Thursday, April 01, 2021

House of Hellish Harlots ver0.017 (Full Intro and Madam's Tour)

The new version of "House of Hellish Harlots" is available for patrons and can be found here:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/house-of-hellish-49457831

Here's a list of the new features:

FULL INTRO
The game has a beginning.  I adapted the very old intro and streamlined the options.  Yeah, the car breakdown scenario is a little hackneyed, but it's the classic.  There are also multiple options to set character dispositions as well as chat to some NPCs for some background.

MADAM'S TOUR
On entering the House, the Madam will give the player a tour which has a primary purpose of explaining her 'rules'.  It also introduces a succubus I'll be giving a scenario to at a later date.

The full versions of both the Intro and Tour are quite long.  They exist to set the scene a little better than just throwing the player into the first set of choices.  Because they're long, I also added options to skip through them quickly, so on subsequent playthroughs you should be able to get right to the first harlot selection in about 5 clicks.

FLESHED OUT PASSAGES
The main game loop passages have all been fleshed out, so it should feel more like a continuation of reading a book rather than the barebones instructions that were there before.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to complete The Barman NPC in time, so the hub passage for pre-room actions is still clearly a placeholder.

NEW HARLOT
The stoner caterpillar girl, Kanna bi Grafolita, makes her debut in the House.  This was an attempt to write a monster girl a little different to the usual ones.  I hope people like her.  I'll post something on her creation later when I'm not frantically trying to beat a deadline, because it opens up another harlot idea.

MADAM REVAMP
This is just part of the regular updating and improving I do to the NPCs.  The main change is that the 'Buy Mulligan Token' option unlocks a little quicker.  I also put in support for harlots that are multiple girls such as the Muchadh Sisters, so that The Madam refers to them naturally as "they" instead of "she".

HARLOT MAINTENANCE
I carried on updating the harlots I didn't get a chance to finish for ver0.016.  This means that Calliophi and Queen Colubridis will now reveal their true forms earlier if the player has the right charm among other interactions.  I didn't get them all done, so Suffocatrix Mamilla won't interact with the anti-smother charm even though it might seem like she should.  This is queued up to be done.

What isn't in ver0.017:

THE BARMAN
Too many rewrites and awkwardness this month.  I have rough drafts of his segments, but they still need a bit of editing to hit the right tone.  I'm hoping to get him out of the way early April.

SOME HARLOT MAINTENANCE
I'll save you some time and experimentation.  Suffocatrix Mamilla, Cibi Somnia and Sorpresa Ombra have not been updated to interact with charms, so don't torture yourself trying out combinations.  Mamilla will have an interaction I'll add later.  Sorpresa may have an interaction.  I forgot to create an anti-sleep charm, so Cibi still has free rein to eat your dreams.

SOME BUGS AND ODDNESS
These are things I've noticed and queued up to sort out.  They're corner cases that shouldn't come up very often.  An obvious one is the 'true vision' charm.  If the player picks it up, the text will behave as though they've seen the true form of the harlot at the presentation stage when this didn't happen.  The fix will be delaying its effect to the start of the next round and I'll add that for a future release.

I'm not far off what I want for a public demo.  I still need to add the Barman and replace the 4 remaining placeholder harlots.  I'll be looking at options to get the file hosted somewhere in the next couple of months.

In the meantime, all support is appreciated.  I'd love to be able to hire artists for this and give people a game as good as Monmusu Quest and the others.