Tuesday, August 27, 2019

New(ish) story on Literotica - "Let Sleeping Beauties Lie"

I say newish because those of you with good memories will recognize this as the Sleeping Beauty Mimic story from the H-space bestiary super short stories I put out a while ago.  I fleshed the story out to add more background and let Bate have a little more fun with the monster girl before his inevitable grisly demise (and it is grisly, that editor's note at the top is there for good reason!)

Let Sleeping Beauties Lie

The H-space bestiary shorts have given me a quandary for a while.  I'd like to put them in some sort of collection up on Amazon (and maybe reveal a bit more of the mystery around Bate and why he keeps dying).  I don't think the stories in their current state are good enough.  They were only originally intended to be placeholders to show off an unusual monster girl without having to develop a plot of how the protagonist ended up in the monster girl's sexy clutches.  I've been looking at taking the better ones and filling in the story to bring them up to the standard of the other stories in my collections.

It's a... trickier process than I thought.  Still trying to figure out the most efficient way of doing it as at the moment it seems even more time-consuming than writing a brand new story from scratch!  (On a more positive note, I have been chipping away at a few new bestiary stories - this time full stories rather than quick sex scenes ' n ' grisly death.)

The other thing I'm quite relieved about is that the story was accepted and is now live on Literotica.  Originally it was rejected and this post was going to be very different - me bemoaning how my usual Bad End stories were no longer acceptable and wondering if I'd ever have anything up on Literotica again.

I wouldn't have blamed Literotica for that, to be fair.  This story does feature one of my nastier bad ends and we live in the sort of outrage-hungry times where owners of sites like Literotica have to walk a fine line in what they allow.  Sucks, but that's how it is.  It would have also made continuing the Succubus Summoning series on there tricky.  At some point Nyte would be Nyte and then I'd have a chapter I couldn't put up.

Fortunately, rather than mope around in a funk, I reread the rejection note, saw that it mentioned "snuff" and then PMed Laurel (Lit's head honcho) for clarification.

While I have seen my good (vile) self referred to as "The Snuff Guy", I don't consider what I write to be snuff.  I think I've written on this before.  Snuff in erotic literature is generally writing from the perspective of someone getting their rocks off by killing someone else.  The sexual titillation comes from the act of killing.  You can do this in regular horror to depict a particularly nasty character, but it's a little trickier in erotic horror.  With erotica the purpose is to sexually arouse and titillate the reader.  If the reader is getting turned on by putting themselves in the shoes of someone killing someone else there is a real risk of feeding unhealthy fantasy.  Now, as far as I'm concerned, fantasy, even unhealthy fantasy, is still fantasy.  If it remains fantasy it's harmless, no matter how sick other people might think it.  The nightmare scenario is if someone indulges that fantasy, develops a liking for it, finds fantasy is no longer enough, and then - to try and recapture that same thrill - takes it into the real world.  With that risk, you can understand why a site like Literotica would not want to publish that type of story.

Then you get to my stuff.  There is sex.  There is death.  And while I do like to blur one into the other, the viewpoint is always from the victim, and the sexual arousal comes from the sex stuff the succubus is doing to them rather than the death stuff.  The death stuff is also nearly always supernatural in nature, and therefore impossible to copycat into the real world.  That to me is the important distinguishing feature between "snuff" and regular (even if extremely squicky) erotic horror - is there a risk someone might copycat this and cause a tragedy in the real world?

I didn't get a reply from Laurel (I imagine she's way too busy to be fair - Literotica gets a massive number of submissions every day), but as the story is now live it must have been given a second look and deemed okay.  This is an important thing to remember, if you're having stories bounced by Literotica, remember they get a ton of submissions daily.  Sometimes it's worth giving Laurel a (polite!) PM to check if a story got bounced by the filters by mistake.

I'm happy anyway.  The horror in erotic horror is still allowed at Literotica (although I should flag my nastier stories a little better next time!).

Hope you enjoy the new(ish) story!

Friday, August 23, 2019

Ideas for a Darkest Dungeon-esque H-game - Being the Warlock

Ok, here's some more random musings on the type of Darkest Dungeon-esque succubus H-game I'd like to see (because I don't have the technical chops to make it myself).

Last up, I talked a bit about the combat, which is going to have various smutty succubi and monster girls mucking up the standard 4-on-4 structure by jumping the bones of members of the opposing party.  This is where we have the excuse for lots of lovely and gratuitously xxx-rated pixel art (and hopefully some strategy to make the fights a little interesting as well).

The next question: Are we Team Succubus, or Team Succubus Bait?

I'll start with Team Succubus, as that's probably the most straightforward.

This is pretty much going to be like Iratus, but we're an eroge, so our banshees and vampires are going to be fucking the life out of enemies rather than spooping them to death.

The background setup is easy.  Perhaps a little too easy.  The player takes the role of a warlock or demon lord, and goes after the human realms with an army of sexy succubi.  From that starting point there is plenty of freedom with respect to humour, tone and lightness.  The Japanese games tend to push the slider towards goofy cute (although Monmusu Quest: Paradox can get very down and serious when it wants).  Personally, given that most of these games are fairly light-hearted, I think it might be interesting to try a darker tone – give our succubi some real fangs and an aura of sexy deadliness.  That would require some work on the main protagonist as goofball villain protagonists tend to work whereas deadly serious ones do not.

Maybe our warlock protagonist is the good guy, just using dubious tools to take down an army of corrupt and hypocritical shining knights.

There's also a fair bit of freedom with respect to the enemies.  Maybe they're your classic knights and D&D adventuring parties, but corrupt.  Maybe it can be a bit of succubus-on-succubus action.  While I think you probably want both sexes represented to appeal to a larger audience, this might necessitate extra work in the pixel art department as the monster girl may have different scenes depending on whether she's having fun with a man or woman.

I'd probably go with succubi vs knights, and start out with making the knights all male to avoid needing to multiply the art assets too much.  Then maybe adding female enemies to also attract ryona enthusiasts if resources allow.

One key difference to Darkest Dungeon is we'll want to hide a lot of those units behind some sort of unlock system.  In Darkest Dungeon all of the available units are pretty much available from the start and gated only by the RNG determining which ones show up on the stagecoach.  For a monster girl eroge, the focus is going to be on the sexy monster girls.  The lure of seeing new ones is what will (hopefully) keep the player playing, so we want to make them part of the progression system.  This then has an impact on balance.  The later unlocks should, in theory, be more powerful than the starter units, but then there's a risk of moving away from the finding synergistic parties aspect that makes Darkest Dungeon so damn good.  I think just making the later units more powerful than the starter units is back to the problem of boring combat mechanics.

Rather than more powerful, I think more strategic options might be a better thing to aim for.  Make the newer monster girls open up new options and new party configurations.  Just like Darkest Dungeon, the enemies are going to add more nuisance units to their roster, and that should prompt the player into trying out newer strategies to overcome them.

Another interesting consideration is whether we go roguelite or not.  Roguelite would have unlocks carry over into the next run (Iratus does this), whereas a more traditional RPG-type system would require the player to go through the same unlocking process with each new game (but, like a typical RPG, would only be playing one game rather than many randomized runs).

There's also the easy opportunity for more sex content.  One source of H-content is going to be in the battles as succubi "overcome" the enemies.  We can also have more conventional H-scenes of the succubi having fun with their warlock commander (i.e. the player) outside of battle.  Monmusu Quest: Paradox does this with the request scenes in the pocket castle.  This is also an additional form of player progression – the player raising affection with their monster girls (through levelling them up or maybe some kind of gift system) in order to unlock their H-content.

In general, I think the game would look something like this:

- The player plays a warlock/demon lord out to conquer various regions with sexy succubi/monster girls.

- There are different regions with different enemy unit compositions requiring different strategies to overcome in each.

- The player grinds short 'dungeons' in each region to unlock new units and strengthen existing ones (with the goal being to get strong enough to take down a 'final castle').

- The player unlocks new succubus/monster girl units.  New skills for the monster girls can be unlocked.  New H-content for the monster girls can be unlocked.

- The player has a 'base area' to develop with resources taken from the dungeon runs.

- 2D sprite strategic battles.  As we're an eroge, a large part of the strategy will be pulling enemy units out of formation or restraining enough of them so that they can be sexually drained.  Combat also has to always feel interesting.  There's going to be a lot of it, so the player needs to not feel like it's a massive grind.  Have different roles for each of the monster girls (but not too obvious and rigid).

So far, so vague.  But I doubt the various core gameplay loops can be nailed down until getting more serious about planning and development, and this tricky for me.  I have ideas, but I suspect I don't have the technical chops to take it all the way, so there's only so much time I feel comfortable to devoting to something like this.  I've always liked jotting down game design ideas, so maybe this is something I'll return to when I need a quick break from regular writing.

Thinking about this did remind me of a 2D sprite eroge that does do some of this stuff, but is real-time action rather than turn-based strategy – Attack it! Devil Legion.

Attack it! Devil Legion - Your demonic legions of... uh... doom.

I didn't get on with the demo, but did give the full game more of a try when I was thinking of existing eroge examples similar to the ideas above.  Attack it! Devil Legion does have some strategy in the form of various offensive, defensive and support roles, but it mostly feels a little too frenetic.  You control a little bat and can interrupt attacks and knock enemies over, but your monster girls and succubi mostly seem to do their own thing.  It does have an unlock system (but no H-content with your own minions - for good reason given the protagonist).

I'm not convinced on the real-time play aspects.  Most of the time you're too busy flinging your bat avatar around the screen to get a chance to enjoy your succubi double-teaming adventurers in various smutty ways.  It's still better than most of the other sexy monster girl eroges I've played recently, so I might give it the full Hentai Game Review treatment if it holds my attention long enough to complete the game.  The sprite artwork is really nice.  This, but turn-based was what I was thinking of as I wrote this post.

Hot succubus double team action.  I'm thinking this but where you can sit back and enjoy watching rather than trying to figure out where your bat avatar has been bashed to.

Maybe this will give some of you reading some ideas.  I'd love to see a game along these lines, but as I've said already, I doubt I have the technical chops to make it myself (or even organise a group of people that could).

Next up I'll brainstorm the other approach – Team Succubus Bait.

Monday, August 19, 2019

Thoughts (rough!) on how to do a Succubus H-game version of Darkest Dungeon

So where were we?  Oh yes, I was talking about Darkest Dungeon and sexy monster girl H-games.  Then I got side-tracked.  Briefly thought about posting something political (an urge thankfully resisted).  Then I rewrote a bestiary story to make it more of an actual short story (available to patrons now, but hopefully will be on Literotica later this week if it doesn't get rejected).

So, Darkest Dungeon sexy monster girl H-game.

First thing to clear up: if you're making a hentai game, the number one priority is the sex.  This is what people are going to be buying it for.  So that comes first – which means sexy characters, good art, hot scenes.

If everything is about the sex, is it even worth bothering with the game mechanics?

I don't know the answer to this.  Personally, I prefer to play hentai games that have a little more than a rudimentary combat system, but I might just be a weirdo.  I'm going to assume other people are weirdos too and write this from that perspective.  But if you are actually creating a sexy succubus H-game and have limited resources, put those resources into the sexy first, then start to think about adding clever game mechanics.

So, what does Darkest Dungeon-style combat give you over regular JRPGs?

Added strategic depth by making both party composition and character position very important.

Typical Darkest Dungeon combat - a party of 4 vs a party of 4 rendered in 2D

The basic JRPGs are very simple.  You have an attack(s), the enemy has attack(s).  Repeat until one of you is dead.  Damage goes up as you level up, but so does enemy toughness.  It works, but is bloody boring if it has no depth.

The standard way to add depth is to incorporate some kind of elemental paper-scissors-stone system.  With H-RPGs elemental is usually substituted with body parts, so the player character (or monster) might be more sensitive to boobs, kisses, sex, etc.  It's depth, but not much depth – find the weakness, hit weakness for bonus damage, rinse, repeat.

Adding a party adds more complexity, as the party members will likely specialise in different areas – healer, tank, DPS mage, etc.  Monmusu Quest: Paradox did this pretty well I thought.  It was fun trying out different monster girl parties as they all synergised in slightly different ways.

And this is also one of the major appeals of Darkest Dungeon – mucking around to find the party compositions that 'click'.

(Generally, the ones that don't click get savagely butchered fairly quickly – that game does not fuck around when it comes to difficulty.)

For regular RPGs, it's usually about putting the beefier classes in the front and the squishier ones in the back.  But then you get other synergies such as classes with skills that move them (or enemies) about or taking advantage of the 'marking' mechanic in Darkest Dungeon.

That's just for regular RPG combat.  We're looking at options for smutty H-game equivalents, which largely come down to: where's the sex?

Again, the easy option is to move it out to separate H-scenes, eg a Bad End scene if the player loses.  A lot of the monster girl hentai games do this.  You fight a regular battle and then, if you lose, you get treated to a nice scene of having 'fun' with the monster girl.

I think we can do more than that though.  Why waste the opportunity to create fun pixel art of succubi getting it on with hapless (lucky?) party members?

In Darkest Dungeon (and the other recent games inspired by it), you have up to four characters in your group facing off against up to four characters in their group.  Each character has a range of attacks that can only be used in the right position, and only target certain positions on the other side.  An example of this is Darkest Dungeon's Leper.  He's a tank with a big sword that can only hit the first two rows, and only if he's in the first two rows himself.  If he gets moved to the back two rows he's pretty much useless.

If we want to put a bit of snu-snu into our Darkest Dungeon-style combat we're going to need to break that 4-on-4 placement system and get the sexy monster girls in amongst the other party.  At first I thought about making it more complex with the characters being able to move freely through 8 to 10 slots and have attacks more dependent on adjacency than position.  I think that might be hellishly complex and move too far away from the straightforward 4-on-4 system.

An easier approach would be to make it possible for two characters to co-exist on the same spot.  That way the monster girl would either be jumping into the ranks of the party to jump the bones of the mage in position 3, for example.  Or a succubus/alraune would lure one of the opposing party to her position and then start having fun with them.  Darkest Dungeon already has some fights like this.  The Siren will steal a party member to fight on her side for a turn.  The Hag will throw someone in her pot.

As this is a hypothetical sex game, team monster girl grabbing someone is going to be a nice excuse to throw some pixel-art smuttiness in.  If anyone has ever played the FOBS game, that, but as part of a turn-based strategy game rather than a 2D platformer/metroidvania.

FOBS - picture this as taking a character out of combat

If a portion of the fight is going to be about party members being pulled out of the group or pinned by a monster girl within the group, then this might inform some of the combat gameplay.  Maybe neighbouring characters can help out pinned characters by knocking the invading monster girl off.  If a character is grabbed, then the focus can be about trying to pull them back from the monster girl group.

The other feature of Darkest Dungeon (and Iratus, but on the enemy side) is the addition of the stress bar.  Characters can be taken out via conventional HP damage.  Or they can be driven mad and stressed out enough to make them to succumb to heart attacks.

If characters are getting heart attacks in our H-game version, it's going to be of the overexertion-through-sex kind.

The stress system in Darkest Dungeon adds an additional layer to combat.  Stress attacks don't cause physical damage, but if you fail to manage the stress build-up, your party members will start behaving erratically and not follow orders.

It wouldn't make sense to use stress in a H-game equivalent.  But something like willpower or seduction would be a perfect replacement.  That way you'd have monster girls attacking with either physical or seduction techniques.  This could again force players to think about party composition.  Muscular types might be very good versus muscular monster girls, but very weak to succubi with strong seduction arts.  Generally, you want the player to be constantly thinking about chopping and changing their party composition in response to whatever the AI is throwing at them (whether it is monster girls or humans).

That's another interesting question.  Do you play as the monster girls (as a succubus-summoning warlock equivalent to Iratus's titular necromancer) or as the leader of a human squad trying to resist the unholy temptations of various succubi?

I think either would work, and I have ideas for both.  I'll detail those ideas in separate posts later this week.

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

Non-Hentai Game Look - Iratus: Lord of the Dead

Wait.  Non-Hentai?  What kind of heresy is this?

Iratus, a very angry necromancer

There is a point to it.  Honest.

Technically, Iratus has monster girls.  No succubi, as your forces are drawn from the necromantic section of the classic fantasy bestiary rather than the demonic, but you can recruit female monsters such as vampires, banshees (even ghouls) to your teams.  The developers are Russian, so they're still allowed to put boobs on their female characters.

The easiest way to describe it is – Darkest Dungeon, but where you get to play the monsters.

Combat might look familiar if you've played Darkest Dungeon, but does play a little differently

You play Iratus, the titular Lord of the Dead.  After being released from long imprisonment, he embarks on a journey to conquer the surface world.  The basic economy is body parts.  You craft your minions out of body parts and get more by slaying the various hapless miners, dwarves and high-fantasy D&D parties stupid enough to stand in your way.

Unlike Darkest Dungeon, there is a clear fail state.  Body parts are limited.  Lose too many minions and you will run out of body parts to craft more and will have to restart.  It is also very easy to lose minions as – just like Darkest Dungeon – the combat is fairly brutal and unforgiving.  Your minions are very squishy and while you don't have to worry about sanity (this is a reverse Darkest Dungeon, so you get to drive your enemies insane instead, although this isn't always a good thing…), there isn't a Death's Door mechanic, so enemy crits have a nasty habit of killing minions out of nowhere.

As with Darkest Dungeon you have a home base to update and combat consists of 4 rows of your team battling 4 rows of their team, where position is important and dictates what attacks can and can't be used.  Despite the similarities, it plays differently enough to be its own thing.

Combat is interesting.  You can choose to either kill your enemies with direct damage or spook them hard enough until their hearts burst from stress.  The direct damage is split between melee and magical, with both having different resistances.  How the resistances work is also interesting.  Defence comes in either armour resistance, which reduces incoming damage, or blocks/wards, which completely nullifies a hit at the cost of losing a block/ward (unless it's a crit).  This brings an extra tactical component.  Big, single-hit attacks are good versus armour resistance, but bad against block/wards.  On the other hand, smaller multi-hit attacks are great for chewing through wards, but can be countered by decent armour resistance as each individual hit doesn't do a lot of damage.

Overall, despite looking a lot like Darkest Dungeon, combat plays a little differently.  Enemies are a lot tankier, so it's difficult to nuke out a single target on the first turn.  Also, because of the block/ward system, AoE attacks hitting multiple targets are viable, whereas in Darkest Dungeon they tended to be pretty bad.

Exploration is a little similar to Slay the Spire

Currently Iratus is still in Early Access, so it's incomplete and there are a few balance problems.  The devs do seem to be responding to feedback and making good updates.  I like the change to show the whole enemy group when next to it rather than just a single unit.  It's a game where you need to form teams to counter various different parties and that tactical element is missing if there's no real way to predict what you might face.

It's definitely worth a look, especially if you're a fan of the original Darkest Dungeon.  The devs seem to have taken that for inspiration and then iterated upon it to make a game that is different enough to stand on its own.  Which is pretty much the history of videogames in a nutshell.

Okay, so why are you talking about it, Hydra?

With Iratus and another game, Vambrace: Cold Soul, it looks like Darkest Dungeon was successful enough to spawn a new subtype of turn-based RPGs.  And that usually gets me thinking as to whether that blueprint could work for a sexy monster girl game.

This time I thought I might as well put some of the ideas I have in a more public place.  Rather than write them down in a notebook, forget them, lose the notebook, yadda yadda.

So, I'll make that a little mini-series this week (or next) - my thoughts on how to make a Darkest Dungeon-esque hentai game.  As with most of these ideas, I'm aware I don't have the technical chops to pull them off, but it might inspire someone that does, and we'd all love to see more sexy monster girl games made!

Sunday, May 19, 2019

New Short Story - "The Banquet of the Queen of the Goblins"

Finally finished that damn carnivorous plant girl story.  Not sure why the 2nd draft took as long as it did, but it did.

Might as well get the bad news out of the way first.  Yes, it is pay-walled behind my Patreon account.  Sorry, regular readers who don't have access to that.  As with the previous boobie girl story, it will find its way into an ebook collection at some point in the future.

You can find it here:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-short-story-26958434

The monster girl was inspired by the carnivorous plant girl from Domination Quest: Kuro and the Naughty Monster Girls.



I did my usual thing when I dip into vore-ish areas to make the monster girl more interested in the sex part rather than the "git in my belly" part, so in that respect she deviates quite a lot from the initial inspiration.

It's another H-space story, although it's more in keeping with my older H-space stories rather than the Stewart Peter Bate stories I experimented with for a while.  At 8,200 words, it is much more like the older stories!

And now onto the more controversial stuff.

This is Patreon pay-walled again, are you ever going to go back to putting stuff up on Literotica for everyone to read?

Right, the problem here is that I'm still chugging along in low gear when it comes to writing.  As much as I don't like or trust the people behind Patreon, it currently is a useful source of income to keep my finances ticking over.  I'm of an old-school mindset when it comes to entertainment.  If people are giving you money, you need to give them something back to make them think it was worth giving you that money.  In this case it's timed exclusives (and some options to name protagonists, etc).

When I set it up, my initial aim was to give patrons something exclusive at least once a month and then anything I produced extra could then go up on Literotica (or here if Literotica found it a little too icky).  As I mentioned earlier, I'm currently stuck in low gear when it comes to productivity.  So far this year I've finished 2 short stories (16K words) and a demo opening section for a possible CYOA game (5K words).  This is obviously not ideal.  The only positive is that I am still chugging along to some extent.

While I am stuck in low gear, my options are limited.  I'd like to get out of low gear, so I can start terrorizing the erotic horror section of Literotica again.  (and also maybe blog a little more frequently than I have been doing of late.)

So, yep, sorry to the readers that can't get on Patreon (or are unwilling to give them money).  I will try and get something done for you at some point.  As for those that can, enjoy... uh... being erotically consumed as my lovely new carnivorous plant girl puts it.

(I'm not entirely sure she's being trustworthy, but her last prey seemed to enjoy himself...)


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!)

Thursday, March 14, 2019

Build Your Own Sextrap Dungeon

No, we're not talking about BDSM studios.  This is more gamer-y stuff.

(But not this particular gamer-y stuff, which jumped to the top of the list when I did a google search on "Sextrap Dungeon".  I should have expected it really.  "Sextrap Dungeon" is the sort of term that rolls off the tongue nicely, so it's inevitable someone else would have already grabbed it.)

Yesterday I was talking about MachiaVillain, a cute little indie game where you build a murder mansion.  They added succubi, so the perverted little black cells in my brain immediately conjured up a little murder bordello, where the 'guests' get to go out with a bang at the hands (and other parts) of sexy succubi.  It did make me wonder if that concept could work as a nice little hentai game.

The 'build-your-own-Deathtrap-Dungeon' genre has been around in videogames for a while.  Dungeon Keeper was the famous one, and there have been a couple of spiritual successors in recent years in Dungeons and War for the Overworld.

Dungeon Keeper 2's succubus - Dark Mistress.  Likes torturing people.

My main bugbear with these games is they're often bait'n'switches.  You start off laying down traps to squish invading adventuring parties, but then the game usually morphs into a typical RTS around level 3 or 4, and the rest of it is mostly spent doing the usual RTS-y things of harvesting resources, recruiting new units, and then battling opposing dungeon keepers until the map is clear.

This may be down to the realities of what works as basic game design.  Building up a force to take out a rival puts the player in an active role and is easy to grok and calibrate challenge.  Building a dungeon to squish adventurers puts the player in a more passive role and is harder to grok and calibrate challenge.  Dungeon masters with human players have an incentive to keep things 'fair'.  If they constantly kill the party with an inescapable deathtrap in the first room, well pretty soon they're not going to have any players show up to their games.  A human player trying to keep AI heroes from plundering their goodies doesn't have to worry about that.  Kill 'em all in the first room works, but will make for a dull gameplay loop if too easy to pull off.

My thinking is you'd want to allow as much freedom for fiendish design and creativity, but also some sort of challenge element to keep the player from getting bored.  Generally, I think you'd want some kind of additional reward for the player to incentivize building long and elaborate deathtrap dungeons for the heroes to get lost in rather than throwing everything at them in the first room.  How to do that seems tricky, and probably why games like Dungeon Keeper switch to standard RTS gameplay once the initial concept wears out its welcome, as that's a tried and trusted means of maintaining player interest.

Dungeons 3.  I'm pretty sure this game has a succubus, but could I find a decent pic of one, could I bollocks!  (She also likes torturing people)

MachiaVillain sort of has this with bonuses awarded for killing victims according to horror movie rules - kill them when they're alone, kill the virgin last, etc.  But most of the time you just zerg rush the victims as soon as they enter the murder mansion anyway.

So far, I've mostly been talking about regular games, where my real interest is in more... ahem... perverted fare.  The advantage with more perverted fare is it opens up... ahem... rewards that can't be offered in regular boring mainstream games.  After all, where's the fun in filling a deathtrap dungeon with delectable demonesses if you can't catch a peek of them... ahem... dispatching those dastardly dogooders.

This then also opens up further possible gameplay options than just dropping a mountain on the heroes' heads in the first room.  If we have succubi, we need to keep them happy.  Happy horny succubi make lovely porn movies (obviously we edit out the part where the barbarian stud dries up like beef jerky).  Sulky sad succubi rip their victims' hearts out and throw entrails at the camera.

War for the Overworld's succubus.  Bit spiky.  Likes torturing people.

This now implies a rudimentary management sim.  You have a dungeon.  You have various sexy (and deadly) sirens.  You maybe have a black market distributor specialising in... certain types of films.  The player now has aims and goals beyond just bumping off the marauding heroes in as efficient a way as possible.  Maybe there's an audience score that gives gold bonuses.  Maybe the monster girls have certain restrictions - more powerful ones will only take up residence in lower levels.

This creates tension in that you'll want to lure heroes powerful enough to penetrate the dungeon deep enough to reach the more exotic succubi, but not powerful enough to beat them up.  Maybe part of the gameplay will be figuring out ways to weaken the more powerful heroes without breaking them completely, so that your succubus doesn't get bored with too-easily 'dominated' prey.

I can see there being potential here.

However, there is one awkward question - is all this as fun (and as sexy) as the player trying to battle through the dungeon themselves while fending off (and occasionally frequently 'losing' to) various amorous monster girls?

I did blog about a 'hentai Dungeon Keeper' a few years back - Pretty Warrior May Cry.  That was more of a ryona game.  It did have a rather lovely succubus-type unit, but most of the rest of the game was focused on watching orcs, dogs, slimes, even a dragon!, do various unmentionable things to the female adventurers stupid enough to set foot in your dungeon.  Ryona isn't my thing, but it has an audience and meshes well with the Dungeon Keeper concept.

Pretty Warrior May Cry's succubus.  In the middle of torturing... hey, wait a minute.

Would a similar thing appeal to the same sort of audience that enjoyed Monster Girl Quest?  I suspect players would rather the succubi were doing all the sexy snu-snu stuff (minus any angry heart-ripping) to them.  Although this can easily be fixed in-lore with some sort of magical maguffin that allows the player to bodysurf in to experience their succubi's delectable skills firsthand without those awkward 'dried fish' consequences.

You could probably even cater to both audiences by allowing them to mix'n'match which monsters they want to populate their 'sextrap dungeon' with.

Anyway, enough idle musings.  I think something like this could work and hopefully I've given some ideas for anyone wanting to make a succubus/monster girl hentai game that isn't just another RPGMaker clone.

Yes, I'd like to make something like this myself, but I suspect it would be rather difficult to do well, and certainly far beyond my current skill set.  Hence me posting a bunch of ideas here.  If you think you can make it work, feel free to go for it!