Skirting the Line
Skirting the Line
A high-stakes management sim where the customer is always wrong.
Miyuki is a university student with a massive debt of 1,000,000 yen due in just 30 days.
Her solution? Sell herself in the heart of the Kabukicho red-light district to lure in wealthy customers.
The catch? She must do everything in her power to prevent anyone from actually having sex with her!
About the Game
Skirting the Line is a dialogue-heavy, point-and-click management game where you must use every trick in the book to protect your body. Navigate the treacherous nightlife of Kabukicho, using your wits, charm, and skill to extract money from customers while masterfully deflecting their attempts defile you.
Every interaction is a high-stakes negotiation where one wrong move could lead to a terrible fate. Can you pay off the yakuza before your time is up, or will you break under the pressure?
Gameplay Features
- Tense Dialogue Encounters: Engage in turn-based conversations where your choices matter. Persuade, deceive, and intimidate a cast of customers.
- Stat-Based Choices: Strategize with a stat-based dialogue system inspired by Fallout: New Vegas.
- Manage Your Vitals: Keep a close eye on your Money to pay off your debt, and your Sanity to keep from cracking under the immense stress of sexual torment.
- Multiple Endings: Your success, failure, and mental state will determine Miyuki's ultimate fate. Can you achieve the perfect ending? There are three to discover!
- Dynamic Visuals: Watch the story unfold with expressive character portraits and cinematic cutscenes that change based on your actions and outfits.
Controls
- Mouse: Click to advance dialogue, navigate menus, and make choices.
- Space Bar: Use as an alternative to clicking to advance dialogue.
Development Notes
This game was created in 8 days for NSFW MiniJam #18. It was a frantic and exciting race to the finish! I hope you enjoy Miyuki's perilous journey.
Content Warning: NSFW. Rough, reluctant, and coercive encounters. If you're only comfortable with very lovey-dovey and vanilla sexual situations, you may want to skip over Skirting the Line.
AI Disclaimer: Generative AI was used for all visual assets in the game. LLMs were used for minor developmental assistance, especially in the conversion of .twee files to JSON format, and for fixing a critical compatibility issue with the Firefox browser.
The main theme is "Bohemia Rag" by Joseph Lamb. The sex theme is "Great Crush Collision March" by Scott Joplin. Both derived from open source original sheets, converted to MIDI and instrumented by me.
Comments
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Not super hard, but an interesting gameplay loop. It seems too easy to avoid engaging in sex situations, especially later in the game, and there's not much incentive to actually take the risk, especially since you can't avoid sanity damage and get the money. It would've been cool if you could, for example, say yes to a client asking for a bj, but then, with a sufficient skill check, avoid having to actually do it.
The 1mil debt does make the game pretty repetitive if you want to pay it off fully, and it would've been way more tedious if not for the "hold space to skip" feature.
Thanks for the feedback. I think something that will help with the tedium is better gating and staging for the customers. More difficult customers should be exceptionally more difficult to deceive, but also pay out a lot more money.
Yeah, agreed! That's one thing I noticed: there's no real benefit to the more difficult customers, since they pay out just as much as the others. Perhaps with different behaviors during the interactions? Like, some being less receptive to the "talk your ear off" option or something like that, or maybe just different options overall.
I hope to see more updates to this in the future, since it seems like it could be really fun with the right polish.
Stealing from customers costs no time and loops forever. I beat the game on Day 2.
Good catch. I have a list of updates I want to implement after the game jam is over, and I'll add this to the list.
How exactly I'll handle the money exploit is up in the air. It will probably be a combination of: