HunieCam Studio is a Western Business Sim in the same way that HuniePop is a Dating Sim. Created by the same developer, Ryan Koons, it casts the player in the role of being a "Camgirl Tycoon" in charge of their own website and employees, with the mission of making as many fans as possible in twenty-one days. A number of those potential employees are characters from the original HuniePop.
Watch the first trailer here.
A second trailer was uploaded upon the game's release, which you can watch here.
The game was released on April 4th, 2016 and is available on Steam and Humble Bundle.
The game provides examples of:
- Achievement Mockery: The game awards the player an achievement for contracting all six STDs on a single save file. While this is technically a matter of luck, STDs can be prevented with the correct items, meaning that catching so many of them would be the result of extremely poor decision-making. Either that, or using the last-day motel spam technique.
- Adaptation Personality Change: Downplayed. While the returning girls' fundamental personalities are the same, many of them have been given slight development to explain how they came to work as camgirls. Notable examples include Beli becoming more comfortable with her sexuality, and Lola looking for a career change out of frustration.
- Alliterative Title:
- The Title Theme: Camflix and Chill
- The Night #2 song: Midnight Monies
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: At the end of your three weeks, you get a number of tokens depending on how well you did that lets you unlock hair and clothing options for the girls, which have no actual effect on gameplay.
- Animal-Eared Headband: You can buy them in the Adult Shop and give one to the girls to appeal to the Furry Fandom. The wardrobe of some girls also offer this, such as Jessie with her bunnie outfit hairstyle.
- Art-Shifted Sequel: The Animesque art style of HuniePop was changed in favour of a more simplistic Western cartoon style. According to the developers, this change was made in part to defy being typecast.HuniePotDev: Ideally we can make each project something totally unique. We're not interested in being a sequel-ware company.
- Having said that, the Devs opened multiple opinion polls since announcement asking what art style people prefer, though they ultimately decided to stick with the cartoonish art style.
- Ass Shove: Never shown explicitly, but heavily implied by the Butt Plug item. Giving it to a girl allows her to cater to fans of the Anal category.
- Awesome, but Impractical:
- A girl who has both high talent and high style can do her own photo shoots to gain the greatest possible number of fans, and earn more money from each fan when they do cam shows. The problem is that a girl's wage doubles each time you raise either talent or style by one point, so that whereas a girl with 1 talent and 1 style earns $1/hr, a girl with 5 talent and 5 style earns $256/hr. High wages can negate the benefit of the money she brings in, so it makes more sense to have style-heavy girls who focus on photo shoots and talent-heavy girls who focus on cam shows. At least in normal mode you can take a style-dominant girl who's built up a large fanbase and max her talent later on in order to turn her into a money earner, and you can consider hiring a girl with high base stats like Renee or Marlena from the modeling agency in the later game when you've accumulated the fanbase and items to support them. In hard mode there's no such wiggle room because the starting wage is $3/hr, which means a 5-5 girl costs $768/hr! And sure, you can cut that in half with a piggy bank, but by the late game you need all available slots for fetish items to increase fan count. All that makes even Lola, Candace, and Brooke kind of tricky to work with in hard mode, while making Renee and especially Marlena barely usable except for the seedy motel.
- Hiring a high talent girl from the modeling agency before you've gotten a large enough fanbase for her through advertising or a photo shoot girl who serves the same fetishes. Talent enables a girl to earn more money from her fans, but if there isn't a large enough fanbase she will cost more money to employ than she earns.
- Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Aside the two default fetishes a girl satisfies, there's optional fetishes you can boost her up with. You know, the usuals: sex toys, an Animal-Eared Headband for the furries, a ball gag for those into bondage, a gallon of water for those that have a pee fetish, and a chocolate cake for the people that like cake farting.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Kyu is once again the master of this. At the end of the game, she says that you can always replay to get a higher score, not that she cares because she's a fictional character.
- Black Comedy Burst: Audrey's reaction to finding out the protagonist of the previous game was cheating on her with so many girls at once – namely, doing loads of drugs and turning into a bitter shell of a woman, desperately turning to livecams to fund her coke habit and try to reclaim some sense of control and agency over men – probably came off a little darker than the devs intended.
- Buxom Beauty Standard: Fans of the Huge Tits category certainly think so. Inverted for fans of the Flat Chest category.
- Call-Back: There are several to HuniePop:
- One of the Asian fetish sites you can advertise on is called "Yellow Plague", which is how Kyu described her love of Asian girls.
- One of the Bondage fetish sites is called "Closet Freaks", which is how Kyu described Beli after seeing her panties.
- One of the Squirting fetish sites is called "Milky Pink Pie", a reference to Tiffany's favourite colour.
- Aiko's underwear is called "Naughty Teacher", a reference to one of her bedroom lines.
- The Stuffed Whale and Stuffed Sheep date gifts are visible in the background of Nikki's CG.
- The vibrator and butt plug items use similar sprites to the Pocket Vibe and Fairy's Tail, two of Kyu's unique gift items.
- Some of the returning girls' CGs are similar to their photos in HuniePop:
- Tiffany's CG has her in an almost identical pose to her post-coital photo, the only real difference being that she has a skirt on.
- Beli's CG has her in a very similar pose to her post-coital photo, with her lower body lifted up and her legs folded back over her head. The only real difference is that she's doing a handstand instead of resting on her shoulders.
- Jessie's CG is a picture of her doing a cam show, just like her third photo. It has several similar elements, such as the box of tissues on the table and the identical webcam.
- Cap: You can have up to 99 cigs and drinks.
- Cigarette of Anxiety/I Need a Freaking Drink: Cigarettes and drinks are used to reduce the amount of stress a smoking and/or drinking girl suffers from making her activities, allowing her to work for a longer time before having to hit the spa. Running out causes the girls with those requirements to skyrocket in stress. There are equippable items that take away their requirement, though, but this has the tradeoff of taking up item slots that could be used to cater to fetishes.
- Chubby Chaser: There's people out there that like girls with a little more meat on their bones. Girls with the "Chubby" and "Thick Ass" tags can do good to them.
- Commonplace Rare: You only have a small chance of finding a single condom on any trip to the adult shop, despite the fact that in real life they're usually sold in packs of 10+.
- Continuity Snarl: Fans are encouraged to not take the continuity between HuniePop and HunieCam Studio too seriously.HuniePotDev: The continuity in Hunie games is like Zelda. In 20 years we'll make up a timeline trying to piece it all together.
- Conveniently Common Kink: Many of the girls react enthusiastically to any item they're given, including ones that involve catering to rare or unusual fetishes. While some others might express shock, no girl is unwilling to cater to any fetish, even something like Cake Farting.
- Cutting Off the Branches: Continuity Snarl entry above aside, it's worth noting that, as a reference to the events of the previous game, Audrey's descent into harder drugs was because she found out her previous boyfriend cheated on her (you could play as a girl in the first game, though it had no effect on gameplay).
- Darker and Edgier: The game is more in-your-face with the smut and Black Comedy than HuniePop was. In particular, Audrey's life taking a darker turn in her bio pic, and gameplay now includes both hard drugs and STDs.
- Despair Event Horizon: The girls becoming too depressed to do any kind of work if they catch AIDS suggests this.
- "Double, Double" Title: The Day #2 song, "Yaya Ya Ya".
- Drugs Are Good:
- Audrey's coke addiction is stated to be "awesome".
- Cocaine enables any task to be completed in half the time, and causes a girl equipped with heels or a magazine to earn talent or style (respectively) at quadruple speed. This is amazingly good, especially when coke is used for shopping to get enough coke for everyone, and can form the basis of an optimal strategy.
- Weed can be used to minimize a girl's stress.
- Steroids allow a girl to ignore the effect of any STD. Somehow.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Most of the girls' outfits have creative and interesting names, apart from Beli's underwear. It's just called "Underwear".
- Exotic Eye Designs: The new art style gives all the girls heart-shaped pupils.
- Experience Booster: The Stripper Heels and the Fashion Magazine halve the time it takes to increase a girl's Talent or Style, respectively, while cocaine makes a girl do any task faster.
- Eye Catch: To compensate for the lack of visual in-game fanservice, the loading screen has images of the girls in various fanservice-y moments. You can collect each girl's leading image by unlocking all of her outfits.
- Fanservice Pack: Inverted for the most part with returning girls, with most of them going down at least one cup size. Played straight with Nikki, who went from a C to a DD cup with no explanation (though she's also 28 pounds heavier than she was in HuniePop, so it's possible that all the extra weight just went to her breasts.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: Some of the returning girls from HuniePop have canonical interest in some of the fetishes you can cater to, such as bondage for Aiko or anal sex for Jessie. These girls still can't cater to those fetishes unless you give them appropriate accessories.
- Godzilla Threshold: If you're on the last day, and you need money to buy the last couple ads that will put you over the top, spamming the sleazy motel with all your girls even if you don't have condoms becomes a justified tactic. They will all have an STD by the time you're done, killing that save file for post-game fooling around, but if you only care about your 21 day high score the ends justify the means.
- Hartman Hips: All the girls thanks to the new art style, though Beli is particularly noticeable.
- Hotter and Sexier: Zig-zagged. The premise is hotter and sexier, and there's mention of hardcore fetishes and kinks. That being said, the game itself lacks the nudity and sex scenes of the first game.HuniePotDev: [Nudity] just doesn’t go with the art style. Trust me, we tried it, it's... weird.
- Item Caddy: A very common strategy is to have one girl serve as a dedicated gopher, doing nothing but making runs to the stores and occasionally the adult shop. On teams with a lot of heavily addicted characters, this role becomes absolutely essential. There's even a special item for it—the Shopping Basket—which doubles the amount of booze and cigs that the user brings back from the stores. When tallying up your end score, the game even acknowledges who you designated as your "Errand Girl". On rock hard difficulty it becomes necessary to have at least two, and preferably three errand girls to handle consumables, recruiting, and the item store.
- Likes Older Women: Jessie, Brooke, and Nadia attract this type of fan.
- The Load: There's a risk of girls who frequently drink or smoke (i.e. Audrey, Jessie, Nora) becoming liabilities if you can't nail the sequence for setting up your errand girl(s). They get stressed at a slower rate as long as you keep the cigs and booze coming, but if their supply is interrupted they get rapidly stressed and are stuck in a vicious cycle of needing the Day Spa until you correct the shortage.
- Luck-Based Mission: It's up to chance which three girls you can choose from in any one trip to the modeling agency, or which six items you can choose from in any one trip to the adult shop. In hard mode it can throw you off if you don't get the girl your build works best with right out the gate, and you're screwed if you have bad luck with the adult shop several times in a row and can't get the shopping basket when you need it. When you're thwarted thusly by bad luck in the opening days, it's better to just give up and start over.
- Magic Antidote: The antibiotics item can cure any STD... even ones that antibiotics don't do dick against in real life.
- The Millstone: Any girl who ends up getting AIDS can't do any tasks, not even make trips to the Corner or Liquor stores, without having the steroids item used on them, which only lasts for three in-game days. Other incurable STDs carry nasty penalties, but won't render your girls unable to do the most menial tasks. In either case, you're still probably better off shelving her.
- Multinational Team: Aside of the already diverse cast from HuniePop, there's a Russian woman, a Brazilian woman, and a girl from the Pacific.
- Never Trust a Trailer: Though the first trailer linked above has gameplay indicating that Jessie is bisexual and Nikki's a lesbian (or that they at least cater to those fetishes), there is no sexuality-based fetishes or mechanics present within the final game, nor can you control how long cam shows, photo shoots, etc. take in the method pictured. The second trailer, which was uploaded around the time the game released for sale, is more accurate.
- Nostalgia Filter: There's a Steam achievement for employing a staff entirely made out of HuniePop girls named "Brand Loyalty".
- Nothing Personal: Kyu will tell you this in response to you going in debt. She doesn't want to fire you, but she will if you fail to keep your money out of the negatives.
- One Curse Limit: The STD system in this game works this way. There are 5 different STDs that the girls can acquire while being escorts, but each girl can only have one STD at a time because you can't send her to escort again until her current one is cured.
- Race Fetish: The "Latina", "Asian" and "Ebony" preference tags.
- Serial Escalation: Take the (optional) sex stuff that made the original game famous, and ramp it up to a ridiculous degree. The devs are having fun playing with their reputation.
- Shout-Out:
- One website/community in the Promos tab is named DegenerateART. Another, catering to the Tattoo fetish, is named Homicide Girls, alluding to the real-life pin-up website Suicide Girls. There's also an Asian fetish site called Sakura Spirits, likely a reference to the adult visual novel, Sakura Spirit.
- The handheld that Nikki is playing in her CG is very obviously a Nintendo 3DS, and there are two controllers on the shelf in the background that are extremely reminiscent of Wii remotes (they're thin and rectangular, and have wrist-straps).
- Skill Gate Characters: Girls with moderate or no vices are much easier to manage than their more-indulgent counterparts, but stress out faster. New players will find them easier to keep happy, but more addicted characters are pretty much essential to getting high scores due to being able to do more work before needing to spend time in the spa.
- STD Immunity: Averted. The girls can get six different kinds of STDs at the Sleazy Motel working as escorts. Four of them can be cured by antibiotics, while the other two are incurable. They cause different penalties to the stats, but if a character gets AIDS then they can't do anything anymore (without steroids).
- Take That Us: The trailer for HunieCam Studio says it is brought to you by "basement-dwelling virgins", and that it's a game "absolutely nobody asked for".
- The official Twitter gives small blurbs about the girls appearing in the game. Instead of trying to make the girls appealing, they're all written to be as scathing and insulting as possible.
- A subsequent trailer calls the devs "degenerates" and the game a "depraved corruption of a perfectly innocent game genre".
- Take That, Audience!: "Abandon your morals and disappoint everybody who cares about you!"
- Kyu's congratulatory words for winning the Diamond Dick trophy? "Congrats! You're the all time champion of putting pictures of girls' faces on top of buildings! You must be so proud!"
- At the beginning of a new game, she'll tell you that she won't be paying you because she's already doing you a huge favour by letting you manage her girls, saying "this is the closest you're getting to female interaction right now."
- She also calls the player a "sick freak" when explaining fetishes.
- Tamer and Chaster: Despite a way more risque premise than the first game, it has no explicit pornographic content. Though this has more to do with nudity not suiting the art style than anything else.
- You, Get Me Coffee: Each of the girls is interested in cam work according to her bio, but you can pick whichever one you like to be a mere gofer who's always fetching supplies and never gets to perform on camera. Nikki, Kyanna, and Tiffany are most suited to this role because they don't drink or smoke and have minimum talent and style when you recruit them, meaning they're low maintainence and you can pay them the lowest wage while your actual cam girls are earning the big bucks.
- Your Size May Vary: Many of the girls look considerably more buxom in their wardrobe achievement images than in their sprites.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: As mentioned, you can make your girls have unprotected sex with clients and cause them to get an STD up to and including AIDS, just because you want immediate cash. Furthermore, instead of taking care of her illness you could just get another girl to replace her.
- Virtual Paper Doll: You can unlock various hairstyles and outfits for the girls. They've no in-game value other than to play dress-up with them.
