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.)

11 comments:

  1. I think you might wind up surprised with the number of people that will pitch in on the patreon. I'm certainly crossing my fingers for your sake.

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  2. The Crystal Maze model does sound promising. And I'm looking forward to the next adventure!

    I'd definitely be tempted to throw a monthly buck your way to support your endeavors.

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  3. I for one am looking forward to future scenarios (though I hope you'll make the revisions and improvements to the Arachne one as well!). I know there are plenty of your characters that I'd like to see featured. Let us know if you are open to suggestions on this.

    As for gameplay suggestions, I would like to see the ability to manually assign attributes at the beginning of the game, RPG style; from a finite pool, obviously. The current random selection gets tedious after a few play-throughs. It is fun to try different builds to see how the scenario plays out. The statuettes could then be integrated in this system by giving the opportunity to increase or reassign attributes, providing good incentive to obtain them, but without making it strictly necessary to do so.

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    1. I'm keeping the mechanics very basic for now so I can focus on the text side of things. Once I feel a little bit more confident with what I'm doing, I might look to get more RPGy with the player stats.

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  4. If you're looking for a Fighting Fantasy boook with a rather modular structure, I'd recommend Scorpion Swamp.
    The "navigate a maze while gathering collectibles" sounds more like Deathtrap Dungeon or Trial of Champions, though.

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    1. I remember mapping that as a kid. It's very different to the other books. Not a bad blueprint to go by. Deathtrap Dungeon is a classic. I picked a lot of them apart to see how they were put together. House of Hell is another great case study on how to hide the one correct route (all the options at the start look like they have the same outcome - the player is drugged and taken to an upstairs room - but one has a different reference, which allows the player to pick up a piece of info which is critical later on). Tin Man games has an adaptation of it (pretty much a straight port of the book) on Steam that is worth a look.

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    2. Yeah, I draw a map too :D.
      And I remeber about House of Hell. I picked up a copy of the book where some pages were out of order, so I couldn't avoid being drugged xD

      Another book comes to my mind (not Fighting Fantasy, and afaik not available in English) where your only option to avoid a bad end was to quit the adventure right after the first few sections, thus missing most of the book. (Not because everything lead to a dead end, but because you were doomed after a certain event early in the story anyway, even if you finished the scenario "succesfully".)

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  5. Not a feedback to just Escape the Arachne but rather the way you handle bad ends.
    You describe vividly what happens, but after the first or second orgasm you often just end the story with "and then she sucked him dry". Being more descriptive here, like how the arms and legs turn more and more numb, the throut drier and drier, the skin paler and paler, the vision more and more blurry and etc. would make those bad ends much more enjoyable.

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    1. For the game stuff I wanted to avoid going too much into wall-of-text territory. It might be fun to pick one of the Bad Ends and really drag it out - maybe one of the harder ones to find like the draining silk one in the arachne scenario.

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  6. I have a general question, relating to your writing as as whole, instead of just "Escape the Archne". How much brainpower do you devote to constructing your monster women's mentalities?

    I assume creating a spectrum of motivations would make it easier to make each and every creature "pop". For instance, different Arachne would act differently depending on whether they see sex as trophy hunting, punishment, reward, casual fast-food, population control or something they're entitled to. That would give each of them a different taste in men, different hunting methods and most importantly, a different kind of "pillow talk".

    It could even be expanded into other activities when they're not on duty. Exploring their hobbies, beliefs, successes, failures and relationships could give them more potential, bleeding through to sex scenes.

    One of my favorite villains in fiction, while 100% selfishly evil, was made great precisely through that approach.

    I hope my question isn't misguided, keeping in mind the purpose of smut. It's just something that I had on my mind and decided to ask.

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