Showing posts with label game development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label game development. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Monster Girl Card Game - Brainstorming III

The Kingdom Deck

I thought of the central deck mechanic as a way to avoid going to down the much-travelled route of summon mons and smash 'em into each other.

Time to brainstorm how that mechanic might work.

In abstract terms the kingdom deck represents a battlefield (in this case the organisations and individuals available to the players to corrupt) and making it a deck of cards is a simple way of varying how each game will play out.

At any time a certain number of kingdom cards will be in play.  This can be thought of as a window of access.  These are characters that are accessible to the warlock's sexy minions.  This window of access will be constantly moving - cards will cycle out at end of turn and new cards come in (representing opportunities to get at an individual passing).  Thematically and mechanically this seems plausible.  If the current configuration locks all players out from doing anything the game should have a way of keeping things flowing.  Effectively the cards in play are a queue.  At the end of turn the bottom card is removed from play, all the others slide down and new card is turned over from the kingdom deck and added to the top of the queue.

With that mechanic in place the questions become:

How big should the kingdom deck be?
Big enough to provide enough variety without being unnecessarily unwieldy.  Less than 100 and greater than 50 at a rough estimate.

How many cards in play at any one time?
This is the size of the window of access.  Too many and it becomes overwhelming.  Too few and reduces the possibilities of interaction between kingdom cards.  I'm thinking of starting with 12 and seeing where it goes from there.

Is the layout important?
This shouldn't matter.  Designate where the top is and where the bottom is.  As the game progresses cards cycle off the bottom and new cards are added to the top.  It shouldn't matter if this is a line or a grid.  The reason we might want to specify a specific layout is it allows for a spatial mechanic.  eg.  Bodyguard - while this is in play cards adjacent to it may not be seduced and corrupted.

How fast does the kingdom deck cycle?
Do we expect to go through it once or multiple times in a game?  This will affect strategy.  Deckbuilding games such as Dominion have the player cycle through their own deck many times in a game and having some control over the content of that deck is a major part of the strategy.  I'm not sure how it would work in a physical game (as opposed to computer game), but an interesting idea would be a "capture'n'subvert" type mechanic - seduced minions are shuffled back into the kingdom deck.  The game would then become about both players try to "build" the kingdom deck (by corrupting some pieces to their side, removing others that are detrimental to their strategy).  I think that could be interesting, but probably online only as tagging the characters once they go back into the deck to indicate who had turned them would by tricky to implement in a physical card game.

Then to think about what goes in the kingdom deck.  Characters for succubi to target, tempt, seduce and then corrupt to the player's side is the most obvious.  So what type of characters?

Resources
Basic characters that don't fight and don't have influence.  They exist as an energy source for monster girls to slurp energy out of (and give us lots of lovely perversion potential).  Also, if we don't mind wandering into grimdark territory, bloody sacrifices required to bring the more powerful demons into play.

Keys
Seducing these opens up access to higher tier characters.

Blocks
While these characters are in play, players are prevented from certain actions (eg a priest that prevents succubi seductions from taking place while they're on the table).

Keys and Blocks are functionally doing the same thing - controlling access to higher rank cards.  Main mechanical difference is that a key can be grabbed at any time and used later on the higher target while the block needs to be in play at the same time the target is.   If the goal of the game is to capture top-rank "King" cards, it's going to be important that there are Blocks in play while the King is in play.

Heroes
These cards exist to be a nuisance to the player through things like banishing succubi, rescuing seduced characters, hampering certain magic.  Think of them as like random events being turned over for the turn.

Thinking about heroes as mechanical representations also makes me think about when events trigger.

Here are some possibilities:

When the card comes into play (is turned over from kingdom deck at start of turn)
When the card leaves cycles out of play (less important)

And also on player actions:
When a succubus is summoned
When a spell is cast.
We can also have triggers that are specific to spells and succubi of different factions (Most card games divide into groups - e.g. the five colours of Magic: the Gathering).
When a character is seduced

This should give a lot of design space for making cards. (and we haven't even started on the succubi yet!)

Dangers
Not in-game dangers, but design dangers.  I think the game wants the various kingdom cards to be able to interact with each other and the player.  The danger there is that if the interactions are too specific (eg limited to one of maybe five factions within the kingdom deck) or there are too many card types, there's a danger there will be too many instances where none of the kingdom cards in play at any one time do anything.

For this reason I like the idea of making the kingdom deck all characters.  That way there's more overlap between the types.
e.g. Strategically a player will want to remove Blocks to open up access to other characters.  The choices there can be:
a) Very easy - temporarily take them out of the picture.  e.g. an arachne sticking them in a web, sending them to sleep with alraune perfume.
b) Easy - removing them permanently.  e.g. Nom-noms for the more vore-y monster girls.
c) Hard - seducing them into resource.  e.g. Succubus drains them for mana a player can use for spells.
d) Very hard - seducing them and using them as a double agent.

Hmm.  I should start thinking about those sexy succubi cards now...

Sunday, November 08, 2015

Monster Girl Card Game - Brainstorming II

More rambling notes and musings I'm jotting down here in the hope that they coalesce into something fun people would like to play.

While doing some research on the internet I remembered some articles Mark Rosewater wrote on game design a while back.  MaRo is the public face of the design and development teams for Magic: the Gathering and writes a regular column on game design.  He knows his stuff on this topic.

His Ten Things Every Game Needs articles are a good checklist to run every budding game idea against to see how it holds and identify possible weaknesses.

So let's try it here.

As a recap from the last post, my idea is for a game where the player takes on the role of a succubus-summoning warlock and uses their sexy minions to gain control of a kingdom behind the scenes.  Nothing about this is set in stone.  Rather than ye-olde-world-fantasy, the kingdom could just as easily be a corporation, or army invading hell-space, or even a college for warlocks.  The succubus minions could be intelligence agents.  You get the idea.  What I'm trying to do is think up a monster girl game that's slightly different from the usual path of smashing mons into each other (coz, I'm awkward like that! :) )

Let's run through MaRo's points and see if that helps to clarify things.

1) Goal
The player is a warlock capable of summoning demons and other monsters.  Their goal is to take over a kingdom (or other similar organisation) by gaining control of various key pieces.  The kingdom is represented by a deck of cards.

Having a central kingdom deck opens up possibilities for solo or collaborative play if the central deck is capable of defending itself.  The solo option in particular might be important.  I want to try and keep the sexy if possible, but there's a danger then that most players might find it too embarrassing to play with others.  Personally I'd prefer to aim at a niche audience than water everything down for a larger audience that probably wouldn't even notice it.

2) Rules
This is the mechanics.  From the rough concept we know each player is able to cast spells and summon monster girls to do their bidding.  These monster girls are then able to seduce and bring NPC characters under the player's controls.  The rule system should determine how and when the cards can be played and captured, and also enable players' to interact with each other.

3) Interaction
And the first warning flag.

One problem with the concept is it might not lead to interaction between players.  They could end up working their plans in isolation, with the winner randomly determined by which kingdom cards get turned over during the game.  To get around this the game will need plenty of cards that can disrupt an opponent's strategy (but not so many it becomes overwhelming) and the game should force conflicts over the various kingdom deck cards.

4) Catch-up feature
A lot of games suffer from a snowballing problems.  That's when an early advantage for one player increases their chance of further advantages later on to the point where the game is effectively decided in the first few turns and the rest is an annoying grind to a foregone result.

With the concept's theme, a player with more puppets has more influence and is closer to a goal of total domination.  But they're also more visible to authorities trying to weed out corruption.  Assuming the kingdom deck contains random negative effects (e.g. witchfinders and paladin heroes), having these disproportionately affect the leading player will give the other player(s) chances to catch up.

5) Inertia
The pull to get the game finished.

As MaRo says in his article, in Magic the power level of the cards ramps up as more mana is available to the player until something will go unanswered and end the game (dragons cost more to summon than goblins, but they typically end the game in short order if they're allowed to stay in play).  There's also an alternate loss condition where a player runs out of library, so even long games will end eventually.

I probably want a resource system - start with low-level succubi and spells, but open up access to much more powerful demons and magic in later turns.

The easiest termination condition is have the game last a set number of turns.

A more complex condition (and one I'd like to make work) is for it to be provided by the kings in the central deck.  For that condition to work there needs to be reasonably fast cycling through the central deck to make sure the relevant win conditions make it into play before everyone gets bored.

6) Surprise
Cards are good for this.  Players need access to 'trick' cards to surprise the opponent.  That means we'll need spells as well as succubi.  The central kingdom deck can also be a source of surprise factor if seeded with cards that have interesting impacts on the game whenever they're turned over.  Having a random deck of cards determine these events also adds to replayability as the game should play out differently depending on what order the kingdom cards are turned over in.

7) Strategy
Different factions in the kingdom deck.  Different factions of monster girls available to the player.  They should play differently and open up different routes to the end-goal.  For example - succubi might be good at seduction and temporary charms, other monster girls might favour taking pieces off the board entirely (e.g. carnivorous plant girls eating them), an angel faction might favour disruption by making it harder for kingdom NPCs to be seduced.

8) Fun
Playing a warlock with a harem of hawt monster girls.  Sound fun? ;)

The last two points are easier for this concept.  It's a top-down concept, in as much as I have the background and flavour first, and I'm trying to come up with game mechanics to get that across.

9) Flavour
Sexy monster girls.  I'm also trying to reinforce the sex being important by making the game about seduction and corruption rather than fighting.

One question of flavour is where to turn the dial in terms of atmosphere.  Cute monster girls or sensual-but-deadly femme fatales?  Crude sexual humour or gothic elegance?  Light and fluffy, or total grimdark?

10) Hook
Also easy.  A fun, sexy monster girl card game for an audience that likes things like my stories, Kenkou Cross's Monster Girl Encyclopedia and Monster Girl Quest.  Here's where I might need to rein in some of my own grimdark predilections so as not to scare everyone off! ;)

Still very vague and general.  I'll see if I can start throwing out more concrete mechanics in future brainstorming posts.

Thoughts and suggestions in the comments appreciated!


Friday, November 06, 2015

Monster Girl Card Game - Brainstorming I

Writing productivity is still shite.  I suspect it's a mild case of writer's block.  The ideas are there, but the mechanics of transcribing them down as words and sentences are a little jammed.  I suspect it's a little bit of mental sluggishness brought about from trying to make this my sole activity.

In the past I've found programming projects a good way to get the cogs moving again.  It might be a good time to start thinking about monster girl games again.  While going through old notepads I found some notes on a card game idea and thought it might be worthwhile to brainstorm things out here to see if the ideas could form a viable game.

The most obvious way to use succubi/monster girls is in an adult Pokemon-type game where the player summons various monster girls and has them fight (or fuck) monster girls of his opponent(s).

I want to avoid this.

The moment you slap a */* on a card to represent attack and defence values for the purposes of fighting other cards, it's very easy to get stuck on a path that terminates in generic Magic: the Gathering clone.  The design space is large (as witnessed by Magic still being a great game despite being nearly 20 years old) but the basic mechanics tend to end up being very similar.  That said, Magic/Yu-Gi-Oh-lite, with sexy monster girls doing smexy stuff to each other, would probably still be a fun game.

The other and main reason I want to avoid travelling down the obvious road is thematically it doesn't feel right.  Succubi to me seem more about seduction and subtle use of influence behind the scenes rather than bare-knuckle fighting in a pit.

Picture two warlocks (in Phil's world for example) summoning a pair of succubi to fight each other Pokemon-style.  Rather than fight, I think it more likely the two succubi would give each other a wink and then put on a lesbian sex show so hawt their gormless 'masters' would get so horny they'd have to join in... and then get their life/soul sucked out.  (I should write that story!)

I like the idea of the player taking the role of a warlock with access to a bevy of beautiful monster girls and succubi to (maybe) do their bidding.  That seems fun.

I also like the idea of just keeping it to monster girls and seductive succubi.  Having random orcs and other monsters drags it back to being about fighting, which I want to avoid.

So I was thinking of how to represent sexy succubi in a top-down way for a strategy game, and this is what I came up with:

Seduction and Corruption.

And this gives a goal and an idea for the central mechanic.  The players are warlocks.  They summon succubi and other tempting monster girls to attempt to gain control of a kingdom behind the scenes.  This is done through using their succubi to seduce and corrupt various NPC characters.

 Mechanically this can be represented with three decks.  Each player has their own deck and between them is a third deck representing the kingdom.  At any one time there will be a number of cards in play from the central deck.  These are the characters (and also maybe locations and items) that each player will attempt to subvert and corrupt with summoned succubi.

One way of determining a winner would be which player has brought the greatest influence value under their control at a designated end point.

Another thing I thought might work is to have the win condition be a variety of 'king' cards.  The victory condition would them be the first player that successfully had one of their succubus minions seduce and bring a 'king' under the player's control (the game could have a variety of 'kings' such as an actual king, or a pope, or top general of the military - each would have different strengths and weaknesses).

The idea I had then was of chains.  A player wouldn't be able to bring a king under their control right away, even with their most powerful succubus.  They'd need to engineer a situation to be able to get at them.  This could be achieved by chaining through various ranks.  Gaining control of a squire opens up opportunities to seduce knights.  Gaining a knight opens up an opportunity to compromise the elite royal guard.  Compromising the elite royal guard exposes the king.  Once the king is exposed the player can slip their most powerful succubus into the king's (or queen's) bedchamber and claim victory as their succubus corrupts the king into a puppet to carry out their every command (or the succubus's command if the warlock is not careful, succubi being deliciously duplicitous creatures and all that).

It's a rough idea anyway.  I'll add to it with a few more brainstorm-type posts as I think things through.  If it sounds interesting, feel free to make suggestions in the comments.

At this point there's no point getting too excited.  I don't need to remind anyone my track record (especially this year) has not been the best on this type of thing - but if it gets cogs turning again for writing it will be fulfilling its purpose.  And there might be a cool game there to build.

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.

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
[[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:

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 First 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:

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.