Showing posts with label escape the pink jelly girl. Show all posts
Showing posts with label escape the pink jelly girl. Show all posts

Thursday, November 12, 2020

Art Commission - Setouchi's Illustration of Volumpula

A while back I set aside some money for an art commission of Volumpula. That fell through unfortunately. Fast forward to about a week or so ago and one of my patrons (thanks Stephen!) pointed me in the direction of Skeb, a Japanese site that facilitates commissions of various artists, including some of the artists of Monster Girl Quest. I love Setouchi's work, especially his gooey slime girls, and put in a request. This is the result:


   

It's lovely. Volumpula does make for a nice soft comfortable bed while she gently drains away all that... tension. If you're not aware of who Volumpula is, she's a pink cushionblob. About a year or so ago, while first experimenting with Twine, I created a couple of monster girl CYOAs. One of which was "Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly". That can be played here: Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly Setouchi did a great job here. I love his monster girls in Monster Girl Quest, so to be able commission him to draw one of mine is a dream come true. I'll talk a bit about Skeb.jp, in case any of you are interested in commissioning pieces for yourselves (which I highly recommend). It's an intermediary site. You put in a request. It's put to the artist. They say yay or nay, and then you get the piece within a certain time period. Setouchi was very very fast with both acceptance and delivery. Some things to note. You deal through the site and not with the artist directly (In fact it is frowned upon to contact them outside of the site). English requests are translated to Japanese with DeepL. As with all machine translation, it's a good idea to run the output Japanese through the translator to make sure you roughly get back to the original English. (I originally described Volumpula's colour as "cherry-blossom pink", which came out as "cherry red" - glad I caught that one!) Payment is taken on submission of request and then held until the artist delivers the piece, so make sure you have the money up front. The work is for personal rather than commercial use. I think that means it's okay to stick it up on a blog or social media site, but not okay to package it up in a game for sale without asking the artist for additional permissions beforehand. This means I'll need to find a different approach if House of Hellish Harlots progresses to the point of needing artwork. If you have a favourite monster girl from MGQ and would like to see more pieces of her in action, I'd recommend dropping in a request. As you can see from Setouchi's page, there are a lot of MGQ pieces requested by fans. There are also other MGQ artists on Skeb such as Shiki (although currently closed to commissions) and Xelvy. Overall I found it an easy and professional site to use. I think I might commission a few more pieces in the future. Never hurts to have more artwork of sexy monster girls and succubi floating around!

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...

Thursday, October 04, 2018

October 2018 plans

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

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

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

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

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

The CYOA development process consists of these stages:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, October 01, 2018

"Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly" is done!

Whew, and breathe.

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

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

Wednesday, September 05, 2018

Pink Jelly CYOA Update: Scenes Typed Up

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

(Obligatory cheeky Patreon plug link.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, August 20, 2018

Can anyone recommend a good slime girl artist?

My initial plan was to use some of those lovely patreon bux to commission some artwork of Volumpula to go with her CYOA.  (when I finally finish the monstrous thing - Volumpula, do you have to play with your food this much?)

Unfortunately this appears to have fallen through.  No money changed hands, so there's nothing to worry about there.  The artist didn't get back to me after initial contact, so I have to assume they're busy, or the commission wasn't something that interested them.  Nothing wrong with that.  It happens.

I'm still keen to get a piece done (mainly as a thank you for the people that have contributed).

Here are the details of the piece:


Character Detail

Name: Volumpula

Description:
She's a slime girl with so much additional mass it forms a bed-like blob beneath her.   Her human part looks like a gorgeous woman in her mid-twenties with a voluptuous hourglass figure.  The blob part looks somewhere between a large circular waterbed or gigantic over-stuffed cushion.  Both blob and woman look like they're made out of translucent pink jelly (standard slime girl transparency).  Shade of pink should look more unnatural rather than being mistaken for human skin tone (should look more like berries or artificial plastic/rubber).

Here's a pic of Milfy from the Violated Hero 2 game to give an idea of what I mean (she was the primary inspiration for Volumpula).  Volumpula is pinker, bustier and the bed/blob part is bigger.

Any resemblances between Milfy and Volumpula are purely... ahem... incidental.
She has a glamourpuss face with sensual pouty lips and big eyes.  Her "hair" is a slightly darker shade of pink, "big", curly (given her slimy composition will look more like froth) and cascades down to below her shoulders.

The soapland slime girl from the Wicked City anime is a good reference point for hairstyle.  It's a nice callback as she's the first instance of a sexy slime/blob girl I can think of in popular(ish) culture.

His body-to-body massage got a little too close...

Pose:
Volumpula lounging seductively on her "bed" and looking out at the viewer as if she's trying to tempt them into joining her on her "bed".

Background:
Optional.  The room has pink padded walls, floor and ceil.  A pink girl on a pink bed in a pink room is likely to be lost completely in a sea of pink if not done carefully!



If anyone knows an artist who might be a good fit for this, please drop a link to their work and commission rates in the comments below.

Alternatively, if you feel inspired and fancy creating your own representation, please feel free to go ahead and have fun.

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.

Monday, August 06, 2018

Updatery stuff - Escape the Pink Jelly Girl

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

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

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

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

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