Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Wrapping up 2019

Seems to be a tradition of youtubers and various content creators to do a "this was 2019, here are my plans for 2020" post.  I tend to be hit and miss on end of year posts.  Half the time I start them, watch them descend into self-flagellation and whining, and promptly drown them in a bucket to put them out of their misery.  I feel a bit better at this point of time, so let's go for it.

2019 was probably the Patreon year for me.  A bit ironic considering I started the year wondering if the platform would survive the Orwellian tendencies of its "trust and safety" division.  The backlash to that did seem to curb further authoritarian impulses and Patreon seems to have been relatively stable since then. Unfortunately, the realities of making XXX content means I can never get too complacent, but for now it's a reasonable income stream.

For most of the year I wasn't really sure what to do with my Patreon account.  I did like the original short stories I produced for patrons, but was less happy with the time it took to write them.  It meant I ended up "paywalling" more content than I would have liked because I was barely getting a timed exclusive story finished a month.

The big change was "The House of Hellish Harlots".  I've been wanting to create an eroge along the same lines as games like "Monster Girl Quest" for a long time.  Most of my brainstorming went nowhere.  Either I couldn't get the sex/combat to work how I wanted or the game idea was beyond my means to create.  With "The House of Hellish Harlots", it all fell into place.  I think I have a really strong idea for a game here, something that a lot of people will enjoy playing (and reading).  For this reason, I dropped a lot of my tentative plans and have been throwing everything into developing it over the latter part of the year.  More importantly, it brought my enthusiasm back, which then fed into greater productivity and more hours spent writing every day.  I think this has a good chance to be really good, so I want to see it through to some form of finished product.

There are still some things to be careful of.  For starters, while the concept might seem solid, it might not necessarily translate to enjoyable game play.  There is also the risk I might run into unforeseen technical brick walls.  For now it's running smooth.

At the upper end of possibilities, the demos play well, the interest is there, I'm able to hire artist/music people and we have a proper Western (friendly) rival to "Monster Girl Quest".  In the medium case, it ends up as a text-only game - not quite a viral hit, but enjoyed by the people that find it.  In the worst case scenario, people have fun with the various scenarios I create and I have a bunch of succubus/monster girl scenes I can tweak and reuse in future stories.

So.

Primary Objective for 2020
"The House of Hellish Harlots", all the way.  It's a good idea.  I'm regularly adding new succubi/monster girls.  Once I have all the NPCs done and the intro done (or redone, as I wrote an early CYOA that handled the journey to the house a while back), I want to get that up on a website to attract people that wouldn't otherwise know about it.  And then we'll see.  I think this could go far, so fingers crossed.

Secondary Objective for 2020
Getting "The House of Hellish Harlots" up and running is my primary goal.  This doesn't mean I've abandoned writing completely.  I want to get back to posting stories on Literotica (assuming they don't get rejected!).  I also want to get books up on Amazon again.  I almost have enough stories for a new "A Succubus for" collection and I'd like to something with all those H-space stories.

There is also a certain hapless warlock's adventures I need to get back to.  That's the funny one.  I keep looking on Amazon and seeing popular succubus series and think "Why don't I do that?", when of course I already have a popular series people have been clamoring to read more of.  Yep, I haven't made the smartest of choices over the past few years...

Things I will be doing less of:

Blogging
This is where all the lovely metrics sites like Blogger provide can be a trap.  There was a time I felt pressured to post and post to keep the monthly hits up.  Looking back, it feels like I was expending a lot of effort on things that while fun, were probably not the most important things I should have been working on.  I'll still be around here, but I will likely only post at a reduced rate and generally to bring people's attention to a new story, or book, or demo release.  Let's write the succubus smut, rather than write about the succubus smut.

H-Game Reviews
Unfortunately, this is more imposed by my ongoing struggles with finding stable translation software and keeping it running.  They get blocked fairly swiftly nowadays and without some form of machine translation support, I can't play the fun games.  If I find something sweet, I'll write about it, but I don't feel as though I have my finger on the pulse as much as I did in the past.  (Although someone has sent me a translated version of Succubus Senki that seems like it might be fun - thanks for that!)

Things I will be avoiding altogether (if I can help it!):

Politics
I've made a fairly conscious effort to not bring up politics over the latter half of the year and will continue to do so.  In the past I wrote about issues that I felt were negatively impacting creativity (and still are).  Unfortunately, there is so much toxicity and bad-faith discussion around these subjects that any kind of attempt to take a nuanced position results in scarlet letters being carved on your forehead and your name being put on a "list".  So, I think I'll just stick to writing succubus smut from now on.  I think both you (the readers) and I will be happier with that!

On the positive side, it looks like the market is gradually solving a lot of these problems.  In the meantime my advice for any creatives would be:  Ignore the drama.  Reroute around blocks.  Focus on creating your best possible work.  Treat your audience with respect.

H-Game Walkthroughs
This ties in with both blogging and the problems with playing Japanese games at the moment.  I do have fun writing them, but I have to be realistic - they don't pay the bills.  I might make an exception for Chapter 3 of "Monmusu Quest: Paradox", but I really need to be focusing on the work that keeps my bank balance healthy (or at least, not critical).

Writing How-Tos and inspiration behind stories
This was something I thought would make nice posts for patrons.  Then I saw the metrics for how many people were actually reading them...

Write the succubus smut, not about the succubus smut!

Anyway, I've written enough on this and I need to get back to writing that succubus smut (in this case some sexy new Hellish Harlot scenarios).

Happy New Year!  Let's grab 2020 by the scruff of the neck!

- manyeyedhydra

Monday, December 16, 2019

House of Hellish Harlots demo (ver0.007 - The Portly Gentleman) out now

xposted from my Patreon:


Okay, now I've had a chance to get some sleep (and get some other morning tasks out of the way), let's go over this release properly.

First up, it's a mechanics-focused release, which means it's more games-type stuff rather than sexy scenario-type stuff.  Because of how complex the new scoring system (and the code refactor) turned out to be, I decided to split the planned release into two.  Now this is out, I'll be switching back to finishing off 5 or so harlot scenarios for the second half.  Hopefully to be done by around the end of December depending on how much I can dodge the usual holidays stuff.

Now onto the new additions:

The Portly Gentleman.
This NPC will be the player's main source of money while in the House.  He is only encountered in the post-room phase and will "score" players on their encounters with the harlots.  For more background on him, you can talk to The Elegant Woman.

The Scoring System.
Originally, this was just a single numerical value, then I realised I wanted to make repeat visits to harlots a feature, and because of this, needed to keep track of what had already been scored.  I didn't want players picking up easy coins by playing the same scenario over and over, and it also wouldn't make sense for The Portly Gentleman to pay out again for information he'd already paid for.  This also opened up the option to have The Portly Gentleman give custom feedback depending on the harlot (you should notice this with Suka).  It was a bit more work, but I think it will be rewarding in the long term for the options it gives me.

More Dummy Harlots.
This one might be more annoying than useful at this stage.  Because this is a mechanics-focused release, I wanted players to be able to play through more rounds before the selection algorithm 'breaks'.  It will dilute the 'real' harlots, but is only a temporary thing as I start to replace them with 'real' scenarios.  If you like the names of some of the dummies, let me know and I'll attach them to future scenarios.

Code Refactor.
For some reason, I was all over the place with implementing NPCs to start with.  The Elegant Woman was a little buggy in the last release because the way I'd implemented her was... not great.  With The Portly Gentleman I finally found a cleaner way to implement the NPCs and upgraded both The Madam and The Elegant Woman accordingly.  The other change is a little more technical and related to how Twine handles objects.  I'm not going to go into it in too much depth as it probably isn't that interesting.  One bit of advice I can give to anyone working with Twine - be very careful with object references, they don't always work the way you think they might and a lot of times you'll end up modifying the property of a copy rather than the original.

Repeat Visits.
Some back story.  I had the four features above pretty much done (minus testing) around Wednesday last week.  So, in a moment of madness, I thought I'd tack on Repeat Visits as an additional feature.  Oh boy, was that a bad idea.  The idea behind Repeat Visits is a player would get the option to revisit some harlots as future selections and the harlot would remember the player from the first time.  This could open up options for side quests, maybe additional bonus scenes, or maybe even necessary to 'perfect' some harlot scenarios.  I updated the scoring system with this in mind.  I picked Suka no-Hirudo as a test case as she has multiple options for sex scenes and future visits would allow players to pick a different option.  And... it was a little more complex to implement than I thought.  That plus a dental appointment on Friday was the reason this release went out at midnight on Sunday rather than a sensible time on Friday.

Despite that, I'm still glad I did it now rather than later as I now know roughly what's required and can build it into future scenarios.  Not all harlots will have this option, but it will add a bit extra to some.  As always, I have to be careful not to make the harlot scenarios too complex, otherwise they will take too long to write and implement.

And now something I should have added and will be working on later today:

Choosing Harlots Directly.
After Smith's comment on the original post, I did check to make sure I'd flipped the right flag on Suka's properties to enable her to show up for repeat visits.  That was set correctly.  Then I did a quick back-of-an-envelope calculation on the probability of Suka showing up twice... and grimaced.  The endgame plan is to have a lot of harlots so that each play through - the order the harlots are presented, etc - will be fairly unique.  Unfortunately, this doesn't work so well in the early phases of development where around 4/5ths of the harlots are dummies and it takes a lot of random playthroughs to get a specific harlot to show up.  I have an idea on how to get around this.

I did leave a stub in The Madam options for a 'gallery mode' where a player selects a harlot directly.  This was meant to be outside of the regular game.  Gallery mode will come (likely near the end of development), but I think I can add an option similar to it.  It will work like this - The Madam gives the player a list of harlots, they pick one, and that harlot will automatically be added to the next selection.  That should make it easier to pick out specific scenarios rather than running the game loop over and over, trying to get RNG to throw up the scenario you want.

Bugs.
I did a fair bit of testing, but the project is now getting big enough that it's easy to miss some pathways and corner cases.  If, while playing the demo, you spot something that shouldn't be there, or a point where the game outright breaks, please let me know in the comments below.  I'd like to ensure everything is running smoothly by the time I add the next batch of harlots.

And that's that for now.

ver0.008 will be that tweak to The Madam's options plus any bugfixes I've missed (and maybe repeat visit options for Arana Solfugis and Anna Boa).

ver0.009 will be 5+ new harlot scenarios depending on how many I can finish before the end of the month.


Now back here.  The House of Hellish Harlots project is going well.  I don't think I've been as focused as this for a while.  It is going to continue to devour a lot of my time while I put together what I hope will be a very enjoyable succubus/monster girl eroge.  I haven't abandoned fiction completely.  Once I get House of Hellish Harlots to a more advanced demo state (all the major game pieces in place and a decent number of harlot scenarios added), I'll look to start sneaking out short stories again.  It will be a preventative measure against burnout on the game project.  Until then, sorry to the people not currently able to access Patreon.

Friday, November 15, 2019

New demo of "House of Hellish Harlots" (ver 0.006) out now

I guess it might not be much consolation to people that can't access Patreon, but the last month or so might be the most I've been fired up for a project in a long time (if only I'd been like this for some of those novel ideas a couple of years back, sigh...).

If you've been following the previous posts here, or me on twitter, you'll have heard me talking a lot about the "House of Hellish Harlots".  This is where I not only came up with an idea for a sexy monster girl/succubus game, but a sexy monster girl/succubus game I could feasibly develop rather than just talk about.  And that's what I've been doing for the past couple of months.

For now it's a text-only game built in Twine.  At some point, if it really takes off and proves popular I might migrate it to Unity and hire artists, etc.  For now it's still at proof-of-concept stage, so I'm still not sure whether what seems like a good idea in abstract translates to a fun (and more importantly, sexy!) game to play.

The last couple of releases featured a skeleton showing what the main game loop would be, followed by an example sexy scenario with Sapoonismenos Nerei.  Since then I've been adding more content and come up with another playable demo.

This demo adds 2 NPCs, The Madam and The Elegant Woman.  Both can be used to obtain information on the various harlots (and other things).

More importantly, I've added 5 new harlot scenarios for the player to play through.  These are of varying degrees of lethality.  The harlots have a wide range of different triggering events to determine whether the player gets their brains fucked out or... less pleasant things.

For now, the demo is a Patreon exclusive (you can find details on it here).  I'm still looking into ways to get it out to other people (to make it a timed exclusive rather than just plain old exclusive) as I want to try and build up as big an audience as possible.

More on that when it's sorted.

As for now, the demo is up on Patreon and can be unlocked for the low price of $1.

Wednesday, October 09, 2019

1st Harlot in the House - Sapoonismenos Nerei

"The House of Hellish Harlots" has progressed a little further than the brainstorming stage.  I've prototyped the main game loop in Twine and now added the first harlot scenario.

She is the lovely Sapoonismenos Nerei.  She loves giving out soapy massages (but handle with care!).

So far I'm pretty happy with how things are going.  The idea dropped neatly into place.  And now the code looks like it's doing the same.

I'll probably hit some fuck-off iceberg somewhere, because there's always some big fuck-off iceberg somewhere in game development.  For now things look promising.  At least for the initial text-only version.

For now, regular updates are only on patreon.  I know not everyone can subscribe there, so I'll try to get those demos out to everyone else at some point.  Not sure how yet, but I'll figure something out.

I'm still fairly excited about this.  If it pans out the way I'm hoping it will pan out, it will be a nice framework to continually add new monster girls and succubi to.  (And somewhere to park the more interesting monster girls and succubi ideas until I have a proper story/novel for them.)

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

"House of Hellish Harlots" brainstorming

After talking about game ideas I can't build, let's have one I think I can build.  I'm excited about this one and currently bashing the code together in Twine.

(x-posted from my patreon)

I mentioned it at the end of the last post, so here's a bit more on how the "House of Hellish Harlots" brainstorming is going.

The original idea has changed a few times.  I plotted out the intro thinking it would be the start to a gamebook along similar lines to Fighting Fantasy's "House of Hell".  When I implemented it in Twine I was thinking it would be the introduction to a framing device to hold the "Escape the [monster girl]" scenarios.

The idea was this:

The player would find themselves in a supernatural brothel.  Every round the madam would give the player the choice of three succubus harlots.  Each succubus would have her own "Escape" scenario and the player would have to survive several rounds without being Bad Ended to win the game.  Various NPCs in the brothel would give the player hints on how to survive these scenarios.

I don't have a problem with coming up with sexy Bad Ends, but I was struggling to think up good puzzles, and the ones I had were starting to get too complicated.  I also didn't have any kind of progression system.  It was just a series of puzzles with no real link between them.

Playing "Lobotomy Corporation" was the lightbulb moment.  Inspired by the SCP Foundation, that game has a large bestiary of weird objects/entities.  These entities have relatively simple triggering conditions to determine whether they play nice, kill the employee studying them, or even break containment and rampage through your complex.  The difficulty comes from those triggering conditions being hidden from the player.

Which gets me back to my current ideas for "House of Hellish Harlots".

The background is the same.  The player arrives at the mysterious brothel.  They have an array of physical (strength, etc) and personality (confidence, etc) attributes.

Each round the player is presented with three harlots.

They then have a short phase where they can consult NPCs or buy items within the club.

After that phase they must pick a harlot.  (There will be options to 'mulligan' and pick from 3 new harlots, but these will be rare.)

After picking a harlot, the harlot will then go to her room.  Before the player follows, he has to select a gift to take up to her room.  Outside the door the player will have to decide on what attitude they will have on entering the room (dominant, submissive, funny, charming…).

Then they enter the room and the 'fun' stuff happens.  Depending on various factors, the harlot will give the player a good time, a very good time, a terminally lethal time, a bad time, or just eat them.  Sometimes there will be a puzzle option and choices (but not to the complexity of previous scenarios), but mostly it will be dependent on various factors.

Examples of these are the player's stats, the gift, the attitude they bring to the room, some decisions made in the room, certain items (charms) they might be carrying, player's semen level, girls they've visited previously…  A lot, in other words.  The game will also not be telling you why you get a particular scene.  The player will have to try and work it out for themselves.

On its own, this would be a little harsh, and likely involve the player being snu-snu'ed to death by various succubi over and over (like that's a bad thing!) until they figure out why they're being erotically extinguished.  This is where the phase between the three harlots being presented to the player and when they have to make a choice comes in.  The player will use this to ask around and find out information on the harlots.

They will also have time to find out general information about the house and its inhabitants, buy charms, alter stats through pills and potions, remove negative statuses, and also buy special drinks to replenish their semen counter (run out of semen in the room and the player gets a Bad End regardless of how nice the harlot is).  This time is fairly limited, so the player will have to make some tough choices on what to prioritise.

I did have a couple of sticking points.  The player would need some currency to buy things and I wasn't sure how to give it to them.  It should be related to the player's performance with the harlot, but the house is a brothel, so it wouldn't make sense for either the harlot or the madam to give money to the player.  The other problem was progression.  There needed to be a grand overall puzzle for the player to solve in order to escape the house.

Then both those things just dropped into place, also giving me a good chunk of background lore in the process.  I'm not going to reveal anything right now, because figuring out how the house works is going to be a major part of the game.

This also forced a change.  The stat checks had to go.  The reason being is that the hidden info part with all the possible variables is going to make figuring out what is important for each harlot difficult.  Making hidden stat checks and not disclosing the result to the player would probably make it impossible.  For that reason, the RNG part will mostly be restricted to which harlots are offered to the player each round (with options to mulligan acting as a safety valve in case the player is presented with 3 'certain death' harlots in the same round).

I'm quite excited about this.  The game loop and surrounding framework feels like it works.  The building blocks are also fairly simple, so it shouldn't be too hard to code.

The main thing is the extensibility.  Once I've built the skeleton, I can just keep adding more and more monster girl scenes as I come up with them, which is what I've wanted from a monster girl eroge idea since I first started trying to design them.

While, I'm currently very excited about this, I should probably step in to dampen down YOUR excitement.  This is very very early days.  I think I have a pretty good core design that shouldn't be too difficult to implement.

Shouldn't is a word that has buried many code projects…

I'm currently building the skeleton in Twine.  I suspect at some point I might break Twine, or the project may grow too big and unwieldy to maintain in Twine.  At that point I'll probably switch to something like C# (and maybe even something like Unity).

The next question mark is over the game loop.  While the idea sounds and feels good to me, there's always a chance it might not translate to a compelling and fun play experience.  At that point we'll probably be shit out of luck – just an idea that wasn't as good as it first seemed – but even in the worst-case scenario you'll still have a lot of sexy monster girl/succubi Bad End scenarios to read.

It's put me in an odd position.  I wanted to get back to writing some CYOA scenarios, but I didn't expect the whole game idea to drop neatly into place as it has done.  Now that it has, I want to work on it like a mad thing while everything is still hot and fresh in my mind.

Give me your thoughts below anyway.

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Ideas for a Darkest Dungeon-esque H-game - Being the Succubus Bait in H-space

Okay, after a brief pause while I actually put some new stories out, it's time to finish my random ramblings on hypothetical Darkest Dungeon-style games with monster girls.

Also, after another pause.  I didn't like how rambling the last piece was, and how this one was turning out, so I decided to rewrite it, hence it's a bit later than I planned.

And yes, I know these posts aren't to everyone's taste, and some of you would rather I binned this wannabe game dev stuff and got back to writing.  I hear ya, and I don't blame ya.  This is something I do to give the writing brain a bit of a break.  It also puts these notes somewhere where I can find them later.  (And for anyone else to use as inspiration.)

After talking about the Iratus approach, where the player controls a harem of lovely succubi, I thought I'd get back closer to Darkest Dungeon with the player-as-succubus-bait approach.

For this one I have setting and plot, unlike the generic warlock waffling I did last time (although, that's probably still the easiest and most likely to be successful way of implementing this sub-genre).

We're in H-space.  The player is a scientist-type leader of a military/research group.  That unit has been isolated deep in H-space because of a weird phenomenon and the goal is to get back home with as many people as possible.

H-space has weird physics that render most human tech, including guns, unreliable.  The main purpose of this is so we can upgrade the various conventional fantasy RPG classes (melee, tank, ranged, etc) to present-day equivalents forced to use improvised weaponry (basically, provide a plausible reason for a fantasy-RPG-esque battle system rather than marines running around with machine guns and blasting succubi Doom-style).

We'll want a good mix of front-line and back-line classes so the player can experiment with finding synergistic combinations (one of the strengths of Darkest Dungeon, and a weakness of Iratus, which doesn't quite get that right).  Tanks will be especially important as the main combat theme will likely be the succubi pulling party members out of formation to fuck their brains (and soul) out.  Instead of Darkest Dungeon's stress mechanic, our equivalent will be based around seduction and willpower.  This means we can play around with what constitutes a 'tank'.  Sometimes you'll want the frontline to be muscled marines to fend off physical attacks.  Sometimes you'll need it to be that skinny, iron-willed chaplain.

We'll need to be fair about what enemies the player faces.  It's no good hitting them with an all-physical-restraint party of lamias and then following it up with a party full of seductive, willpower-sapping succubi.  One thing we'll want to copy from Darkest Dungeon is multiple regions with their own enemies and flavour.  In our case it will likely be an excuse to pool similar monster girls together (a jungle region for plant girls, a desert region for lamias, etc).

The main gameplay loop for Darkest Dungeon is send a party into various dungeons to plunder cash and items required to build up the base camp (the hamlet).  This allows the player to increase the strength of their characters, plunder harder dungeons, and then finally challenge the darkest dungeon itself.

It's also very grindy.  Personally, I think 'grind' and hentai games don't go together very well.  Regular RPGs can get away with it to some extent as gradually building up characters is part of the core loop.  For eroges, the primary focus is the sex stuff, and if you're gating that off behind umpteen super-generic combat encounters (which might even be against regular rather than sexy monsters), you're only going to bore the player.  This is probably the number one reason why I don't review as many monster girl eroges nowadays – I get bored way before completing them because the devs threw in a bunch of needless grind out of a misguided need to pad out their game.

For that reason, we probably want our dungeon explorations to be more like Slay the Spire or Iratus – each dungeon being a single run to the boss, rather than going back into the same area over and over.  The main problem with this approach is that it forces the dungeons to be sequential where I'd rather the player had some choices over the area to go through.  I'm not sure how to resolve this.  From a plot perspective it would make more sense for the player to traverse the regions sequentially as they tried to get closer to the portal back home.

Now for the important stuff – the sex.  As with the warlock approach, a lot of the H-content is going to be pixel art of team succubus getting it on with the other (in this case our) team.  We probably also want Bad End snu-snu scenes if the party wipes, but this will force some design considerations.

We'll need to be sparing with the permadeath.  While I like the dilemma – it's almost an additional, meta, attack for the succubus to see if she can tempt the player into losing to see her sexy Bad End – forcing the player to have to throw away whatever time investment they've put into their party just to view the sex content seems unfun.

And also, who is being Bad Ended?  i.e. Where is the player avatar in all this?  In Darkest Dungeon you're the guy that inherited the creepy mansion and you're the one hiring all the idiots to go get killed by Lovecraftian horrors.  You're never on-screen and if the party wipes, you just hire the next lot of shmucks off the stagecoach.

I think we'll still keep the player avatar off-screen, but I think we'll let them have a little more 'fun' in our eroge version.  In this case, the player avatar is the scientist/commander guy in charge.  Now, if the party wipes, it'll be the player avatar getting the nice Bad End scene.  If we're running permadeath, I think we'll want the Bad End's to be less game-ending.  For this, I'd likely use a plot device where the succubi are forbidden from actually killing the main character.  The party wipes, the player gets a sexy Bad End scene, but it's a fake out where the main character is either found or rescued by whatever surviving characters he has left in the overall pool.  The player would lose the party characters, but they wouldn't get a full Game Over and would be able to continue (as long as they still have other characters – we'll get to that in a mo).

I would also involve the player character in other ways.  One of the things I liked in Domination Quest: Kuro & the Naughty Monster Girls, which they sadly didn't do enough of in my opinion, were the battles where the main character was snatched by the monster girl and the other party members had to rescue him before all his energy was drained (through various sexy means).  That could make for some sexy fights.  You, the player, are grabbed by a giant alraune or similar monster girl and the party has to fight to free you before the sexy monster girl fucks your life out.  It could even be the main focus of most of the combat encounters.

Rescue the leader before... uh... bad things happen to... hey, are you sure you want rescuing?

Then we come to the recruits.  Most games like this start you off with a limited number of characters, and then you get more as the game progresses (or you can just recruit new ones at any time to replace losses).  One thing I haven't really seen in a game, especially a horror game, is one that mimics the 'dwindling party' trope of horror movies.  i.e. Your units die and aren't replaced and when you run out of units it's Game Over.  Darkest Dungeon has a hard mode where you Game Over after a certain number of party deaths.  I think they could have also done a hard mode where you start with a finite number of characters and have to complete the game with just them.

That fits the setting for my hypothetical H-space game.  You're teleported to the starting location with a set number of soldiers, scientists and medics.  You might pick up a few prisoners along the way, but your starting crew is mostly all you have and you need to manage them in a way to get you (and as many others as you can) to the portal back home.

I think this also plays well for a game based around Bad End sex scenes.  Sacrifice can be a major game mechanic.  Tossing a soldier to a hungry succubus can be a legitimate strategy (you don't have to be a good commander!) and also another source of possible H content.  It also gets around another area where difficulty and eroges don't mesh well.  You want to get to the next succubus to see if she's fappable, but you're stuck because there's this irritating boss in the way!  Easy way to get around this is to have the ability to sacrifice squads to get around problem encounters.  While the succubi are having their 'fun', the player sneaks by with the rest of his forces.  This also meshes sexy Bad Ends into the gameplay better.  Rather than being punished for seeing that sexy scene, the player can use it as a cheap means to get past an annoying encounter and move on to the next one.

Whew.  That was a little more than I thought I was going to write.  As I said at the top, this is all hypothetical.  I just don't have the current skills or knowledge to create something like this.  But maybe it might inspire someone who does, and I think we'd all like to see more sexy succubus and monster girl games!

Monday, September 02, 2019

New Story for Patrons - "The Good, the Bad, and the Monstrous Beauty"

Another new story up for patrons:

The Good, the Bad, and the Monstrous Beauty

This one actually went up on Saturday, but people tend to rush in with the subs for new stories and I didn't want them getting double-tapped by Patreon, given it was right at the end of the month.

And yes, it's another temporary Patreon exclusive.  I know this sucks for people that can't sub for whatever reason, but that money is helping with the bills at the moment, so I have to do the cold-nosed commercial thing.  As with all these stories, I will be adding them to the regular collections at a later date.

My productivity is slowly climbing back up from snail's pace, so I'm hoping I'll also be able to get back to free-for-everyone stories on Literotica as well.  There is a Halloween story I've had in the works for a while I'm hoping to get finished for this year.

In the meantime, it's been a while since I've done any Twine stuff, so I might see if I can get another one of those "Escape the..." type scenarios written up this month.

Hope you enjoy this new story anyway.

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

New(ish) story on Literotica - "Let Sleeping Beauties Lie"

I say newish because those of you with good memories will recognize this as the Sleeping Beauty Mimic story from the H-space bestiary super short stories I put out a while ago.  I fleshed the story out to add more background and let Bate have a little more fun with the monster girl before his inevitable grisly demise (and it is grisly, that editor's note at the top is there for good reason!)

Let Sleeping Beauties Lie

The H-space bestiary shorts have given me a quandary for a while.  I'd like to put them in some sort of collection up on Amazon (and maybe reveal a bit more of the mystery around Bate and why he keeps dying).  I don't think the stories in their current state are good enough.  They were only originally intended to be placeholders to show off an unusual monster girl without having to develop a plot of how the protagonist ended up in the monster girl's sexy clutches.  I've been looking at taking the better ones and filling in the story to bring them up to the standard of the other stories in my collections.

It's a... trickier process than I thought.  Still trying to figure out the most efficient way of doing it as at the moment it seems even more time-consuming than writing a brand new story from scratch!  (On a more positive note, I have been chipping away at a few new bestiary stories - this time full stories rather than quick sex scenes ' n ' grisly death.)

The other thing I'm quite relieved about is that the story was accepted and is now live on Literotica.  Originally it was rejected and this post was going to be very different - me bemoaning how my usual Bad End stories were no longer acceptable and wondering if I'd ever have anything up on Literotica again.

I wouldn't have blamed Literotica for that, to be fair.  This story does feature one of my nastier bad ends and we live in the sort of outrage-hungry times where owners of sites like Literotica have to walk a fine line in what they allow.  Sucks, but that's how it is.  It would have also made continuing the Succubus Summoning series on there tricky.  At some point Nyte would be Nyte and then I'd have a chapter I couldn't put up.

Fortunately, rather than mope around in a funk, I reread the rejection note, saw that it mentioned "snuff" and then PMed Laurel (Lit's head honcho) for clarification.

While I have seen my good (vile) self referred to as "The Snuff Guy", I don't consider what I write to be snuff.  I think I've written on this before.  Snuff in erotic literature is generally writing from the perspective of someone getting their rocks off by killing someone else.  The sexual titillation comes from the act of killing.  You can do this in regular horror to depict a particularly nasty character, but it's a little trickier in erotic horror.  With erotica the purpose is to sexually arouse and titillate the reader.  If the reader is getting turned on by putting themselves in the shoes of someone killing someone else there is a real risk of feeding unhealthy fantasy.  Now, as far as I'm concerned, fantasy, even unhealthy fantasy, is still fantasy.  If it remains fantasy it's harmless, no matter how sick other people might think it.  The nightmare scenario is if someone indulges that fantasy, develops a liking for it, finds fantasy is no longer enough, and then - to try and recapture that same thrill - takes it into the real world.  With that risk, you can understand why a site like Literotica would not want to publish that type of story.

Then you get to my stuff.  There is sex.  There is death.  And while I do like to blur one into the other, the viewpoint is always from the victim, and the sexual arousal comes from the sex stuff the succubus is doing to them rather than the death stuff.  The death stuff is also nearly always supernatural in nature, and therefore impossible to copycat into the real world.  That to me is the important distinguishing feature between "snuff" and regular (even if extremely squicky) erotic horror - is there a risk someone might copycat this and cause a tragedy in the real world?

I didn't get a reply from Laurel (I imagine she's way too busy to be fair - Literotica gets a massive number of submissions every day), but as the story is now live it must have been given a second look and deemed okay.  This is an important thing to remember, if you're having stories bounced by Literotica, remember they get a ton of submissions daily.  Sometimes it's worth giving Laurel a (polite!) PM to check if a story got bounced by the filters by mistake.

I'm happy anyway.  The horror in erotic horror is still allowed at Literotica (although I should flag my nastier stories a little better next time!).

Hope you enjoy the new(ish) story!

Friday, August 23, 2019

Ideas for a Darkest Dungeon-esque H-game - Being the Warlock

Ok, here's some more random musings on the type of Darkest Dungeon-esque succubus H-game I'd like to see (because I don't have the technical chops to make it myself).

Last up, I talked a bit about the combat, which is going to have various smutty succubi and monster girls mucking up the standard 4-on-4 structure by jumping the bones of members of the opposing party.  This is where we have the excuse for lots of lovely and gratuitously xxx-rated pixel art (and hopefully some strategy to make the fights a little interesting as well).

The next question: Are we Team Succubus, or Team Succubus Bait?

I'll start with Team Succubus, as that's probably the most straightforward.

This is pretty much going to be like Iratus, but we're an eroge, so our banshees and vampires are going to be fucking the life out of enemies rather than spooping them to death.

The background setup is easy.  Perhaps a little too easy.  The player takes the role of a warlock or demon lord, and goes after the human realms with an army of sexy succubi.  From that starting point there is plenty of freedom with respect to humour, tone and lightness.  The Japanese games tend to push the slider towards goofy cute (although Monmusu Quest: Paradox can get very down and serious when it wants).  Personally, given that most of these games are fairly light-hearted, I think it might be interesting to try a darker tone – give our succubi some real fangs and an aura of sexy deadliness.  That would require some work on the main protagonist as goofball villain protagonists tend to work whereas deadly serious ones do not.

Maybe our warlock protagonist is the good guy, just using dubious tools to take down an army of corrupt and hypocritical shining knights.

There's also a fair bit of freedom with respect to the enemies.  Maybe they're your classic knights and D&D adventuring parties, but corrupt.  Maybe it can be a bit of succubus-on-succubus action.  While I think you probably want both sexes represented to appeal to a larger audience, this might necessitate extra work in the pixel art department as the monster girl may have different scenes depending on whether she's having fun with a man or woman.

I'd probably go with succubi vs knights, and start out with making the knights all male to avoid needing to multiply the art assets too much.  Then maybe adding female enemies to also attract ryona enthusiasts if resources allow.

One key difference to Darkest Dungeon is we'll want to hide a lot of those units behind some sort of unlock system.  In Darkest Dungeon all of the available units are pretty much available from the start and gated only by the RNG determining which ones show up on the stagecoach.  For a monster girl eroge, the focus is going to be on the sexy monster girls.  The lure of seeing new ones is what will (hopefully) keep the player playing, so we want to make them part of the progression system.  This then has an impact on balance.  The later unlocks should, in theory, be more powerful than the starter units, but then there's a risk of moving away from the finding synergistic parties aspect that makes Darkest Dungeon so damn good.  I think just making the later units more powerful than the starter units is back to the problem of boring combat mechanics.

Rather than more powerful, I think more strategic options might be a better thing to aim for.  Make the newer monster girls open up new options and new party configurations.  Just like Darkest Dungeon, the enemies are going to add more nuisance units to their roster, and that should prompt the player into trying out newer strategies to overcome them.

Another interesting consideration is whether we go roguelite or not.  Roguelite would have unlocks carry over into the next run (Iratus does this), whereas a more traditional RPG-type system would require the player to go through the same unlocking process with each new game (but, like a typical RPG, would only be playing one game rather than many randomized runs).

There's also the easy opportunity for more sex content.  One source of H-content is going to be in the battles as succubi "overcome" the enemies.  We can also have more conventional H-scenes of the succubi having fun with their warlock commander (i.e. the player) outside of battle.  Monmusu Quest: Paradox does this with the request scenes in the pocket castle.  This is also an additional form of player progression – the player raising affection with their monster girls (through levelling them up or maybe some kind of gift system) in order to unlock their H-content.

In general, I think the game would look something like this:

- The player plays a warlock/demon lord out to conquer various regions with sexy succubi/monster girls.

- There are different regions with different enemy unit compositions requiring different strategies to overcome in each.

- The player grinds short 'dungeons' in each region to unlock new units and strengthen existing ones (with the goal being to get strong enough to take down a 'final castle').

- The player unlocks new succubus/monster girl units.  New skills for the monster girls can be unlocked.  New H-content for the monster girls can be unlocked.

- The player has a 'base area' to develop with resources taken from the dungeon runs.

- 2D sprite strategic battles.  As we're an eroge, a large part of the strategy will be pulling enemy units out of formation or restraining enough of them so that they can be sexually drained.  Combat also has to always feel interesting.  There's going to be a lot of it, so the player needs to not feel like it's a massive grind.  Have different roles for each of the monster girls (but not too obvious and rigid).

So far, so vague.  But I doubt the various core gameplay loops can be nailed down until getting more serious about planning and development, and this tricky for me.  I have ideas, but I suspect I don't have the technical chops to take it all the way, so there's only so much time I feel comfortable to devoting to something like this.  I've always liked jotting down game design ideas, so maybe this is something I'll return to when I need a quick break from regular writing.

Thinking about this did remind me of a 2D sprite eroge that does do some of this stuff, but is real-time action rather than turn-based strategy – Attack it! Devil Legion.

Attack it! Devil Legion - Your demonic legions of... uh... doom.

I didn't get on with the demo, but did give the full game more of a try when I was thinking of existing eroge examples similar to the ideas above.  Attack it! Devil Legion does have some strategy in the form of various offensive, defensive and support roles, but it mostly feels a little too frenetic.  You control a little bat and can interrupt attacks and knock enemies over, but your monster girls and succubi mostly seem to do their own thing.  It does have an unlock system (but no H-content with your own minions - for good reason given the protagonist).

I'm not convinced on the real-time play aspects.  Most of the time you're too busy flinging your bat avatar around the screen to get a chance to enjoy your succubi double-teaming adventurers in various smutty ways.  It's still better than most of the other sexy monster girl eroges I've played recently, so I might give it the full Hentai Game Review treatment if it holds my attention long enough to complete the game.  The sprite artwork is really nice.  This, but turn-based was what I was thinking of as I wrote this post.

Hot succubus double team action.  I'm thinking this but where you can sit back and enjoy watching rather than trying to figure out where your bat avatar has been bashed to.

Maybe this will give some of you reading some ideas.  I'd love to see a game along these lines, but as I've said already, I doubt I have the technical chops to make it myself (or even organise a group of people that could).

Next up I'll brainstorm the other approach – Team Succubus Bait.

Monday, August 19, 2019

Thoughts (rough!) on how to do a Succubus H-game version of Darkest Dungeon

So where were we?  Oh yes, I was talking about Darkest Dungeon and sexy monster girl H-games.  Then I got side-tracked.  Briefly thought about posting something political (an urge thankfully resisted).  Then I rewrote a bestiary story to make it more of an actual short story (available to patrons now, but hopefully will be on Literotica later this week if it doesn't get rejected).

So, Darkest Dungeon sexy monster girl H-game.

First thing to clear up: if you're making a hentai game, the number one priority is the sex.  This is what people are going to be buying it for.  So that comes first – which means sexy characters, good art, hot scenes.

If everything is about the sex, is it even worth bothering with the game mechanics?

I don't know the answer to this.  Personally, I prefer to play hentai games that have a little more than a rudimentary combat system, but I might just be a weirdo.  I'm going to assume other people are weirdos too and write this from that perspective.  But if you are actually creating a sexy succubus H-game and have limited resources, put those resources into the sexy first, then start to think about adding clever game mechanics.

So, what does Darkest Dungeon-style combat give you over regular JRPGs?

Added strategic depth by making both party composition and character position very important.

Typical Darkest Dungeon combat - a party of 4 vs a party of 4 rendered in 2D

The basic JRPGs are very simple.  You have an attack(s), the enemy has attack(s).  Repeat until one of you is dead.  Damage goes up as you level up, but so does enemy toughness.  It works, but is bloody boring if it has no depth.

The standard way to add depth is to incorporate some kind of elemental paper-scissors-stone system.  With H-RPGs elemental is usually substituted with body parts, so the player character (or monster) might be more sensitive to boobs, kisses, sex, etc.  It's depth, but not much depth – find the weakness, hit weakness for bonus damage, rinse, repeat.

Adding a party adds more complexity, as the party members will likely specialise in different areas – healer, tank, DPS mage, etc.  Monmusu Quest: Paradox did this pretty well I thought.  It was fun trying out different monster girl parties as they all synergised in slightly different ways.

And this is also one of the major appeals of Darkest Dungeon – mucking around to find the party compositions that 'click'.

(Generally, the ones that don't click get savagely butchered fairly quickly – that game does not fuck around when it comes to difficulty.)

For regular RPGs, it's usually about putting the beefier classes in the front and the squishier ones in the back.  But then you get other synergies such as classes with skills that move them (or enemies) about or taking advantage of the 'marking' mechanic in Darkest Dungeon.

That's just for regular RPG combat.  We're looking at options for smutty H-game equivalents, which largely come down to: where's the sex?

Again, the easy option is to move it out to separate H-scenes, eg a Bad End scene if the player loses.  A lot of the monster girl hentai games do this.  You fight a regular battle and then, if you lose, you get treated to a nice scene of having 'fun' with the monster girl.

I think we can do more than that though.  Why waste the opportunity to create fun pixel art of succubi getting it on with hapless (lucky?) party members?

In Darkest Dungeon (and the other recent games inspired by it), you have up to four characters in your group facing off against up to four characters in their group.  Each character has a range of attacks that can only be used in the right position, and only target certain positions on the other side.  An example of this is Darkest Dungeon's Leper.  He's a tank with a big sword that can only hit the first two rows, and only if he's in the first two rows himself.  If he gets moved to the back two rows he's pretty much useless.

If we want to put a bit of snu-snu into our Darkest Dungeon-style combat we're going to need to break that 4-on-4 placement system and get the sexy monster girls in amongst the other party.  At first I thought about making it more complex with the characters being able to move freely through 8 to 10 slots and have attacks more dependent on adjacency than position.  I think that might be hellishly complex and move too far away from the straightforward 4-on-4 system.

An easier approach would be to make it possible for two characters to co-exist on the same spot.  That way the monster girl would either be jumping into the ranks of the party to jump the bones of the mage in position 3, for example.  Or a succubus/alraune would lure one of the opposing party to her position and then start having fun with them.  Darkest Dungeon already has some fights like this.  The Siren will steal a party member to fight on her side for a turn.  The Hag will throw someone in her pot.

As this is a hypothetical sex game, team monster girl grabbing someone is going to be a nice excuse to throw some pixel-art smuttiness in.  If anyone has ever played the FOBS game, that, but as part of a turn-based strategy game rather than a 2D platformer/metroidvania.

FOBS - picture this as taking a character out of combat

If a portion of the fight is going to be about party members being pulled out of the group or pinned by a monster girl within the group, then this might inform some of the combat gameplay.  Maybe neighbouring characters can help out pinned characters by knocking the invading monster girl off.  If a character is grabbed, then the focus can be about trying to pull them back from the monster girl group.

The other feature of Darkest Dungeon (and Iratus, but on the enemy side) is the addition of the stress bar.  Characters can be taken out via conventional HP damage.  Or they can be driven mad and stressed out enough to make them to succumb to heart attacks.

If characters are getting heart attacks in our H-game version, it's going to be of the overexertion-through-sex kind.

The stress system in Darkest Dungeon adds an additional layer to combat.  Stress attacks don't cause physical damage, but if you fail to manage the stress build-up, your party members will start behaving erratically and not follow orders.

It wouldn't make sense to use stress in a H-game equivalent.  But something like willpower or seduction would be a perfect replacement.  That way you'd have monster girls attacking with either physical or seduction techniques.  This could again force players to think about party composition.  Muscular types might be very good versus muscular monster girls, but very weak to succubi with strong seduction arts.  Generally, you want the player to be constantly thinking about chopping and changing their party composition in response to whatever the AI is throwing at them (whether it is monster girls or humans).

That's another interesting question.  Do you play as the monster girls (as a succubus-summoning warlock equivalent to Iratus's titular necromancer) or as the leader of a human squad trying to resist the unholy temptations of various succubi?

I think either would work, and I have ideas for both.  I'll detail those ideas in separate posts later this week.

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

Non-Hentai Game Look - Iratus: Lord of the Dead

Wait.  Non-Hentai?  What kind of heresy is this?

Iratus, a very angry necromancer

There is a point to it.  Honest.

Technically, Iratus has monster girls.  No succubi, as your forces are drawn from the necromantic section of the classic fantasy bestiary rather than the demonic, but you can recruit female monsters such as vampires, banshees (even ghouls) to your teams.  The developers are Russian, so they're still allowed to put boobs on their female characters.

The easiest way to describe it is – Darkest Dungeon, but where you get to play the monsters.

Combat might look familiar if you've played Darkest Dungeon, but does play a little differently

You play Iratus, the titular Lord of the Dead.  After being released from long imprisonment, he embarks on a journey to conquer the surface world.  The basic economy is body parts.  You craft your minions out of body parts and get more by slaying the various hapless miners, dwarves and high-fantasy D&D parties stupid enough to stand in your way.

Unlike Darkest Dungeon, there is a clear fail state.  Body parts are limited.  Lose too many minions and you will run out of body parts to craft more and will have to restart.  It is also very easy to lose minions as – just like Darkest Dungeon – the combat is fairly brutal and unforgiving.  Your minions are very squishy and while you don't have to worry about sanity (this is a reverse Darkest Dungeon, so you get to drive your enemies insane instead, although this isn't always a good thing…), there isn't a Death's Door mechanic, so enemy crits have a nasty habit of killing minions out of nowhere.

As with Darkest Dungeon you have a home base to update and combat consists of 4 rows of your team battling 4 rows of their team, where position is important and dictates what attacks can and can't be used.  Despite the similarities, it plays differently enough to be its own thing.

Combat is interesting.  You can choose to either kill your enemies with direct damage or spook them hard enough until their hearts burst from stress.  The direct damage is split between melee and magical, with both having different resistances.  How the resistances work is also interesting.  Defence comes in either armour resistance, which reduces incoming damage, or blocks/wards, which completely nullifies a hit at the cost of losing a block/ward (unless it's a crit).  This brings an extra tactical component.  Big, single-hit attacks are good versus armour resistance, but bad against block/wards.  On the other hand, smaller multi-hit attacks are great for chewing through wards, but can be countered by decent armour resistance as each individual hit doesn't do a lot of damage.

Overall, despite looking a lot like Darkest Dungeon, combat plays a little differently.  Enemies are a lot tankier, so it's difficult to nuke out a single target on the first turn.  Also, because of the block/ward system, AoE attacks hitting multiple targets are viable, whereas in Darkest Dungeon they tended to be pretty bad.

Exploration is a little similar to Slay the Spire

Currently Iratus is still in Early Access, so it's incomplete and there are a few balance problems.  The devs do seem to be responding to feedback and making good updates.  I like the change to show the whole enemy group when next to it rather than just a single unit.  It's a game where you need to form teams to counter various different parties and that tactical element is missing if there's no real way to predict what you might face.

It's definitely worth a look, especially if you're a fan of the original Darkest Dungeon.  The devs seem to have taken that for inspiration and then iterated upon it to make a game that is different enough to stand on its own.  Which is pretty much the history of videogames in a nutshell.

Okay, so why are you talking about it, Hydra?

With Iratus and another game, Vambrace: Cold Soul, it looks like Darkest Dungeon was successful enough to spawn a new subtype of turn-based RPGs.  And that usually gets me thinking as to whether that blueprint could work for a sexy monster girl game.

This time I thought I might as well put some of the ideas I have in a more public place.  Rather than write them down in a notebook, forget them, lose the notebook, yadda yadda.

So, I'll make that a little mini-series this week (or next) - my thoughts on how to make a Darkest Dungeon-esque hentai game.  As with most of these ideas, I'm aware I don't have the technical chops to pull them off, but it might inspire someone that does, and we'd all love to see more sexy monster girl games made!

Sunday, May 19, 2019

New Short Story - "The Banquet of the Queen of the Goblins"

Finally finished that damn carnivorous plant girl story.  Not sure why the 2nd draft took as long as it did, but it did.

Might as well get the bad news out of the way first.  Yes, it is pay-walled behind my Patreon account.  Sorry, regular readers who don't have access to that.  As with the previous boobie girl story, it will find its way into an ebook collection at some point in the future.

You can find it here:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-short-story-26958434

The monster girl was inspired by the carnivorous plant girl from Domination Quest: Kuro and the Naughty Monster Girls.



I did my usual thing when I dip into vore-ish areas to make the monster girl more interested in the sex part rather than the "git in my belly" part, so in that respect she deviates quite a lot from the initial inspiration.

It's another H-space story, although it's more in keeping with my older H-space stories rather than the Stewart Peter Bate stories I experimented with for a while.  At 8,200 words, it is much more like the older stories!

And now onto the more controversial stuff.

This is Patreon pay-walled again, are you ever going to go back to putting stuff up on Literotica for everyone to read?

Right, the problem here is that I'm still chugging along in low gear when it comes to writing.  As much as I don't like or trust the people behind Patreon, it currently is a useful source of income to keep my finances ticking over.  I'm of an old-school mindset when it comes to entertainment.  If people are giving you money, you need to give them something back to make them think it was worth giving you that money.  In this case it's timed exclusives (and some options to name protagonists, etc).

When I set it up, my initial aim was to give patrons something exclusive at least once a month and then anything I produced extra could then go up on Literotica (or here if Literotica found it a little too icky).  As I mentioned earlier, I'm currently stuck in low gear when it comes to productivity.  So far this year I've finished 2 short stories (16K words) and a demo opening section for a possible CYOA game (5K words).  This is obviously not ideal.  The only positive is that I am still chugging along to some extent.

While I am stuck in low gear, my options are limited.  I'd like to get out of low gear, so I can start terrorizing the erotic horror section of Literotica again.  (and also maybe blog a little more frequently than I have been doing of late.)

So, yep, sorry to the readers that can't get on Patreon (or are unwilling to give them money).  I will try and get something done for you at some point.  As for those that can, enjoy... uh... being erotically consumed as my lovely new carnivorous plant girl puts it.

(I'm not entirely sure she's being trustworthy, but her last prey seemed to enjoy himself...)


Monday, April 22, 2019

Introducing "The House of Hellish Harlots"

(x-post from Patreon)

(Update.  Whoops, did not realise the formatting had been completely borked after cut'n'pasting from Patreon.  This is why you always cut'n'paste to Notepad first to remove all the crap MS Word and other places bundles in with text and check your post afterwards.  Sorry for making everyone's eyes bleed with that atrocious formatting snafu.) 


Firstly, apologies for another lengthy period of quietness. I ran into a fairly severe productivity slump on the second draft of the carnivorous plant girl story and had to change things up for a while rather than plowing on at measly couple-of-hundred words a day (it is still being worked on - more on that in a follow-up post). Of the side projects I busied myself with, the one that won the race to have something to show for it was this one. "The House of Hellish Harlots" is a prospective framing device to hold all the Escape the [Succubus/Monster girl] scenarios together. I had vague ideas on how to do this, but nothing really clicked until I got some inspiration from "Rusty Lake Hotel". If you haven't played it, "Rusty Lake Hotel" is a macabre point'n'click puzzle game where you murder five guests in overly complicated ways and serve them up for dinner for the remaining guests. Essentially, it's a framing device for 5 single-room puzzles where you combine various items to "escape" the room (by offing the animal-headed guest). I realized I could make this work for a succubus sex game. A while back I mapped out the beginning scenario for a porn gamebook in a similar vein to the classic Fighting Fantasy gamebook "House of Hell". The idea was to have the player wind up at an isolated brothel where all of the prostitutes are various sexy - but also hungry and dangerous - monster girls. The goal was to survive the night and escape the brothel, with a lot of sexy Bad Ends for failing to do so (in a similar vein to Tokinokogiri's "Succubus Prison"). I decided to write it up in Twine as an intro. It's probably more detailed than it should be (a lot of different ways to basically knock on a door, with some NPCs that may or may not have a future role). I think the concept has potential. The brothel is the framing device with the central hub of a bar within it. You have the madam, other clients and maybe an NPC on the player's side to give helpful advice (probably a barman of not-quite human aspect). The "hookers" represent the individual scenarios. The player has to select a girl, go to her room, then survive her attentions (the CYOA scenario - a puzzle or stats test with a whole bunch of inappropriate and perverted sex acts thrown in). This makes for a fairly straightforward core gameplay loop: -Select monster girl (with the barman giving hints to their nature). -Solve the puzzle (or just let her creatively Bad End you). -Repeat with next girl until the player wins their escape in the morning. From a development perspective this makes life very easy as each encounter is compartmentalized in its own CYOA. Once the framework is in place, I can keep extending the game indefinitely by adding new monster girl encounters. If things really shape up well, I can maybe also start to think about commissioning art and voice acting for the encounters - that is probably a long long way off though! But before we get too excited, the demo at the moment is a very short intro. There is only one Bad End scene and all I've written up so far is the background info leading up until the front door. So don't go in there expecting a full scenario. I've still got a fair bit to do, but I thought I'd post the chunks as and when I finish them. This first demo chunk is currently available for everyone on philome.la: http://philome.la/manyeyedhydra/house-of-hellish-harlots-v001 I thought I'd make it available to everyone to start to get as much feedback as possible. (Although currently it's very short, any suggestions on game mechanics, etc are welcome.) The sexy scenarios will likely be temporarily gated on Patreon and then added to the public version later. This is assuming I'm able to maintain steam on the project. As you may have already noticed, I tend to be a little chaotic and wayward on such things. But I think a modular approach might work better with my natural weaknesses. Rather than create a single large game (which I'd never finish), I'll be creating a lot of individual CYOA scenarios and stitching them together. In theory, I already have two scenarios with Volumpula and the arachne. I suspect they will need a bit of re-jigging. Arachne is too simplistic. Volumpula has too much. Emphasis will purely be on walking out of the door afterwards rather than trying to grab their "trophy" Anyway, this does get me back to doing some sort of text-based game dev stuff again. I'll still be writing regular short stories, but I think I need to be bouncing between both to keep myself from feeling like I've fallen into a rut. As for the carnivorous plant girl story (and other stuff that I've gone quiet on), I'll post on that later this week (hopefully releasing the short story soon after - I have 5.5K words typed up at the moment). Start of the year has been mixed for one reason or another. Thank you to the people sticking by me despite my rather erratic progress at the moment. I'll continue to produce hot succubus/monster girl smut to the best of my ability, even if the output frequency will be a little all over the place. (As a blog bonus - because Patreon is a bit crap with embedding things, here's a bit of the map for the intro - even if you can probably reach the front door in about 4 clicks!)

Thursday, March 14, 2019

Build Your Own Sextrap Dungeon

No, we're not talking about BDSM studios.  This is more gamer-y stuff.

(But not this particular gamer-y stuff, which jumped to the top of the list when I did a google search on "Sextrap Dungeon".  I should have expected it really.  "Sextrap Dungeon" is the sort of term that rolls off the tongue nicely, so it's inevitable someone else would have already grabbed it.)

Yesterday I was talking about MachiaVillain, a cute little indie game where you build a murder mansion.  They added succubi, so the perverted little black cells in my brain immediately conjured up a little murder bordello, where the 'guests' get to go out with a bang at the hands (and other parts) of sexy succubi.  It did make me wonder if that concept could work as a nice little hentai game.

The 'build-your-own-Deathtrap-Dungeon' genre has been around in videogames for a while.  Dungeon Keeper was the famous one, and there have been a couple of spiritual successors in recent years in Dungeons and War for the Overworld.

Dungeon Keeper 2's succubus - Dark Mistress.  Likes torturing people.

My main bugbear with these games is they're often bait'n'switches.  You start off laying down traps to squish invading adventuring parties, but then the game usually morphs into a typical RTS around level 3 or 4, and the rest of it is mostly spent doing the usual RTS-y things of harvesting resources, recruiting new units, and then battling opposing dungeon keepers until the map is clear.

This may be down to the realities of what works as basic game design.  Building up a force to take out a rival puts the player in an active role and is easy to grok and calibrate challenge.  Building a dungeon to squish adventurers puts the player in a more passive role and is harder to grok and calibrate challenge.  Dungeon masters with human players have an incentive to keep things 'fair'.  If they constantly kill the party with an inescapable deathtrap in the first room, well pretty soon they're not going to have any players show up to their games.  A human player trying to keep AI heroes from plundering their goodies doesn't have to worry about that.  Kill 'em all in the first room works, but will make for a dull gameplay loop if too easy to pull off.

My thinking is you'd want to allow as much freedom for fiendish design and creativity, but also some sort of challenge element to keep the player from getting bored.  Generally, I think you'd want some kind of additional reward for the player to incentivize building long and elaborate deathtrap dungeons for the heroes to get lost in rather than throwing everything at them in the first room.  How to do that seems tricky, and probably why games like Dungeon Keeper switch to standard RTS gameplay once the initial concept wears out its welcome, as that's a tried and trusted means of maintaining player interest.

Dungeons 3.  I'm pretty sure this game has a succubus, but could I find a decent pic of one, could I bollocks!  (She also likes torturing people)

MachiaVillain sort of has this with bonuses awarded for killing victims according to horror movie rules - kill them when they're alone, kill the virgin last, etc.  But most of the time you just zerg rush the victims as soon as they enter the murder mansion anyway.

So far, I've mostly been talking about regular games, where my real interest is in more... ahem... perverted fare.  The advantage with more perverted fare is it opens up... ahem... rewards that can't be offered in regular boring mainstream games.  After all, where's the fun in filling a deathtrap dungeon with delectable demonesses if you can't catch a peek of them... ahem... dispatching those dastardly dogooders.

This then also opens up further possible gameplay options than just dropping a mountain on the heroes' heads in the first room.  If we have succubi, we need to keep them happy.  Happy horny succubi make lovely porn movies (obviously we edit out the part where the barbarian stud dries up like beef jerky).  Sulky sad succubi rip their victims' hearts out and throw entrails at the camera.

War for the Overworld's succubus.  Bit spiky.  Likes torturing people.

This now implies a rudimentary management sim.  You have a dungeon.  You have various sexy (and deadly) sirens.  You maybe have a black market distributor specialising in... certain types of films.  The player now has aims and goals beyond just bumping off the marauding heroes in as efficient a way as possible.  Maybe there's an audience score that gives gold bonuses.  Maybe the monster girls have certain restrictions - more powerful ones will only take up residence in lower levels.

This creates tension in that you'll want to lure heroes powerful enough to penetrate the dungeon deep enough to reach the more exotic succubi, but not powerful enough to beat them up.  Maybe part of the gameplay will be figuring out ways to weaken the more powerful heroes without breaking them completely, so that your succubus doesn't get bored with too-easily 'dominated' prey.

I can see there being potential here.

However, there is one awkward question - is all this as fun (and as sexy) as the player trying to battle through the dungeon themselves while fending off (and occasionally frequently 'losing' to) various amorous monster girls?

I did blog about a 'hentai Dungeon Keeper' a few years back - Pretty Warrior May Cry.  That was more of a ryona game.  It did have a rather lovely succubus-type unit, but most of the rest of the game was focused on watching orcs, dogs, slimes, even a dragon!, do various unmentionable things to the female adventurers stupid enough to set foot in your dungeon.  Ryona isn't my thing, but it has an audience and meshes well with the Dungeon Keeper concept.

Pretty Warrior May Cry's succubus.  In the middle of torturing... hey, wait a minute.

Would a similar thing appeal to the same sort of audience that enjoyed Monster Girl Quest?  I suspect players would rather the succubi were doing all the sexy snu-snu stuff (minus any angry heart-ripping) to them.  Although this can easily be fixed in-lore with some sort of magical maguffin that allows the player to bodysurf in to experience their succubi's delectable skills firsthand without those awkward 'dried fish' consequences.

You could probably even cater to both audiences by allowing them to mix'n'match which monsters they want to populate their 'sextrap dungeon' with.

Anyway, enough idle musings.  I think something like this could work and hopefully I've given some ideas for anyone wanting to make a succubus/monster girl hentai game that isn't just another RPGMaker clone.

Yes, I'd like to make something like this myself, but I suspect it would be rather difficult to do well, and certainly far beyond my current skill set.  Hence me posting a bunch of ideas here.  If you think you can make it work, feel free to go for it!

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Succubi in Mainstream Games: MachiaVillain

Okay, in this case, by mainstream I mean the sort of non-hentai responsible games you might find on GOG or Steam.

(Yes, I do play those from time to time, to keep the mind ticking over while working on various writing projects.  Darkest Dungeon, yeah!)

MachiaVillain is... what... a Murder Mansion creator sim.  You take control of a bunch of brainless horror-movie minions (psychos, zombies, skeletons, etc) and task them with building a spooky mansion out in the wilds.  Then you lure unsuspecting victims to it to steal their cash and keep your minions well-fed with the victims' brains, blood and body parts.


I picked it up a while back because I liked the concept and off-kilter art style.  I didn't really get into it back then.

Then I saw recently they'd added an update (and hopefully a ton of bug fixes!) that included a new monster type - succubus.

Yes, I'm a simple fella.  I check out most games with succubi in them.

So, I gave it a second look (as well as finding a guide to figure out what I'm supposed to do!).  It's a more mainstream game, so don't expect too much smexy from the succubi (I think indie non-H game devs get publicly drawn and quartered on Twitter if they make their succubi too sexy nowadays).

MachiaVillain's array of succubi 

The game is fun.  It's also a bit weird and wibbly with the bugs.  Heads of victims sometimes randomly fly off to the other side of the map.  Sometimes all the walls vanish when you reload.  At least the devs keep to the initial concept.  The one thing that bugged me about the original Dungeon Keeper was the bait-and-switch into another bog-standard RTS slugfest of keeper vs keeper after the first couple of missions.

MachiaVillain could do with... something, though, although I'm not sure what that something is.  Some sort of end-state victory to aim for, maybe.  You do get attacked by escalating bands of heroes ranging from meddling (and easily eaten) kids to quite tough squads of holy templars, but the game does start to run out of steam once the murder mansion is built and up and running.  The beauty of indie games like this is often the devs keep chipping away and adding improvements, so maybe they'll find the solution to that particular puzzle.

I can't, in good conscience, recommend the game as a gem, but I did get some hours enjoyment creating a little bordello of blood staffed almost exclusively with succubi.  Victims would visit and one-by-one be shunted off into hidden rooms, where a waiting succubus would lovingly take "care" of them.

The Bordello from Hell (unfinished)...

Hmm, there might be a story idea there...

Friday, March 08, 2019

Recent Monster Girl Hentai Games

Yesterday (Today?) seemed pretty good on dlsite.com for new releases.  I thought I'd check some of them out.

The Encyclopedia of Tentacles for Boys Vol. 3

This is up to a 3rd volume!!!  We only got 1 of the monster girl one.  And where is Monmusu Quest: Paradox Pt.3?  Goddammit, Japan.

Not much to be said on this that I didn't say before.  The West is pretty fucked up with outrage culture at the moment, making it a risky purchase even for the people solely interested in the femdom aspects of being sucked off by various weird and wonderful things while a sexy, sadistic shop owner watches on.  Outrage is everything.  Context is nothing.  That's how it is nowadays, unfortunately.

(I doubt anyone is going to play this and then go on to throw kids into the giant octopus tank of their local aquarium in the hope of getting a good show if the octopus is feeling particularly frisky that morning.)

Even without the stupid outrage culture fears, it still falls a little outside my own personal turn-ons.  I like monstrous semen suckers, but I also like them to have tits and a pretty face.

Lost Fragments - An Otoko-no-ko is Given Status Effects, Reverse R*ped, and Defeated


I liked the demo enough to pick up the full game.  I've played a couple of games by this circle before.  They like having their monster girls bury the player in various sexy binds and negative status effects.  Fortunately, I was able to get machine translation back up and running for this one, as trying to navigate the combat blind is a little tricky.

Fighting is turn-based RPG-style with a heavy focus on binds and negative status effects.  So much so the player has separate buttons depending on whether the adverse status effect is physical (binds) or mental (increased sensitivity) in nature, and can use either as an additional free action every turn.  The status changes are also visible on the player's sprite on the left of the screen, which is a nice visual cue to show just how much an arachne or slime girl has slimed you up.

(The player character's odd appearance is explained in-game.  You play a male gamer transported to a game world with only female character models (for both the NPCs and monsters), hence the feminine appearance.  (The main character is quite relieved to find all his other... ahem... faculties are fully intact.  The monster girls he encounters are arguably even more delighted about it!))

During combat, the monster girls also have an additional 'absorption' move they can use when the player is naked.  This switches the display to a H-scene and a sub-game where the player has to mouse-over various pink hearts to break out.

Without machine translation, this would be a hard pass, but now I have something that appears to work (more on that in a future post), the game seems like good sexy fun.  Mind you, I am a sucker for being tied up by an amorous arachne, or slimed by a sexy slime girl, so this is hitting all the right spots for me.  I'll try and get around to posting a full review at some point in the future.

Daydreamer - Memories of a Succubus & Angel & Hero/Bunny


This looks like another of those strange games that looks like an RPGMaker type RPG, then ditches all the stats for simple action.  In this case you run around firing magic bolts at succubi.

The plot seems to be set just after the hero has defeated the main demon king.  Somehow this has opened the way for succubi to invade and they steal power by attacking people through dream states created from their memories.

There's not much revealed in the demo apart from a tutorial section with an angel assigned as a guide.  The guide angel seems far too lewd in how eager she is to give the hero a big sloppy blowjob, so I imagine there's some kind of plot twist lurking there.

The demo doesn't show much more than the angel scene.  Which is a pretty good scene.  The other art on the store page also looks okay.  I suspect this might be one of those games that consists of nice H-scenes strung together by some very rudimentary and forgettable action game mechanics.

I'm on the fence on this one, but I wouldn't be surprised if I pick it up at some point.  The promotional artwork teases some nice slime girl scenes and I do love being erotically glooped by a sexy slime girl.

Succubus Battles


This one came out a couple of days earlier.  The thread on ULMF calls it Succubus Senki, which I'm guessing is a more literal translation of the title.

I'm not sure what to make of this one.  It looks a more tactical-style RPG.  I saw it described as being like Advance Wars, but I never played that series.  Which is unfortunate, as some knowledge of this type of game might have helped me try to work out what the hell was going on in the demo.

You have a hero and two support guys.  You move them to attack a skeleton dude with a couple of (regular) slimes in tow.  Then a bunch of succubi show up, and your dudes... uh... lose.  Then there's a reasonably pleasant animated paizuri scene of you being drained by a succubus afterwards.  Given how easily the succubi wiped my party, I figured this was the typical auto-loss scenario to kick off a campaign.

Wrong.  The succubus dry-fishes the hero with her big bouncing boobs and it's Game Over.

Turns out you can't attack the succubi directly.  That causes your dude to suicide masturbate instead.  Instead, you have to stand next to them and rely on your character's counter attacks to win the battle.

I saw enough to be interested, but also enough to scared by the complexity.  I think this might be fun to play, but probably needs some basic translation of the interface beforehand.  I'll probably wait to see if one of the lovely volunteer translation teams out there thinks the game is good enough to work on before diving in.