Showing posts with label Escape the Arachne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Escape the Arachne. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Many-Eyed Hydra finally has a Patreon

I've faffed around with this for a while, to be fair.

First up, I'm terrible at asking for anything, so writing what is essentially a begging "giz us cash" post is alien and uncomfortable for me.

Turns out a couple of big dentist bills on the horizon are pretty good for making one swallow his pride.  (I had a root ripped out today after the crown snapped off a few weeks ago.  Ow.  I'm not sure which is more painful - the pliers or the imminent damage to the bank account.)

Secondly, there was a smidgeon of doubt.  Last couple of years I've been a bit all over the place - The H-space monster girl bestiary stuff, the long (probably too long) Monmusu Quest: Paradox walkthroughs, the bits of novels you haven't yet seen because they didn't quite get there and are currently on hiatus.  I didn't want to open up a Patreon until I felt confident I could give people value for their subscriptions.

After publishing the "Escape the Arachne" CYOA scenario and finally getting back to Literotica with a 13K word monster short story, "Night of the Nude Succubus Orgy", I feel in a much better place productivity-wise.  Another story I got about halfway through before sticking on a backburner has recently popped up and punched me in the face with a "Finish me!"  One of the hopes I have with the Patreon is that it'll free me from thinking - "I can't do the short stories like before, I need to be writing novels and things I can put on Amazon for money," and I'll just get back to writing what feels right at the time (which usually ends up turning into a series/novel or short story collection anyway).

Finally, there was the fear.  Not starting up a Patreon is a bit like Schrödinger's cat.  As long as you haven't launched it, it can't actually fail.  Once you launch it, well... reality ensues and you have to face the prospect of it only making $5 a month.

Feh, if it happens, it happens.  No-one has an automatic right to be rewarded and recompensed for their creative endeavors.

(It would be fairly soul-destroying, though, so please support me if you can. ;) )

But we can swiftly move on past all that mewling.  I've finally got off my ass and got the Patreon up.  You can find it (and hopefully back me) here.

(Having a tooth ripped out does wonders for focus.)

Some nitty-gritty.

There is only one reward tier currently ($1).  According to Patreon this is taken out the moment you back me and then again at the 1st of each month.  I will add more tiers in future when I have a better idea of what I'm doing.

My plan is to give patrons early access to stories and CYOA scenarios.  As a test I've made available a later version of "Escape the Arachne" where I jiggled the math a little and added a "hard" mode (tests fail on ties rather than passing).

This will be my plan for future CYOA scenarios and regular (i.e. non-contest) short stories and serial chapters.  I don't plan to make any of these totally exclusive, mainly because it could come back to bite me in the ass if I really want to use a particular story in a future collection.  The period of exclusivity will likely be for a week before I post the story on Literotica or here.  For some stories it will be a lot longer as they won't be put on Literotica or the blog and instead will be earmarked for future ebook short story collections.

I'll probably also post snippets of various bit of works-in-progress.  Some might become something, some might not, but the individual scenes will likely still be enjoyable.  (I have a hot one with Nicole and Madam Voluptula having a lot of fun together lying on one of my hard drives somewhere.)

Anyway it's up.  I would love it if you could support me.

Also, as I'm new to this, I would love feedback on the page, tiers, etc.  If anything seems obviously broken, or awful and cringy, please let me know.  Expect the first couple of months to be a little amateurish while I figure stuff out.

I'm hoping this will motivate me to get some new fiction out.  It's about time I reclaimed Lit's Erotic Horror category...

EDIT: I've also added a handy button link.  It does appear to go to the right Patreon page through some black magic beyond my ken.  (I might be getting too old - I was convinced I had to hack the raw HTML in the button example somehow and yet it just goes straight where I want it to after pasting it into the blog's widget section.)

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Working on next CYOA/Gamebook scenario

"Escape the Arachne" has been live a week and has so far nearly racked up 8,000 plays.  I hope you enjoyed it.  If you have any feedback to make it better, please leave it below.

Also, if anyone feels suitably inspired to create some art of L'hesperusa having "fun", feel free to go ahead and send me links of the results.

I'm personally having fun with this and currently in the process of creating the next scenario.  I refactored bits of the arachne scenario to tidy things up and give me a nice generic template to start the next one off from.

I also added a difficulty mode.  All the stats tests are based off rolling 2d6 and comparing the result against the stat.  Currently you only need to roll less than or equal to your stat value to pass the test.  I added a hard mode which changes that to just less than (ties count as failures).

e.g.  Your Strength is 7.  You're asked to perform a Test of Strength.  In Easy mode a roll of 7 would be considered a pass.  In Hard mode a roll of 7 is considered a failure.  You need to roll 6 or less.

This should shift the probabilities around and give the monster girls more opportunities to have "fun" with you.

Changing difficulty mode isn't in the current "Escape the Arachne" scenario, but I will be adding it to future scenarios.

Now about those future scenarios.  As far as I know, there is no way I can package these up and sell them on Amazon, so I will (finally!) be setting up some sort of Patreon to beg for funding for my smutty endeavors.  It will either go live when the next scenario is ready (and I can prove I can deliver) or earlier if I think it will help motivate me to sit at my desk 8+ hours a day.

The Patreon will also include my short story writing, and I'll look at ways to release things early to patreons as part of the rewards (and hopefully get back to posting smut on Literotica again!).

Is there a game here with all this Twine stuff?

At the moment I'm just going to create them as separate scenarios until I figure out the best way to stitch them together.  By going modular like this, even if the whole game plan falls apart, people will at least still have had fun playing a bunch of separate sexy monster girl scenarios.

In case people hadn't already figured it out, the Gold Statuette in "Escape the Arachne" is a placeholder and serves no function other than extra bragging rights when you escape.

This could end up being replaced by a key item if I take the Fighting Fantasy approach of sending players through a fiendish maze and remorselessly killing them off at a checkpoint near the end because they missed the key numbers engraved in a rock in the very first cave.  That would be fun to create, but would require a lot more work to put everything together.

An easier approach would be to treat it as a more perverted Crystal Maze.  Each scenario is a puzzle room where the goal is to escape with a statuette.  At the end a succubus "rewards" you depending on how many statuettes you retrieve.  That would fit very well with a modular structure and allow for juggling of the scenarios so players are encountering them randomly and in different orders.

This is all for future consideration.  For now I want to get 4 or 5 scenarios under my belt first.

As for now I'm working on the next scenario.  It's going to feature a soft and comfy pink cushionblob like the one in this H-space story.  She's waiting to give you a lovely erotic body-to-body massage.

As with the arachne scenario there will be multiple sexy Bad Ends, and maybe some sexy Good Ends as well.

I probably need to give her a different name though.  "Escape the Cushionblob" doesn't have the right ring to it.  Escape the Pink Jelly Girl?

Anyway, let me know your thoughts below?  Do you like the idea of more Gamebook scenarios like the arachne one?

(I haven't forgotten about my other fiction either.  I want to get a serial started back up on here as well.  I'm trying to feel around for the right one.  But while I'm currently excited on this, it makes sense to channel the crazy manic phase into as much productivity as I can while it lasts.)

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Along came a spider... Escape the Arachne is live!

Okay, now you can get excited (maybe).

"Escape the Arachne" is live.

I don't know much about the people behind philome.la, so I don't know how long it will be live.  They may take exception to the adult nature of the story and/or some political things I've said in the past and give me the boot.  My long-term plan is to buy some web hosting and post these where I won't have to worry about that sort of thing (or at least, worry about it less).

Now onto the story.  It's short, about the length of a short story.  I intended the scenario to be more a demo/proof of concept.  If you follow the optimal path you can reach the end of the scenario very quickly.  It's also designed to be relatively easy.  Even with average stats you should be able to blunder to the end without too much trouble.  It's also possible to escape without even passing a single stat test.

Of course, it isn't much fun if you do that, so I'd suggest letting L'hesperusa "play" with you a little longer.

There are 6 different Bad Ends available (and one Good End).  5 of these are fairly easy to find.  The last might require a little bit of trial and error (hint: nakedness is an attribute within this scenario).

The whole thing is written in Twine using the SugarCube story format.  As this is a demo/proof of concept I was focusing more on the coding and the text rather than the presentation, so yep, it looks a little basic.  Everything has to start somewhere.  Artwork, sound fx, a prettier GUI are things I can look at in the future.

The game mechanics are very similar to old gamebooks, the Fighting Fantasy series in particular.  If people find the scenario a little too easy and want to L'hesperusa to dominate them a little more I might switch the test probabilities around.  Currently the tests call for rolling equal to or lower than the stat on 2d6.  Giving L'hesperusa the tie (so a pass is only if the roll is less than the stat) would shift the probabilities in her favour.  That's something I'm considering doing.  The current stat tests are a demo version anyway and might be replaced by something more complex at a future date.  (Plus I don't know what patents/copyright/trademarks the Fighting Fantasy series still holds on d6 attribute checks.  My gut feeling is simple attribute tests like this are too generic to patent/copyright, but very stupid patents exist...)

Anyway, I hope people have fun playing with L'hesperusa.  I haven't done any coding for a while, so this was a fun diversion.  Please post feedback (and bugs encountered) below.

If the interest is there, I would like to write more scenarios featuring different monster girls.  Maybe even stitch those scenarios together into a full game.  I'd likely need funding for this (especially if it gets to the point of commissioning artwork etc), so it might be an excuse to finally get that Patreon up and running.  So long as the interest is there.  If people try it out and give it the thumbs down, well it was an experiment that didn't work out (although it was great to do some coding again).

I have no plans to stop doing the other writing.  Ideally I'll have a nice serial up and running next week (although probably not "The Heart Squad" as that's proving stubborn and will likely need to go back onto the backburner).

Hope people enjoyed this little game demo anyway.  Please leave feedback below.

Oh, and I probably should add.  If you like it, please spread the word.  :D

Sunday, May 20, 2018

CYOA Testing Stuff

Test Link

DO NOT GET EXCITED.

This is just a test to see what a twine story looks like when hosted (And in this case is a bit of test code I wrote to randomise some choices).  I didn't want to post the demo and then find out it got scrambled on the the upload.

Current hosting site is philome.la.  Not massively enthusiastic about this considering they wanted me to use my twitter handle to login with.  I suspect it's also a platform I might be booted off at any time and will continue with the expectation of that happening at any moment.

I did want to post it here, but Blogger is not really geared up for this type of thing from what I gathered when looking into it.

The real demo is near completion.  I'm just ironing out some bugs and adding text for any segments I might have missed.  Bear in mind, this is a demo, so it will look like ass.  Hopefully the text will make up for it and you'll enjoy your (brief) time with L'hesperusa.


ETA:

Fuck.  Played 294 times.  Didn't I tell you not to get excited.  There's nothing there at the moment.  It's just some test code I threw together to check random choices work.  The real thing will be along in a couple of days hopefully.

Monday, May 07, 2018

And now... Spiders?

Chaos Writing strikes again.

This was supposed to be a continuation of the "Heart Squad" series.  I think that series can be salvaged, but I didn't get a chance to work on it over the weekend.  The reason being I currently have another project screaming very loudly "Work on me!" in my ear.  I did briefly consider ignoring it, but not working on things when they're red-hot in my mind is usually when my productivity goes to hell.  If you wake up and your brain is currently bouncing around going "let's work on this thing", it's usually best from a productivity standpoint to get as much work done on that project while the enthusiasm is there.  So, that's what I'm going to do.

I've got 3 days before I'm off for a work assignment for a week.  I want to see if I can smash as much of this idea as I can before then in case I come back and find the enthusiasm has waned.

I've had a look at where I got to with "The Heart Squad" and think it's retrievable, but I don't want to make it a chore by forcing myself to work on it when something else is screaming for my attention.

As for this mystery project, here's a clue:



You turn and see a monstrous spider woman—an arachne.  Above the waist she has the body of an exotic young woman with voluptuous round breasts.  Below the waist she has the shiny black abdomen and eight long jointed legs of a giant spider.  Straight black hair falls in curtains on either side of a thin and haughtily beautiful face.  Her sensually plump lips are stained black and curled up in a cruel smile.

“Hello, little cricket.  I am L'hesperusa the arachne,” she says.  “I’m going to suck up all your fluids...”

She pauses to run a moist tongue around her sensual lips.

“...through your lovely hard cock.”

Her words send both a shiver of arousal and fear through you.  You don’t think she’ll stop with just your semen.

No time to dwell on that now.  The arachne rears up on her long spindly legs and points the tip of her bulbous black abdomen in your direction.  It looks like she’s taking aim.

Test of Agility



This will probably be the only post this week as I'm going to hammer away on this thing while it's hot.  I have written a lot of text for it over the last few weeks, but I'm not 100% sure on how it will fit together.  At the worst, if my programming skills fail me, I'll post the raw text for people's enjoyment.

(L'hesperusa really really likes playing with her prey...)