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!
