I respect your ... well, respect in not wanting to promote other creators on Caribdis's page, but is there a way that I can get in touch with you to ask you who you hold in such high regard? If so, I'll delete this comment afterwards so you don't get flooded with random contact requests lol. If not, that's cool - I get it.
Dr PinkCake has very very strong character writing as well as a large scale branching story that is very compelling.
Perverteer (who is actually on itch) has some of the strongest erotic writing and very good dialogue writing.
Phillygames thrives in suspension of disbelief when designing characters and sets in the visuals of the VN with very good story writing
Zanith is another very good character writer and designer
honorable mention to Parodos who in their first and in-progress project has some of the best comedic writing ive read
while i generally agree with you, i think its easy to miss these same criticisms in Caribdis' work, OIAL doesnt treat all girls equally in my opinion when it comes to story but its not enough to make me dislike the game at all. if we are talking about writing the overarching story that has really motivated me to play a game 10+ times i need to be a Stan for Dr Pinkcake. sure his writing was pretty dark in Acting Lessons, Being a DIK is such a well constructed "choices really matter" visual novel" ive played through. sometimes just for the writing of the characters and story that I just skip the lewd scenes sometimes to get to the story permutations.
that being said, we are "arguing" about 2 of the best creators in the adult game space so really these are first world problems
i completely get that about AL, it really can be a mood killer lol. honestly what it really comes down to is DPC (more specifically Being a Dik) was the first great creator I found when discovering lewd games. the style of the storytelling in Dik is just the right amount of dark for me, especially when compared to AL. I think we are really debating personal writing tastes here because I really really enjoy Caribdis' work but the imperfect (dark) elements in a story really elevate it for me.
definitely a good discussion though. we are working from my list of great creators, do you think there were any i missed in my initial reply?
lol Dark Cookie isn't bad but they are absolutely milking their Patrions with the "tech" update. honestly the game caters well to less common fetishes and i appreciate it lol. rather than creating a whole main quest arc about cucking trump/putin/kim (even though its written decently funny) i think the time would be better spent on the original characters they created like the principal's weird dom sex cult or the swim team. just a lot of effort for a storyline that is the main plot but also wraps itself up sort of.... definitely messy conceptually.
Love and Sex is a fantastic game and I cant believe I forgot to mention it. NLT is pretty good but ive only played Nadia and the story never really grabbed me. i can definitely get behind releasing finished games though. didnt even mention runey because i believe this whole comment thread was based off of OP comparing this to HH.
Ive never played anything by the other 2 but am aware of eroniverse. what games has Freya made? since searching "freya adult game patreon" in google leads to a patreon with 4 supporters
Dr PinkCake has very very strong character writing as well as a large scale branching story that is very compelling.
Perverteer (who is actually on itch) has some of the strongest erotic writing and very good dialogue writing.
Phillygames thrives in suspension of disbelief when designing characters and sets in the visuals of the VN with very good story writing
Zanith is another very good character writer and designer
honorable mention to Parodos who in their first and in-progress project has some of the best comedic writing ive read
Well, I'm about a half a year late, but thank you for the leads! I look forward to checking these other creators out.
In return, I'll share the names of the two best adult games I've ever played; Ravager, by 4MinuteWarning, and Desert Stalker, by... Ah fuck... I think his name is Zetan???
Really awesome games, if you haven't already played.
Edit: Pretty sure you're referring to Harem Hotel by "HH" in another of your comments on this thread, which is why I excluded it; Otherwise I would have felt the need to leave you my top 3, because there's no way I could cut any of those from the list and not feel bad about it lol. They're all fantastic games in their own right ^_^