Monday, December 31, 2018

The Patreon Problem

Another xpost from my Patreon.  I'm trying to get all of this out of the way so I can hit the ground running with my regular writing as soon as 2019 hits.

Thank you to the people sending me comments over the past couple of days.

In case you were unaware, Patreon have been de-platforming creators on what appear to be ideological or political grounds.  I object strongly to this for both ethical and practical reasons.

Ethically, I believe it wrong for a company to discriminate on political or ideological affiliation and hide this behind a gauze of vague "hate speech" rules.  This has been happening far too regularly and companies that play these games deserve to go out of business.

Practically, it is hard for me, as a creator, to justify spending lots of time and energy building up a following on Patreon when my account can be yanked at any time on a whim by their Trust and Safety team.  Patreon have as much as admitted they're making up the rules as they go along with respect to their ToS.  This makes them a very unsafe and untrustworthy platform for creators, as we can be terminated at any moment for not adhering to rules that are subjectively enforced and can change at any time.

At this point I'm not sure what to do.  The ethical thing would be to close everything down and refuse to countenance Patreon's BS.  But this would also hurt me and the people who wish to support my writing (I've heard you, thanks for your comments and support).

I don't like Patreon and would like to move everything over to a more political neutral platform (ideally one that sees a "Trust and Safety Team" for the Orwellian nonsense it is) as soon as a reliable competitor emerges.  Any suggestions here will be gratefully received.

I also need to work something out for the patrons who no longer feel they can keep an account up on Patreon in the light of Patreon's Orwellian nonsense.  If you supported me during November and December I still owe you a boob monster girl short story and the next CYOA.  I'll need some way of getting those to you when they're done.  Suggestions again gratefully received.

And once again, I'm really sorry for wasting good writing time on this political shite.  I know you're here for sexy succubus smut, not to hear me sperg out about free speech.  Unfortunately, this is something I've always held a fairly absolutist position on, largely out of self-interest.  I write horror.  I write erotica.  While we might not always be first in line, we're usually somewhere in the queue when it comes to banning people and stripping their income.  That's why it's important to always take a stand against censorshit whenever it rears its ugly head.

Blegh.  I just wanted to write sexy succubus smut.

Anyway, have a lovely New Year's Eve out there, ya filthy animals!  Let's all hope for a better 2019. 

-manyeyedhydra

Friday, December 28, 2018

Something for Patrons - Stealth Tuckers

This is a xpost from my Patreon (which I will likely be exiting soon in light of the Orwellian creepiness they've displayed recently).  This is currently for paying patrons, but I might expand it to whatever platform I move to in 2019 if there's interest.

First up, apologies for the quietness this December.  Some other-life stuff cropped up at the start of the month and by the time I was through it I was caught up in the holidays.

And then Patreon decided to shit the bed…

I'm not going to go into it in great detail, but I am of the opinion Patreon is no longer a safe or trustworthy platform for creators.  If it wasn't for the fact other work had caused my current writing projects to fall behind schedule, I would have already cancelled my account here.

More on this later, but for now I thought I'd do a better job of managing expectation and lead off with the more positive stuff first.

First, as far as I'm concerned, everyone who has subbed to me up until December is owed a sexy boob monster girl short story and an advance look at the next monster girl CYOA.  I intend to stick to that plan regardless of what happens here.  If you no longer wish to use Patreon in the light of the Orwellian nonsense they've been pulling recently (or support me—I'm fully aware my own output has been very erratic), I fully understand.  If you have been a backer up until now, I will try to get the projects to you as soon as they are completed.

Whatever happens, I do want to thank the people here that have supported me, even for this brief period of time.

Because of the nature of my work, I'm aware a lot of you are uncomfortable about seeing your names in any kind of credits list.  However, I think I might have a sneaky solution that might be of interest.

All of my stories contain references to writers, movies and bands that I've enjoyed over the years.  These are usually reflected in the names of characters, but I'll sometimes use them as references for place names (street names, etc).

I should also add that I don't do "Take That's."  I only ever reference things I've enjoyed, so even my most feckless and/or despicable characters are named after creators/creations I like.  This is because of a story I heard (possibly apocryphal) about Wes Craven naming his iconic Freddy Krueger after a bully who used to torment him at school.  It might have been initially intended as a Take That, but then Freddy Krueger became a horror icon.  My imagination pictures that bully looking at a film poster years later and thinking, "I used to beat this runt up at school and he went on to name a horror icon after me, how cool is that!"  So, no Take That's, ever.

More recently I've been moving away from this.  It's fine for a random nobody on Literotica, but starts to look icky on a sort-of erotic horror writer with multiple books published on Amazon, especially if people come to the erroneous conclusion they were intended as disses.

However, this does leave me with something I can give back to those of you who've supported me here.  Whatever happens in the future, I'm still going to be writing stories and those stories will have characters and places that requires names.  It doesn't even need to be a name.  It can be a little snippet of description—something you'll be able to recognise and think, I helped fund this.

If you would like to be included in this, please comment below with the name or little descriptive tag you'd like to see used in a story at some point.  If you want, also add your favourite monster girl or fetish and I'll try to use your reference in an appropriate story.

Just to be clear, this is just a minor name or descriptive tag rather than any insert characters.  When it comes to storytelling, I always do what I feel is right for the story first.  On that note, it's quite likely your name might get dropped on a less-than-stellar example of humanity (my succubi do love slurping up assholes).  If you really really don't want this, let me know and I'll try and apply your moniker to a less-assholish doomed succubus meal instead (my succubi also love slurping up the innocent as well).

Also, if you'd prefer even this sneaky reference to be totally anonymous, feel free to DM me rather than commenting.  My aim is to put a private list together and dip into it for future stories.

(And maybe even grow that list with future subscribers if this political nonsense blows over, or an apolitical competitor to Patreon emerges.)

Obviously, I can't put a timeline on when I'll sneak your reference in—there are over a hundred of you for starters!

Once again, thanks for your support and apologies for the uncertainty.  I'll try to post again over the weekend while I try to figure out some backup plans for 2019.

Fuck Censorshit!

-manyeyedhydra

Friday, December 21, 2018

Monster Girl/Succubus H-games on my Radar

As I've stated before, I haven't played many of late because of problems with getting Machine Translation to work on my computer.  (I could solve all this by actually learning to read Japanese, but unfortunately I'm English, and we're congenitally awful at picking up other languages).

Thankfully for us gaijin slobs, other solutions are starting to appear.  DLSite has been posting some products with English translation (of varying degrees of quality) and other talented folks have made or are making English translations of juicy succubus smut games.

Domination Quest ~ Kuro and the Naughty Monster Girls




AKA the brand new one, as it came out yesterday (the day before?).

It's from the same people that created Demon Angel Sakura.  This time they've gone for traditional RPG rather than a platformer.  Bizarrely, rather than use something like RPG Maker, they appear to have tried to build something like RPG Maker in Unity, which might just be the most Japanese Game Dev thing ever.

Given that it's from Kokage no Izumi, the people that made Demon Angel Sakura, I'm guessing it's going to be weird and end up frequently crossing the line between erotic and WTF! a lot.  In theory it's your typical Gotta Get 'Em All monster girl harem game, but the way the main character picks up new waifus is by shrinking them down and gobbling them up with a tail mouth coming out of his butt.

So, basic Demon Angel Sakura weirdness then.

I would caution against picking it up just yet.  It looks like the creator rushed the game out a little too soon and it's extremely bug infested.  I hit a game-breaking bug within the first half hour where I couldn't continue down a path because the game kept putting the character sprite on the exit point of the new screen, promptly looping the player right back to where they'd just come from.  I've seen comments that this can be avoided if you hit the right spot on the screen, but I haven't found it yet.  The same people have also reported encountering lots of crashing problems later in the game.

I have it and it looks interesting enough that I will write about it once the current broken stuff is fixed.  For now I'd advise staying clear until a patch or two has dropped.


Drain Dungeon

While checking back to see if Domination Quest had been patched, I noticed the English version of Drain Dungeon sitting in my DLSite game library.  This surprised me as I don't remember buying it.  I think what might have happened is DLSite gave me the English translation as a freebie as I already owned the original.




This is an old one.  2016, I think.  You stomp down an abstracted dungeon and then spurt all your accumulated levels inside a trio of succubi on the way out.  I think I played it a little a while back.  Now, with the English version I can give the whole game a thorough...

Actually, scratch that.  I must be getting senile as well as old and fat.  I already wrote a full review of this back here, including delving all the way down the final (and hot!) succubus boss.  The fact I can't remember this is probably not a good endorsement for the game.

Oh well, it might be fun to have a playthrough where this time I actually know what all the items do.  (And have all that delicious draining done in English-text Bad Ends.)


Shrift




Ignore the art style.  A lot of people have been impressed with this game, and I think with good reason.  It might be the best implementation of femdom battle fuck mechanics around.  The creator has given a lot of attention to the various binds and status effects to make the player horny and helpless before the monster girls moves on to the snu snu.  The art style is... idiosyncratic... but they do make good use of puppeting to animate the scenes.  It ends up being a lot more sexier than I expected.

This level of detail on the battles combined with an artist like Setouchi or Shiki would be my dream monster girl H-game combo, I think.

There is a workable English translation patch for the game.  I haven't managed to delve too deep into it yet.  The game also has a bit of Undertale's quirk to it.  The obvious influence is in the separate genocide and pacifist routes, but it also seems to be doing similar funky meta stuff with saved games.  This makes going back to redo various "fights" difficult as the character isn't there anymore.  My last run sort of petered out because I managed to get myself trapped in a fight versus the doll girl that was virtually unwinnable with the equipment I had.

I'm tempted to run at this again and give it the full let's play treatment.


Lust Grimm





Another game that has been recommended to me multiple times in the comments.  I was iffy on the demo.  The art style looked delightful, but the Bad Ends seemed short.

A lot of this was because I was playing with no English.  Translation team =Together= are working on a full translation of this (They've already translated Succubus Prison).  I have played the translated demo and can definitely appreciate the game a little more.  As with Succubus Rhapsody, there's a lot of sexiness in the text of the battles.  Now I'm eager to play the full thing when the complete translation is done.


Because of my translation issues I haven't been keeping as close an eye on interesting H-games as I'd like. Domination Quest is new, but both Lust Grimm and Shrift have been out for a while (although Shrift is using a chapter release model, with the fourth and final chapter not out yet).  If you've spotted any other juicy succubus games, let me know in the comments.

I am tempted to run another let's play type thing again (but maybe not as detailed as the Paradox series).  I'm nervous of doing them because of time that could be spent writing, but I also don't like leaving the blog empty for too long when I'm working on longer projects.  Having something at the forefront that's quick and easy to put out might make for an appropriate screen for those times when I want to be working on larger-scale project in the background.  I don't like the regular update posts.  They're great when things are running smoothly, but end up doom-spiraling my mood pretty quickly when I fall behind.  I think I might have to learn the time-honoured corporate strategy of keeping shtum until I can properly wow people with a new thing.

(For instance, it would have been far better if I'd not told people about the boob monster story and just released it when it was done, rather than fucking up the time estimations, again!, and have people wondering where the fuck is this story and why is it so goddamned late?)

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Someone made a hentai anime of Cornelica, Town of Succubi

While wading through the sticky swamps of 4chan I found a link to this:

(these hentai sites tend to be iffy on things - make sure adblock is on and virus shield is fully deployed! :) )
http://hentaimama.com/episodes/muma-no-machi-cornelica-episode-1/

It's a hentai anime of Dieselmine's Cornelica, Town of Succubi game.




This was a game I ended up skipping.  If you're wondering why I don't cover Japanese succubus/monster girl H-games as much as I used to, the main reason is because successive Windows updates have completely borked most of the hooking and machine translation tools.  Unless I get around to learning to read Japanese, I can't really play these.  I did try doing a walkthrough of Monmusu Conquered World blind, but the results were a bit shit to be honest.

(although some have had translation patches - I really need to write about Shrift and Lust Grimm at some point)

Cornelica looked interesting, but Dieselmine did their typical Dieselmine thing of having the random encounters have the nice pseudo-animated (basic Photoshop puppeting at a guess) scenes while the main, named characters all had static-image Bad End scenes.  They did get this right with the following game, Monster Girl Labyrinth, which did have some delicious Bad End scenes, including the lovely boob monster girl who inspired the current story I'm working on (No, I haven't forgotten about it).

I did like the setting.  A town of succubi seems a fun location to work with and it's nice to see someone make an anime using the location and characters.  The big-boobed innkeeper succubus, the big-boobed temple succubus and the cat-eared shopkeeper succubus all get to fuck the hapless protagonist, much to the disgust of his succubus girlfriend.

Maybe I'll try the game out if I can ever get hooking and translation to work again (or get a new laptop with a non-shit version of Windows).



(As an aside, yes I know I went AWOL for a couple of weeks again.  This is what happens when you effectively live two lives and the other one has to take precedence for a short while.  Rather than post yet another not-update post I thought I'd post links to some sexy succubus snu-snu instead.) 

Friday, November 30, 2018

A belated November update

Apologies for the belated update.  I've had some dental work done which has knocked me about a bit (having bits of metal screwed into your skull will do that!).

So, what has Hydra been up to?

As part of my commitment to patrons, I've been looking at posting story ideas from my ideas file and behind-the-scenes looks at some of my stories.  I wanted to do a piece on H-space, but I wasn't really happy with how that piece was turning out.  Mostly, I was unhappy with how long it was taking.  When I'm in slow, scratchy periods of writing, pieces like that sometimes eat up far too much of the day.  That's time that should be spent writing fiction or creating CYOAs.

(This is the reason I stopped writing the more general blog posts on other subjects – I'm not very quick at writing them and it's time that should be spent writing more useful things.)

I don't want to stop writing those pieces, or the game reviews, walkthrough etc.  Currently I'm experimenting with zoning off bits of the day so I can write these bits'n'bobs without suddenly looking up and realising I've wasted most of the day dicking about on some less-important paragraphs when I could have been bashing out another short story/chapter.

I'll come back to the H-space behind-scenes-stuff article at a later date.  I've been trying to think about what to do with the H-space bestiary.  I think I can make a good collection (or collections) with the material I have, but I think the current stories need a little more fleshing out before I'd be comfortable publishing them (and others) as an ebook.

In the meantime, I've set aside an hour a day.  I'll use it for the more general posts to keep both the manyeyedhydra blog ticking over with new content as well as give some nice behind-scenes insights for patrons.

(Although, for the next week it's mostly going to be needed for filing my tax returns.  Blegh.)

As for actual writing.  That was a little spotty about the time of having dental work, but is moving quite rapidly again.  The first draft of the boob monster girl story is pretty much done and I'm about 2K words into typing it up.  I'm hoping to have that done in the next couple of days.  It will be a patreon exclusive, I'm afraid, but only a temporary one.  I'm getting close to enough material for another ebook, and it will be included in the next collection.

I put the CYOA on the backburner a little while I was focused on getting the boob monster girl sort story written.  That should jump back to the forefront now the first draft of said boob monster girl story is done.  I'm targeting end December/early January for that, although it might slip depending on how difficult the central mechanic proves to implement in Twine.

And that's that for this week.  I'm still looking to find the right day for these update posts, so expect them to slide around a little until I find a slot that fits.

-manyeyedhydra

Thursday, November 08, 2018

A brief look at Toro Toro Resistance's new thing

Toro Toro Resistance (とろとろレジスタンス) is the person (people?) behind Monster Girl Quest and Monmusu Quest: Paradox.  You might be familiar with those.  I've talked a lot about them in the past.

Toro Toro Resistance has a new thing on the way.

It's... uh... different?




This is going to present a challenge.  How to talk about this without coming off like an overly judgmental prick or have the rozzers knocking on my front door tomorrow morning with a warrant to examine the contents of my hard drive.

I checked out the demo (it can be downloaded from Toro Toro Resistance's blog).  In structure it seems very similar to the Monster Musume HYAKURAN Vol. 1 product TTR put out between MQ:P 1 and MQ:P 2.  i.e. Rather than being a game, it's more a collection of illustrated Bad End scenes selected from a menu.

Choices... choices...

The demo has two encyclopedia entries and an introductory section showing off the artwork for some of the other things that will likely appear in the finished product.  I don't have access to machine translation at the moment, so I can't give more information than what's in the blurb or can be google-translated from Toro Toro's blog.

The main difference to Monster Musume HYAKURAN vol. 1 - and I imagine this will be the main deal-breaker for a lot of Monster Girl Quest fans (it is for me, to be fair) - is this time the monsters don't have the girl part tacked on.  Instead of cum-hungry succubi, harpies, slime girls and the like, there are cum-hungry leeches, insects, plants, worms, slimes, and other oddities.


I think nope.

I'm guessing each will have a encyclopedia entry detailing their stats and a Bad End scene/story.

The central framing device is an unusual shop selling sex toys, with the witchy owner telling stories about their use in a variety of settings.

That in itself doesn't seem a bad idea.  I can see the erotic potential in a witch selling a variety of unusual and living sex toys, which are just a bit too good at sucking semen out of their unsuspecting users.


Slurp? Mmm... nope.


This is not exactly new territory for TTR either.  Their earlier voice dramas had some scenarios where the femdom villainess would set some crazy biological cum-sucking device loose on the hapless (lucky?) hero.  I just didn't think those scenarios were as hot or as sexy as when the villainess set a sexy spider-girl or alraune loose on the hero.

But... diff'r'nt strokes for diff'r'nt folks and all that.


Nope nope nope nope.

However, there is a massive elephant in the room concerning the age of the (un)lucky individuals getting to try out these exotic sex toys.  The work's title is The Encyclopedia of Tentacles for Boys Vol. 1.  The artwork I've seen definitely puts it into the shota-esque category.

While I am intrigued to see what bizarre and exotic organic sex toys TTR's devious mind can come up with, I wish they'd set them loose on a cast of gormless eighteen-year-old university or college students.  It's hard to enjoy a good wank over a sexy witch and her selection of fantastical sex toys when you're concerned someone else (the authorities especially!) might consider the Bad End scenes child porn.

WTF!!!!  Nope!

Kudos to TTR for trying something different, but I think I'll pass on this in these outrage-hungry times and wait for MQ:P 3.

(There's also not enough hawt femdom succubus boobage for my liking.)


Nop...  Hmm, wait.  How much...?

Friday, November 02, 2018

Updates and plans for November

Literotica's Halloween story contest is over. My entrant, "AProudMaleFeminist gets Creamed" didn't place, but to be honest I didn't expect it to.  I'm trying to write myself back into form and that involves working through the gears of the more straightforward erotic horror stories I started out with.  I was pleasantly surprised by the final score (which I think was the highest in the Erotic Horror category, although not 100% on that), and that I didn't get a complete shellacking from angry male feminists.

It is a risk with certain hot button topics, especially when you want to create a juicy villain, that people see the end character as a stand-in for the whole group, rather than just an individual (and flawed) character.  I suspect it would be just as true if I made the asshole protagonist a MAGA-hat-wearing Trump fan, or a hardcore gamer.

I do like to give my succubi a varied diet, so please don't take it too personally if the current asshole-du-jour is from a group you identify with.  At the end of the day they're individual characters, and while my personal moral views will inevitably bleed into the stories, my overall goal is to create good characters first.

Okay, second.

Creating hot and icky (and usually fatal) horror-sex scenes is still first.  As it should be.

Anyway, I did put a full update post up on my patreon.  Rather than repeat it I'll just post the link here (this post should be open to everyone).

The shortened version is this November I want to sink my teeth into the next CYOA project.  I liked how Volumpula turned out (the trophy is gettable, honest!), but it did take too long and I want to see if I can get the development times down for these CYOAs.

I also have a few short story ideas I want to explore.  My version of a boob monster is something that looks close to fruition, so I'm going to see if I can pluck that and turn it into lovely cider (or something).

It's probably us she'll turn into lovely... milk...?

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Halloween Story Out - "AProudMaleFeminist gets Creamed"

I didn't think I'd make Literotica's Halloween contest this year.  I had a story unfinished from last year, but when I picked it up again I realised one of the characters was too similar to Volumpula and I didn't want to put it out right after the "Escape Volumpula" CYOA.  (I still think it's a very good story idea and I will finish it at some point.)

With a couple of days to go before the deadline I had a few ideas and fragments, but nothing close to completion.  Then an old idea unlocked, I typed up 4,000 words in a day and got the story in with half an hour to spare.

Here it is:

"AProudMaleFeminist gets Creamed."

Yes, the title is a little troll-y.  The story is a throwback to the old ones I used to write where random asshole runs into succubus/monster girl and (maybe) lethal snu-snu occurs.  Sometimes I try to add a bit of nuance to the assholes (or randomly destroy an undeserving good guy instead to keep readers on their toes).  With this one I stuffed him full of straw and gave him a good thwack.  Sometimes you have to have a little fun as a writer.

It wasn't the story I originally intended to put out, but I hope people have fun with it anyway!

Monday, October 08, 2018

Open version of "Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly" is live!

As I said I would last week, I've posted "Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly" up on philome.la for everyone to play.  You can enjoy it here.

I'm still not sure what is and isn't allowed on philome.  I put in a few links to my Patreon (because I do like getting paid to write these and it's a good incentive to make me write more. hint hint. ;) ).  Some websites can be a little iffy about that, so I'll keep an eye out and resubmit a linkless version if the first gets bounced.

Putting a week's delay on the general release seems like a good balance between rewarding patrons for their contributions while not shutting out entirely people that can't contribute for whatever reason, so I'll continue doing it (maybe eventually migrating the CYOAs to my own web domain).

I hope you enjoy playing with Volumpula.  Writing her took a little longer than I anticipated, but the scenario is out now and I hope the wait was worth it.  Please let me know what you think in the comments below.

As I mentioned before.  I'm in the brainstorming/planning phase for the next scenario.  However, there are a couple of short stories I'd like to finish first, so those will likely be my priority for the rest of the month.

In the meantime, I'm sure Volumpula will take very good care of you...

Thursday, October 04, 2018

October 2018 plans

Here's a xpost from my patreon (I should be doing this for all public posts - during the late-stage panic of finishing Volumpula I kept forgetting to update here).

"Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly" is out.  If you're a patron, you can grab that file from the relevant patron update post.  (If you're not a patron, fear not, I'll be posting it up on philome on Monday.)

Please let me know what you think - what worked, what didn't (and most importantly - let me know if anything seems broken!)

After completing these things I usually like to review the code a little and see what can be cleaned up and what can be generalised to shave time off future scenarios.  How Twine/Sugarcube handles arrays is quirky, and will be something I need to keep in mind for future projects (I'll do a full post on that later as it might be useful for other people trying to make their own Twine games).  The other thing that was a little clumsy (behind the scenes) is handling repetition of text.  A late change I made was to tweak the text when the player returns to a passage after reconsidering struggling.   I want to try and avoid immersion-breaking repetition where possible, and there are probably built in tools to track how many times a player passes through a particular passage.

Overall, the development process took too long at 3 months.  Some things went a little awry in the middle there and deadline panicking turned the later stages into a bit of a death march.  I'm more productive when enthusiastic, so I think I'll look at project rotation system, so I have something to switch to rather than sitting around twiddling my thumbs when I hit a temporary wall on one project.

The CYOA development process consists of these stages:

1) Brainstorming and ideas - come up with the monster girl, sex scenes and a rough plan.
2) Create the map of the scenario in Twine.
3) Write out the text freehand.
4) Type up text.
5) Plug text into the map and add the HTML formatting (adjusting the map if the text calls for it)
6) Edit/Debug (99% errors are forgetting to put in the <</if>> statement.)

I think it might make more sense to take a break between each stage and work on a short story or even earlier stages of subsequent scenarios.  The development time might still be 3 months, but I'll also be getting shorts stories or half the next CYOA scenario out of the same time period.

Now let's move away from the nitty-gritty behind-the-scenes stuff and talk about what's next.

I have 2 short stories I'd like to get finished.  One will be a temporary patron-exclusive.  The other will be an entrant for Literotica's Halloween Competition.

I've also begun brainstorming the next "Escape the" scenario.  At the moment I'm thinking it will be an elf/dryad with a very unusual flower collection, but that will depend on if it pans out.

And that ends the Thursday update.  I'll try to make a regular thing of this on Thursdays even if the updates are of the "got captured by a succubus and her hellhound ate my homework" type.

Monday, October 01, 2018

"Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly" is done!

Whew, and breathe.

Sorry for the extended quiet period here.  Once I started to overrun on the CYOA project, I hit that horrible type of deadline paralysis of trying to focus everything on getting the project done, but not really being able to hit any kind of productivity.  Having the Patreon was pretty good, in that knowing people were paying for this meant I had to deliver it, so it kept me on the path rather than abandoning or putting it on hiatus.  I definitely struggle with any project once it goes past a certain timeframe.  It's probably no surprise my two novels were written first as bite-sized serials.

I did want to to try and take the pressure off myself of thinking I had to make regular blog posts (which resulted in some ill-advised decisions in the past with serials that weren't ready), but I didn't intend going dark for quite this long.

Anyway.

I completed the "Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly" CYOA.  Lots of gooey fun there.  Probably a little too much gooey fun.  I did get to write various different slime girl sex scenes, which was fun.

For now the Twine scenario is only available to my patrons on Patreon.  If you're not a patron for whatever reason, you'll be able to read the scenario for free when I post it up on hitome.la in a week's time.  I figure this is the fairest way to give patrons some perks for their dollars without paywalling away my work entirely.

As for the blog here and my other writing, rest assured I have no plans to abandon either.  Literotica's Halloween short story competition is coming up, and I'd like to get an entry in for that.

Wednesday, September 05, 2018

Pink Jelly CYOA Update: Scenes Typed Up

It's been a little slow and sludgy.  For some reason I always run into productivity problems whenever a phase/chapter/story runs longer than I'd like, and the last week or so has been a bit of a brutal crawl.  The Patreon has been really useful here as an incentive to keep at it and not put the project on hiatus as has happened in the past with other series/projects.

(Obligatory cheeky Patreon plug link.)

The majority of the scenes are now all typed up.  I'd say all of them are done, but based on my past experience with the Arachne CYOA, I usually find I've missed the odd little transition scene here and there when I come to stitch the whole thing together.

The next phase is to plug the text scenes into Twine.  The pathways have pretty much all been programmed, so this is pretty much a straight cut'n'paste job into the existing map.  There are a couple of things I'll need to tweak as I do this, and the inevitable bug squashing to make sure everything fits together and works correctly.

I'm a little annoyed I didn't manage to finish this in August, but barring unforeseen catastrophes it shouldn't take much longer.  I was less annoyed when I totted the word count up.  Yep, I went a little bit overboard with Volumpula's various talents.  Obviously there is some repetition with some scenes, but the total word count for all the scenes is 18,000 words.

Whoops.  That's like a third of a novel.

Oh well.  That's a lot of "fun" with a sexy slime girl.

Future CYOAs will not be this long.  I want to be producing them faster than this one (especially as my interest and productivity start to wane once projects start to drag on too long) and 18K words per CYOA for a single encounter is too much.

I was hoping to have a version out by the end of the week, but I also have a dental appointment tomorrow and don't know how much that's going to knock me about, so I don't want to make any concrete predictions.  However, it shouldn't be long now before I unleash Volumpula on you all!

Monday, August 20, 2018

Can anyone recommend a good slime girl artist?

My initial plan was to use some of those lovely patreon bux to commission some artwork of Volumpula to go with her CYOA.  (when I finally finish the monstrous thing - Volumpula, do you have to play with your food this much?)

Unfortunately this appears to have fallen through.  No money changed hands, so there's nothing to worry about there.  The artist didn't get back to me after initial contact, so I have to assume they're busy, or the commission wasn't something that interested them.  Nothing wrong with that.  It happens.

I'm still keen to get a piece done (mainly as a thank you for the people that have contributed).

Here are the details of the piece:


Character Detail

Name: Volumpula

Description:
She's a slime girl with so much additional mass it forms a bed-like blob beneath her.   Her human part looks like a gorgeous woman in her mid-twenties with a voluptuous hourglass figure.  The blob part looks somewhere between a large circular waterbed or gigantic over-stuffed cushion.  Both blob and woman look like they're made out of translucent pink jelly (standard slime girl transparency).  Shade of pink should look more unnatural rather than being mistaken for human skin tone (should look more like berries or artificial plastic/rubber).

Here's a pic of Milfy from the Violated Hero 2 game to give an idea of what I mean (she was the primary inspiration for Volumpula).  Volumpula is pinker, bustier and the bed/blob part is bigger.

Any resemblances between Milfy and Volumpula are purely... ahem... incidental.
She has a glamourpuss face with sensual pouty lips and big eyes.  Her "hair" is a slightly darker shade of pink, "big", curly (given her slimy composition will look more like froth) and cascades down to below her shoulders.

The soapland slime girl from the Wicked City anime is a good reference point for hairstyle.  It's a nice callback as she's the first instance of a sexy slime/blob girl I can think of in popular(ish) culture.

His body-to-body massage got a little too close...

Pose:
Volumpula lounging seductively on her "bed" and looking out at the viewer as if she's trying to tempt them into joining her on her "bed".

Background:
Optional.  The room has pink padded walls, floor and ceil.  A pink girl on a pink bed in a pink room is likely to be lost completely in a sea of pink if not done carefully!



If anyone knows an artist who might be a good fit for this, please drop a link to their work and commission rates in the comments below.

Alternatively, if you feel inspired and fancy creating your own representation, please feel free to go ahead and have fun.

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

More Updatery stuff on Escape the Pink Jelly Girl

Been bounced around on real-life work related things last few days, but on the positive side all the waiting around in airports and flying did allow me to get the 1st draft of the Escape the Pink Jelly CYOA written. It nearly filled the whole notebook. I'm curious to see what the final word count on this is going to be! Here's a list of what's been done and what still needs doing:
-Layout and Coding in Twine: Done-ish -1st Draft (freehand): Done-ish -2nd Draft (typing up + editing): 40-50% -Plugging the text into Twine: ToDo -Testing and Debugging: ToDo I'm still experimenting with what works and what is most efficient. I tend to find it best to map out the skeleton and code all the links first. Then I write the scenes out freehand before typing them up and editing them. The 1st draft part is usually the most time-consuming, so I'm glad that's out of the way. The 2nd draft is something I normally hammer through - the "Night of the Nude Succubus Orgy" short story took three days, despite being over 10K words. Plugging the text in is basic cut'n'paste with a little bit of editing to make sure the text links up through the different routes. Debugging is less easy to predict. I'm not doing anything hideously complicated, which should make it relatively straightforward, but I always have to allow for those weird roadblocks where a stupid typo has me looking at the wrong place for hours until the inevitable "D'Oh!" moment.
Not sure when I'll have a playable file ready. Next week hopefully, depending on how nasty the inevitable bugs are. This is a little behind schedule as I lost a few days to other stuff and underestimated how complicated I'd made the whole scenario.

Monday, August 06, 2018

Updatery stuff - Escape the Pink Jelly Girl

First off, massive thank you to my patrons.  It means a lot.

Ideally I would have liked to have been in the middle of a serial when starting this, just so it wouldn't look like I'd taken the money and gone AWOL.  This hasn't happened.  I'm still working on the pink cushionblob CYOA scenario.  I did think about posting some of the scenes from this, but I think it would then make those scenes anticlimactic in the finished scenario.

As for that scenario - yeah, I over-complicated things for myself.  At the last count there are 11 End scenes of varying degrees of badness.  This is not including the various sexiness Volumpula gets up to with the player outside of those.  I think the final scenario will be a lot of fun, but I think for future scenarios I'll try and keep the sex scene count down to something more manageable so the waiting periods between releases aren't too long.

I was working on another short story, but I've temporarily put that aside to concentrate on finishing the cushionblob scenario.  My plan is to get back to it once the scenario is finished, as well as writing (or rather, finishing off, as I wrote half of it last year) a short story for Lit's Halloween competition.

Apologies for the brevity of the update.  Back to bouncy, sexy slime girl sex scenes.  Hopefully the next update will come with a finished beta version for people to have fun with.     

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Literotica's Nude Day Contest Results

Are in.

I didn't place, but I think I came close.  I was on the site just as the results were announced (which tends to be important if you want to check scores as winners usually have their entrants bombed by jealous eedjits right after the announcement).  The 3 winners were all in the 4.83-4.84 range and I think my story finished up around 4.82-4.83.  So, close.

Closer than I was expecting to be honest.  Usually I have to throw in a nice ending and a satisfying twist like this or this to place.  "Night of the Nude Succubus Orgy" has 3 idiots who end up being very very lucky.  But it's good fun and I know the "nice-ending" fans have been a little under-served of late with all the grimdark H-space stuff.

The main purpose was to get back on Literotica, and that was achieved.  I'm hoping this will continue.  I have a story I didn't quite get finished for last Halloween and hopefully by next Valentine's Day I will have retrieved "The Heart Squad" from its current production hell.

And also, you'll notice on the right...

roughly about here if I got my placement right--------------------->
(Which I... uh... didn't)


...I have a link button to my Patreon.

Yes, I finally managed to set one up if you missed my announcement yesterday.

My Patreon page is here.

I'm going to be using this to fund things like writing the Literotica stories, the H-space monster girl bestiary shorts and the CYOA scenarios.

A big thank you to the people who are already backing me.

Today I've mostly been writing bouncy paizuri scenes with a lovely pink slime girl.  That CYOA scenario is back on the go, even if it has spiraled a little out of control.  More updates to come as soon as I'm nearer completion.

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Many-Eyed Hydra finally has a Patreon

I've faffed around with this for a while, to be fair.

First up, I'm terrible at asking for anything, so writing what is essentially a begging "giz us cash" post is alien and uncomfortable for me.

Turns out a couple of big dentist bills on the horizon are pretty good for making one swallow his pride.  (I had a root ripped out today after the crown snapped off a few weeks ago.  Ow.  I'm not sure which is more painful - the pliers or the imminent damage to the bank account.)

Secondly, there was a smidgeon of doubt.  Last couple of years I've been a bit all over the place - The H-space monster girl bestiary stuff, the long (probably too long) Monmusu Quest: Paradox walkthroughs, the bits of novels you haven't yet seen because they didn't quite get there and are currently on hiatus.  I didn't want to open up a Patreon until I felt confident I could give people value for their subscriptions.

After publishing the "Escape the Arachne" CYOA scenario and finally getting back to Literotica with a 13K word monster short story, "Night of the Nude Succubus Orgy", I feel in a much better place productivity-wise.  Another story I got about halfway through before sticking on a backburner has recently popped up and punched me in the face with a "Finish me!"  One of the hopes I have with the Patreon is that it'll free me from thinking - "I can't do the short stories like before, I need to be writing novels and things I can put on Amazon for money," and I'll just get back to writing what feels right at the time (which usually ends up turning into a series/novel or short story collection anyway).

Finally, there was the fear.  Not starting up a Patreon is a bit like Schrödinger's cat.  As long as you haven't launched it, it can't actually fail.  Once you launch it, well... reality ensues and you have to face the prospect of it only making $5 a month.

Feh, if it happens, it happens.  No-one has an automatic right to be rewarded and recompensed for their creative endeavors.

(It would be fairly soul-destroying, though, so please support me if you can. ;) )

But we can swiftly move on past all that mewling.  I've finally got off my ass and got the Patreon up.  You can find it (and hopefully back me) here.

(Having a tooth ripped out does wonders for focus.)

Some nitty-gritty.

There is only one reward tier currently ($1).  According to Patreon this is taken out the moment you back me and then again at the 1st of each month.  I will add more tiers in future when I have a better idea of what I'm doing.

My plan is to give patrons early access to stories and CYOA scenarios.  As a test I've made available a later version of "Escape the Arachne" where I jiggled the math a little and added a "hard" mode (tests fail on ties rather than passing).

This will be my plan for future CYOA scenarios and regular (i.e. non-contest) short stories and serial chapters.  I don't plan to make any of these totally exclusive, mainly because it could come back to bite me in the ass if I really want to use a particular story in a future collection.  The period of exclusivity will likely be for a week before I post the story on Literotica or here.  For some stories it will be a lot longer as they won't be put on Literotica or the blog and instead will be earmarked for future ebook short story collections.

I'll probably also post snippets of various bit of works-in-progress.  Some might become something, some might not, but the individual scenes will likely still be enjoyable.  (I have a hot one with Nicole and Madam Voluptula having a lot of fun together lying on one of my hard drives somewhere.)

Anyway it's up.  I would love it if you could support me.

Also, as I'm new to this, I would love feedback on the page, tiers, etc.  If anything seems obviously broken, or awful and cringy, please let me know.  Expect the first couple of months to be a little amateurish while I figure stuff out.

I'm hoping this will motivate me to get some new fiction out.  It's about time I reclaimed Lit's Erotic Horror category...

EDIT: I've also added a handy button link.  It does appear to go to the right Patreon page through some black magic beyond my ken.  (I might be getting too old - I was convinced I had to hack the raw HTML in the button example somehow and yet it just goes straight where I want it to after pasting it into the blog's widget section.)

Thursday, July 12, 2018

New Story - "Night of the Nude Succubus Orgy"

Yay.  I made it.

As can be seen from the list of entrants to Lierotica's Nude Day Erotic Story Competition, I did just manage to get my story in before the deadline (by about 45 minutes according to my reckoning - leaving it fine just adds to the drama).

Here is the direct link:

Night of the Nude Succubus Orgy

A bit about it.  I wanted to start with a traditional horror/ghost story opening going over the history of a spooky old mansion... and then it turned into a big old porn fest, probably one of the porniest stories I've ever written.  Oh well, I'll have to write that traditional spooky horror/occult tale some other time.

The opening is a bit long, cynically so.  There is a weird quirk to Literotica contests where it's better to have a reader give up half way through than have them read to the end and give the story an "ok" 4 out of 5.  Because of how the scoring works, it's better for a writer if they're given no score at all rather than a 4 (or lower).  Shorter stories have traditionally suffered for this in their competitions.  So stick with it, even if you don't care for the wobbly occult stuff, it gets a lot hotter and sexy later.

Another note on Literotica contests.  Please don't vote more than once or bomb other writers entrants.  One, it's not very sporting and two, Literotica has algorithms to spot that type of behaviour and the votes just end up getting scrubbed.

While I wouldn't recommend starting an erotic tale this slow, it was fun to play around with all the Crowley stuff.  Aleister Crowley is a real-life historical occult figure and tends to get name-checked a lot in this type of story to give them a pseudo-grounding in reality.  The indie adult game "Lust for Darkness" I talked about a couple of weeks ago clearly took some inspiration from Crowley's exploits.  A bust of his likeness can be found in the mansion and one of the books you can find mentions Crowley's Thelema religion.

Rather humorously, I botched my research and had to make some last minute edit changes as the original date I had for when the ritual took place was during a time when Crowley had already moved back to England.  The body double stuff is pure fiction on my part.

The succubi also developed stronger characters than I was expecting.  I'm tempted to use them again.  Maybe there's a full novel here once I include the other succubus scenes.  Obviously it will depend on how the story is received.  I enjoyed writing it, but that might not necessarily translate to people enjoying reading it!

If you did really like one (or more) of the succubi in the story, let me know in the comments below and I'll see if I can give them some more action in a future story.

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Some good news, finally - a new Literotica story on the way

Some good news, finally, as the title says.

I've kept quiet about this one, mainly because I wasn't sure I'd get it finished in time and I didn't want to repeat what happened with "The Heart Squad" earlier this year.

Literotica is currently running their annual Nude Day Erotic Story Contest.  I thought I had a good idea for last year, then failed to finish it on time, because I've had a rough patch of struggling to finish stories.  I dusted it off for this year... and just about got it done, considering I posted it just now, about an hour before the contest deadline.

The main reason is I... uh... might have got a little carried away.  Normally I aim for around 6K words for a short story.  When I finished typing this up (in 3 days) it came to a whopping 13K words.  The succubi had a lot of fun in this one.

I don't know when the story is going live.  I think I entered it in time, but I have had a few problems with Lit randomly bouncing some of my recent stories.  It is is a little tamer than my usual death-by-sex stories, so I think it should be okay, but you never know.  There was a weird period where I did wonder if Lit had a rogue mod problem, so we'll see.

Anyway, if I do get bounced, I'll just serialize the story here.

Hopefully that won't happen and I'll put up a new post with the story link as soon as it goes live in the next day or so.

As my getting carried away put me under a little time pressure, I had to pause work on the slime girl CYOA for a couple of weeks to get this done in time.  To give an idea of how much time pressure - the first draft wasn't complete until Sunday, so I had to type up about 12,000 words in 3 days.  This does mean the editing window was much much shorter than I'd normally like, so there will probably be a few more typos and sloppy sentence constructions than I'd normally be happy with in the finished story.

Now that this is done I will get back to that slime girl CYOA.  I have a decent chunk of the 1st draft already written, but again, I might have got a teensy bit carried away with all the sexy action...

Tuesday, July 03, 2018

Short updatery post

...because I've been a bit quiet here again.

So, I, uh, got more than a little carried away with the pink cushionblob CYOA.  I'm still trying to get a feel for the right amount of content in these.  In this case she gets up to a lot of sexy slimy fun outside of the 6 or 7 Bad Ends, which has made it a lot longer than I was anticipating.  Writing the first draft is definitely the slowest part and I'm waiting until that is done before popping up the Patreon and starting with the panhandling.

There is something else I'm in the middle of, but I'm going to keep it cryptic for now as I'm not 100% sure I'll get it done in time, which will necessitate it being pushed back a year.  After more than a few project trainwrecks recently, I don't want to get people's hopes up only for another story or serial to go over the side of a cliff in a big fireball.

I was also going to post a bit of politics (or rather anti-politics), but I'm getting the impression people are heartily sick of politics being rammed into their entertainment at the moment.  To be honest I think we only have to put up with it for another year and a half or so.  The previously unsinkable franchise, Star Wars, doesn't look in a good way at the moment, and that going down will likely trigger a seismic shift in the entertainment industry.

But fuck all that.  I'm here to write sexy (and occasionally horrifying) succubus smut.  There are some nice juicy things on the way.  And I'm hoping I'll be able to unveil them in the next week or so (or month, still kinda slow at the writing thing at the moment).

Saturday, June 16, 2018

Some Western Erotic Horror Games - "Agony" and "Lust for Darkness"

I'm still beavering away on the next "Escape the Cushionblob" (or Pink Slime girl or Pink Jelly girl) CYOA piece.  Likely because I'm getting carried away and writing too much for each segment, but never mind...

I normally talk about the Japanese sex games, but here are a couple of Western erotic horror games that caught my eye.

Agony is probably the more famous one as it also had a console release.




It's a first person survival horror set in hell.  The aesthetic looks pretty cool.  There are also succubi, other demons with big boobs, various bits of suggestive imagery, and lotz and lotz of claret 'n' gore, if the various trailers are anything to go by.

This one I haven't played.  I was impressed by the look of the game (and tits and succubi).  Unfortunately the reception after release has not been so positive.  From what I've heard the game play and technical stuff don't live up to the promise of the aesthetic.  I'll wait until a patch and sale before giving it a go.




The one I did play was Lust for Darkness.




This has been on my radar since seeing some let's play footage of the demo at the start of the year.  It takes the classic Lovecraftian tropes of cults and eldritch abominations and throws in some kinky sex stuff on top.  You play a husband trying to rescue his wife from a creepy sex cult that kidnapped her a year ago.  The creepy sex cult is attempting to bring a dimension of pure lust into our world with a midnight ritual.  It's first principles Lovecraftian horror, in that the game creates its own eldritch abominations and alien dimensions rather than name-checking Cthulhu and chums.

It also manages the odd feat of being both over-the-top and understated.  You can't walk five paces without seeing a salacious statue, finding a kinky sex toy hidden in a drawer or have a bare-breasted cultist (or demon) jiggle her tits in your face.  But it also seems natural.  You'd expect to see these things in the mansion of the psychopathic leader of a weirdo sex cult, so their presence seems organic rather than crowbarred in for shock value or titillation.

The look of the sex dimension Lusst'ghaa is a little mixed.  They clearly aren't fucking around as you can see right after entering the dimension for the first time:




For me it felt a little too "generic videogame alien world".  The devs chose to base it on the works of Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński, which are weird, but also the sort of weird that's been seen many times over in games with weird alien universes.  It's also your typical alien plane of death.  The booby alien demons seem more interested in slicing you in half and most of the cultists learn fairly quickly that Lusst'ghaa is more interested in tearing them apart than granting them all of their carnal desires.  I would have liked to have seen a sexier (but still dangerous) world.  There is a room near the end with plenty of debauchery on full display, which is fairly imaginative, but I think the game would have benefited from blurring more sexy into the horrific.  Maybe given the main character a few more detailed death scenes rather than a splash of red and fade to black.

Of course, go too far and you run into the problems the Agony people had, so devs have to tread a fine line if they want to be able to actually release and sell their game.

Overall I thought Lust for Darkness was okay if a little short for the price.  It's good to see games experiment with more adult themes/visuals in a way that fits the story.  I hope we see more game devs taking risks on this type of content, and maybe try to push boundaries further.

Monday, June 04, 2018

Update on Next CYOA/Gamebook Scenario

It's not working out.  Looks like I'll have to move onto something else.

/joke

(Although I have done that far too many times with other projects over the last year...)

It's actually moving along quite nicely.  I've planned out the scenario and mapped all the routes through it, along with the various tests the player character needs to perform.

It looks a bit like this:


Oh, and this:


Because I couldn't fit everything on one screen.

I definitely feel like I'm in a "hot" productive phase, so I'm going to keep mining it for as long as it stays "hot".

As I said in the last post, the scenario is going to feature a lovely lady very similar to this one.

Some people asked for it, so I've included some options for non-lethal sex this time around.  She's not quite as predatory as the spider girl, but she will quite happily suck all your good stuff out if the mood takes her.  Escaping with the trophy/statuette should also be a little more of a challenge this time around.

But what we really care about are those Bad End scenes.  Assuming this one pans out the way I've designed it, there will be 4 "good" sex scenes, 5 Bad End scenes and a couple of Very Bad End scenes if you manage to annoy her too much.

I'm now working on writing all the raw text.  I'm estimating it will take about 1-2 weeks to write, type up and edit the scenes and then another week to correctly test and debug the scenario.  The raw text is critical.  Once I've got the big scenes (those sexy Bad Ends) written down, then I'll be confident I'll be able to see this through to completion.  This will be the point I crack open the Patreon and start panhandlin'.  The plan will be to release the finished file to patreons first, and then post the story to philome.la for everyone else a week later.

One question remaining is what to call it.  The H-space Bestiary names I gave monster girls were... variable in quality.

"Escape the Pink Cushionblob" doesn't quite have the right ring to it.

I could use "Escape the Slime Girl", but I have a rough idea of another scenario with a slightly gooier slime girl.

"Escape the Pink Jelly Girl?"

"Escape the Pink Slime Girl?"

Post your thoughts below, as well as anything else you want to say on this.

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Working on next CYOA/Gamebook scenario

"Escape the Arachne" has been live a week and has so far nearly racked up 8,000 plays.  I hope you enjoyed it.  If you have any feedback to make it better, please leave it below.

Also, if anyone feels suitably inspired to create some art of L'hesperusa having "fun", feel free to go ahead and send me links of the results.

I'm personally having fun with this and currently in the process of creating the next scenario.  I refactored bits of the arachne scenario to tidy things up and give me a nice generic template to start the next one off from.

I also added a difficulty mode.  All the stats tests are based off rolling 2d6 and comparing the result against the stat.  Currently you only need to roll less than or equal to your stat value to pass the test.  I added a hard mode which changes that to just less than (ties count as failures).

e.g.  Your Strength is 7.  You're asked to perform a Test of Strength.  In Easy mode a roll of 7 would be considered a pass.  In Hard mode a roll of 7 is considered a failure.  You need to roll 6 or less.

This should shift the probabilities around and give the monster girls more opportunities to have "fun" with you.

Changing difficulty mode isn't in the current "Escape the Arachne" scenario, but I will be adding it to future scenarios.

Now about those future scenarios.  As far as I know, there is no way I can package these up and sell them on Amazon, so I will (finally!) be setting up some sort of Patreon to beg for funding for my smutty endeavors.  It will either go live when the next scenario is ready (and I can prove I can deliver) or earlier if I think it will help motivate me to sit at my desk 8+ hours a day.

The Patreon will also include my short story writing, and I'll look at ways to release things early to patreons as part of the rewards (and hopefully get back to posting smut on Literotica again!).

Is there a game here with all this Twine stuff?

At the moment I'm just going to create them as separate scenarios until I figure out the best way to stitch them together.  By going modular like this, even if the whole game plan falls apart, people will at least still have had fun playing a bunch of separate sexy monster girl scenarios.

In case people hadn't already figured it out, the Gold Statuette in "Escape the Arachne" is a placeholder and serves no function other than extra bragging rights when you escape.

This could end up being replaced by a key item if I take the Fighting Fantasy approach of sending players through a fiendish maze and remorselessly killing them off at a checkpoint near the end because they missed the key numbers engraved in a rock in the very first cave.  That would be fun to create, but would require a lot more work to put everything together.

An easier approach would be to treat it as a more perverted Crystal Maze.  Each scenario is a puzzle room where the goal is to escape with a statuette.  At the end a succubus "rewards" you depending on how many statuettes you retrieve.  That would fit very well with a modular structure and allow for juggling of the scenarios so players are encountering them randomly and in different orders.

This is all for future consideration.  For now I want to get 4 or 5 scenarios under my belt first.

As for now I'm working on the next scenario.  It's going to feature a soft and comfy pink cushionblob like the one in this H-space story.  She's waiting to give you a lovely erotic body-to-body massage.

As with the arachne scenario there will be multiple sexy Bad Ends, and maybe some sexy Good Ends as well.

I probably need to give her a different name though.  "Escape the Cushionblob" doesn't have the right ring to it.  Escape the Pink Jelly Girl?

Anyway, let me know your thoughts below?  Do you like the idea of more Gamebook scenarios like the arachne one?

(I haven't forgotten about my other fiction either.  I want to get a serial started back up on here as well.  I'm trying to feel around for the right one.  But while I'm currently excited on this, it makes sense to channel the crazy manic phase into as much productivity as I can while it lasts.)

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Along came a spider... Escape the Arachne is live!

Okay, now you can get excited (maybe).

"Escape the Arachne" is live.

I don't know much about the people behind philome.la, so I don't know how long it will be live.  They may take exception to the adult nature of the story and/or some political things I've said in the past and give me the boot.  My long-term plan is to buy some web hosting and post these where I won't have to worry about that sort of thing (or at least, worry about it less).

Now onto the story.  It's short, about the length of a short story.  I intended the scenario to be more a demo/proof of concept.  If you follow the optimal path you can reach the end of the scenario very quickly.  It's also designed to be relatively easy.  Even with average stats you should be able to blunder to the end without too much trouble.  It's also possible to escape without even passing a single stat test.

Of course, it isn't much fun if you do that, so I'd suggest letting L'hesperusa "play" with you a little longer.

There are 6 different Bad Ends available (and one Good End).  5 of these are fairly easy to find.  The last might require a little bit of trial and error (hint: nakedness is an attribute within this scenario).

The whole thing is written in Twine using the SugarCube story format.  As this is a demo/proof of concept I was focusing more on the coding and the text rather than the presentation, so yep, it looks a little basic.  Everything has to start somewhere.  Artwork, sound fx, a prettier GUI are things I can look at in the future.

The game mechanics are very similar to old gamebooks, the Fighting Fantasy series in particular.  If people find the scenario a little too easy and want to L'hesperusa to dominate them a little more I might switch the test probabilities around.  Currently the tests call for rolling equal to or lower than the stat on 2d6.  Giving L'hesperusa the tie (so a pass is only if the roll is less than the stat) would shift the probabilities in her favour.  That's something I'm considering doing.  The current stat tests are a demo version anyway and might be replaced by something more complex at a future date.  (Plus I don't know what patents/copyright/trademarks the Fighting Fantasy series still holds on d6 attribute checks.  My gut feeling is simple attribute tests like this are too generic to patent/copyright, but very stupid patents exist...)

Anyway, I hope people have fun playing with L'hesperusa.  I haven't done any coding for a while, so this was a fun diversion.  Please post feedback (and bugs encountered) below.

If the interest is there, I would like to write more scenarios featuring different monster girls.  Maybe even stitch those scenarios together into a full game.  I'd likely need funding for this (especially if it gets to the point of commissioning artwork etc), so it might be an excuse to finally get that Patreon up and running.  So long as the interest is there.  If people try it out and give it the thumbs down, well it was an experiment that didn't work out (although it was great to do some coding again).

I have no plans to stop doing the other writing.  Ideally I'll have a nice serial up and running next week (although probably not "The Heart Squad" as that's proving stubborn and will likely need to go back onto the backburner).

Hope people enjoyed this little game demo anyway.  Please leave feedback below.

Oh, and I probably should add.  If you like it, please spread the word.  :D

Sunday, May 20, 2018

CYOA Testing Stuff

Test Link

DO NOT GET EXCITED.

This is just a test to see what a twine story looks like when hosted (And in this case is a bit of test code I wrote to randomise some choices).  I didn't want to post the demo and then find out it got scrambled on the the upload.

Current hosting site is philome.la.  Not massively enthusiastic about this considering they wanted me to use my twitter handle to login with.  I suspect it's also a platform I might be booted off at any time and will continue with the expectation of that happening at any moment.

I did want to post it here, but Blogger is not really geared up for this type of thing from what I gathered when looking into it.

The real demo is near completion.  I'm just ironing out some bugs and adding text for any segments I might have missed.  Bear in mind, this is a demo, so it will look like ass.  Hopefully the text will make up for it and you'll enjoy your (brief) time with L'hesperusa.


ETA:

Fuck.  Played 294 times.  Didn't I tell you not to get excited.  There's nothing there at the moment.  It's just some test code I threw together to check random choices work.  The real thing will be along in a couple of days hopefully.

Monday, May 07, 2018

And now... Spiders?

Chaos Writing strikes again.

This was supposed to be a continuation of the "Heart Squad" series.  I think that series can be salvaged, but I didn't get a chance to work on it over the weekend.  The reason being I currently have another project screaming very loudly "Work on me!" in my ear.  I did briefly consider ignoring it, but not working on things when they're red-hot in my mind is usually when my productivity goes to hell.  If you wake up and your brain is currently bouncing around going "let's work on this thing", it's usually best from a productivity standpoint to get as much work done on that project while the enthusiasm is there.  So, that's what I'm going to do.

I've got 3 days before I'm off for a work assignment for a week.  I want to see if I can smash as much of this idea as I can before then in case I come back and find the enthusiasm has waned.

I've had a look at where I got to with "The Heart Squad" and think it's retrievable, but I don't want to make it a chore by forcing myself to work on it when something else is screaming for my attention.

As for this mystery project, here's a clue:



You turn and see a monstrous spider woman—an arachne.  Above the waist she has the body of an exotic young woman with voluptuous round breasts.  Below the waist she has the shiny black abdomen and eight long jointed legs of a giant spider.  Straight black hair falls in curtains on either side of a thin and haughtily beautiful face.  Her sensually plump lips are stained black and curled up in a cruel smile.

“Hello, little cricket.  I am L'hesperusa the arachne,” she says.  “I’m going to suck up all your fluids...”

She pauses to run a moist tongue around her sensual lips.

“...through your lovely hard cock.”

Her words send both a shiver of arousal and fear through you.  You don’t think she’ll stop with just your semen.

No time to dwell on that now.  The arachne rears up on her long spindly legs and points the tip of her bulbous black abdomen in your direction.  It looks like she’s taking aim.

Test of Agility



This will probably be the only post this week as I'm going to hammer away on this thing while it's hot.  I have written a lot of text for it over the last few weeks, but I'm not 100% sure on how it will fit together.  At the worst, if my programming skills fail me, I'll post the raw text for people's enjoyment.

(L'hesperusa really really likes playing with her prey...)

Wednesday, May 02, 2018

Wrapping up Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] and moving on

I was going to go into a little more detail on the gameplay and mechanics, but I think people are getting antsy for me to move on... :)

Not much more to say.  As a game MQ:P just about holds up, mainly on the strengths of the characters, story and the wide variety of weird, wonderful and mostly sexy monster girl designs.  The JRPG elements are still too grindy IMHO, and not the best fit for the femdom-esque Bad Ends, although the series does have a harem element not present in the original series.  Overall, I think TTR's baby, while still very good, is in danger of being dethroned by other up-and-coming whippersnappers.  Tokinokogiri's Succubus Prison is probably the benchmark for hot succubus/monster girl Bad Ends now and even Dieselmine managed to raise their game with Monmusu Labyrinth.

She really likes to give you a good squeeze (Succubus Prison)

The main thing MQ:P lacks now is animation for the Bad End scenes and I'm not sure how easy that would be to add given that the Monster Girl Quest series' greatest strength has been the sheer number and variety of monster girls.  That's a lot of dicking around with puppeting tools to get all those boobies bouncing around in a pleasing manner.  Used selectively, maybe...  One of MQ:P [part 2]'s biggest weaknesses is that all the monster girl queens fought later in the game are repeat encounters from the original series.  A little bit of sneaky puppeting/animation might have given those old sex scenes a fresh twist.

Boobies bouncing around in a pleasing manner (Monmusu Labyrinth)

Anyway, that's enough on Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] for now.

I suspect you're more interested in the moving on part.

I definitely want to get back to some original fiction.  The odd blip aside, the thrice-weekly posting schedule I used for the MQ:P series worked pretty well for me.  I'd like to apply that same discipline to my original fiction and see where it takes me (ideally the raw material for a new book I can submit to my publisher every 4-6 months).

What is something I haven't yet decided.  I'm still in the middle of some upheaval as I have another trip (this time for work) scheduled to knock out most of next week.  Getting back to and finishing off "The Heart Squad" seems like a decent interim project before I decide whether to launch into Succubus Summoning 301 or something completely different.

If work on "The Heart Squad" starts flowing again, expect that to resume Friday (or Monday).  If it's still stuck, expect a bit of wibbly-wobbly inconsistency while I pick something else to work on.

There is something else I've been tinkering with recently, an old project dragged off hiatus.  That does appear to be going somewhere, but I'll hold off on posting more about it until I have something a little more presentable.

Does this mean you're done with Japanese monster girl games?

I think I'll lay off the extended "Let's Play" series for a while.  It's been too long since I last submitted a book to my publishers and I need to concentrate on my own fiction for a bit.

Ideally, I would like to keep reviewing the good ones as they come out, but there is an issue here unrelated to clashes with my other work.  Windows 10 appears to be in some kind of weird arms race with the tools I use for text-hooking and machine translation.  Every Windows 10 update broke my tools.  I was able to keep going by reverting the Windows updates, but in the end I was in a race against time to actually finish MQ:P before a deadline where I'd have to either accept those updates or leave my machine unsupported.  So, as of now, I'm back to having no means of hooking and auto-translating Japanese games.  This currently makes playing and reviewing them rather difficult.

Assuming I can fix this, I'd have to have a long think before doing another big series on MQ:P [part 3] when it comes out.  It would be nice to do it to complete the series, but I'd have to think carefully about how to do it in a way that doesn't swallow up all of my time.  Running two series alongside each other doesn't work for me (as you may have noticed when my schedule went to hell right after starting posting "The Heart Squad"), so I might look at some kind of one month on, one month off schedule to prevent my blog being completely swamped by MQ:P stuff.

I suspect that will be a long way off though.  I imagine TTR still has plenty to do before unleashing the final chapter of Paradox on the world.

Lest we forget MQ:P also has some very nice succubi (Monmusu Quest: Paradox)

Anyway, I hope those of you that enjoyed the series, enjoyed it, and apologies to those who felt it ran on for way too long.

Friday (or Monday) I think it's time we found out what happened to that software engineer on his very special Valentine's Night...