Open version of "Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly" is live!

As I said I would last week, I've posted "Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly" up on philome.la for everyone to play.  You can enjoy it here.

I'm still not sure what is and isn't allowed on philome.  I put in a few links to my Patreon (because I do like getting paid to write these and it's a good incentive to make me write more. hint hint. ;) ).  Some websites can be a little iffy about that, so I'll keep an eye out and resubmit a linkless version if the first gets bounced.

Putting a week's delay on the general release seems like a good balance between rewarding patrons for their contributions while not shutting out entirely people that can't contribute for whatever reason, so I'll continue doing it (maybe eventually migrating the CYOAs to my own web domain).

I hope you enjoy playing with Volumpula.  Writing her took a little longer than I anticipated, but the scenario is out now and I hope the wait was worth it.  Please let me know what you think in the comments below.

As I mentioned before.  I'm in the brainstorming/planning phase for the next scenario.  However, there are a couple of short stories I'd like to finish first, so those will likely be my priority for the rest of the month.

In the meantime, I'm sure Volumpula will take very good care of you...

October 2018 plans

Here's a xpost from my patreon (I should be doing this for all public posts - during the late-stage panic of finishing Volumpula I kept forgetting to update here).

"Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly" is out.  If you're a patron, you can grab that file from the relevant patron update post.  (If you're not a patron, fear not, I'll be posting it up on philome on Monday.)

Please let me know what you think - what worked, what didn't (and most importantly - let me know if anything seems broken!)

After completing these things I usually like to review the code a little and see what can be cleaned up and what can be generalised to shave time off future scenarios.  How Twine/Sugarcube handles arrays is quirky, and will be something I need to keep in mind for future projects (I'll do a full post on that later as it might be useful for other people trying to make their own Twine games).  The other thing that was a little clumsy (behind the scenes) is handling repetition of text.  A late change I made was to tweak the text when the player returns to a passage after reconsidering struggling.   I want to try and avoid immersion-breaking repetition where possible, and there are probably built in tools to track how many times a player passes through a particular passage.

Overall, the development process took too long at 3 months.  Some things went a little awry in the middle there and deadline panicking turned the later stages into a bit of a death march.  I'm more productive when enthusiastic, so I think I'll look at project rotation system, so I have something to switch to rather than sitting around twiddling my thumbs when I hit a temporary wall on one project.

The CYOA development process consists of these stages:

1) Brainstorming and ideas - come up with the monster girl, sex scenes and a rough plan.
2) Create the map of the scenario in Twine.
3) Write out the text freehand.
4) Type up text.
5) Plug text into the map and add the HTML formatting (adjusting the map if the text calls for it)
6) Edit/Debug (99% errors are forgetting to put in the <</if>> statement.)

I think it might make more sense to take a break between each stage and work on a short story or even earlier stages of subsequent scenarios.  The development time might still be 3 months, but I'll also be getting shorts stories or half the next CYOA scenario out of the same time period.

Now let's move away from the nitty-gritty behind-the-scenes stuff and talk about what's next.

I have 2 short stories I'd like to get finished.  One will be a temporary patron-exclusive.  The other will be an entrant for Literotica's Halloween Competition.

I've also begun brainstorming the next "Escape the" scenario.  At the moment I'm thinking it will be an elf/dryad with a very unusual flower collection, but that will depend on if it pans out.

And that ends the Thursday update.  I'll try to make a regular thing of this on Thursdays even if the updates are of the "got captured by a succubus and her hellhound ate my homework" type.

"Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly" is done!

Whew, and breathe.

Sorry for the extended quiet period here.  Once I started to overrun on the CYOA project, I hit that horrible type of deadline paralysis of trying to focus everything on getting the project done, but not really being able to hit any kind of productivity.  Having the Patreon was pretty good, in that knowing people were paying for this meant I had to deliver it, so it kept me on the path rather than abandoning or putting it on hiatus.  I definitely struggle with any project once it goes past a certain timeframe.  It's probably no surprise my two novels were written first as bite-sized serials.

I did want to to try and take the pressure off myself of thinking I had to make regular blog posts (which resulted in some ill-advised decisions in the past with serials that weren't ready), but I didn't intend going dark for quite this long.

Anyway.

I completed the "Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly" CYOA.  Lots of gooey fun there.  Probably a little too much gooey fun.  I did get to write various different slime girl sex scenes, which was fun.

For now the Twine scenario is only available to my patrons on Patreon.  If you're not a patron for whatever reason, you'll be able to read the scenario for free when I post it up on hitome.la in a week's time.  I figure this is the fairest way to give patrons some perks for their dollars without paywalling away my work entirely.

As for the blog here and my other writing, rest assured I have no plans to abandon either.  Literotica's Halloween short story competition is coming up, and I'd like to get an entry in for that.

Pink Jelly CYOA Update: Scenes Typed Up

It's been a little slow and sludgy.  For some reason I always run into productivity problems whenever a phase/chapter/story runs longer than I'd like, and the last week or so has been a bit of a brutal crawl.  The Patreon has been really useful here as an incentive to keep at it and not put the project on hiatus as has happened in the past with other series/projects.

(Obligatory cheeky Patreon plug link.)

The majority of the scenes are now all typed up.  I'd say all of them are done, but based on my past experience with the Arachne CYOA, I usually find I've missed the odd little transition scene here and there when I come to stitch the whole thing together.

The next phase is to plug the text scenes into Twine.  The pathways have pretty much all been programmed, so this is pretty much a straight cut'n'paste job into the existing map.  There are a couple of things I'll need to tweak as I do this, and the inevitable bug squashing to make sure everything fits together and works correctly.

I'm a little annoyed I didn't manage to finish this in August, but barring unforeseen catastrophes it shouldn't take much longer.  I was less annoyed when I totted the word count up.  Yep, I went a little bit overboard with Volumpula's various talents.  Obviously there is some repetition with some scenes, but the total word count for all the scenes is 18,000 words.

Whoops.  That's like a third of a novel.

Oh well.  That's a lot of "fun" with a sexy slime girl.

Future CYOAs will not be this long.  I want to be producing them faster than this one (especially as my interest and productivity start to wane once projects start to drag on too long) and 18K words per CYOA for a single encounter is too much.

I was hoping to have a version out by the end of the week, but I also have a dental appointment tomorrow and don't know how much that's going to knock me about, so I don't want to make any concrete predictions.  However, it shouldn't be long now before I unleash Volumpula on you all!

Updatery stuff - Escape the Pink Jelly Girl

First off, massive thank you to my patrons.  It means a lot.

Ideally I would have liked to have been in the middle of a serial when starting this, just so it wouldn't look like I'd taken the money and gone AWOL.  This hasn't happened.  I'm still working on the pink cushionblob CYOA scenario.  I did think about posting some of the scenes from this, but I think it would then make those scenes anticlimactic in the finished scenario.

As for that scenario - yeah, I over-complicated things for myself.  At the last count there are 11 End scenes of varying degrees of badness.  This is not including the various sexiness Volumpula gets up to with the player outside of those.  I think the final scenario will be a lot of fun, but I think for future scenarios I'll try and keep the sex scene count down to something more manageable so the waiting periods between releases aren't too long.

I was working on another short story, but I've temporarily put that aside to concentrate on finishing the cushionblob scenario.  My plan is to get back to it once the scenario is finished, as well as writing (or rather, finishing off, as I wrote half of it last year) a short story for Lit's Halloween competition.

Apologies for the brevity of the update.  Back to bouncy, sexy slime girl sex scenes.  Hopefully the next update will come with a finished beta version for people to have fun with.     

Update on Next CYOA/Gamebook Scenario

It's not working out.  Looks like I'll have to move onto something else.

/joke

(Although I have done that far too many times with other projects over the last year...)

It's actually moving along quite nicely.  I've planned out the scenario and mapped all the routes through it, along with the various tests the player character needs to perform.

It looks a bit like this:

Oh, and this:

Because I couldn't fit everything on one screen.

I definitely feel like I'm in a "hot" productive phase, so I'm going to keep mining it for as long as it stays "hot".

As I said in the last post, the scenario is going to feature a lovely lady very similar to this one.

Some people asked for it, so I've included some options for non-lethal sex this time around.  She's not quite as predatory as the spider girl, but she will quite happily suck all your good stuff out if the mood takes her.  Escaping with the trophy/statuette should also be a little more of a challenge this time around.

But what we really care about are those Bad End scenes.  Assuming this one pans out the way I've designed it, there will be 4 "good" sex scenes, 5 Bad End scenes and a couple of Very Bad End scenes if you manage to annoy her too much.

I'm now working on writing all the raw text.  I'm estimating it will take about 1-2 weeks to write, type up and edit the scenes and then another week to correctly test and debug the scenario.  The raw text is critical.  Once I've got the big scenes (those sexy Bad Ends) written down, then I'll be confident I'll be able to see this through to completion.  This will be the point I crack open the Patreon and start panhandlin'.  The plan will be to release the finished file to patreons first, and then post the story to philome.la for everyone else a week later.

One question remaining is what to call it.  The H-space Bestiary names I gave monster girls were... variable in quality.

"Escape the Pink Cushionblob" doesn't quite have the right ring to it.

I could use "Escape the Slime Girl", but I have a rough idea of another scenario with a slightly gooier slime girl.

"Escape the Pink Jelly Girl?"

"Escape the Pink Slime Girl?"

Post your thoughts below, as well as anything else you want to say on this.