Saturday, January 03, 2015

Many-Eyed Hydra makes a Monster Girl Hentai Game: CYOA with Twine (part 3)

Last up I threw an introduction together to set the scene.  An introduction on its own isn’t a full story and definitely isn’t interactive.  When I’m writing a short story I normally have an idea of what the ending and set pieces are and then keep writing until I hit an appropriate end point (usually the point when the lucky/unlucky protagonist has had all their juice squeezed out).

I haven’t tried it, but I suspect trying to write an interactive story in a big splurge isn’t the best idea when there are multiple branching points and endings.  Or maybe it is the way to go.  I’m new to these things after all.  What I’ll do instead is map out a rough structure and then fill in the text afterwards.

The simplest structure would look something like this:


Obviously, it’s very basic, but it’s the essence of this type of game – choose naughty & fun stuff or be boring and try and ‘beat’ the game.

At the moment nothing is hooked up.  That’s done through the Twine syntax of
[[Text to display->Name of Passage to goto]]

From the introductory passage we continue to Stuff.

Stuff gives us a simple choice of GoodEnd1 and BadEnd1.  I’ve numbered them because there will probably be multiples of one and probably both and it makes sense to put the numbers in now rather than trying to change the names later.


Connected up, it looks like this.


That’s just to give an idea of the simplest structure.  I’ll want a lot more branching points than this to give the reader a more interactive experience.  A simple structure I’ve seen some of the cheaper monster girl hentai games use is this:


(clicking on these pictures brings up a bigger version that can be read without a magnifying glass)

A neat touch is that if I create the link before the passage Twine will automatically create the passage for me.

This will give me a skeleton of sorts.  One thing I will do is rename and reorganise the passages.  If I want to move things around (which I almost certainly will) TemptationTitWank is a much clearer target to link to than Temptation3.  I’ll also add some more sections to the introduction to give a clearer breakdown of what those passages are going to do.

Unfortunately Twine doesn’t appear to keep track of name changes to passages, but it does at least show passages with broken links as red boxes.


The modified structure looks a little like this:


At the moment the lovely Ceptophthorié isn’t exactly tempting.  I’ll fix that when I start to flesh out the passages.

6 comments:

  1. awesome so far hydra a game from you is something i always wanted yet never thought would actually see so thumbs up because i know its gonna be awesome

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  2. From one game designer to another, you might, at some point, want to program little 'callbacks' into your game, that allow the player to say, "hey wait, I actually wanted that blowjob, after all".

    In RPGMaker, these are called labels, and since, in RPGMaker, you can only have 4 choices on screen at once, your best option is to have one of the choices be, 'I want something else', which takes you back to the beginning of the flowchart, or to another list of choices. So 3 real choices, and then a 'more choices' choice.

    In Twine, you might be able to use more choices, so one solution would be to, after each temptation, add the previous temptations to the list of choices, and then have them connect to their respective story blocks. Another solution, which might be, stylistically better, would be to have the succubus ask what the player wants, specifically, after he says yes.

    Something along the lines of this page
    http://a.pomf.se/jfnrbs.jpg
    The manga that came from, by the way, is here
    http://g.e-hentai.org/g/102166/dc6eb03e81/

    It's just something to make things more convenient for the player.

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    Replies
    1. Yep, that's my plan eventually. First off it will be 'choose the way the sexy succubus sucks you dry'. Then I'll break each of the sex acts down into stages and the player will have a bit more freedom to move between them (and back). It will be a bit like the separate attacks in MGQ but with an element of chicken - go too far down one path and it will be too late to go back, the succubus will have the player.

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    2. That sounds pretty cool, I'm looking forward to playing it!

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  3. I love interactives... reading about the hapless hero meet ing his bad end is one thing. But actually clicking yourself to that bad end... that's something else :)

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  4. I really like it! Perhaps in order to be allowed to escape though, he actually has to let her play with him just a bit... Just to make the game a little harder.

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