First update of the year. I've added 4 new harlots to the game project I'm working on, "The House of Hellish Harlots." Their names are Pix Decipula, Couchelaxa, Vête Piège, and Suffocatrix Mamilla, and they're waiting for you to "play" with them right here:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/house-of-hellish-33503316
It's still a Patreon exclusive, I'm afraid. Got bills to pay, succubi to feed and all that.
If you would like to contribute, but won't or can't deal with Patreon, and have an alternative site that you would be okay with using, let me know and I'll try to mirror things up on there. I'm still not the world's biggest fan of Patreon. They seem to have been quiet lately, but it's always worth having a backup in place in case Patreon gets a touch of the Orwells again.
As for a full public release: yes, I want to be doing this at some point to attract a bigger audience.
Currently I have the main game loop implemented, 3 NPCs and 11 sexy(ish) harlots. As it stands, that's almost the same content as a small DLsite game (in text and code - I'm still lacking such luxuries as art and sound). Unfortunately, I've been influenced too much by Torotoro resistance and Monster Girl Quest, so I'm a mad bastard that wants to make something awesome and unforgettable.
What I want in place before I start throwing it open to the public is the intro and the game loop all fully written, all major NPCs in place, and enough harlots to be able to play through for a few rounds. That will then be the rough equivalent of an early access demo. I'm still about 4-7 months off from that.
In the meantime I'll keep posting the early demos to my Patreon. I'm only working in text, so I don't charge more than a $1 per month for access. (If you feel I deserve more, I'm not going to turn it down!)
Showing posts with label Twine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Twine. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
Monday, December 16, 2019
House of Hellish Harlots demo (ver0.007 - The Portly Gentleman) out now
xposted from my Patreon:
Okay, now I've had a chance to get some sleep (and get some other morning tasks out of the way), let's go over this release properly.
First up, it's a mechanics-focused release, which means it's more games-type stuff rather than sexy scenario-type stuff. Because of how complex the new scoring system (and the code refactor) turned out to be, I decided to split the planned release into two. Now this is out, I'll be switching back to finishing off 5 or so harlot scenarios for the second half. Hopefully to be done by around the end of December depending on how much I can dodge the usual holidays stuff.
Now onto the new additions:
The Portly Gentleman.
This NPC will be the player's main source of money while in the House. He is only encountered in the post-room phase and will "score" players on their encounters with the harlots. For more background on him, you can talk to The Elegant Woman.
The Scoring System.
Originally, this was just a single numerical value, then I realised I wanted to make repeat visits to harlots a feature, and because of this, needed to keep track of what had already been scored. I didn't want players picking up easy coins by playing the same scenario over and over, and it also wouldn't make sense for The Portly Gentleman to pay out again for information he'd already paid for. This also opened up the option to have The Portly Gentleman give custom feedback depending on the harlot (you should notice this with Suka). It was a bit more work, but I think it will be rewarding in the long term for the options it gives me.
More Dummy Harlots.
This one might be more annoying than useful at this stage. Because this is a mechanics-focused release, I wanted players to be able to play through more rounds before the selection algorithm 'breaks'. It will dilute the 'real' harlots, but is only a temporary thing as I start to replace them with 'real' scenarios. If you like the names of some of the dummies, let me know and I'll attach them to future scenarios.
Code Refactor.
For some reason, I was all over the place with implementing NPCs to start with. The Elegant Woman was a little buggy in the last release because the way I'd implemented her was... not great. With The Portly Gentleman I finally found a cleaner way to implement the NPCs and upgraded both The Madam and The Elegant Woman accordingly. The other change is a little more technical and related to how Twine handles objects. I'm not going to go into it in too much depth as it probably isn't that interesting. One bit of advice I can give to anyone working with Twine - be very careful with object references, they don't always work the way you think they might and a lot of times you'll end up modifying the property of a copy rather than the original.
Repeat Visits.
Some back story. I had the four features above pretty much done (minus testing) around Wednesday last week. So, in a moment of madness, I thought I'd tack on Repeat Visits as an additional feature. Oh boy, was that a bad idea. The idea behind Repeat Visits is a player would get the option to revisit some harlots as future selections and the harlot would remember the player from the first time. This could open up options for side quests, maybe additional bonus scenes, or maybe even necessary to 'perfect' some harlot scenarios. I updated the scoring system with this in mind. I picked Suka no-Hirudo as a test case as she has multiple options for sex scenes and future visits would allow players to pick a different option. And... it was a little more complex to implement than I thought. That plus a dental appointment on Friday was the reason this release went out at midnight on Sunday rather than a sensible time on Friday.
Despite that, I'm still glad I did it now rather than later as I now know roughly what's required and can build it into future scenarios. Not all harlots will have this option, but it will add a bit extra to some. As always, I have to be careful not to make the harlot scenarios too complex, otherwise they will take too long to write and implement.
And now something I should have added and will be working on later today:
Choosing Harlots Directly.
After Smith's comment on the original post, I did check to make sure I'd flipped the right flag on Suka's properties to enable her to show up for repeat visits. That was set correctly. Then I did a quick back-of-an-envelope calculation on the probability of Suka showing up twice... and grimaced. The endgame plan is to have a lot of harlots so that each play through - the order the harlots are presented, etc - will be fairly unique. Unfortunately, this doesn't work so well in the early phases of development where around 4/5ths of the harlots are dummies and it takes a lot of random playthroughs to get a specific harlot to show up. I have an idea on how to get around this.
I did leave a stub in The Madam options for a 'gallery mode' where a player selects a harlot directly. This was meant to be outside of the regular game. Gallery mode will come (likely near the end of development), but I think I can add an option similar to it. It will work like this - The Madam gives the player a list of harlots, they pick one, and that harlot will automatically be added to the next selection. That should make it easier to pick out specific scenarios rather than running the game loop over and over, trying to get RNG to throw up the scenario you want.
Bugs.
I did a fair bit of testing, but the project is now getting big enough that it's easy to miss some pathways and corner cases. If, while playing the demo, you spot something that shouldn't be there, or a point where the game outright breaks, please let me know in the comments below. I'd like to ensure everything is running smoothly by the time I add the next batch of harlots.
And that's that for now.
ver0.008 will be that tweak to The Madam's options plus any bugfixes I've missed (and maybe repeat visit options for Arana Solfugis and Anna Boa).
ver0.009 will be 5+ new harlot scenarios depending on how many I can finish before the end of the month.
Now back here. The House of Hellish Harlots project is going well. I don't think I've been as focused as this for a while. It is going to continue to devour a lot of my time while I put together what I hope will be a very enjoyable succubus/monster girl eroge. I haven't abandoned fiction completely. Once I get House of Hellish Harlots to a more advanced demo state (all the major game pieces in place and a decent number of harlot scenarios added), I'll look to start sneaking out short stories again. It will be a preventative measure against burnout on the game project. Until then, sorry to the people not currently able to access Patreon.
Okay, now I've had a chance to get some sleep (and get some other morning tasks out of the way), let's go over this release properly.
First up, it's a mechanics-focused release, which means it's more games-type stuff rather than sexy scenario-type stuff. Because of how complex the new scoring system (and the code refactor) turned out to be, I decided to split the planned release into two. Now this is out, I'll be switching back to finishing off 5 or so harlot scenarios for the second half. Hopefully to be done by around the end of December depending on how much I can dodge the usual holidays stuff.
Now onto the new additions:
The Portly Gentleman.
This NPC will be the player's main source of money while in the House. He is only encountered in the post-room phase and will "score" players on their encounters with the harlots. For more background on him, you can talk to The Elegant Woman.
The Scoring System.
Originally, this was just a single numerical value, then I realised I wanted to make repeat visits to harlots a feature, and because of this, needed to keep track of what had already been scored. I didn't want players picking up easy coins by playing the same scenario over and over, and it also wouldn't make sense for The Portly Gentleman to pay out again for information he'd already paid for. This also opened up the option to have The Portly Gentleman give custom feedback depending on the harlot (you should notice this with Suka). It was a bit more work, but I think it will be rewarding in the long term for the options it gives me.
More Dummy Harlots.
This one might be more annoying than useful at this stage. Because this is a mechanics-focused release, I wanted players to be able to play through more rounds before the selection algorithm 'breaks'. It will dilute the 'real' harlots, but is only a temporary thing as I start to replace them with 'real' scenarios. If you like the names of some of the dummies, let me know and I'll attach them to future scenarios.
Code Refactor.
For some reason, I was all over the place with implementing NPCs to start with. The Elegant Woman was a little buggy in the last release because the way I'd implemented her was... not great. With The Portly Gentleman I finally found a cleaner way to implement the NPCs and upgraded both The Madam and The Elegant Woman accordingly. The other change is a little more technical and related to how Twine handles objects. I'm not going to go into it in too much depth as it probably isn't that interesting. One bit of advice I can give to anyone working with Twine - be very careful with object references, they don't always work the way you think they might and a lot of times you'll end up modifying the property of a copy rather than the original.
Repeat Visits.
Some back story. I had the four features above pretty much done (minus testing) around Wednesday last week. So, in a moment of madness, I thought I'd tack on Repeat Visits as an additional feature. Oh boy, was that a bad idea. The idea behind Repeat Visits is a player would get the option to revisit some harlots as future selections and the harlot would remember the player from the first time. This could open up options for side quests, maybe additional bonus scenes, or maybe even necessary to 'perfect' some harlot scenarios. I updated the scoring system with this in mind. I picked Suka no-Hirudo as a test case as she has multiple options for sex scenes and future visits would allow players to pick a different option. And... it was a little more complex to implement than I thought. That plus a dental appointment on Friday was the reason this release went out at midnight on Sunday rather than a sensible time on Friday.
Despite that, I'm still glad I did it now rather than later as I now know roughly what's required and can build it into future scenarios. Not all harlots will have this option, but it will add a bit extra to some. As always, I have to be careful not to make the harlot scenarios too complex, otherwise they will take too long to write and implement.
And now something I should have added and will be working on later today:
Choosing Harlots Directly.
After Smith's comment on the original post, I did check to make sure I'd flipped the right flag on Suka's properties to enable her to show up for repeat visits. That was set correctly. Then I did a quick back-of-an-envelope calculation on the probability of Suka showing up twice... and grimaced. The endgame plan is to have a lot of harlots so that each play through - the order the harlots are presented, etc - will be fairly unique. Unfortunately, this doesn't work so well in the early phases of development where around 4/5ths of the harlots are dummies and it takes a lot of random playthroughs to get a specific harlot to show up. I have an idea on how to get around this.
I did leave a stub in The Madam options for a 'gallery mode' where a player selects a harlot directly. This was meant to be outside of the regular game. Gallery mode will come (likely near the end of development), but I think I can add an option similar to it. It will work like this - The Madam gives the player a list of harlots, they pick one, and that harlot will automatically be added to the next selection. That should make it easier to pick out specific scenarios rather than running the game loop over and over, trying to get RNG to throw up the scenario you want.
Bugs.
I did a fair bit of testing, but the project is now getting big enough that it's easy to miss some pathways and corner cases. If, while playing the demo, you spot something that shouldn't be there, or a point where the game outright breaks, please let me know in the comments below. I'd like to ensure everything is running smoothly by the time I add the next batch of harlots.
And that's that for now.
ver0.008 will be that tweak to The Madam's options plus any bugfixes I've missed (and maybe repeat visit options for Arana Solfugis and Anna Boa).
ver0.009 will be 5+ new harlot scenarios depending on how many I can finish before the end of the month.
Now back here. The House of Hellish Harlots project is going well. I don't think I've been as focused as this for a while. It is going to continue to devour a lot of my time while I put together what I hope will be a very enjoyable succubus/monster girl eroge. I haven't abandoned fiction completely. Once I get House of Hellish Harlots to a more advanced demo state (all the major game pieces in place and a decent number of harlot scenarios added), I'll look to start sneaking out short stories again. It will be a preventative measure against burnout on the game project. Until then, sorry to the people not currently able to access Patreon.
Friday, November 15, 2019
New demo of "House of Hellish Harlots" (ver 0.006) out now
I guess it might not be much consolation to people that can't access Patreon, but the last month or so might be the most I've been fired up for a project in a long time (if only I'd been like this for some of those novel ideas a couple of years back, sigh...).
If you've been following the previous posts here, or me on twitter, you'll have heard me talking a lot about the "House of Hellish Harlots". This is where I not only came up with an idea for a sexy monster girl/succubus game, but a sexy monster girl/succubus game I could feasibly develop rather than just talk about. And that's what I've been doing for the past couple of months.
For now it's a text-only game built in Twine. At some point, if it really takes off and proves popular I might migrate it to Unity and hire artists, etc. For now it's still at proof-of-concept stage, so I'm still not sure whether what seems like a good idea in abstract translates to a fun (and more importantly, sexy!) game to play.
The last couple of releases featured a skeleton showing what the main game loop would be, followed by an example sexy scenario with Sapoonismenos Nerei. Since then I've been adding more content and come up with another playable demo.
This demo adds 2 NPCs, The Madam and The Elegant Woman. Both can be used to obtain information on the various harlots (and other things).
More importantly, I've added 5 new harlot scenarios for the player to play through. These are of varying degrees of lethality. The harlots have a wide range of different triggering events to determine whether the player gets their brains fucked out or... less pleasant things.
For now, the demo is a Patreon exclusive (you can find details on it here). I'm still looking into ways to get it out to other people (to make it a timed exclusive rather than just plain old exclusive) as I want to try and build up as big an audience as possible.
More on that when it's sorted.
As for now, the demo is up on Patreon and can be unlocked for the low price of $1.
If you've been following the previous posts here, or me on twitter, you'll have heard me talking a lot about the "House of Hellish Harlots". This is where I not only came up with an idea for a sexy monster girl/succubus game, but a sexy monster girl/succubus game I could feasibly develop rather than just talk about. And that's what I've been doing for the past couple of months.
For now it's a text-only game built in Twine. At some point, if it really takes off and proves popular I might migrate it to Unity and hire artists, etc. For now it's still at proof-of-concept stage, so I'm still not sure whether what seems like a good idea in abstract translates to a fun (and more importantly, sexy!) game to play.
The last couple of releases featured a skeleton showing what the main game loop would be, followed by an example sexy scenario with Sapoonismenos Nerei. Since then I've been adding more content and come up with another playable demo.
This demo adds 2 NPCs, The Madam and The Elegant Woman. Both can be used to obtain information on the various harlots (and other things).
More importantly, I've added 5 new harlot scenarios for the player to play through. These are of varying degrees of lethality. The harlots have a wide range of different triggering events to determine whether the player gets their brains fucked out or... less pleasant things.
For now, the demo is a Patreon exclusive (you can find details on it here). I'm still looking into ways to get it out to other people (to make it a timed exclusive rather than just plain old exclusive) as I want to try and build up as big an audience as possible.
More on that when it's sorted.
As for now, the demo is up on Patreon and can be unlocked for the low price of $1.
Wednesday, October 09, 2019
1st Harlot in the House - Sapoonismenos Nerei
"The House of Hellish Harlots" has progressed a little further than the brainstorming stage. I've prototyped the main game loop in Twine and now added the first harlot scenario.
She is the lovely Sapoonismenos Nerei. She loves giving out soapy massages (but handle with care!).
So far I'm pretty happy with how things are going. The idea dropped neatly into place. And now the code looks like it's doing the same.
I'll probably hit some fuck-off iceberg somewhere, because there's always some big fuck-off iceberg somewhere in game development. For now things look promising. At least for the initial text-only version.
For now, regular updates are only on patreon. I know not everyone can subscribe there, so I'll try to get those demos out to everyone else at some point. Not sure how yet, but I'll figure something out.
I'm still fairly excited about this. If it pans out the way I'm hoping it will pan out, it will be a nice framework to continually add new monster girls and succubi to. (And somewhere to park the more interesting monster girls and succubi ideas until I have a proper story/novel for them.)
She is the lovely Sapoonismenos Nerei. She loves giving out soapy massages (but handle with care!).
So far I'm pretty happy with how things are going. The idea dropped neatly into place. And now the code looks like it's doing the same.
I'll probably hit some fuck-off iceberg somewhere, because there's always some big fuck-off iceberg somewhere in game development. For now things look promising. At least for the initial text-only version.
For now, regular updates are only on patreon. I know not everyone can subscribe there, so I'll try to get those demos out to everyone else at some point. Not sure how yet, but I'll figure something out.
I'm still fairly excited about this. If it pans out the way I'm hoping it will pan out, it will be a nice framework to continually add new monster girls and succubi to. (And somewhere to park the more interesting monster girls and succubi ideas until I have a proper story/novel for them.)
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.
(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.
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!)
(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!)
Monday, October 08, 2018
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...
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
More Updatery stuff on Escape the Pink Jelly Girl
Been bounced around on real-life work related things last few days, but on the positive side all the waiting around in airports and flying did allow me to get the 1st draft of the Escape the Pink Jelly CYOA written. It nearly filled the whole notebook. I'm curious to see what the final word count on this is going to be!
Here's a list of what's been done and what still needs doing:
-Layout and Coding in Twine: Done-ish
-1st Draft (freehand): Done-ish
-2nd Draft (typing up + editing): 40-50%
-Plugging the text into Twine: ToDo
-Testing and Debugging: ToDo
I'm still experimenting with what works and what is most efficient. I tend to find it best to map out the skeleton and code all the links first. Then I write the scenes out freehand before typing them up and editing them. The 1st draft part is usually the most time-consuming, so I'm glad that's out of the way. The 2nd draft is something I normally hammer through - the "Night of the Nude Succubus Orgy" short story took three days, despite being over 10K words.
Plugging the text in is basic cut'n'paste with a little bit of editing to make sure the text links up through the different routes.
Debugging is less easy to predict. I'm not doing anything hideously complicated, which should make it relatively straightforward, but I always have to allow for those weird roadblocks where a stupid typo has me looking at the wrong place for hours until the inevitable "D'Oh!" moment.
Not sure when I'll have a playable file ready. Next week hopefully, depending on how nasty the inevitable bugs are. This is a little behind schedule as I lost a few days to other stuff and underestimated how complicated I'd made the whole scenario.
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
"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
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...)
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...)
Friday, January 09, 2015
Many-Eyed Hydra makes a Monster Girl Hentai Game: CYOA with Twine (part 4)
Last time up I put a rough outline up and divided the story into sections based on what sex acts Ceptophthorié was likely to use.
Then the British flu season caught up with me and knocked me on my back for a few days, followed by my usual chaotic tendency to try and work on too many projects simultaneously (a collection due March and something new that will appear next week if I can get the cover finished in time).
It did give me time to think about how to proceed next. Interactive fiction is a little tricky because of all the branching points and multiple pathways. As with all writing there is a danger of being stuck in ‘design paralysis’, where the writer gets stuck thinking about what they want to write and how it should fit together instead of just writing it and whacking the plot back into shape with the big editing hammer later. So I thought I’d throw some sentences at MS Word and see what stuck.
Tentatively I had a three passage introduction – one to set the scene, two to introduce Ceptophthorié, and three to setup the game. While I was writing passage two I realised the main character (and player!) would likely have questions at this point and I decided to add choices rather than skipping directly to passage three. This gives a number of advantages. First off it brings interactivity into the story sooner rather than later. It also gives the player more control over the intro. On the first playthrough they have the option of reading the expanded introduction. For subsequent playthroughs they can skip straight to the sexy. It’s an obvious thing, and something RPGs do a lot, but didn’t actually click with me until I was going through the design process.
For the first options it made sense to add a couple of background-giving choices. “What is a succubus?” is a useful one on the off chance the reader is unfamiliar with the mythology. For the more contrary readers there should also be a “No” option so they don’t feel like they’re being railroaded down a single plan. This route will probably funnel the reader into an early Game Over. I’ll flesh it out later with plenty of options to get the reader back on right track and appropriately icky/comedic Bad End if they persist on being contrary.
It’s possible to keep track of whether a player has entered a passage before in Twine. I could do some clever stuff and remove options that have already been taken or have her reply with a sarky “I’ve already told you this!” if the player’s repeat options already taken. For now I’ll keep it simple and just repeat the passage.
After moving things around (and deleting a passage that was somehow spawned off-screen for some reason), the layout starts to look like this.
The next step is to fill in the details of Ceptophthorié’s little game and from there provide a seamless link to the smexy stuff. At this point I’m experimenting in finding the most comfortable way to write these sections. At first I was typing in MS Word and then transferring the text across. That felt a little wasteful, so I switched to working directly in Twine. Then I found it wasn’t as easy to see an overview of the text across multiple passages. It’s something I’ll play around with. I suspect the optimal approach will be a bit of both.
Then the British flu season caught up with me and knocked me on my back for a few days, followed by my usual chaotic tendency to try and work on too many projects simultaneously (a collection due March and something new that will appear next week if I can get the cover finished in time).
It did give me time to think about how to proceed next. Interactive fiction is a little tricky because of all the branching points and multiple pathways. As with all writing there is a danger of being stuck in ‘design paralysis’, where the writer gets stuck thinking about what they want to write and how it should fit together instead of just writing it and whacking the plot back into shape with the big editing hammer later. So I thought I’d throw some sentences at MS Word and see what stuck.
Tentatively I had a three passage introduction – one to set the scene, two to introduce Ceptophthorié, and three to setup the game. While I was writing passage two I realised the main character (and player!) would likely have questions at this point and I decided to add choices rather than skipping directly to passage three. This gives a number of advantages. First off it brings interactivity into the story sooner rather than later. It also gives the player more control over the intro. On the first playthrough they have the option of reading the expanded introduction. For subsequent playthroughs they can skip straight to the sexy. It’s an obvious thing, and something RPGs do a lot, but didn’t actually click with me until I was going through the design process.
For the first options it made sense to add a couple of background-giving choices. “What is a succubus?” is a useful one on the off chance the reader is unfamiliar with the mythology. For the more contrary readers there should also be a “No” option so they don’t feel like they’re being railroaded down a single plan. This route will probably funnel the reader into an early Game Over. I’ll flesh it out later with plenty of options to get the reader back on right track and appropriately icky/comedic Bad End if they persist on being contrary.
It’s possible to keep track of whether a player has entered a passage before in Twine. I could do some clever stuff and remove options that have already been taken or have her reply with a sarky “I’ve already told you this!” if the player’s repeat options already taken. For now I’ll keep it simple and just repeat the passage.
After moving things around (and deleting a passage that was somehow spawned off-screen for some reason), the layout starts to look like this.
The next step is to fill in the details of Ceptophthorié’s little game and from there provide a seamless link to the smexy stuff. At this point I’m experimenting in finding the most comfortable way to write these sections. At first I was typing in MS Word and then transferring the text across. That felt a little wasteful, so I switched to working directly in Twine. Then I found it wasn’t as easy to see an overview of the text across multiple passages. It’s something I’ll play around with. I suspect the optimal approach will be a bit of both.
Saturday, January 03, 2015
Many-Eyed Hydra makes a Monster Girl Hentai Game: CYOA with Twine (part 3)
Last up I threw an introduction together to set the scene. An introduction on its own isn’t a full story and definitely isn’t interactive. When I’m writing a short story I normally have an idea of what the ending and set pieces are and then keep writing until I hit an appropriate end point (usually the point when the lucky/unlucky protagonist has had all their juice squeezed out).
I haven’t tried it, but I suspect trying to write an interactive story in a big splurge isn’t the best idea when there are multiple branching points and endings. Or maybe it is the way to go. I’m new to these things after all. What I’ll do instead is map out a rough structure and then fill in the text afterwards.
The simplest structure would look something like this:
Obviously, it’s very basic, but it’s the essence of this type of game – choose naughty & fun stuff or be boring and try and ‘beat’ the game.
At the moment nothing is hooked up. That’s done through the Twine syntax of
From the introductory passage we continue to Stuff.
Stuff gives us a simple choice of GoodEnd1 and BadEnd1. I’ve numbered them because there will probably be multiples of one and probably both and it makes sense to put the numbers in now rather than trying to change the names later.
Connected up, it looks like this.
That’s just to give an idea of the simplest structure. I’ll want a lot more branching points than this to give the reader a more interactive experience. A simple structure I’ve seen some of the cheaper monster girl hentai games use is this:
(clicking on these pictures brings up a bigger version that can be read without a magnifying glass)
A neat touch is that if I create the link before the passage Twine will automatically create the passage for me.
This will give me a skeleton of sorts. One thing I will do is rename and reorganise the passages. If I want to move things around (which I almost certainly will) TemptationTitWank is a much clearer target to link to than Temptation3. I’ll also add some more sections to the introduction to give a clearer breakdown of what those passages are going to do.
Unfortunately Twine doesn’t appear to keep track of name changes to passages, but it does at least show passages with broken links as red boxes.
The modified structure looks a little like this:
At the moment the lovely Ceptophthorié isn’t exactly tempting. I’ll fix that when I start to flesh out the passages.
I haven’t tried it, but I suspect trying to write an interactive story in a big splurge isn’t the best idea when there are multiple branching points and endings. Or maybe it is the way to go. I’m new to these things after all. What I’ll do instead is map out a rough structure and then fill in the text afterwards.
The simplest structure would look something like this:
Obviously, it’s very basic, but it’s the essence of this type of game – choose naughty & fun stuff or be boring and try and ‘beat’ the game.
At the moment nothing is hooked up. That’s done through the Twine syntax of
[[Text to display->Name of Passage to goto]]
From the introductory passage we continue to Stuff.
Stuff gives us a simple choice of GoodEnd1 and BadEnd1. I’ve numbered them because there will probably be multiples of one and probably both and it makes sense to put the numbers in now rather than trying to change the names later.
Connected up, it looks like this.
That’s just to give an idea of the simplest structure. I’ll want a lot more branching points than this to give the reader a more interactive experience. A simple structure I’ve seen some of the cheaper monster girl hentai games use is this:
(clicking on these pictures brings up a bigger version that can be read without a magnifying glass)
A neat touch is that if I create the link before the passage Twine will automatically create the passage for me.
This will give me a skeleton of sorts. One thing I will do is rename and reorganise the passages. If I want to move things around (which I almost certainly will) TemptationTitWank is a much clearer target to link to than Temptation3. I’ll also add some more sections to the introduction to give a clearer breakdown of what those passages are going to do.
Unfortunately Twine doesn’t appear to keep track of name changes to passages, but it does at least show passages with broken links as red boxes.
The modified structure looks a little like this:
At the moment the lovely Ceptophthorié isn’t exactly tempting. I’ll fix that when I start to flesh out the passages.
Thursday, January 01, 2015
Many-Eyed Hydra makes a Monster Girl Hentai Game: CYOA with Twine (part 2)
This is posted a little later than planned. In my defence I was out drinking for New Year’s Eve and didn’t get back until 6 in the morning.
Okay, let’s go into Twine and have a look around. I downloaded it from the website so I can use it offline if need be. It opens up in whatever you use as a web browser (Firefox for me).
First step is to create the new story. The original title was “Ways to Break a Good Man, #1” to tie in thematically with a previous short story ("Ways to Break a Good Man, no.2". This is a bit abstract and as the focus of the CYOA version is going to be more on Ceptophthorié doing her naughty things rather than the philosophical questions of the original, I’ll change it to the more innocent sounding A Night With Ceptophthorié.
After entering the title and creating the story we’re taken to the story editor.
Stories in Twine are made up of passages that are linked together in ways to make it interactive to the reader. As of the moment we only have the one passage. This is going to be the starting point and must be named “Start” according to Twine’s wiki (I’m unsure on this point – it might only apply to an earlier version of Twine).
Now for the text. This is the introduction from the short story:
Regular readers of mine will recognize the fat man with ‘a bloated pale moon of a face’ as Koontz, a recurring character of mine. For the sake of simplicity I’m going to remove both him and the lengthy discussion that sets up the later challenge. I might return them later, but to start with I think it’s best to cut the story right down to the bare essentials and then build on that later.
As Ceptophthorié is now getting more focus we need to get straight to a description of her. For reference here’s the initial description of her in the short story:
The introductory passage will combine both these sections and as I’m writing a CYOA the viewpoint will shift from Third Person toFirst Second Person (classic post-NYE booboo, thanks to anon for spotting). I’ll also shift the tense from past to present as it’s supposed to represent things that are happening right now. That gives us an introductory passage that looks like this:
I could type this directly into the passage box in Twine, but for ease of editing I wrote it in MS Word and then copy’n’pasted it into the dialog box for the passage. Which looked like this:
One tip for copy’n’pasting text. Always go through notepad or similar basic text editor as an intermediate. It might not apply for Twine, but for most web apps/pages pasting directly from MS Word will drag in and add a lot of junk to the resulting HTML.
Now I have an introductory section. This can seen by hitting either Play or Test on the bottom right.
It’s not quite right. In the original you’ll notice there was some italicised text. A quick check of the Twine wiki reveals they have support for various bits of text formatting and to get italics I add // on each side of the section I want italicised.
A further thing I could do is reduce the font size or split the introduction into two to avoid the player needing to scroll to read the whole of it. It also looks very crude. I’m not going to worry about that for now. I can pretty it up later.
I now have a nice introduction that sets the scene. At the moment the CYOA doesn’t have much in the way of choice or story. I’ll look to rectify that next time.
Okay, let’s go into Twine and have a look around. I downloaded it from the website so I can use it offline if need be. It opens up in whatever you use as a web browser (Firefox for me).
First step is to create the new story. The original title was “Ways to Break a Good Man, #1” to tie in thematically with a previous short story ("Ways to Break a Good Man, no.2". This is a bit abstract and as the focus of the CYOA version is going to be more on Ceptophthorié doing her naughty things rather than the philosophical questions of the original, I’ll change it to the more innocent sounding A Night With Ceptophthorié.
After entering the title and creating the story we’re taken to the story editor.
Stories in Twine are made up of passages that are linked together in ways to make it interactive to the reader. As of the moment we only have the one passage. This is going to be the starting point and must be named “Start” according to Twine’s wiki (I’m unsure on this point – it might only apply to an earlier version of Twine).
Now for the text. This is the introduction from the short story:
Norris King woke up. His tongue felt dry, swollen, about two sizes too big for his mouth. His eyelids scraped over his eyeball like sandpaper as he opened his eyes. The lines of the ceiling swayed and blurred above him, as if he was looking at a projection onto a swirling pool of water rather than solid architecture. By concentrating he was able to bring the lines and angles back into sharp focus, but only while maintaining concentration. The moment he stopped focusing, his vision started to blur and shift.
His head felt awful. He felt like he’d gone on the mother of all benders the night before. He knew that couldn’t be the case. He’d never picked up a taste for alcohol and a drunken prank gone wrong during his university days had convinced him drink was not going to feature in his future in any shape or form.
He heard car horns and the sound of traffic. They sounded a long way down. Was he in a hotel room?
It looked like a hotel room. His head felt heavy—slow and sluggish—like someone had poured concrete in his ears. He moved it enough for the walls to swim murkily into focus. The wallpaper was a bland print with lines of fleur-de-lis as a pattern. An equally bland painting of a bowl of fruit was hung on one of the walls.
Definitely a hotel room.
There were two other people in the room. An attractive girl with long, wavy red hair sat on a chair in the center of the room. Behind her stood a fat man in an expensive suit with a bloated pale moon of a face.
Regular readers of mine will recognize the fat man with ‘a bloated pale moon of a face’ as Koontz, a recurring character of mine. For the sake of simplicity I’m going to remove both him and the lengthy discussion that sets up the later challenge. I might return them later, but to start with I think it’s best to cut the story right down to the bare essentials and then build on that later.
As Ceptophthorié is now getting more focus we need to get straight to a description of her. For reference here’s the initial description of her in the short story:
Even if she was an attractive floozy, and King had to concede she was very attractive indeed. She must be one of Koontz’s higher quality escorts. Wavy red hair cascaded down on either side of a doll-perfect face. Her face had the perfect, unblemished contours of a fairytale princess . . . combined with eyes and full lips that glimmered with the prospect of less-than-innocent mischief. He thought it a shame such a pretty face had been squeezed into a ridiculous Vegas-style showgirl costume. The neckline of her shiny top plunged down to her navel and revealed enough flesh to shame a ten-dollar whore. He presumed it must be some kind of fancy-dress devil costume as she was also wearing a pair of fake horns.
The introductory passage will combine both these sections and as I’m writing a CYOA the viewpoint will shift from Third Person to
You wake up. Your tongue feels dry, swollen, about two sizes too big for your mouth. Your eyelids scrape over your eyeball like sandpaper as you open your eyes. The lines of the ceiling sway and blur above you, as if you were looking at a projection onto a swirling pool of water rather than solid architecture.
You hear car horns and the sound of traffic. They sound a long way down. Is this a hotel room?
It looks like a hotel room. You move your head enough for the walls to swim murkily into focus. The wallpaper is a bland print with lines of fleur-de-lis as a pattern. An equally bland painting of a bowl of fruit hangs on one of the walls.
Definitely a hotel room.
There is another person in the room with you. A highly attractive young woman is sitting on a chair in the centre of the room. Wavy red hair cascades on either side of a doll-perfect face. Her face has the unblemished contours of a fairytale princess . . . combined with eyes and full, sensual lips that glimmer with the promise of less-than-innocent mischief. She is wearing a revealing red outfit that shows off enough flesh to shame a common street hooker. The neckline of her shiny top plunges down to her navel and shows off the lush valley of her cleavage to its full extent. It must be some kind of fancy-dress devil costume as she’s also wearing a pair of fake horns.
She smiles at you.
I could type this directly into the passage box in Twine, but for ease of editing I wrote it in MS Word and then copy’n’pasted it into the dialog box for the passage. Which looked like this:
One tip for copy’n’pasting text. Always go through notepad or similar basic text editor as an intermediate. It might not apply for Twine, but for most web apps/pages pasting directly from MS Word will drag in and add a lot of junk to the resulting HTML.
Now I have an introductory section. This can seen by hitting either Play or Test on the bottom right.
It’s not quite right. In the original you’ll notice there was some italicised text. A quick check of the Twine wiki reveals they have support for various bits of text formatting and to get italics I add // on each side of the section I want italicised.
A further thing I could do is reduce the font size or split the introduction into two to avoid the player needing to scroll to read the whole of it. It also looks very crude. I’m not going to worry about that for now. I can pretty it up later.
I now have a nice introduction that sets the scene. At the moment the CYOA doesn’t have much in the way of choice or story. I’ll look to rectify that next time.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Many-Eyed Hydra makes a Monster Girl Hentai Game: CYOA with Twine (part 1)
I’ve been saying for a while I’d like to make a monster girl hentai game. Rather than just thinking and talking about it I thought I’d finally get my finger out of my ass and get around to creating something. As I thought it might be an interesting topic to blog about you’re going to get the whole gory process right here.
I do have programming experience, but it’s mainly with generic languages such as Java and C#, and mainly making dull-but-functional desktop applications for manipulating probabilities and other maths. One of the reasons why I’ve always thought about making games rather than getting down to actually making them is an unfortunate tendency to dream up projects that are stupidly complex and ambitious. This time I’ll start with something small and simple.
My main strength lies in writing. I’ve written a lot of stories featuring kinky sex scenes with succubi and other monster girls. Because of this it makes sense for me to start with a text-heavy game. Unfortunately text-heavy won’t attract as much attention as games with nice artwork of sexy monster girls, but it will give me something to start with (and I can always source artwork from other sources later). Examples of popular text-heavy monster girl hentai games can be found over on Fenoxo’s site. I’m sure most of you out there know of the existence of Corruption of Champions.
I won’t try to make anything as complex as CoC to start with. First off I’ll start with a simple Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA). This will allow me to take the type of scene I normally fill my stories with and juice it up with a bit of interaction for the reader.
Next up is to look for tools. In the past another of my weaknesses was to bang my head against a wall trying to build game engines from scratch. There is no need to reinvent the wheel if someone else has already put a perfectly decent toolkit together.
Twine is “an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.” It was created by Chris Klimas in 2009. I have no real experience of working with it. People recommended giving it a look on the MGU forums and a quick check of the wiki revealed it has additional functionality should I want to move on to something more complex than a simple CYOA. This is important as I do have some ideas for adding player stats and other variables. From what I read, Twine should be more than sufficient in creating gamebooks along the lines of the classic Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf series (Personally I always had a soft spot for J. H. Brennan’s GrailQuest).
That will be the next step. For now I’ll keep to a vanilla CYOA.
Now I have a toolkit to play around with it’s time to think about what story I want to tell. As I want to keep it simple this will be a single interactive encounter with a sexy monster girl. Originally I thought it might be a slime girl similar to the one I wrote about in "Jackson in HRPG-World 3" (Japanese monster girl HRPGs always seem to have a blue slime girl as the first encounter – a nod to Dragon Quest, I think). Then I remembered thinking about this before and the plan had been to base it on a short story of mine: “Ways to Break a Good Man, #1”.
Unfortunately, that story is exclusive to my last collection, A Succubus for Remembrance and other tales, so I can’t just link to it as I would to any of my other tales up on Literotica. It’s a good story to use as a template as it has an ontological mystery-esque start and a clearly defined challenge. In summary, the protagonist wakes up in a hotel room after being drugged and . . . actually, let’s go right to succubus involved. Here's the gorgeous and charming Ceptophthorié with the full details.
Hi.
Now Ceptophthorié, you’re a princess of hell?
Yes, that’s correct.
That means you’re an extremely powerful succubus, right?
Yes.
And you know a lot of sexy tricks?
I know many ways to cause intense sexual pleasure.
Um . . . yes . . . interesting. *adjusts collar.* So can you tell us what this game will be?
It’s a really simple game. The easiest possible. All the player has to do is go the whole night without choosing to have sex with me.
Hmm. Are you sure? That does sound a little eas . . .
. .
. .
. .
Ceptophthorié, please don’t suck the soul out of this human. We need him to spread our corruption through this world.
Okay. As you wish.
. .
. .
Um yeah, where was I. Right, yes. “Ways to Break a Good Man, #1”. This will form a nice template for my interactive story. The player will be placed in a similar predicament to the unfortunate (fortunate?) Norris King. And obviously we’ll give the lovely Ceptophthorié a few more tricks with which to tempt the reader.
It should be fun. Keep an eye on this blog!
I do have programming experience, but it’s mainly with generic languages such as Java and C#, and mainly making dull-but-functional desktop applications for manipulating probabilities and other maths. One of the reasons why I’ve always thought about making games rather than getting down to actually making them is an unfortunate tendency to dream up projects that are stupidly complex and ambitious. This time I’ll start with something small and simple.
My main strength lies in writing. I’ve written a lot of stories featuring kinky sex scenes with succubi and other monster girls. Because of this it makes sense for me to start with a text-heavy game. Unfortunately text-heavy won’t attract as much attention as games with nice artwork of sexy monster girls, but it will give me something to start with (and I can always source artwork from other sources later). Examples of popular text-heavy monster girl hentai games can be found over on Fenoxo’s site. I’m sure most of you out there know of the existence of Corruption of Champions.
I won’t try to make anything as complex as CoC to start with. First off I’ll start with a simple Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA). This will allow me to take the type of scene I normally fill my stories with and juice it up with a bit of interaction for the reader.
Next up is to look for tools. In the past another of my weaknesses was to bang my head against a wall trying to build game engines from scratch. There is no need to reinvent the wheel if someone else has already put a perfectly decent toolkit together.
Twine is “an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.” It was created by Chris Klimas in 2009. I have no real experience of working with it. People recommended giving it a look on the MGU forums and a quick check of the wiki revealed it has additional functionality should I want to move on to something more complex than a simple CYOA. This is important as I do have some ideas for adding player stats and other variables. From what I read, Twine should be more than sufficient in creating gamebooks along the lines of the classic Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf series (Personally I always had a soft spot for J. H. Brennan’s GrailQuest).
That will be the next step. For now I’ll keep to a vanilla CYOA.
Now I have a toolkit to play around with it’s time to think about what story I want to tell. As I want to keep it simple this will be a single interactive encounter with a sexy monster girl. Originally I thought it might be a slime girl similar to the one I wrote about in "Jackson in HRPG-World 3" (Japanese monster girl HRPGs always seem to have a blue slime girl as the first encounter – a nod to Dragon Quest, I think). Then I remembered thinking about this before and the plan had been to base it on a short story of mine: “Ways to Break a Good Man, #1”.
Unfortunately, that story is exclusive to my last collection, A Succubus for Remembrance and other tales, so I can’t just link to it as I would to any of my other tales up on Literotica. It’s a good story to use as a template as it has an ontological mystery-esque start and a clearly defined challenge. In summary, the protagonist wakes up in a hotel room after being drugged and . . . actually, let’s go right to succubus involved. Here's the gorgeous and charming Ceptophthorié with the full details.
Hi.
Now Ceptophthorié, you’re a princess of hell?
Yes, that’s correct.
That means you’re an extremely powerful succubus, right?
Yes.
And you know a lot of sexy tricks?
I know many ways to cause intense sexual pleasure.
Um . . . yes . . . interesting. *adjusts collar.* So can you tell us what this game will be?
It’s a really simple game. The easiest possible. All the player has to do is go the whole night without choosing to have sex with me.
Hmm. Are you sure? That does sound a little eas . . .
. .
. .
. .
Ceptophthorié, please don’t suck the soul out of this human. We need him to spread our corruption through this world.
Okay. As you wish.
. .
. .
Um yeah, where was I. Right, yes. “Ways to Break a Good Man, #1”. This will form a nice template for my interactive story. The player will be placed in a similar predicament to the unfortunate (fortunate?) Norris King. And obviously we’ll give the lovely Ceptophthorié a few more tricks with which to tempt the reader.
It should be fun. Keep an eye on this blog!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)