Hello everyone, I hope you are having a great day!

I'm Zed, the developer of Kinky Fight Club, and today its been one year since I started in game development!I'm super excited and happy about this. One year ago I didn't knew shit about game development, and i feel like I have learned a lot in the past few months, even though i still feel like I know very little.

I always wanted to make games, and I thought it was something almost impossible for me, without any formal education in computers/programming.  My biggest dream is to actually make an action-rpg game that is dark and fun, and balanced. However, i knew i cant just start working on something that big, i knew i had to start with something smaller, but i didnt wanted to end up making another of those 100s of games thrown in steam each month that nobody even looks at.

 So, one year ago i decided to give it a shot at game developing, but i decided i will try to make a good adult game. I always loved adult/porn/hentai games, and maybe i could do one, and finally craft a game that would be perfect for me. One thing that i dont like about adult games and that i really wanted to focus on combating was the huge amount of unoriginal, unfun or falsely advertised games, so i really wanted to make something good, something different, something that was not just a cashgrabber following the norm, and so , these were my first points:

* Make an original game, not a copypast of every other act, rpgmaker, or VN

* Make a game that contains lots of animations, and not just 1-10  animations/cgs after hours of text.

* Make a game with an actual fun gameplay other than just pressing one button for 1 hour until some animation/CG pops up.

* Make a game that includes content that as much people as possible can enjoy without getting into too weird/illegal content.

* Make a game with an original design, not just use generic 3d renders like a lot of other games.

Quick disclaimer I have nothing against Vns or Rpgmaker games, or other of the stuff i mentioned before, I just played so much of those that were copy-paste-different-CG that I grew bored of them, so i wanted to make something different.

So that was my idea, now that I think about it, it was so unrealistic at that point, having no experience and no knowledge, i should had started with something smaller.

So I started to make KYFC as a 1vs1 fightish game, heavily inspired in Jsk Games, and Furry Fury (the grapple system). If you don't know those names go Google them, they are great!

Originaly the game wasnt going to be so big, it really featur-crepped-out the crap of me, but hey, im happy with how things turned out. 

In the beginning I tried to make some 2d art, but animating  that was so hard for me( i hated sprite sheets), so i tried 3d, because a friend told me about the Skeleton system.
So i googled it and eneded up trying Mixamo and other freeware - rigged 3d models -, and using blender (since it's free!), and after two months of testing and discarding and following every possible tutorial on YouTube managed to find Manuel Bastioni's Lab for blender, and there the first iteration of Maia was created!.
However after some time i had to ditch that model since it had a freaking lot of triangles (which heavily increased performance by a lot). I ended remaking the model by myself, but using a skeleton I found on sketchfab.

So, after i started working on the game, i tried to add more hours each week, and after a few weeks i got to the point where i couldnt work more hours on the game, because i spent most of my time outside working (im a personal trainer), and while i was not with my girlfriend or playing Dnd with friends i was mostly working on the game. I came up with a solution, i would show the world my game and make a Patreon,  so hopefully i could get some funding so i can stop working ouside, and start focusing more on gamedevelopment.

One training montage and a hundred tutorials later I managed to create the first version of Kinky Fight Club.
I won't say it was awful, but it wasn't good, and people made sure I knew how bad it was. However some people also liked it, and I wanted to make things right, not like most AAA game companies where they just don't care about players feedback. So I trazed a base-line for the game, and then modified lots of things based on player feedback, and i feel like it was the best decision i took.

I think right now, the amount of player suggested features is at least 35% of the game, so thank you for making the game better with your ideas!

Another thing I wanted to deep dive on the game was the amount of animations. I wanted to make a game with a lot of animations, so the base version of Kinky Fight Club had around 40 animations, it included seven 5-stage movements (that's 35 animations), plus some other 1 stage animations.
The next version, on which i almost finished the new animations, will include more than 30 new animations, and after making numbers i ended up realizing the huge amount of animations that are on the game right now:

total 5-step movements: 27 (25 het + 2 les)
total 3-step movements: 10  (9 het +1 les)
total 3-step variations: 9 ( MM or FF variations of other animations).
total 1-step movements: 2
total animations: 176 !

Thats 176 different animations, over 48 movements! (and actually each animation consist of 2 characters animating so that's 352 animations in-game, plus another 352 animations for the cum animations of each movement! the game has over 700 different animations!)

And i realized, thats a lot!

So, that's basically my story, i dared to throw all my free time out of the windonw and try to pursue my dream of making a game. And its going quite good, im trying to be completely transparent with the stuff, because i dont like cheating or take advantage of people, if i say something i will try to make it happen, and that's the policy i been following with the game, i know some other people made Patreons and just starting delaying stuff, im actually working harder right now than when i started, and thats something i enjoy, and im grateful for the posiblity of doing so. 

I wanna thank all of the players, testers, and the supporters for believing in me, and my work, and giving me the chance to keep working on the game. $5 may not seem a lot , but it is for me, since a lot of people helping with fives, allows me to stay at home and improve the game as much as i can every day!.

There are some things that i learned that i want to share with other gamedevs or future gamedevs who want to start in the adult area, i by no means consider myself an expert, im just an apprentice, but i wanna give my 2 cents, as some of this stuff would have been usefull for me to know when i started:

* Make your first game small, make something that is a bit different from what exist, but dont go on a totally different direction, or a not-so-commom- niche (like sex wrestling), because the audience is smaller, and you may not even get some feedback at the beggining. I think starting with an ACT, or VN is a safer bet.

* Keep an eye for feature creep. Wanting to add a lot of stuff is cool, but the time that it cost adding every thing will end up consuming a lot of the development time, and even more, and you may end up, one  year later with an unfinished product, and it may be discouraging for some people, so gauge what things are worth to add, and what dont based on how much time will it take you.

* Use Discord! find the discord channels for the program you are using, they may be of help (like half of the time, the other half you will be ignored, but its normal). And also use forums to ask for questions you cant resolve.

* There is going to be a lot of questions you cant resolve, dont despair, ask on discord or forums, wait, and make other stuff in the meanwhile.

* Do backups, backup often and put it on internet/diferent drives, losing progress sucks. (i lost 2 weeks of progress due to a corrupt file, and thats small, some people even lose months, or entire projects).

* When people bash your game, dont take it personal, try to stablish a conversation and ask them, what didnt work on the game for them, this may help you improve the game.

I think that is all i wanted to say. Im very happy of this journey, im a huge step closer to becoming a full-time game developer, and i really hope i can achieve my goal of making a good adult game. I wanna thank all my supporters again, you made this possible, and also my girl who keep believeing in me month after month, even when the numbers where super-low.
If anyone is starting out there, and needs some help with something, feel free to ask me,
I also wanna thanks FoxyPaladin from Cloud Meadow, who was the only one that took the time to answer me and give me some tips and help when i started, and i asked for help to some Adult game devs, you are great and your words really helped me!

Also, to all non-adult gamedevs, i think its very shitty when you porn-shame other gamedevelopers, just because we draw boobs. I mean, we do basically the same work, with the only difference being that, and excluding people because of that sucks.
Last one, but , super thanks to those who helped me spreading the word, supported me from the beggining, and gave me advice on the game, the engine, or even helped me testing the game, thanks!

So yeah, i wrote a lot.

TLDR: one year of gamedev, im super happy, holy crap the game has more animations that i tought.

I will  be dropping a new update including player-suggested features and fixes in like ten days.
I  hope you have an amazing week!
Cheers!