Holy cow, people actually responded to this. I feel somewhat honored. And a bit baffled that somehow, people managed to decrypt my late-night ravings that I was sure would be totally ignored.
So, thank you all. I'm going to try and acknowledge your contributions and answer some of the questions directed at me.
Beatru: Thank you for chiming in! Your game sounds interesting, and I wish you luck on it. Your comments are quite prudent! Certainly, adding polish quickly adds a great deal of expense for this system, and it's been pointed out to me that even the numbers I quoted as a bare minimum still qualify as a good deal of work. I believe you're also likely about a 3D engine? That makes a lot of things easier, and other things harder - As I'm sure you know. Regardless, thank you for chiming in, your perspective on this is quite valuable.
Habisain, thank you for pointing out some of the games that do similar things! I'll be sure to examine some of them, thank you. Lack of control as a mechanic is quite underutilized, I agree, especially when we're talking about the contrast between control and lack thereof. A few noteable examples I remember that did use this to some extent are Corruption of Champions and its modern corollaries - Trials in Tainted Space from the same dev, the sequel COC 2, and Lilith's Throne, to name a few. There's a sad shortage of art in the games (text-based) and it's all entirely turn-based, but they're definitely there and definitely doing the thing you're talking about.
As for QTEs, the main issue with them is twofold: First, being disconnected from the game mechanics make sit so that you sort of have to learn a whole new set of mechanics, and then the consequences are either far too drastic for a player in that situation, or appropriately scaled but laughably weak. Games like DDR get around that problem by making the entire game about it, giving you plenty of practice. Another way to tackle it is to tie the controls of the QTE to the mechanics of the game - Instead of them telling you which button to press, which buttons you press affects what happens in the QTE, as an example.
Another example is Paper Mario's rather compelling use of QTEs to boost your attack power - The consequence is interesting but not wholly dire (at first), and pulling it off makes you feel like you got away with something. And a lot of them have degrees of success, instead of just binary failure or success - You can do poorly at an attack and end up dealing the enemy a glancing blow that still does some damage as a consolation, do relatively well and land a solid hit, or, if you're very skilled and a bit lucky, you can max out the attack and basically get the equivalent of a critical hit. If you design a relatively high skill ceiling into this kind of system, guess what? You get skill based progression instead of/alongside normal progression. Paper Mario was actually sort of the inspiration for this, weirdly - Not a hentai game, but it's good to take notes from normal games, as they tend to have a larger diversity of mechanics since there's just... More of them. And a lot of those can translate quite well.
Yes, the code complexity seems like the main issue, unfortunately. Honestly I'ms tarting to see how it might be difficult to put something like this together, and if not handled carefully it could end up being very niche. Even so, it does seem like an interesting challenge, nonetheless.
Tenma, you seem to have caught on later in the discussion, but the general idea here would be something like (Overworld/Movement Gameplay)->(Combat Gameplay)->(Struggle Mechanics), which then branches off into looping back to combat, or in a few cases ends combat and winds up back at Overworld/Movement. You have a good point about there being a fine line between this and torture porn - Or in some interpretations, this basically being torture porn. If I was to try and do something like this myself, I'd probably try and avoid as much of the really dark and hopeless stuff as possible. That's kind of what I don't like about the bad ends/game overs that a lot of games tend to plonk at the end of a combat failure - It actively encourages savescumming which breaks immersion, and makes it impossible to play through failure, which has some really dismal implications for... Life in general. I believe Habisain made some of those same points, and while I can understand Slicer's perspective on not wanting to play through rape, there are plenty of games that cater to that already. As for your commentary on the affects playing through rape has on the narrative, I believe you've realized that that largely depends on the game's structure both narratively and mechanically. And yes, playing a battlefuck game as a female would be very interesting ;P I've had that same thought, as it happens.
I wish I had been here while there was some discussion going on, I... Honestly wasn't expecting any response at all, given how terribly put together the original post was. I lament the direction the thread has gone, but at least there's some good discussion in here so far. Again, thank you to everyone who contributed. Your perspectives were enlightening, and your enthusiasm is deeply appreciated.
