Sunday, December 12, 2021

Wombo-ing up the House of Hellish Harlots website

This is a x-post from my patreon (where I posted a few more pics, coz they can't all fit in this post).

If you've checked out the House of Hellish Harlots website recently, you might have noticed it has a little bit more colour now.


My webdev skills are rudimentary at best (probably less, to be honest - when it comes to IT I'm more of the backend math model coding type).  It looks vaguely okay on my laptop, but I haven't been able to test it for other devices.  If it looks like ass on your display (rather than just garish - that's intentional! :D ), let me know.

The art is from the new viral AI art toy, WOMBO Dream, you might have seen floating around on social media.  You can play with it here:
https://www.wombo.art/ 

You feed it some keywords or phrases, and it spits out an impressionist painting in a variety of different styles (I'm guessing they're using some kind of neural network and trained it on a massive art catalogue).  Obviously, me being me, I fed it a bunch of filth and the results were... interesting.


Currently, the AI only really seems good for abstract and impressionist works.  It seems fairly difficult to get anything resembling a human form out of it, with "house7" below being the closest I got.  Most of the time it spits out a weird jumble of body parts and facial features that looks bad rather than weird or disturbing.


I like it more with buildings and room interiors.  The lines are still 'off', but they're off in a way that looks weird and hallucinatory.  Especially if you feed it conflicting terms such as "house" with "hellish" and "sexual pleasure"/"perversion".  That results in the AI blurring the lush voluptuous curves painted by the old masters with the regular lines of a building, and resulting in something that's 'off' in an interesting and slightly perverse way.  Perfect for the House of Hellish Harlots, which is more than it appears!


I'm not sure if the developers intended it as anything other than a fun toy, but it seems to me like a really good way to produce abstract art for album or book covers (especially for self-published authors).  Looking up the guidelines for use, the people that made the app don't want people trying to sell the artwork, but seem okay with people using it as album/book covers.  I don't know how long that will stay in place as I suspect other people will latch onto the usefulness fairly quickly.


In the meantime I thought some of these would make nice background art to brighten up the website.  It's a nice interim fix to hold me over until I can get some proper artwork commissioned.

Wednesday, December 08, 2021

HoHH Art Commission - Alsharajea Hira, the Corruptress

After seeing how Pori turned out, I contacted the artist, and ran a poll for patrons to pick a HoHH harlot to have art commissioned for.  Alsharajea Hira, the Corruptress won and this is the finished result.



Reception on Patreon has been pretty mixed.  I think a lot depends on how thicc you like your succubi.  Personally, I think it conveys her raunchiness pretty well, but I also understand it might not be everyone's cup of tea.  We all have different preferences.

I hope you enjoy anyway.



The artist is HunggryCroissant.  They have a gallery on Eka's Portal here, and they gave me this link as their artist page if you'd like to contact and commission them:
https://croissantx.carrd.co/

I've put aside a little war chest for character commissions, so I hope to get more harlots commissioned in the future.

Wednesday, December 01, 2021

Public Demo Version of "House of Hellish Harlots" Updated to v0.026

The public version of "House of Hellish Harlots" has been updated to version 0.026.  You can play it here.  There are 2 new harlots added in this release, taking the total count up to 42.

Cíocha Gadaí-na-Bod
The boobfairy.  If you like your monster girls deliciously evil, Cíocha is definitely your gal.  She's a little on the spiteful side.  For some reason, the fairies I add to the House have some of the nastiest Bad Ends, and Cíocha is no exception.  Make good choices and I hope you don't wince too hard.

If you do survive, you'll notice her mention a 'big sister'.  That is Cruiscíní.  I haven't finished her yet.  Cíocha is intended to be a one-two punch scenario similar to Osculia's, where she returns right after with a more dangerous scenario.  That will be in a future release, as well as a solo scenario for the big boobfairy.

Misty
If you remember the very early demo I put out a couple of years ago, there was a fog succubus that killed the player if they dallied too much on the way to the House.  I've given her a harlot scenario.  It's fairly short and simple.  This is close to the original idea I had for how the scenarios would be (so the project wouldn't take too long).  I think I might rattle off a few more like this over the next month or so, just to pump the numbers up a bit.

I've also messed around with some fonts to hopefully make the site a little bit easier to read.  My webdev skills are distressingly basic, so we'll be stuck with plain text for a while until I can get hold of some nice artwork to pretty things up a little.

As I'll be maintaining, the Patreon version is a month ahead.  They're on v0.027 and Suffocatrix Assphyxia finally makes an appearance within the House.  If you want to check that out and help support the project, follow the link here.

As always, any feedback gratefully received.  November was a rough month for some personal reasons, so v0.027 was a small release.  December is also shaping up to be very busy with other things, so I expect that to only add 1 or 2 harlots as well.  I'll post more in detail on that in a couple of days.

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Art of Pori, the Love Sponge

Pori, the Love Sponge is one of the harlots in "The House of Hellish Harlots".  The public demo of that has been updated to v0.025 and can be played here.  Here is a lovely pic of her, showing her in all her comfy loveliness.


While I'd love to say I was responsible for this, the piece was independently commissioned by Mark45 and he kindly gave me permission to share it.

The artist is HunggryCroissant and more of their work can be found here.

I like this.  If I was to add art to HoHH it would be through profile pictures like this.  The ideal GUI for HoHH would likely take the form of a book with artwork on the left page and the text on the right.  Unfortunately, I lack the wherewithal to create this, so the project will likely stay text-only for the moment.  What I did think of doing was to create a profile page on houseofhellishharlots.com and list all the harlots with profile pics and details (Kind of like Monster Girl Encyclopaedia, but if all the monster girls were offering services in a massage parlour/brothel).  Art like this would be perfect for that.



Wednesday, November 03, 2021

Public demo version of "House of Hellish Harlots" updated to v0.025

Not quite the "hopefully, by the end of the week" as I originally said, as October was bedevilled with technical problems for me which ended up in me needing to replace my computer, but I've finally managed to update the public website version of "House of Hellish Harlots" to v0.025.  It can be found here:

https://houseofhellishharlots.com/

The major change is the addition of an accelerated restart mode.  I got plenty of feedback about how annoying it was to have to go through the Barman's introduction and warnings for every new game and so added an option to skip that for subsequent playthroughs (similar to how the original car journey and Madam's tour are skippable on subsequent playthroughs).  I also extended this to the Madam's explanations of how Mulligan Tokens work.  The accelerated restart option drops the player right in at the first round of harlot choices.  This should make the game a lot more playable!

I've also given the demo a designated endpoint.  There were reasons for the "we've run out of harlots" comment from the Madam, but it probably seemed weird to players to get it after only seeing 6 of 40 harlots.  Now, the demo runs for the first 5 rounds.  The 5th round is a designated special mini-boss round.  No 'mini-bosses' have been added yet (they will have slightly longer and more complex scenarios than the regular harlots), but I've moved back most of the really dangerous harlots to round 5 to temporarily fill that role.  This should reduce the chances of the player getting a first round of harlots that are impossible to survive.

I've added a changelog section to the webpage, so the full details can be found there.  I've also added some separate sections for links and begging for any artists to take interest.

Patrons are slightly ahead at the moment as I released a new version at the end of the month that includes two new harlots.  They are at v0.026 while the public version is at v0.025.  Because I want patrons to feel like they're paying for something (and if you wish to support this project, you can do it here), I'll continue to maintain the early access approach of patrons getting the new version a month before the public update.   

As for the overall look of the website, yeah, my webdev skills... suck.  I'm definitely very boomer-esque when it comes to that department.  I probably spent most of last night screaming at the screen because I'd change a font size, hit publish, only for the change to be completely ignored (likely because some other global setting I'm unaware of is overriding it).  That's something I'm just going to have to keep working at until I get better.  At the moment it sort of displays okay as plain white text on a black background to me, but I don't know if it's doing crazy stuff like white text on a white background for other people.  If you notice anything off, please let me know.  Also, because I am clearly noobish, any hints, tips, feedback and suggestions will be gratefully received!

The idea I had for the website was to have it spoof a high-class brothel/massage parlour website, with sections for facilities, ladies available, etc.  As I'm not sure I'll be able to add artwork to Twine without it slowing down to a crawl, a nice interim step would be to create a "Ladies" page that lists all the harlots with a profile and picture.  Think Monster Girl Encyclopaedia, but with the profile listing what services they offer and specialties.  The current site is a long way off that at the moment, but I think that idea is doable and something to aim for.  Consider it a work in progress I'll keep tinkering with to make better

Anyway, have fun and try to avoid those Horror Ends!

Sunday, October 10, 2021

New(ish) Story for Literotica's 2021 Halloween Story Competition: "The Subway Succubus"

 My entrant for Literotica's 2021 Halloween Story competition is up:

"The Subway Succubus"

Okay, so this one isn't brand spanking new.  I wrote it last year.  I was a bit poor with competition deadlines last year.  "The Succubus in Mr Herbert's Summer House" was supposed to be my entrant to the Summer Lovin' competition.  I didn't finish it in time, so I entered it into the Halloween competition instead.  "The Subway Succubus" was supposed to be my entrant for the 2020 Halloween competition, but I didn't finish that either.  I posted it afterwards.  It was rejected for being a little too nasty, so I used it as a (temporary) patron-exclusive on Patreon.

Roll around to 2021 and I'm a bit iffy on whether I'll be able to finish a new story for this year's competition.  I lost the first week of October to having to redo most of September's work after a software crash, and I'm currently up to my eyeballs trying to get a new public release of "House of Hellish Harlots" ready.

I do have a half-written story that I was originally planning to finish and enter, and I will set aside a couple of days next week to see if I can finish it.  What with everything else going on, I'm not confident that will happen and it will likely get pushed back for another attempt next year.

Then I remembered I had "The Subway Succubus" lying around.  I thought I'd resubmit it with a nice big disclaimer at the top and see if it would go through this time.  And it did.

As an aside, if I feel the need to put a disclaimer at the start, yeah, you can be sure the story is going in some nasty places.  So, consider yourself warned.  I wanted to write a proper scary-monster-succubus for this one.  It definitely brings the 'horror' of  'erotic horror' and gets a bit icky at the end.

Normally I write a bit about how Literotica's competition scoring works, but it's not really necessary in this case.  This one isn't placing, so there's no need to worry about that!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy (and are not too traumatised!) 

Wednesday, October 06, 2021

House of Hellish Harlots v0.024 (to be new public demo) released

I was able to recover from the computer crash mishap a little faster than I was anticipating.  This means "House of Hellish Harlots" ver0.024 is now ready for release for patrons at:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/house-of-hellish-57036705

This is what I'm hoping will be the new public demo.  It covers the first 5 rounds and ends after the first 'special' round.  I'm going to release it here first to check there aren't any obvious bugs, and then put it up on the public website in a week or so.

Here are details of the new additions:

NEW HARLOT: PEL-V GNOI
Just the one new harlot this month (because of all the other changes). Pel-V is one of the Doctoress's artificial beings.  She's inspired by the watermelon girl from Monmusu Quest crossed with Pel-O.  Her scenario is vore-y.  You have been warned!

REPEAT HARLOT: OSCULIA SUFFOCATI
Osculia gets a new repeat scenario.  This follows right after her first and makes her a lot more dangerous.

The reason there are only the two new scenarios is I had to make a lot of other changes last month, which I'll list below:

QoL: ACCELERATED START
Now with even more acceleration.  I added The Madam's explanation of mulligan tokens to the list of things that can be skipped for subsequent playthroughs.  This option will use up 3 actions, but introduce all of the NPCs and fastforward through explanations of some of The Madam's functions.  It still leaves one action left for the player to grab an emergency potion from The Doctoress, etc.

As part of the implentation for this, I cleaned up the transition going from The Madam presenting the next round of harlots to the Club Activities phase (visiting the various NPCs before pucking a harlot).  This gives me a spot to add little warnings from The Barman to indicate he has new information to impart.  (In this case, a warning before Round 5).

I also fixed the bug where using a mulligan token in the 1st round would force the player to go through the Barman's full intro (again).

QoL: BUY ANY CHARM
As also requested, I added an option to the Buxom Lolibaba where a player can have the option of buying any charm for the cost of a mulligan token (similar to the select any harlot option The Madam offers).  I doubt this will be in the finished game, but it's probably useful now for testing purposes.

SELECTION ALGORITHM
I tweaked this to allow some repeat visits to show up more frequently and also to give harlots the ability to schedule future round appearances.  You'll see what I mean if you run into Osculia.  You won't have to wait long for her to show up again for her repeat visit!

I also designated some rounds to be special rounds with slightly different selection criteria.  These are primarily for the mini-boss harlots when I get around to writing them.  In the meantime, it's a good place to dump the late-game harlots that require stricter conditions to survive.  From the player's perspective, it means they're less likely now to get an unwinnable combination of harlots on the 1st round. 

GRAMMAR FIX FOR PLURAL GIFTS
I fixed a few things that readers have pointed out.  The major one is that gifts now have an .isSingular attribute.  Items like 'grapes' should now be referred to as 'them' rather than 'it'.  It's a minor change, but I know it was bothering some folks before.

Overall, the game shouold now feel like a proper demo that covers the 1st third of the game and has an ending message should the player survive the first 5 rounds.

Unfortunately, I couldn't fit everything in, so this was what I had to cut and hold back for a future release:

NEW HARLOT: BOOBFAIRY
I have about 5K words typed up and just one scene to finish.  She should be showing up in the next release and will also bring a friend.  As with Osculia she has a more dangerous follow-up scenario and putting her back a month will give me a chance to finish that as well.

BARMAN ADVICE
Along with the round 5 warning, I was going to give the Barman new advice he could give out on the relative strengths of harlots.  Then I realised having him talk about Tier 1 harlots after the player would stop seeing them didn't make a lot of sense.  I'll look to have him speak briefly to the player at the beginning of Round 2 and that unlock advice on harlot tiers.

MINI-BOSSES
They're still on the way.  For the moment, high tier harlots like Hiru and Tete can fill that role.

VISION CHARM FIX
This is currently delayed until the beginning of the next round because the round the player buys it causes an issue when they'd see Anna Boa as a human during the introductions and then as a lamia when they went back to stage to make their choice.  If this happens, they should comment on it!

Also, a more unfortunate oversight:

NURSE HONEY'S CURE FOR LIPS FIXATION
This makes Osculia's new scenario a little more dangerous than I originally intended. (I forgot I only added implementation for the ailments currently in use and didn't update to add Lips Fixation.)

Once I've fixed this and any other bugs patrons have noticed I'll update the public demo on the https://houseofhellishharlots.com/ website.  (In a week or so, at a guess).