How it Started...

[This is Part 1 of a 2-part post. If you want to read the second part of this post, follow this link: https://stobros-studios.itch.io/strip-junken-na/devlog/586642/how-its-going]

It all began in late 2021 or early 2022, when I was still starting over with game development using the Unity game engine. And after having to set aside my collectible card game project, which gave me a hard time getting it perfected, I've decided to do something much easier to build and that would not require a lot of assets. So, I searched for some good tutorials for some simple mechanic games and made some prototypes out of them, even though some of them were a bit too difficult for me back then since they required stuff that I hadn't learned yet at that time.

And then there was this browser game called Strip Poker Night at the Inventory, which used models made using a dress-up game called Minna no Kisekae (which I had been playing for a while before I discovered SPNatI), and I saw how good that game was even though I'm not very skilled in at least making my own rig for it. The other piece of inspiration that led me to creating Strip Junken was these YouTube playthroughs of adult video games, mostly having the name 'Yakyuken' in them, which was very interesting, yet very hard to find any ROMs or ISOs of such. Yakyuken, by the way, is a Japanese stripping game of Paper-Rock-Scissors, or Jan-Ken-Pon (or Jack-en-Poy as we call it in my country), where two players (usually a man and a woman) do a specific dance before the throw to determine the winner of that round, and the loser strips off a piece of clothing. The game goes on and on until either player strips off their last piece of clothing. Other Yakyuken games don't even have the dancing part, just to focus on the best part of the game.

After much research and a bit of learning some stuff, I've decided to begin developing the original version of Strip Junken around January–February 2022, with the plan of having 14 playable girls, 4 playable game modes, and versions for PC and mobile. For the UI of the game, I chose to make it colorful, much like any other game I've seen. Unfortunately, the project was left unfinished due to many problems, like getting the game ported to Android, which was a pain to do, and the game loading very slowly due to the fact that I had over 400 uncompressed image assets just for the girls alone, which includes all the clothing layers and the reaction variants. In addition, I also messed up the game too soon, which made me lose interest in finishing the project and start over fresh.

Originally, the new plan was to be one game, albeit with only six girls, with two being new characters and the rest being the four girls in pink sailor uniforms from the original project. I also cut the number of reactions to just 2-3 per layer, adding up to just 125 image assets. I've also decided to drop every other planned game mode from the old project and just include the basic stock-type game mode like in some Yakyuken games. I've also planned to do a working demo, which took me several revisions to get working properly. (You can play the aforementioned demo if you want to try it out before buying the full version.) The demo only has three out of six girls, and you're only allowed to strip them down to their underwear. Then I decided to split the game into two different versions and two different schools: Shiratori College, which includes the six girls that I initially included in the new project, and Nightingale Academy, which reuses three out of the 10 girls I scrapped from the original project and gives them a revamp.

Eventually, I've decided to make both games function a bit like The Legend of Zelda: Oracles of Season and Ages (for the Game Boy Color), where you have to play both for the ultimate adventure, where a simple little password system is involved, and you need to jot down some clues given by the girls after beating them once in normal difficulty. I can't tell you what to do with the passwords until you figure it out for yourself. As for the music and sound effects, royalty-free stock or original, I've decided to leave them off for now. I'm not sure whether I'll add this feature in a future update (as soon as I figure out how to make games automatically update when the update is available).

[To be continued...]