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.
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.
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.
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.
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.