Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Many-Eyed Hydra makes a Monster Girl Hentai Game: CYOA with Twine (part 1)

I’ve been saying for a while I’d like to make a monster girl hentai game.  Rather than just thinking and talking about it I thought I’d finally get my finger out of my ass and get around to creating something.  As I thought it might be an interesting topic to blog about you’re going to get the whole gory process right here.

I do have programming experience, but it’s mainly with generic languages such as Java and C#, and mainly making dull-but-functional desktop applications for manipulating probabilities and other maths.  One of the reasons why I’ve always thought about making games rather than getting down to actually making them is an unfortunate tendency to dream up projects that are stupidly complex and ambitious.  This time I’ll start with something small and simple.

My main strength lies in writing.  I’ve written a lot of stories featuring kinky sex scenes with succubi and other monster girls.  Because of this it makes sense for me to start with a text-heavy game.  Unfortunately text-heavy won’t attract as much attention as games with nice artwork of sexy monster girls, but it will give me something to start with (and I can always source artwork from other sources later).  Examples of popular text-heavy monster girl hentai games can be found over on Fenoxo’s site.  I’m sure most of you out there know of the existence of Corruption of Champions.

I won’t try to make anything as complex as CoC to start with.  First off I’ll start with a simple Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA).  This will allow me to take the type of scene I normally fill my stories with and juice it up with a bit of interaction for the reader.

Next up is to look for tools.  In the past another of my weaknesses was to bang my head against a wall trying to build game engines from scratch.  There is no need to reinvent the wheel if someone else has already put a perfectly decent toolkit together.

Twine is “an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.”  It was created by Chris Klimas in 2009.  I have no real experience of working with it.  People recommended giving it a look on the MGU forums and a quick check of the wiki revealed it has additional functionality should I want to move on to something more complex than a simple CYOA.  This is important as I do have some ideas for adding player stats and other variables.  From what I read, Twine should be more than sufficient in creating gamebooks along the lines of the classic Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf series (Personally I always had a soft spot for J. H. Brennan’s GrailQuest).

That will be the next step.  For now I’ll keep to a vanilla CYOA.

Now I have a toolkit to play around with it’s time to think about what story I want to tell.  As I want to keep it simple this will be a single interactive encounter with a sexy monster girl.  Originally I thought it might be a slime girl similar to the one I wrote about in "Jackson in HRPG-World 3" (Japanese monster girl HRPGs always seem to have a blue slime girl as the first encounter – a nod to Dragon Quest, I think).  Then I remembered thinking about this before and the plan had been to base it on a short story of mine: “Ways to Break a Good Man, #1”.

Unfortunately, that story is exclusive to my last collection, A Succubus for Remembrance and other tales, so I can’t just link to it as I would to any of my other tales up on Literotica.  It’s a good story to use as a template as it has an ontological mystery-esque start and a clearly defined challenge.  In summary, the protagonist wakes up in a hotel room after being drugged and . . . actually, let’s go right to succubus involved.  Here's the gorgeous and charming Ceptophthorié with the full details.

Hi.

Now Ceptophthorié, you’re a princess of hell?

Yes, that’s correct.

That means you’re an extremely powerful succubus, right?

Yes.

And you know a lot of sexy tricks?

I know many ways to cause intense sexual pleasure.

Um . . . yes . . . interesting.  *adjusts collar.*  So can you tell us what this game will be?

It’s a really simple game.  The easiest possible.  All the player has to do is go the whole night without choosing to have sex with me.

Hmm.  Are you sure?  That does sound a little eas . . .

. .

. .

. .

Ceptophthorié, please don’t suck the soul out of this human.  We need him to spread our corruption through this world.

Okay.  As you wish.

. .

. .

Um yeah, where was I.  Right, yes.  “Ways to Break a Good Man, #1”.  This will form a nice template for my interactive story.  The player will be placed in a similar predicament to the unfortunate (fortunate?) Norris King.  And obviously we’ll give the lovely Ceptophthorié a few more tricks with which to tempt the reader.

It should be fun.  Keep an eye on this blog!

18 comments:

  1. Hydra! Damn it! I have spend the last two weeks making a game with this exact concept, and now it's going to look like I stole it from you!

    In all seriousness, though, it's not exactly the same, though eerily similar. It's also going to be more game than story and have some more characters, but still...

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    1. Haha. The concept is fairly obvious for a succubus hentai game. I think there are a few that run with the same setup. I didn't want to risk jumping into something too complex and then getting stuck after a couple of weeks :)

      More game, story and characters is where I'll be hoping to get to with further projects.

      Let me know how your development gets on. Sounds interesting.

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    2. Anonymous, I hope you'll let us know how to find the game!

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  2. Hmm interesting choices/thoughts. This reminds me of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks ( well sort of ). Have you considered RPG Maker ? If you find someone who can create sprites and do all the art work ( or try out yourself, and gain experience on that field ), coupled with your writing I can see a good story unfolding. It doesn't take much of your time to learn the basics/advanced mechanisms of the program. You can keep the gameplay simple, and focus more on the story and sprite development.

    On another thought, creating a gamebook sounds like a nice/creative idea, especially if you intent to make your stories more impactful and interactive. Twine is a good choice to begin with, and if you are into a little bit more complicated stuff, you can give Adobe Flash Player or HTML a try.

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    1. I'm planning to work my way up through various tools. A smutty Fighting Fantasy gamebook is definitely on the cards ;)

      I've had a play around with RPG Maker, but the usual problem of not knuckling down and committing to a project surfaced. By starting this series on my blog it will give me the impetus to actually build and finish something.

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  3. If you decide to go with Twine at some point, there are options to add images in your own story as well ( using basic HTML, Macro, and even CSS or JAVA ), and many other features you can experiment with such as different route choices, fonts, visuals and even Images and GIF'S.

    I can suggest these small tutorial links to get you a bit into it :

    1)https://www.youtube.com/user/TehSneakyLeopard/search?query=twine

    2) https://www.youtube.com/user/TehSneakyLeopard/search?query=twine

    Both use Windows as their Operating Program.

    3) http://twinery.org/forum/index.php?topic=751.0

    This here gives a taste of what you can accomplish with Twine, with more advanced methods like CSS and HTML. Of course if you want to keep it simple, no need to spent much time with animations, but you can regard it as a more advanced choice.

    Generally, there are some already existing codes out there in forums and websites, so you don't have to spent much time developing your own.

    I HIGHLY RECOMMEND TWINE ( if you want to start with a gamebook project). Start with text based stories and choices, get the feedback, and then add more creativity into your stories ( like images, fonts etc). Hope I helped a little bit. Have fun exploring :)

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    1. Cool. Thanks for the links. One of the reasons I wanted to blog the creation process was in the hope that people with more knowledge would throw good info my way.

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    2. You are welcome :) This here is another useful link with a person using Twine and some useful tips to get you started :

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJejo4Jb2Dc

      Also check his description. He shares his own story ''Before the end of the world''. He also included his own Twine source file.

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  4. Haha its rare to find really good cyoa hentai these days. Good luck Ill be expecting great plot

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  5. This is a great idea and I'm very much looking forward to it.

    Also, I love the fact that you referenced the Lone Wolf series. My brother read those, I preferred the Grey Star spin-off. :-D

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  6. Really excited about this! Loved the story, and I think it's a great choice for a COYA -- simple, direct story, but oh so many great opportunities for twists and turns and, well, fatal missteps...

    One thing I hope you'll consider is some "slippery slope" loops, where a series of progressive choices, the first few of which can be rationalized in a way -- lead to the bad end, rather than more on/off "resist or give in fully" choices.

    Anyway, whatever you do, I'm sure it will be awesome!

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    1. My eventual aim is to see if I can make more complex combat/battle fuck encounters. MGQ has brilliant encounters, but some of the monster girls have very small movesets and some of the moves are very abrupt OHKOs. I like how they handled the bound states and think different stages of the player being in trouble might be something to play around with.

      Saying that, this first one will probably be a series of "hold out or give in" choices for simplicity.

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    2. Have you played Virtual Jessica, by chance? If not, it might be an interesting source of ideas -- and regardless, it's a very hot game! At key points, the protagonist is, shall we say, invited to watch and listen to Jessica just a little more, which is very sexy. As all that unfurls, you can type "resist" to resist her... until you can't, and you're mesmerized. It's a little hard to describe, but works wonderfully -- a great use of passivity and the temptation to go just a little farther, until you've gone too far. Complex design, but might give you some ideas.

      Anyway, I recommend it. Easily findable through Google, or via angrywhiteboy on the *old* (archived) hypnopics collective gallery.

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    3. Had a quick look at Virtual Jessica. Hehe, that's a lot of lewd fan art of DQ's Jessica if I'm not much mistaken. :)

      I think there's definitely a mechanic there to play around with. One thing I was thinking was a mechanic similar to the one used in Amnesia, where the character goes more insane/uncontrollably terrified the more they look at the monsters. In this case they would become more and more seduced until the character goes out of the player's control. That would be a much more complex game and way beyond my level of ability. (But might make a risky-but-potentially-lucrative project for a small game studio hint, hint ;) )

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  7. Save the blue slime girl for your feature length game!

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  8. Oh my, can't wait! I'm actually a big fan of text heavy games, Fenoxo's in particular. Sadly, Fen has expressed little interest in including any of the more...*ahem*...conclusive ends for protagonists that you write so well. Something tells me that you might not be so hesitant. ;P

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  9. Damn hydra I planning on making a eroge myself. Oh well your master story teller if anyone could do it. It be you.

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