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!)

16 comments:

  1. I just tried "House of Hellish Harlots" Excellent work, as always. I hope you can finish it soon.

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    1. Soon is optimistic. I think once I get the framework (brothel bar) in place it will become fairly open-ended after that with new monster girl scenarios added as and when I write them.

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  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFnmT82yGpk

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  3. I just played it, and found it quite intriguing. I'm glad you didn't put the setting in the American Nevada desert, as then you would be competing with the Succubus Ranch. I really have to get back to writing someday.

    I look forward to seeing more of this game's "bad" ends.

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    1. I did go back and forth on setting funnily enough. I knew I wanted it to be the "classic horror" setting of a mysterious house out in the woods. UK dialogue/English is easier for me to write, but I wasn't sure the UK was the right country in terms of size. I decided to take the old hammer horror option of having everyone speak British English in an unspecified "European" location. (I think Germany or neighboring countries has bordello-type establishments tucked away on the main routes across borders, which is sort of the vibe I'm going for with this peculiar little establishment). :)

      You should have a play around with Twine when you get some free time to write again. Would work pretty well with the Succubus Ranch I reckon.

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  4. Man I still haven't found the trophy in Volumpula's room.

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  5. May I suggest some form of stat reward for "completing" a CYOA, e.g. some additional agility for the spidergirl one (since there is quite an emphasis on dodging, if I remember correctly?). Instead of a game over, one of your attributes may be reduced following a bad end? Or maybe you could have some sort of lasting debuff, which might(or might not) have consequences (that way, if you wished to write something new on a scenario, you would have a pretext to do so without need to re-establish the settings)?

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  6. Lust Friend, the sequel to Lust Grimm, has now been released: https://www.dlsite.com/maniax/work/=/product_id/RJ234434.html. It seems pretty good from what I've heard.

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    1. It's actually quite bad, there are barely any actual sex scenes(vaginal penetration), it's even more vanilla than the previous game.

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    2. It is a heavily breast-focused game, so most of the scenes are about this.

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  7. I like the intro, i really liked the whole "trapped in a place with hungry monster girls" trope, which is why i wish there was a Succubus Prison 2, in the mean time this looks promising and I can't wait for them to bad end m.. i mean get out safely from those harlots!

    Quick question, will the Madam also be one of the girls you can potentially spend your time with, cause i have a mental image of her in my head right now and i am intrigued.

    P.S. You should promote your patreon a bit more.

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    1. Madam might be. Not sure yet. Definitely if I figure out a progression system (she would likely be a later boss). Less likely if it's just isolated scenarios.

      I'm holding a little more neutral on Patreon. I'm not a big fan of them as a company, but there hasn't been decent replacement. Also, my output has been very erratic for the past couple of months. I don't feel it's right to throw a lot into trying to grab more patrons when I'm constantly missing deadlines.

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  8. Rule number one when your car dies down on an empty road in a dark night and your phone doesn't work: Never ever go to the mansion that you just noticed!

    Gameplay wise: There really should be some kind of reward any time you escape one of the monsters, especially if you're going to scrap the trophies.

    I also have some difficulties imagining the scenario you described to be "believable":
    "Hey, here's a bunch of hookers who are going to try to fuck you to death. Choose whichever of them you like. You're only chance is to follow them to their rooms and somehow find a way back out without fucking them! If you do that often enough, we're going to let you go."
    Willing suspension of disbelief only goes so far. (Of course all the more applause if you somehow make it work.)

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    1. That's the second plus for trophies, or something similar. I think that's something I should try to implement at some point.

      There will be plot explanations for why the player has to pick a girl. I want to link the player's randomly generated stats to a deductive process. Unlike Arachne and Volumpula, some scenarios will be next to impossible without good stats in the right attribute. There will be hints the player can pick up to choose the right girl(s) based on their opening stats.

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    2. Maybe say that if the Player finds all the Trophies (keys?) they'll be given a way out of the house and / or maybe a prize of some sort, perhaps a wish or fondest desire or some such?

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  9. When are we going to get a chance to read the next parts of succubus summoning? They were the reason I stayed a fan of yours.

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