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!

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...

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.

"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.