While the game is moving towards release, we created a dev diary to communicate what this is, how it came to be, and what to expect in the future.
The Story
The main concept was to create a NSFW game where the sexual slavery trope doesn't follow the blueprint "He got some cum on her face, which made her a sex addict". Nothing wrong with that but we wanted this game to aspire for a more “realistic fantasy” feeling. So it focuses on the female perspective by borrowing ideas from a popular book genre called "Dark Erotica". The main focus is the action and the kink, of course, with as little filler as possible – this is an adult game after all. But it's also important to have a heroine we actually care about and villains we love to hate as they exploit her vulnerability.
The Name
The meaning of the name is that this is a story about a heroine so naturally motivated to please others, that with some coercion and manipulation she’d be happy to suffer any kind of discomfort for it. Which she does. A lot.
The Game
This is a game where the main character accepts her fate mostly peacefully and has very limited agency. In a way, this is a trainer game from the perspective of the one being trained. And we felt the classic visual novel style of gameplay is quite appropriate for this dynamic. The heroine is making reactive choices, responding to whatever is happening to her, and these choices can either determine the main route of the game, or have more immediate and temporary impact. As a whole the game has two main routes, sharing a lot of scenes between them, which can be completed in about 2-3 hours if you just read through it at normal speed. Probably more if you have to… take pauses. Which is a bit short for a visual novel but should make up for it by focusing on its main premise and not wasting the player’s time.
The Visuals
The visuals of this game went through several iterations as we were trying to find out something that works. Our main goal was always to have visuals that are pretty to look at but also properly visualize what’s happening. Which is a bit of challenge in a game where so much is happening – it’s scene after scene as the main character is moved around and placed in different… situations. A decision that is a bit unusual for an adult game is that we wanted to display the heroine in a beautiful and graceful light whatever she’s doing and whatever is being done to her. The result is an adult game that is definitely “harder” than usual in terms of what’s happening but at the same time “softer” in terms of avoiding fluids and certain body parts.
The Future
“Suffer to please” is definitely an experiment in many ways and we hope you enjoy it. While anything can and should be improved, right now it feels as a story that feels complete. Thus in case players are hungry for more we’ll likely move on to other projects with different characters but within the same shared world. A particularly exciting possibility is to reverse the point of view and do a VN/trainer hybrid game where the player plays from the male perspective and has more freedom to decide the events and outcome. But it’s still in very early stages of planning so we’ll first see how this one is received and see if we get interesting feedback.