Today I’m chatting with Scarlett Young about the pornographic video game, Kronos Time Titan, currently available on PC. Given the way video games with NSFW content have been received, I was curious about getting her opinion on how she feels her game will fare in a market that continues to shun games with heavy sexual content.
So, Scarlett, tell me about this game I’ve been hearing about?
Thanks, Vaz. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about my game, Kronos Time Titan. So I’ve been describing the game as an erotic adult RPG strategy adventure through time. The premise is Kronos, the Titan of Time, has been mating with the wrong women throughout history and basically fucking up the timeline. His offspring is 100% female, so famous male leaders in history either become female or disappear altogether. When the other gods find out, they strip him of all his powers and give them to other gods. Fortunately for Kronos, they fail to remove his actual power of time travel, so your goal as the player is to help Kronos regain all of his Titan Powers by defeating the gods who have his powers. Of course, there is much mating to be had along the way.
In our pre-interview you mentioned being a one-woman team and developing everything on your own. What challenges have you faced so far?
A major challenge in developing this game mostly by myself is having to play roles I don’t necessarily care to do. Marketing is my least favorite job, but it’s obviously vital in order to spread the word and develop a fanbase. If I could spend all of my time programming the game, I would do that, followed by creating characters, quests, and stories. Not the actual sexual writing: that’s also one of the aspects I don’t love. Funny dialogue, yes, “ohh baby, yes, yes, harder, harder,” not so much. I’m also not the best visual artist in the world, so I have done some outside hiring for some of the map assets, and of course I’ve licensed and customized a lot of the 3DCG elements because, in my opinion, there is nothing worse than playing a game and seeing the same blonde bitch showing up in 50% of all the other NSFW games out there.
So just how sexual will the game be? How explicit are the visuals, text, and content?
The game is highly sexualized and absolutely not for anyone who is not used to porn. Perhaps saying “erotic” is misleading. It is erotic, but not in a tasteful nude sort of way. There are blowjobs, cumshots, pregnancy, full penetration. There’s even a mechanic of the game where, in order to unlock each regained Titan Power, Kronos must bed a virgin. When this happens, he goes into a ghost-like “Titan Form” which essentially allows the player to see right through Kronos. It’s something that is actually found in other sex games; I just made up a reason for it rather than just telling the player, “Hey, you can see through the dude you’re controlling now.” Content-wise, it does push the boundaries of social acceptability, but it’s nothing you wouldn’t find on PornHub. I’ve mostly avoided extreme things like scat, brutal violence, and gore, although there are some non-consensual elements through the use of Titan Powers, but it’s at the player’s discretion and, again, nothing you wouldn’t see roleplayed on popular porn hosts. Oh, and the battles take place on a D&D-type grid, and when you drop an enemy’s HP to zero you can let them run away or you can kill them, which does show some animated blood but no dismemberment. I’m told it’s not a total boner-killer. There are also 5 levels of stripping you can perform on your enemies (currently only the female human enemies) as you reduce their HP, so that would be considered non-consensual considering you’re attacking each other. But hey, if it’s okay to murder someone in a computer game, it should be okay to rip off their clothes of you want, right?
Why is there only stripping for the female enemies?
I do have plans to make all of the enemies, including the male characters, strippable. There will also be gay, lesbian, and transgender content as well, but for the purposes of getting the core features and content running, I just did the girls.
That said, how are you prepared to navigate the groups of people who decide the game is too offensive and not a positive portrayal of women and women’s rights?
I feel like, in a way, a lot of the work related to fighting Puritan backlash has already been done by other games. There was a time when a game like RapeLay made prime time news. Now we’ve got games with far more extreme content than “rape” — yes I know, hard to image — and the mainstream ignores it. That’s not to say there aren’t challenges. Patreon is the number one means for most independent NSFW game developers to fund their games, and they have a hard policy against incest, non-consensual sex, and depicting minors. To what level that is enforced is debatable. There’s a certain popular game which takes place during the summertime and it blatantly portrays high school kids having graphic sex, including scenes of penetration. It also grosses over $50,000 a month. The developers attempt to work around the under-18 and incest issues (you can have sex with your mom and aunt) by changing the relationships and ages of characters and releasing a “patch” to restore the original content. Is a fictional character 18 if she is called 18 and 16 if she is called 16? Well, yes, she’s fictional, and I think that’s the point. George R. R. Martin can graphically describe a 13-year-old girl guiding her adult husband’s fingers to her genitals and it becomes one of the best selling book series of all time. If a similar scene is shown, even as a cartoon, in a game, it’s going to be received VERY poorly. However, take that same character, and slap an 18+ label on her, and suddenly you’re “within acceptable parameters” again. As for women’s rights, again, it’s entertainment, and “violating” a woman in a game is no more anti-woman than shooting a cop in GTA is anti-cop. There is a visceral satisfaction in steamrolling over a sidewalk full of pedestrians, no doubt, but it doesn’t mean you’re secretly a murderer, and playing aggressive sex games doesn’t mean you’re a rapist or anti-women’s rights.
What platforms are you planning a release on? Have you prepared for the potential platforms to deny the game based on the content?
Right now, Kronos is available for PC and is distributed through the official Kronos Time Titan Game Launcher / Updater. Patreon supporters download a single executable file and the launcher will download all the files and let them know if there is an update, and patch the game, every time they play. It’s similar to how Rockstar and Blizzard do their game updates. That is a pet peeve of mine regarding many NSFW games. In order to update those games it’s often a mess of re-downloading huge zip files and trying to copy those files over, etc. So one of my big goals was to make it so I can send supporters new content, features, and bug patches very quickly and easily. I just added SubscribeStar as a distributor as well, and there are a couple of other places I am offering feature-reduced versions for players to try before deciding if they want to become a supporter. Eventually, I am looking at adding platforms like Steam, although that will be another big hurdle, as censorship can be inconsistent there. As for an Android version, there are no immediate plans for a port, because the base game is still very much in development with a lot of content and features to be added. I do have a plan to offer an Android companion app which would link to the PC game and allow players to take the girls with them on their phones and earn Energy and Currency, which can then be used while playing. Naturally players will be able to access sexual content and explicit images from the game, for you know, fun shower times or whatever.
What influenced you to make a game with a sexual focus?
I’m an okay programmer, but the market is saturated with traditional games, especially by indie developers, so I thought about areas which are non-traditional. I also played a few NSFW games, for personal enjoyment, and found myself gravitating toward the games which allowed me to play the role of a man, which luckily for me is most of them. After getting fed up with some of the poor gameplay (or no gameplay at all), I started to think about what I would want to see in a game. I’m not here to put down other people’s work, but the reality is the NSFW gaming world is lousy with Visual Novels and cookie-cutter games where players click through endless dialogue and meaningless choices. It’s fine for those who like that sort of thing — they are very popular — but I don’t. I grew up playing D&D and RPGs with my brother, so I wanted to make a game where players could roam around an “overworld” map and battle on a grid. I also knew I had to write the code from scratch, because I’ve seen what happens when a game gets ambitious beyond what something like a VN-maker like RenPy is capable of: it all falls apart. There are some really cool ideas out there, and some of them are making a lot of money, but when you look at what the games actually offer, it’s boring. I’m not going to say my game is amazing in its current state; it was very VN-like when I was first writing the code for the dialogue. But I have the ability to change anything and add any feature I can imagine (or supporters request).
Were there games that influenced you in it’s design?
I’ve been inspired by many PC games I’ve played or watched others play, but as for NSFW games, I think I first had the idea to write my own game while playing an Akabur game. I enjoyed the humor and the guy is just a great artist. I know I ragged on RenPy a bit, but I still think there are some developers who are doing a great job with the tools they have.
So let me ask you, what does your family think about your choice of game content? Are they supportive?
I grew up in a town in Idaho that is pretty heavily influenced by LDS. We weren’t Mormon but we did go to a conservative Christian church that put “family values” first. Because of this, I wouldn’t dream of telling my parents I am a smut seller, a purveyor of pornography. I have some friends who know, but they left the LDS church and are bound for hell as well. I was taught that sex is between a married man and woman, so the idea that I not only write graphic sexual scenarios and draw digital penises but that I sometimes finger myself while doing it would probably explode their brains.
So what about you, the person and not the persona. Is sex a major focus of your life? Has the pandemic changed anything for you and your personal life?
I haven’t been sexually active since the Covid thing started, which is hard, because I’m kind of in a “rebellious phase,” if you know what I mean, and exploring my sexuality was a big part of my life before. It’s something a lot of formerly sexually-repressed ex-religious people experience. I guess more time to work on Kronos though. Otherwise my life hasn’t been too different because I didn’t go out all that often.
I’d like to come back and talk more with you as the game develops. Is there anything you’d like readers to know before we go?
I know there are a lot of great adult computer game developers out there who deserve to have their work enjoyed. I would be honored if any of your readers found my game worthy of support and I am sincerely grateful to each one of my patrons. As you’ve noticed, I’m a pretty verbose writer, and I apply that to the supporters of Kronos Time Titan as well. If any of your readers want to support this game, and have thoughts and ideas they would like to share with me, I will happily listen and respond to their thoughts. Feel free to add me on Twitter. Vaz, thank you for talking with me today and giving me the opportunity to share the vision I have for my game as well as my ideas about the adult gaming community. Hopefully we can talk again down the road.
These interviews are done and published with permission of the individuals being interviewed. Any comments made by those interviewed are strictly their own and do not represent Vaz Anzai or Medium. If you would like to contribute, please contact me via my twitter link over private DM.
