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.

Monday, March 04, 2019

Hentai Game Look: Monster Girl Dreams

I've definitely been off reservation, so to speak, if it's taken me this long to find out about this one:




This is Monster Girl Dreams.  It's a (mostly) text-based battlefucker with sexy succubi and monster girls.  It's still in development.  Some of the characters have art sprites, but for the later encounters you currently have to make do with text descriptions only.

I like it because it's very close to what I'd do if organised and focused enough to make a monster girl hentai game.  The combat is reminiscent of the original Monster Girl Quest, but with the restraint status expanded into a number of sex stances the player needs to struggle out of before their arousal hits max (or not, if you just want to enjoy yourself).

And those monster girls have a lot of sexy tricks.  My favourite is probably the succubus kunoichi encountered in the mountain stage.  She has a lot of different ways to erotically drain your energy and different Bad Ends depending on whether she depletes your final point of spirit (which she will) with her mouth, tits or pussy.  A fun encounter and well-written as well.




This optional alraune boss at the end of the first stage also has a lot of different moves and is rather enjoyable to fight lose to.




The game is fairly lighthearted in comparison to Monster Girl Quest.  You don't need to worry about some of the nastier Bad End consequences as the main character is equipped with a magic teleport stone to yoink them out of danger before the shrivelled-up mummy stage of succubus draining.

It's still very early in development, but I've liked what I've seen so far.  The free demo can be obtained from the developer's (Threshold?) Patreon and they update their progress on their blog here.

Fairly promising.  I look forward to seeing how this one progresses.

(I also need to pull my thumb out of my ass and get back to working on my own text-based hentai game stuff!)

Saturday, March 02, 2019

Some Quick Notes on Patreon vs Blog/Literotica

Seen a few concerns about me paywalling everything behind Patreon and whether I'm going to post stories on Literotica again.  I thought I'd address them here.

I'm always conscious of a need to give people something in return for their hard-earned money, so I want to produce at least one thing (short story, CYOA scenario) for patrons every month.  I should stress these are temporary exclusives.  The two CYOAs I've done were later posted to the internet.  The short stories will find their way into later ebook short story collections.

Anything past that first item is open to be either posted to Literotica or held back as an ebook collection exclusive (I do like to have a few of these to entice people into buying the books).

This would work better if my productivity wasn't quite so painfully slow at the moment.  I'm aware of it and trying my best to fix it.

So, no, I've not quit Literotica or posting stories for people to read for free.  I just need to shake off this annoying pernickity perfectionism that's crept into my writing process and get back to being a carefree pulp writer of succubus smut again.

Friday, March 01, 2019

Hentai Game Review: Domination Quest

Bit later than intended on this one.  Chez Hydra is still fairly chaotic at the moment, unfortunately.

First, a disclosure.  I didn't make it all the way through this one, although I think I played enough (all but maybe the last one or two sections) to give a fair(ish) review.

With that out of the way, let's get onto the game.




Domination Quest: Kuro and the Naughty Monster Girls is the new hentai game from Kokage no Izumi.  This is the circle responsible for the Demon Angel Sakura series, and Domination Quest has similar themes and humour.  The main difference is the switch in genres from action platformer to JRPG.  Weirdly, rather than use RPGMaker like everyone else, they chose to build something resembling a RPGMaker game in Unity.  This might just be the most Japanese indie dev thing ever, but to be fair, later in the game they do make use of the 3D backdrop to do things not easily done in your typical RPGMaker game.

RPGMaker, in Unity...?

You play Kuro, an incubus-type creature with the ability to shrink opponents down and swallow them into his butt with his tail.

Yeah... um...
(Just roll with it.)

This doesn't consume the swallowees, but instead transports them to a mystical playground where you form contracts with them to add them to your team.  It might sound weird, but mechanically it's a pervier take on pokéballs.

The story has Kuro hitting adulthood and then heading off adventures with his succubus(?) companion, Shiro.  She gets abducted early on by another mysterious dominator and the quest is on to both get her back and stop this rogue group from stirring up tensions between monsters and humans.

Domination Quest is not really a battlefuck game.  Most monsters use regular attacks and you get a regular Game Over if the party wipes.  There are a few encounters where the monster girl grabs Kuro and the rest of the party has to break him free before the monster girl sexually slurps up all his energy.  I did enjoy those fights and wished the game had more of them.

Kuro getting slurped.  It's a shame more of the fights aren't like this.

The H-content is mostly gated behind an affection system.  As with Monmusu Quest: Paradox, scenes are unlocked by raising affection with your chosen waifu.  Also, as with MQ:P, not all of those scenes are good for Kuro…

Kuro's first date with Julie the goblin girl did not go well...

One of the ways to raise affection is through the game's skinship system.  This is sort of the equivalent of walking hand-in-hand with your waifu (where hand-in-cleavage might be the mildest version of it) and is shown as a little animation on the right of the screen while you're exploring dungeons.

Hand-in-...Boobies?

The H-content is pretty good and animated, but not quite to my taste.  As with Demon Angel Sakura, the themes lean heavily on vore, giantess and gross-out humour.

(the reveal of where the delicious pink slime comes from is both very funny and unspeakably unspeakably euwwww!)

As with the Demon Angel Sakura series, I found the various scenes funny rather than erotic, but I guess this is a YMMV thing.  They were still entertaining.

What killed the game for me were the bugs and too-frequent combat encounters.  The game was very unstable on release.  So much so that one of the paths in the first area was completely inaccessible because the entry and exit points were set to the same point, looping the player back to the screen they'd come from.  After that I didn't seem to have many problems until I hit the later forest area, and the game got very crash-happy.  The frequent combat encounters exacerbated this and made later exploration extremely tedious.  They trigger randomly as you walk through an area (like the old Final Fantasy games) and occur very very frequently.  Like, every few pixels frequently.  While this is a feature of this type of game, I really think the developers dialled the frequency too high.  The foggy area with the fox was the finisher for me.  Trying to explore a shifting maze with a combat encounter going off every couple of steps.  No thanks.

Hopefully this will be something the devs patch or fix in future versions.

Overall, despite the shift in genre, I think my recommendations are the same as for the Demon Angel Sakura series.  If you like Giantesses and Vore, this is worth checking out for the H-content (even if you have to grab a 100% save to avoid struggling through the later dungeons).  For general monster girl lovers, a maybe.  The H-content is nicely done, the humour is entertaining, but the game itself is wretchedly unfun to play, unfortunately.

A Shikibus plant girl?  Looks a similar style.

Despite the problems, there were a few monster girl designs I liked.  My favourite was probably the Carnivorous Plant Girl and she did give me inspiration for a new short story.  Even with all the other problems, if I can get a story idea out of a H-game I normally consider it a win.

Looking forward to getting erotically glooped by you, Mio.
Okay, second favourite design.  I really wanted to have some fun with this aphrodisiac goop flinging slime girl, but it looks like we're going to have to wait for a future Chapter 2 to get erotically glooped by her.