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.