The return of Mini Scenes?

If you’ve been following my work for a while you know I used to have what I call “mini scenes”. This was just a small standalone (typically hentai) scene that was based on, or extended stories of existing games. Or sometimes, they were scenes that use canon-like personalities of characters, in non-canon situations.

Some mini scenes can be found here:

Umichan Last Scoop
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/869936

Umichan Opportune Impersonator
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/844731

I generally liked the concept. It allowed me to take ideas and animations and publish something relatively quickly with it, instead of waiting to use animations in a full blown game.

A full game that could take months or years before I even get started on because I am already in the middle of making other full blown games and other projects and initiatives.

The main reason why mini scenes died out for me, was mainly because it was still overly cumbersome to make and distribute.

They used the same game making software as the larger games. So I still needed to make a new project and do all the initialization stuff as if it was a large project. They still needed to be coded and built the same way. I still needed to zip up all the additional overhead files that the game software needed to run the game. So even though the game was small, the file sizes were still large anyway.

And I still needed to make multiple versions (PC, Mac, Android, etc.).

I can’t even imagine doing this in ren’py, because it would take additional time to set up character art for characters I haven’t used in any game yet.

So on both ends, me making it, and a person downloading and playing it, all go through the same motions as playing a larger game, except the mini-scene is just a singular mini scene. So it’s not really worth it.

I thought making a template might help speed up the process (in Construct 3) on my end at least. The character art for every possible character was already imported, but I found that always using standing art was a bit boring. It’s why recently in Sentoryu I made what I call foreplay or intro images before the animation begins. So it’s not just a hard switch from standing art to a hentai animation and there is more static art for the character than just them standing. I guess that’s the fix I was getting with selfie images also.

Recently, I think I’ve come up with a solution that fixes all that.

A totally HTML based solution for making mini-scenes. These don’t use any specialized software to make. I can literally just make them from a text editor like Notepad++. The images and animations would be just made in separate programs, like photoshop and moho, and coded into the text file. No more importing images into a game engine and coding facial expressions and coding where I want the character(s) to be positioned, etc.

So, no image folders, no multiple files, it doesn’t need different versions for pc/android, you just run it in a browser like in the old flash days. I don’t even really need to zip it either. And since it’s html, it has dynamic formatting to like nice on PC or mobile device, regardless of orientation or screen size.

There are some downsides to this, but I think they are largely outweighed by the benefits.

Firstly, I don’t plan to use audio on these. I could likely code even audio into the file also, but it’s one scene, and it’s designed to be made quickly. So trying to sync sound effects and finding a nice bgm for one scene would venture back into “a big game’s worth of work for a small result” kind of territory. And since there is no audio, I’ve added sound effect words to some of the animations and images.

There’s no minigames either. I know some people don’t really like minigames anyway, or even playing through the game collecting whatever resource you need (like money). And especially replaying the game again to unlock everything. So here, it’s simple and straightforward, just clicking next in most cases. It is possible for me to do branching paths, and I plan to do that in some cases, but I think the focus for me would be on making a nice variety of scenes on a regular basis.

They also don’t have a gallery. Mini-scenes are designed to be relatively small and you can just navigate to the parts of the scene you want with ease. But I could release any animations and/or hentai static images contained in the scene separately, or even just make a version that serves as a gallery, where it has just animations and/or lewd art only.

I will have a separate post specifically about mini-scenes in a later post and use Umichan Last Scoop as an example to compare between the old and new format.

Below are announcements for the first upcoming new format mini scenes:

Umichan Wing Girl will be series where Violet tries to get her friends and various characters laid.

Cone Cleavage Chaos is a one-shot mini scene that is based around the time frame of Umichan Two Scoops. Carl hosts a silly fundraising race where the cafe girls race against each other while trying to keep ice-cream cones between their cleavage!

Deal and Desires will be a series about Zytra helping Ace secure deals with some of his dangerous clients.

Play Now!

Umichan Last Scoop is a one-shot mini scene that is also based around the time frame of Umichan Two Scoops, and is a rework of the Construct 3 version. The scene features Maiko trying to sell her last scoop of ice-cream.

Umichan Imitation Inspiration is a one-shot mini scene that takes place after the events of Futa Fantasy. This makes use of the animation between Maiko and Amber since Amber is not in Futa Fantasy. There is also an animations between Amber and Roise I plan to use in different mini scene.

Other upcoming mini-scenes idea I have:
Luma Let’s Loose – A series about Luma’s sexual liberation after finding out her boyfriend, Joiry, cheated on her during the events of Umichan Wing Girl.

And since most existing mini-scenes are in Flash (.swf) format I would like to remake them. Even if I have to use the same old art. Speaking of which. As you can see the mini-scenes are not just limited to 2D art. They could be any kind of images.