2270: HunieCam Studio: A Few Tips

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Have you been playing HunieCam Studio? If not, you should; it’s great.

If you have, you’ve probably discovered that it’s quite challenging, at least for your first few playthroughs. Here, then, are a few tips that I’ve figured out in my first three playthroughs, the last of which resulted in a lovely gold dick trophy.

The first few days on the job

While your overall goal in HunieCam Studio is to have as many fans as possible by the end of the 21st day, don’t sweat fans at all to begin with, since you only have one girl and you need money.

It doesn’t really matter which of the three starter girls you pick, since they all have identical stats and none of them are addicted to drink or cigarettes. Choose whoever you like the most, though take note of the fetishes they cater to, as these will be more important later in the game.

Immediately send your starter girl to do a few cam shows one after the other. This will give you enough money to spend on a few upgrades. You’ll want to prioritise both the staffing upgrade that increases the number of girls you can hire, and the inventory upgrade that allows girls to carry accessories.

Once you’ve upgraded your staffing, send your girl to the model agency to find some hot new talent. Pick someone who won’t break the bank with her hourly rate, because you don’t have a lot of income yet. Once you’ve got your second girl up and running, you can start branching out a bit.

Getting into the rhythm

Now you can start building your fanbase a bit. Remember that when a girl does a photoshoot, she gains fans of some or all of the fetishes she caters to, so it’s actually quite helpful to hire girls with overlapping fetishes. You can force overlaps with the accessories that unlock new fetishes, too; if every girl has a butt plug, for example, they’ll all earn fans of Anal when they do a photoshoot, which will give you a fanbase that will apply to all of them when they do a cam show — which means more money.

Consider upgrading one of your girls’ abilities with the strip club and the shopping mall, but keep a steady flow of income coming in; remember that you have to pay your girls by midnight every day, and if you get into debt and don’t get back out again by midnight of the next day, the game is over! Don’t over-upgrade, either, since your money will still be fairly limited until you have more girls with better skills.

Thrusting forwards

From your third girl onwards, don’t be afraid to hire a drinker or a smoker, though perhaps steer clear of those who are heavily addicted. Drinkers and/or smokers build up stress more slowly so long as they have a supply of their particular vice(s), so they can perform more actions before you need to send them to the Day Spa to recover.

Once you do hire a drinker and/or a smoker, be sure to either use one of your unupgraded starter girls — or, if you’ve upgraded them both, a new hire with skills at the base level to save costs — to become your errand girl, doing nothing but running to the shops to get drink and cigarettes. You can make her considerably more efficient by acquiring a Shopping Basket from the Adult Shop, which doubles the yield of both shops, and you can make her even more efficient by dosing her up with coke each day, which makes her complete her activities at double speed. If you find yourself with a considerable surplus of drink and cigarettes, use the opportunity to send her to the Adult Shop whenever you can, as accessories are always useful. Grab condoms and antibiotics when you see them, as these are handy during financial emergencies.

Oh, God, yes

One of the most useful accessories is the Subscribe pillow. This allows a girl to earn fans when she does a cam show — it’s not quite as quick as when she does a photoshoot, but it gives you a trickle of fan income, which will gradually increase your financial income and final score, too. Equip all your main camgirls with the best skills with one as soon as possible, and fill their remaining inventory slots with fetish accessories, as these increase the amount of fans they earn as well as allow them to cater to specific fetishes.

As you progress, don’t forget about upgrades, particularly those that allow you to collect more money and fans with each click on the cam and photo studios. Time you’re spending collecting resources is time you’re not spending micromanaging your army of sex workers, so being able to collect it more efficiently is a godsend. Also be sure to invest in at least a couple of levels of the Automation upgrade, since this allows you to passively collect resources even when you’re doing other things.

Uhhhhuhhhhggghhhhnnnngh

Money troubles? No worries. Whore out your girls at the Sleazy Motel and you’ll earn all the money they’d earn from a camshow in a fraction of the time. There is, however, the risk of them catching an STD from this, and STDs range from mildly inconvenient and curable to completely incapacitating and incurable. If a girl gets AIDS, immediately hire another one to take her place, since AIDS victims are unable to do anything.

To prevent STDs, give the girl you’re sending to the Motel — your highest earner, obviously — a condom, and you won’t have to worry. If the worst does happen, however, dose her up with antibiotics and she’ll be better in three days. Alternatively, you can give her a shot of steroids to negate the effects of the STD temporarily, though this is not an ideal solution.

Aaaaaahhh

Once you’ve got a good lineup of well-skilled girls and you’re making good money, make sure you start investing in advertising, since this simply allows you to exchange money for fans. If your cashflow is a little limited, prioritise the ads that cater to fetishes you have on staff, since this will make those girls more profitable. If money is no object, buy all the ads you can, and upgrade your advertising to be able to purchase more — and better — ads each day. Note that this upgrade isn’t retroactive, though; it takes effect from the following day, so it’s useless if you forget about it until day 21.

Also, it is very much worth your while to upgrade your web hosting and photo equipment, as these significantly increase the cash you get from camshows and the fans you get from photoshoots respectively. They’re expensive upgrades, but they pay for themselves before long.

Finishing off

In your last few days, ditch any “useful” accessories you’ve been using such as the Piggy Bank, Nicotine Patch or Wine Box, and make sure each girl has three fetish-catering items, increasing her fan yield. Rotate your girls between camming and photoshooting to keep both money and fans coming in, and be sure to buy ads each day. Keep your errand girl active, too; if you don’t need drink and cigarettes, keep her shopping at the Adult Shop for condoms and antibiotics.

Most importantly for the whole game, make sure no girl is wasting time: everyone should always be doing something, even if that something is just resting at the Day Spa. If a girl finishes an activity and you’re in the middle of collecting a resource, stop and assign her to something new before you resume collection, otherwise she’s dead weight for those few moments, and if you want a huge fan count and that big, spunking platinum dick trophy, every second counts.

2267: HunieCam Studio: Private Time Management

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Remember “time management” games? Diner Dash and the like? They were a large part of what constituted “casual games” before free-to-play mobile shit entered the marketplace and ruined everyone’s fun with microtransactions, throttling and “fun pain”.

HuniePot, developer of HuniePop and now HunieCam Studio, clearly remembers the good old days of casual games before free-to-play. Not only have they made an excellent puzzle game in the form of HuniePop — a game that successfully puts an interesting twist on match-3 and doesn’t just clone Bejeweled — but now they’ve made an enjoyable and surprisingly addictive time management game in the form of HunieCam Studio.

HunieCam Studio describes itself as a management/tycoon game, but set aside any thoughts of the complex ’90s/’00s-era tycoon games here: this is a game that is extremely simple to pick up — thanks in part to an amusingly well-written (and skippable) tutorial starring Kyu, the perverted fairy from HuniePop — but challenging to master. And it’s a game that’s designed to be replayed and experimented with, too; both to beat your own high score and to tackle some of the challenging achievements on offer.

But what is HunieCam Studio? Well, let me rewind a bit and give some context. HunieCam Studio’s predecessor HuniePop was a Kickstarter success story, promising a Western-style dating sim with anime-style graphics but a distinctly foul-mouthed Western comedy approach. It changed a little from its original brief, but maintained its core formula of using its puzzle mechanics to represent how well your dates with the game’s various lovely ladies were going, and incorporated some resource management as you upgraded your character’s abilities and bought the girls gifts.

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HunieCam Studio takes much of HuniePop’s cast along with some newcomers and puts them in a new context: the seedy underbelly of the Internet, specifically the “camgirl” industry. For those far too innocent to know what a camgirl is, you can probably work it out; just in case you really have led a sheltered life, though, a camgirl is an online sex worker, putting on shows from her bedroom (or studio) for the gratification of horny people who want to watch some live porn. Camgirls make their money through a combination of tips from the audience (delivered electronically) and particularly amorous punters who pay for some private one-on-one time with the girl.

In many ways, camgirl work is the “acceptable” face of the sex work industry, if such a thing exists, since many camgirls work independently for themselves, and the natural barrier that the Internet puts between them and their audience means that it’s a lot easier for them to stay safe from dangers such as STDs and punters who get a little… overenthusiastic.

Ideal video game fodder, wouldn’t you say? No? Well then, you’d be wrong.

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HunieCam Studio’s gameplay takes place on a static town map. Beginning with just one girl in your camgirl empire — HunieCam Studio’s take on camgirls has you working for Kyu, who in turn wants nothing more than to roll in big piles of money obtained through the sleaziest means possible — you assign your charges to various tasks, each of which takes a varying amount of time, but which can be sped up by clicking or holding the mouse button down on it. This has led many people to arguably erroneously describe HunieCam Studio as a “clicker” game, but it differentiates itself from popular clickers such as Clicker Heroes by having a clearer structure and goals in place rather than just playing endlessly for the sake of it.

The tasks the girls can take on include putting on cam shows (which earns money), doing photo shoots (which earns fans, which equal more money when doing cam shows), training their talent (which improves the money they make per fan during cam shows) and style (which improves the number of fans they acquire per photo shoot), shopping for booze and cigarettes (both of which cause those with varying degrees of addiction to either or both to remain somewhat more stress-free than their clean counterparts), fucking punters in a sleazy motel (which makes money more quickly than cam shows, but which carries a risk of the girl catching one of several STDs, each of which has its own negative effects that restrict her actions), shopping for accessories (which carry passive bonuses) or resting at the day spa (which alleviates stress built up through all of the above activities).

Meanwhile, as Kyu’s assistant, it’s your job to manage the girls’ time effectively and upgrade the overall operation using the money they earn. As you progress, you can unlock more slots to hire more girls and consequently perform more simultaneous actions, and you can also improve the pace at which clicking on things speeds things along as well as automating the collection of the resources actions produce. This becomes particularly important later when the girls start earning large amounts of money and fans with each action; clicking over a thousand times to collect all your ill-gotten gains isn’t going to work.

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You also have to manage the overall budget. The girls have an hourly rate of pay that increases as their talent and style levels increase, and at midnight each day you have to pay them. If this puts you in debt and you’re not back out of debt by midnight on the next day, you lose. There are no other consequences to getting into debt, however, so sometimes it can be tactically advantageous to quickly blow all your money to get your operation in a good position, then spend part of the next day recouping the deficit you’re left with after paying the girls.

The overall aim of HunieCam Studio is to have as many fans as possible by the end of a 21-day period. Once this time period is up, your final fan total is totted up and you’re awarded a trophy according to how well you did. This, in turn, provides you with coins that can be spent on unlocking new hairstyles and costumes for the girls, with a mildly lewd picture on offer as a reward for each girl if you unlock all her variations. (Interestingly, during the game itself there’s no explicitly lewd content whatsoever; everything is implied or mentioned in text. This is not a game to fap to.)

HunieCam Studio appears simple, but there are some interesting things going on under the (clitoral) hood, particularly with how the “fans” system works. Each girl starts catering to two specific fetishes, usually relating to their physical appearance — “MILF”, “Teen”, “Latina” and suchlike. Fans you acquire have specific tastes, meaning that girls who have a greater share of your total fanbase will make more money doing cam shows, and more money means faster upgrades. Ideally, you’ll have multiple girls with overlapping fetishes, and this can be partially manipulated by purchasing accessories from the shop — buying butt plugs and giving them to a girl allows her to cater to fans who enjoy bum fun, for example, but this won’t do you much good until you attract some fans of bum fun in the first place through photoshoots or paying for advertising to a particular audience.

As the game progresses and you get more girls in your little harem, things get surprisingly hectic if you want to keep things running as efficiently as possible, and STDs can throw a real spanner in the works, particularly if they’re one of the serious, incurable ones — AIDS, for example, prevents a girl from doing anything at all because she’s so depressed about the situation, making her completely useless to your operation. There is, sadly, little time to feel sorry for her, though; not if you want to make money and attract fans, anyway. Such is the way of a capitalist society.

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I enjoy HunieCam Studio a lot more than I was expecting to. Its controversial new art direction — taking a distinctly more “Western cartoon” approach than the anime-inspired art of HuniePop — actually looks pretty good in the context of the game, and it’s enjoyable to play. A full 21-day game only takes about an hour and a half tops, too, so it’s easily replayable, and for those with little free time, you can save and come back at another time. You can also continue playing the game in “endless” mode after the 21 days are up, but you can’t achieve the better trophies in this way — you’ll need to start again for that.

A lot of people describe the people making consciously “arty” indie games as the punk movement of the games industry, but I have to say, I feel a bit differently; while I have nothing against the art-games movement and indeed encourage it in many cases, it’s a very cliquey little part of the industry that has very specific ideas about what is and isn’t “acceptable” or “good”, particularly with regard to controversial and/or progressive themes.

HuniePot, meanwhile, don’t give a shit what people think of them and deliberately set out with their games to be as provocative and offensive to those with delicate sensibilities as possible — while taking care to ensure that what they produce is also actually technically proficient and enjoyable to play. That sounds pretty punk to me — and they’ve set out to achieve what they wanted to twice now. I hope we see more from them in the future.

1833: Sexy Puzzle Skills

I spent a significant chunk of time playing some more HuniePop today, and I’m thoroughly enamoured with it. It’s a game for which it’s abundantly clear the development team had an absolute blast making it, and it’s particularly refreshing to see a game put out without any regard for (or perhaps more likely, a wilful disregard for) the Professional Outrage Machine that perpetually whirs on the Internet.

HuniePop is rude. It’s even rude in its “censored” incarnation on Steam, but the uncensored version (available via MangaGamer or the game’s official website) is marginally ruder. (To be exact, the uncensored version features visible vaginas both with and without man-juice spooged all over them, while the censored version covers such disgraceful shame-holes with panties, but is more than happy to still depict women masturbating, boobs and posing in distinctly provocative manners.)

Naturally, the rude bits are what people have mostly been talking about with regard to HuniePop, but as with most games that happen to include sexual content, there’s a lot more going on than just a few (admittedly well drawn and rather erotic) pornographic pictures. A few days I talked a little bit about my first impressions of the gameplay; since that time, I’ve played a whole bunch more and got a good feel for the game; all that I have left to do now is seduce the love goddess Venus and two additional “secret” characters before I have 100% completed it… just in time for a promised Valentine’s Day update which is coming down the pipe.

HuniePop has evolved quite a bit over its development cycle. Originally pushed as a bit more of a “life sim” where you’d have to manage your time effectively, make money from part-time jobs and take part in numerous activities, it was gradually simplified into its current form. Part of me is a little sorry that the full-on life sim incarnation never saw the light of day, but having spent over 6 hours now playing the final release, I can say that I think they made the right decision. The gameplay is kept simple and enjoyable, and that is, at least in part, what makes it so addictive.

Even the match-3 puzzle gameplay has a surprising amount of depth to it. Match-3 is a hugely overused genre, but HuniePop puts enough twists on it to keep things interesting. There’s the need to avoid harmful tokens, for example, and the fact that each girl in the game has a “favourite” token that is worth considerably more points than others. The main depth comes from the items you can take into a “date” puzzle, though; these range from increasing the likelihood that a specific colour or type of tokens will fall when you clear space on the grid, to immediately consuming tokens of a specific type or in a particular area. Given that each girl has her own preferences — and according to how you play the game, your character will have their own strengths and weaknesses, too — it’s very important to take the right items in to a date, particularly when you’re attempting to win over the somewhat more hesitant girls, who require a much higher score in the puzzle game to advance to the next relationship level.

There’s another enjoyable twist on the match-3 puzzle gameplay once you get the girls up to 4 or 5 “hearts” of affection and take them out at night, too: they’ll demand to come home with you and that you give them a right old good seeing to. At this point, all nuance goes out of the window, and all you have to do is simply match as many tokens as you can as quickly as possible — no items, no preferences, no harmful tokens — while your partner for the evening moans and groans in what is, frankly, an exceedingly erotic manner through your speakers. It’s a complete shift in pace from the cerebral, strategic gameplay in the normal dates, and oddly, it actually does a pretty good job of reflecting the intensity and passion of a sexual encounter through pure gameplay. It’s difficult to describe; it’s something that will be very clear if you experience it, however.

I’m developing a real soft spot for the characters, too. As I noted in my previous post, there’s not a lot of plot development, though the developers have taken the time to give each character a distinct personality and relationship to the rest of the world. Porn star Jessie, for example, turns out to be the mother of college student Tiffany, though they don’t speak and they never mention each other by name; it’s something you’ll figure out by yourself as you learn the various pieces of information you can pick up about each girl. And while the game is essentially about making sure you say what each girl wants to hear rather than necessarily what you really feel, there is nothing stopping you deciding to pursue a monogamous relationship with your virtual waifu and shun all the others — or at least try and remain consistent in your responses. (Okay, you won’t get far and you’re arguably missing the point of the game, but the option is there.)

One particular highlight of the game is the love fairy Kyu, who introduces the game concepts to you at the outset of the game, and eventually becomes a dateable character in her own right once you successfully bed one of the other characters. Kyu is hilarious. She’s the main source of the game’s self-aware humour, since she’s written to be fully conscious of the fact that she’s a character in a dating sim, and that the whole situation is ridiculous. She also comes out with some brilliant one-liners over the course of the game and sounds a bit like Pinkie Pie, which makes it all the more adorable and amusing when she not-particularly-seriously berates you for buying her gifts “just because you want to fuck [her]”.

I’ve enjoyed the game a lot and, having come this far, fully intend to 100% complete it in the next day or two. Politically incorrect it may be, but it’s a whole lot more fun than getting mad about stuff on the Internet.