The developer's second game is, in many ways, an entirely different animal, at least as far as gameplay and graphics are concerned. Sex scenes are gone, the art style is markedly different, and the genre is probably best-described as a real-time click-happy time management game. In HunieCam Studio, the player takes control of a camwhore operation and has to keep it running by recruiting and managing up to 18 different girls (including the entire "basic" cast of HuniePop, complete with shamelessly reused voice assets).
After employing girls, you can have them perform various activities, the most important of which are (obviously) camming, which earns you money, and posing for dirty photoshoots, which earns you fans. More fans = more money earned from subsequent cam sessions. Fans themselves are attracted to particular fetishes (teen, latina, etc etc), and when a girl performs a photoshoot, she earns new fans based on fetishes she satisfies. Similarly, only fans attracted to a particular fetish will watch the cam session. Each girl starts with two distinct fetishes (distributed in such way that no two girls share both) and can acquire more by means of accessories that you can procure from the adult shop. Each girl also has two skill attributes that can be trained. Talent increases money earned from camming, while Style gets her more fans from the photoshoots. It's all rather straightforward.
Other activities girls can perform include shopping for alcohol or cigarettes (some girls drink and/or smoke, and you have to keep the supply up or they'll get stressed), performing at the strip club (which increases Talent), shopping for clothes (which increases Style), recruiting new girls at the model agency, browsing the adult shop (which lets you pick up one of six random accessories upon completion), relaxing at the spa in order to remove stress, and... visiting a hotel for some "private time" with rich clients. Yes, you can actually be a pimp in this game. I wonder if Steam folks are even aware of that.
All of this happens in nigh-unpausable real time. I mean, sure, you can pause easily by bringing up various management screens, but it's not the kind of game that lends itself to tinkering with things at your leisure. Virtually every resource you earn (money, fans, booze, even friggin' skill points) must also be manually extracted from corresponding buildings by rapidly clicking them (or, mercifully, by clicking and holding LMB). The process can be automated via upgrades, but even then resources trickle very slowly when you're not actively extracting them, and since you can't manually extract them from multiple buildings simultaneously, you're forced to prioritize. Furthermore, you can speed up any current activity using the same method, but ain't nobody got time for that when you're busy gathering the money. All in all, I more or less hated the gameplay in HunieCam Studio. It's simultaneously stressful and boring (I didn't even know that was possible), and all novelty wears off within half an hour, leaving nothing but grind to look forward to. Once you get to 4-5 employed girls, the game turns into the proverbial equivalent of herding cats.
Moreover, some elements of the gameplay system are a bit... illogical. For example, since fans are attracted to a fetish (and NOT to a particular girl), you can have a girl with maxed-out Style do all the photoshoots, and have another girl with maxed-out Talent (and same fetish) do all cam sessions. I'm not an expert at this sort of thing ((c) Kazami Yuuji), but wouldn't at least some of those imaginary people want to see a cam show starring the girl they've actually seen in photos, rather than some other girl who also happens to have Huge Tits or Thick Ass? Not to mention that the above approach is actually more efficient for the player, in terms of both income and time management. Girls' salaries increase exponentially with each skill point earned, and it makes very little sense to level one girl in both Style and Talent. After all, she can't be in two places at the same time, and two girls trained in Talent or Style, respectively, will earn you the same amount of money or fans (and their combined salaries will be lower), with the added bonus of, y'know, being able to do two things instead of one. The game makes specialization in a narrow range of fetishes much more appealing than diversification, but purposefully inhibits your initial ability to specialize. This is solved by hiring girls with matching fetishes (as I said above, no two girls have two identical fetishes, so there is some recruiting strategy involved) and equipping them with identical accessories, thus giving them more matching fetishes. So yes, specialization in both skills and fetishes is the best way to play...
But why would you do that to yourself? Once you get the message, check out all the bios (some of them are admittedly funny), listen to girls' soundbites the first few times and click on things for a while, HunieCam Studio has nothing more to offer you. Now, I hear you can unlock outfits and hairstyles in a similar vein to HuniePop, but I couldn't even get that far. At some point it became clear to me that I'm wasting my fucking time, which is a minor miracle considering how much of said time I generally waste on games without stumbling upon the above realization.
Maybe I'm just not the kind of person that gets hooked on a game like HunieCam Studio, that is a definite possibility. So, you know, I wouldn't advise against buying it. Hell, I had my share of mild chuckles over the course of 2 hours I spent in it. Maybe I'll even go back and resume managing my collection of DFCs (it's one of the easier fetishes to build around, what with two girls who don't demand a lot of money and can be specialized... I wanted to build around fiery latinas at first (cause, you know, thatsmyfetish.gif), but the goddamn Brazilian chick with pre-maxed skills drove me to bankruptcy, so there's that). But the bottom line is, the gameplay is just not very fun unless you're a grind monkey addicted to floating numbers. 'Tis a shame.
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