons who prefer punishment sex, simply due to the fact that it makes more sense.
The problem is, that nearly all games don't really create a believable world, where you would understand why things happen the way they do. Most games even fail at the pacing of the sex and especially corruption games tend to just have a sudden jump from innocent to pure slut.
I think the reason for all this is, that the game makers are not game designers.. hell most of them are probably not even programmers and make some horrible, ineffective and buggy code... they are artist at most, who can make pretty pictures and try to wrap them together into a game.
To get a believable world, they would need to start with designing the world in itself and make it believable. Let me give you an example of a world which I came up with in like 10 min:
Take a world where the males are highly sex driven and also stronger as the females. Due to that they always dominated woman, used them to satisfy their lust and treated them more like objects.
Over the time, the woman were fed up with it and tried to band together, leaving the males and forming convents/abbeys, amazonian tribes, secret villages and since the males didn't like that their toys were gone, they gone to war. At first the females lost most of them, but eventually they learned how to defend themself and the males were losing more and more battles.
After several years, both groups eventually realized, that there is no gain from it and that no one will budge, so they made a truce. Woman kept living secluded in their groups and males were living in the rest of the world. Now and then there were still invitations for males to join the female groups, just for the sake of reproduction. Male offsprings would be send out to the males again and females were kept in the group. To sustain themself, the females also traded with males for food and other things, yet there is always a tensed situation at a trade.
Now after several years the player joins the game as a woman from a tribe/abbey/whatever.
Now you need a reason why the player character needs to leave the group. The simplest thing would be some problems in the group itself.
-maybe they are a war monastry, having a fortress at a chokepoint to another race, defending their country from them and for that getting supplies from the males... but now they are under a heavy siege and you as player need to travel to other war monastries to get support.
- maybe there is a food shortage in your group and you need to establish new trade agreements with the males for more food supply.
- maybe the caravans leading to your group are raided over and over and they send you out to investigate.
- maybe your sister/the trading group of your folks got lost and you are send out to investigate.
- Or how about you got framed for something and the group threw you out, into the world of the males and you are now a little lost lamb. Now you try to find a way to redeem yourself and for that you need to get the privilege to talk with the leader of your group first, so you need to do something which affects the group in a positive way... like trying to get better trade agreemetns with the males or something else.
... there are tons of possible options on why to send the player character out in a world which is totally foreign for her.
And now the player character needs to go out... a world which is unkonwn to her, a world which is filled with horny males who try to rape her/seduce her/trick her/drug her and simply the fact that the world is totally different from the world and living in the group, makes it reasonable enough why the player character behaves like a moron and you can get her in a lot of difficult situations with that.
- A thief could rob you of all your money and now you are broke, not being able to rest at inns, not being able to buy food and now you need to find a way to make money (prostitution would be an option here for easy money).
- Some strangers could invite you to a drink, or maybe even a tavern owner drugs your drink and you wake up naked and bound in a backroom and need to escape.
- Shops might rip you off and you pay more money as the things are worth, since in your group you never used money.
Of course the group wouldn't send out someone weak, so at the start the player character is someone strong who might slowly but steadily be corrupted more and more... but maybe she is so strong, that she is not only the victim, but also now and then rapes the males to satisfy her lust. Decissions in the game and stats could keep track on the personality of the player character.
Talking about stats, you also need to think about nice mechanics... actually, most non-hentai games are not made for a story, but rather for a mechanic which is fun.
- you could give the player character a tiredness bar
- you could make her want to eat stuff
- you could give her a horny bar, which you want to satisfy
- maybe you have a good idea for nice battle sex and make the game for that.
With some mechanics in mind, you need to think if they are fun and make sense, for instance a horny bar could also be included into the story, explaining why your character was send out. Maybe your group got poisoned with love drugs and are on the verge to open up their gates to become male toys again, but before that happens they send only some out who try to find a treatment for it and you are one of them.
Another important thing are also the kinks you want to include in your game and how you want to weave them into your game mechanics and story. Grrl Power had a pretty nice idea with lactation. For those who don't know the game, it is sci-fi and scientist apparently found out how to give woman breastmilk some healing effects, of course to help mankind, the woman took one for the team and were all milky. Storywise it makes sense, you have some game mechanics around it and it is a kink you cater for.
I think that with a believable world, you can include reward and punishment sex alike and make the sex not feel tacked on but part of the game itself.