(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!)
