Proofreading in Porn Games Is Important

I'm a freelance porn game writer and see a lot of easy opportunities for improvement in people's projects. While there is plenty to mock about the writing of a lot of porn games, this post won't focus on that, and it will mostly focus on the importance of and methods for proofreading.

Finally, if you see any typos or other errors in this post, I will pretend it's a 5D brained metacommentary on the nature of proofreading itself.

I: The Poll

After working on a lot of projects of varying subjective quality for a few years, I began to wonder what everyone’s writing process was like. I couldn’t know for sure what people actually did without asking them, so I polled some porn game developers on f95zone's exclusive developer forum about their writing and proofreading pipeline.

A disclaimer: f95zone is primarily a porn game piracy forum, so the subsection of developers who reside there (usually for marketing) is not identical to the full population of developers. The specific forum I went to is also a private developer-only forum, so these people are in fact developers, and it tends to be populated by solo devs instead of people from large teams.

The results of all replies as of 6 AM on October 10, 2025, are:

4 replies: Very little proofreading, no real spellcheck, maybe looking it over once before sending it out to the general public.

6 replies: Some form of spellcheck or proofreading software used at minimum, plus looking it over manually.

4 replies: Very rigorous proofreading process with multiple programs doing proofreading and/or lots of intense examination of the written material, whether alone or with the aid of another person.

1 reply: Generated and modified the bulk of their written text with AI. (I do not recommend doing this, for reasons other people have discussed to death elsewhere.)

3 replies: Joke, unrelated, or unclear, including one guy who replied solely with “I ship it like it is cuz i am a chad”. Their Patreon makes a respectable $1602 a month, so they’re probably right about that.

In my own personal experience, this breakdown of writing/proofreading pipeline variance seems about right to me, based on the clients I’ve worked with.

Moreover, when I see discussions of porn game writing online, from people who only see the end products, there’s a general consensus that on average, the writing isn’t great, but that great writing is desirable. Games with great writing will have people say “came for BOOBS, stayed for PLOT” whenever the game gets brought up.

The conclusions we can reach from all this:

1) The writing and proofreading process varies significantly from developer to developer.

2) The end products of porn game development are not always well written.

3) Well-written text gives your game some additional hard to quantify value, but possibly substantial, and therefore you want some amount of rigor here for the best results.

II: My Regrets

A few years ago, I made a shitty text-based rpg called Slime Girl Caverns. The details of the game aren’t important, especially since it wasn’t that great, but I typed almost everything directly into Twine, which had no proofreading systems built directly into the editor I was using.

There really wasn’t an excuse or a reason for doing it like this; typing all those large blocks of displayable text into Google Docs or Microsoft Word or any of the dozens of alternatives out there would have killed countless typos before players ever saw them. There was almost no actual money going into the Patreon because of how goddamn niche the game and its format were and how small-scale it was, and I didn’t actively promote it much, but I wonder if I could have gotten an extra couple of pizzas worth of money if I typed most of this stuff out in google docs first. Money aside, I don’t like having typos in anything I write, and I generally rush to update it as fast as possible if they’re found. My writing pipeline should have reflected this.

Although you don’t need to pay several people to have a look at every word you write, the difference between “literally no spellcheck” and “one program with a spellcheck” is earth-shatteringly enormous, whether professional writer or not. Software that proofreads, however flawed, is so good, and it requires virtually no input on your end. Even if you ignore some of the issues it points out for being false positives, it’s still worth looking at the stuff it points out.

A list of software mentioned by people in the f95 thread: Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Obsidian, assorted things referred to as “AI”, Tinyspell, Grammarly, and a Visual Studio Code extension that proofreads text. I haven’t used stuff after the first two items in the list for proofreading purposes, so I can’t tell you how good Tinyspell or that VSC extension is.

The next time I make a game, I’m going to feed virtually all the text into one proofreading software at minimum, and probably two since they all proofread differently. Ideally, I’ll do it with different font sizes/line widths so that no artificial line breaks can disguise themselves as natural ones caused by reaching the edge of the page and fuck with everything, which did happen to me once.

I’ll also briefly address another question: “If I’m making a Ren’Py game, do I only type my raw text into docs/word or do I also type code into there too? Or can I type everything into a Ren’Py code editor first and then proofread in docs/word? Or do I try that VSC extension or Tinyspell?”

Honestly, as long as the text you present to the player gets proofread by a software of some kind, I don’t think it matters that much which exact method you go with. The code should go into a code editor (IDE) that detects code problems, but also if you playtest your game at all, even if you type your Ren’Py python script into some editor that does not check for code problems (i am not suggesting that you do this), it should be very obvious if and when you screw up since Ren’Py will politely tell you when there is an issue and what line it’s on, or if it's unable to do that, it will at least tell you something is wrong and you can go hunt it down.

Arguably, proofreading text is more important than proofreading code, since faulty code can cause big obvious fuckups that you then know about and can solve, and text typos can easily sneak under the perception of the people who typed them. This is arguable though, because it can be much faster to fix a typo once it’s found, and some rare and incredibly fucked up bug could take hours to resolve.

As for a related question, namely “Do I do art or writing first?”, i dunno. People out there have their opinions on it, and since I have never been responsible for both the art and the writing, I have never had many thoughts on it.

III: Manual Proofreading & Methods

This is the biggest part of the post, because I didn’t want to post this until I had a lot of tips in here.

There’s no other way around it: you can have Google Docs, Grammarly, and some mystical AI who speaks in riddles proofreading your stuff, but you, personally, need to review your text and check for problems at some point. You can do this before putting it into the game or do it when you playtest, but you have to actually use your precious time and energy to do this.

For anyone who’s read Thinking: Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, you have to use the slow brain or whatever it's called in that book. You have to actually sit down, pay lots of attention, and move slowly.

…Look man, I don’t want to do it either, I really don’t. I hate manually proofreading anything I have written myself; if it’s something someone else wrote, okay fine, there’s something about it that lets me be engaged as I go through looking for issues, but my stupid dumb ADHD brain doesn’t like doing it for my own text. Yet still, I try to do it anyway at least once for every piece of text I write. You have to do it.

You can also (not instead of, but also) use search features in your word processor of choice to look for mistakes. Google Docs does not notice or care about a quotation mark that’s missing from a line of dialogue, or about accidental double spaces, so I do a Ctrl+F for double spaces, fix those, and I also do a Ctrl+F for quotation marks, start at the first one, and I skim through while counting by tens. If a closing quotation mark is ever odd, and i’m not doing the style of long-winded dialogue where you leave out quotation marks between paragraph breaks to show that the dialogue is continuing (not very popular these days but sometimes I do it), then I know for a fact that there was a missing quotation mark in the last batch of ten.

Also, I have a habit of leaving edits incomplete, so I’ll pay particular attention to stuff I spent a lot of time editing earlier or skipped around to edit something else during, since I have left incomplete sentences just laying around in the text of a story before and never want this to happen again.

Other things I ctrl+F for from time to time include the names of characters; if you write about a lot of characters, it is easy to use the wrong name by mistake, whether from the current story or a previous one. This also applies to code names for characters, since you don’t want a character referring to another character by a specific secret code name they were never exposed to in the story. Very embarrassing.

There are also some things that aren’t quite typos but just general editing things that you can pay attention to while proofreading. You probably don’t want to use the same adjective or noun a bunch in close proximity, and I think the best method for dealing with this is to entirely eliminate the need to say them multiple times rather than replacing nouns with other nouns. (eg: replacing “He slid his cock inside her, and his cock felt good” with “He slid his cock inside her, and he shuddered with delight” to eliminate the double cock without replacing it with “it” or “erection” or whatever.)

You may also want to pay attention to American vs British spellings, which some software does for you, and people from each country or a country in that linguistic sphere tend to stick with their own version of the spelling, but keep an eye out for color vs colour and gray vs grey and whatnot. People don’t pay as much attention to this as a catastrophic spelling mistake, so it’s lower priority but still worth changing if you notice that you used the wrong one.

Also, for stuff like Ren’Py formatting, making sure all your dialogue is being said by the correct people helps a lot. Nothing will automatically detect this, so make sure the large-dicked dom guy with a penis who is currently topping doesn’t beg for stuff to be shoved up his pussy.

My last bit of advice regarding manual proofreading is to get other people to proofread your work if at all possible. Your brain already knows the text that’s supposed to be there and can miss obvious mistakes, but other people can read the text and. Paying people to proofread is always ideal, but you can also just hand it to a friend or to someone who’s excited and ask them to check it over. Please only do this with people who actually want to play your porn game and express active excitement about it, and don’t force your game on people who you suspect are just pretending to be excited about it to sound nice. Also, in the case of Patreon, patrons aren’t automatically good proofreaders, because most of them don’t care about reporting typos. If you have some that are very invested in this, great, but I don’t think this is usually the case.

III.5: More Tips I Stole From Online And/Or Came Up With On The Fly

These are shorter tips, some of which I shamelessly stole and/or got reminded of by looking around online. I’m including these since I want the proofreading post to have as many good proofreading tips as possible.

• Change the look of your document by altering the font, text color, background color, font size, etc. This makes it look new and unfamiliar, and lets you find accidental non-automatic line breaks.
• Slow down! You can’t proofread effectively while reading as fast as humanly possible, which you tend to do if you already know how the plot goes and just want to get through it. Deliberately go through the text slowly.
• Google the mistake when you’re unsure of how to fix a certain mistake with your text.
• Spending time away from the text can decrease your familiarity with it and make you less likely to have your brain fill in mistakes with the “correct” version.
• Don’t do it when extremely tired or drunk or absurdly horny because then you’ll do a bad job. Wait until you’ve rested, after the hangover is over, or after you’ve had that cold shower.
• People have apparently had good experiences with running their text through a text to speech program. Hearing text out loud makes errors more obvious.
• Know and remember what tense (present, past, etc) and what PoV (first, second, third person) you’re writing in. It’s easy to stick with a tense or PoV after writing in it for a while, but if you very recently wrote something else that used a different one, pay special attention to this because you may still be partially in the mindset of the previous tense/pov.
• Do a Ctrl+F search for punctuation marks of various kinds and have a look at them. Some software replaces three consecutive periods with a dedicated ellipsis symbol, and sometimes, this symbol looks different or similar to three consecutive periods depending on where you’re looking at it. Stay consistent with these. You can Ctrl+F for them too.
• Some software makes a line break placed with Shift+Enter work differently than one typed with only the Enter key. If you use Discord, which a frankly absurd number of game developers do, you may be prone to using Shift+Enter in other software sometimes.
• If you’re solely worried about spelling mistakes during an editing pass, reading stuff backwards apparently makes it easier to do that, since it forces you to work at words one at a time. I have not tried this.
• Printing text out on a piece of paper may make it easier for some people to proofread it, but I suspect almost nobody actually does this for porn game writing. There’s no reason it wouldn’t work though.
• Look specifically at pronouns and make sure you use the ones you intended to use. If your game has selectable genders for characters, make sure you’re always using pronoun variables instead of accidentally using a specific pronoun. If gender isn’t selectable, you still want to pay lots of attention to this, especially in games with transgender characters, since it’s especially embarrassing to get it wrong in that case.
• Ensure your text actually fits in whatever text box you use to display it in-game. You do not want it to run off the edge of the screen.
• Some words like lay/lie have multiple forms that are sorta kinda interchangeable, but you should really stop and look up the correct one for the situation if you’re unsure.
• Make sure you know when to use apostrophes (‘) on words and how they work when those words end in S. “Lucas’ cock” is not entirely wrong but it is non-standard and looks worse to most people, and “Lucas’s cock” is the “more” correct one.
• If you get someone else to look over your writing and give feedback, have them look for proofreading mistakes after you already proofread it yourself, not before, since this saves them effort telling you about all the mistakes you would have found yourself. You can also have them put fixes in “Suggesting” mode in Google Docs so you can see what those problems were and keep track of what you tend to do wrong instead of just having them invisibly fixed.
• Mixing up to, two, and too, as well as their, there, and they’re, is really embarrassing, so don’t let those mistakes in particular make it into the final game.
• For emphasis, game developers will use bold or italic or ALL CAPS text sometimes. Try to be consistent with how you use this and pay attention to it while proofreading. I personally don’t recommend using all caps text ever in dialogue, but if that’s your style, do it consistently.
• If you’re afraid to look at something because it might have a lot of mistakes in it that you have to correct, that means you should definitely look at it as soon as possible.
• Don’t forget to keep track of common mistakes you often make and search specifically for those.
• Watch out for inconsistencies, such as sometimes writing out numbers instead of using numerals. This person’s blog post (https://www.forrest-turner.co.uk/the-the-5-most-common-proofreading-mistakes/) has a lot more examples.

IV: Minimal effort, large returns

Porn game developers like to get good results for minimal effort, and I assume some percentage of Daz 3D users are using it just because it seems easier than learning to draw rather than because they love the more realistic 3D artstyle. This isn’t even necessarily a bad strategy since it means you can make something in the next few months instead of in 2 years when you’ve learned how to make great anime titties, but this should be a deliberate strategy meant to maximize rewards instead of just laziness, or worse, giving up on your art dreams (don't do that unless your dreams are awful, and drawing anime titties is always appreciated by people so it’s rarely awful). If you want to learn Daz 3D and learn how to draw, that’s even better, and the sheer amount of knowledge you inject into yourself will probably give you psychic powers or something.

On the writing side, it is incredibly easy to put text into a proofreading software, and you should be playtesting your game anyway to make sure the scenes actually work. You have to write the text anyway, so you might as well take five minutes to copy it into various programs with a spellchecker, and you might as well take a few more minutes to look at the words on the screen while playtesting. The effort can be annoying, but ultimately it’s not that big of an ask.

By the way, make sure you proofread your non-game text too, like your steam page, your Patreon page, any posts you make about the game online, and so on. If spending one extra hour scanning something for typos and mistakes successfully eliminates a typo or two, which convinces 1% more people that you put effort into this thing and that it's worth buying and you go from 1000 sales to 1010 at $5 of revenue per sale, that’s $50 an hour. If you go from 6000 to 6060 sales, that’s $300 an hour instead.

Do you know how much $300 an hour is??? If any job on a job hiring site promised you $300 an hour, you would write it off as a scam. If you discover your loser cousin is doing something that’s netting him three hundred American dollars an hour, but he’s not saying what, you’re probably just going to assume whatever he’s doing will get him killed or arrested eventually. And you too could make About To Be Killed By Rival Gang money by spending an extra hour proofreading to erase all those rough spots in your steam page or marketing material or Patreon. Maybe. It’s hard to know for sure.

The developers of Void Stranger (amazing niche puzzle game for weird people, it's not porn although it has boobs) have a single typo in their steam page (“Trust you wits” instead of "Trust your wits"), and nobody on the team has fixed it at time of writing. Their game has 2700 reviews. Because it’s a weird game, and we assume the usual ratio of reviews to purchases is much higher (lowering total purchase count) at 1/15, and assuming they make 6 dollars per sale, and assuming they would sell 0.2% more copies if they fixed the singular obvious typo in their steam page, that’s 40500 sales to 40581 sales, or an extra 81 sales, or $486. They’re a two person team, so this is $243 per person. This is terrifying to me. Some obvious mistake you don’t know about could have a small impact on your big project and make you lose the equivalent of all the cash the average person carries in their wallet several times over. And this my conservative estimate: if the increased sales from fixing it prior to the game’s launch are 0.5% instead of 0.2%, that’s $1012 USD total, or the value of one existential crisis.

1%, 0.1%, 0.5%, Steam, Patreon, regardless of the numbers, if you have any significant revenue, any low effort tiny improvement in this kind of thing gives you so much money compared to the effort spent on that tiny improvement.

…Proofreading and existential crisis aside, if your game doesn’t have much in terms of gameplay, and you’re relying only on art and writing, then both of those had better be good. You cannot create a good game with zero effort, so if your effort isn’t going into the gameplay, you had better put it into something else.

V: Anti-proofreading and Anti-editing

With all that said, it is possible to proofread and edit in ways that make a piece writing worse instead of better. I feel like “bad proofreading” would miss a lot of mistakes or suggest changes that don't do much, but it’s usually still a net neutral. People don’t usually give this its own term, but I’ll call it “Anti-proofreading” because that's what it is, and same for “Anti-editing”.

Anti-proofreading is a net negative, and there are several things that can cause a piece of editing or proofreading to become its evil counterpart:

• Being really bad at grammar and spelling in your language of choice
• Not knowing what types of changes the writer or developer want you to make so you just kinda wing it
• Changing phrases from the writer’s dialect into your own (british to english, etc) while editing, on purpose or accident, without the writer knowing. Especially bad when done inconsistently.
• For editing, being really bad at broader writing concepts
• Not having played the game you’re doing edits/proofreading for
• Fucking up all the formatting and then the dev goes “god dammit” and has to spend an hour fixing it (exporting in a different format or just linking a google doc instead may fix this sometimes) that they could have used to just proofread it themselves.
• As the developer, only paying your proofreaders an extremely low amount since this means they’ll all be doing it as quickly and lazily as possible so as to quickly get to the next low paying job so they can feed their families tomorrow
• Being uniquely bad at sex scenes and then making changes to sex scenes, such as deciding to replace words you reckon are boring like "erection" with exotic euphemisms like "meat cucumber" or relatively obscure anatomical terms like "frenulum".

Therefore, as a game developer, you should always be open to the possibility that you might hire someone that’s about to make your writing worse. A good way of verifying that corrections are good is to have your proofreader submit things as suggestions in whatever writing software you use: Word and Docs both have suggestion modes. This lets you quickly go through every change yourself and then approve or decline it, and it is very quick since you’re familiar with the text and things are highlighted for you to quickly skip between. If you trust your proofreader a lot, you do not necessarily have to do this.

Also, pay your proofreaders, translators, and editors well. Please.