Updates and plans for November

Literotica's Halloween story contest is over. My entrant, "AProudMaleFeminist gets Creamed" didn't place, but to be honest I didn't expect it to.  I'm trying to write myself back into form and that involves working through the gears of the more straightforward erotic horror stories I started out with.  I was pleasantly surprised by the final score (which I think was the highest in the Erotic Horror category, although not 100% on that), and that I didn't get a complete shellacking from angry male feminists.

It is a risk with certain hot button topics, especially when you want to create a juicy villain, that people see the end character as a stand-in for the whole group, rather than just an individual (and flawed) character.  I suspect it would be just as true if I made the asshole protagonist a MAGA-hat-wearing Trump fan, or a hardcore gamer.

I do like to give my succubi a varied diet, so please don't take it too personally if the current asshole-du-jour is from a group you identify with.  At the end of the day they're individual characters, and while my personal moral views will inevitably bleed into the stories, my overall goal is to create good characters first.

Okay, second.

Creating hot and icky (and usually fatal) horror-sex scenes is still first.  As it should be.

Anyway, I did put a full update post up on my patreon.  Rather than repeat it I'll just post the link here (this post should be open to everyone).

The shortened version is this November I want to sink my teeth into the next CYOA project.  I liked how Volumpula turned out (the trophy is gettable, honest!), but it did take too long and I want to see if I can get the development times down for these CYOAs.

I also have a few short story ideas I want to explore.  My version of a boob monster is something that looks close to fruition, so I'm going to see if I can pluck that and turn it into lovely cider (or something).

It's probably us she'll turn into lovely... milk...?

Halloween Story Out - "AProudMaleFeminist gets Creamed"

I didn't think I'd make Literotica's Halloween contest this year.  I had a story unfinished from last year, but when I picked it up again I realised one of the characters was too similar to Volumpula and I didn't want to put it out right after the "Escape Volumpula" CYOA.  (I still think it's a very good story idea and I will finish it at some point.)

With a couple of days to go before the deadline I had a few ideas and fragments, but nothing close to completion.  Then an old idea unlocked, I typed up 4,000 words in a day and got the story in with half an hour to spare.

Here it is:

"AProudMaleFeminist gets Creamed."

Yes, the title is a little troll-y.  The story is a throwback to the old ones I used to write where random asshole runs into succubus/monster girl and (maybe) lethal snu-snu occurs.  Sometimes I try to add a bit of nuance to the assholes (or randomly destroy an undeserving good guy instead to keep readers on their toes).  With this one I stuffed him full of straw and gave him a good thwack.  Sometimes you have to have a little fun as a writer.

It wasn't the story I originally intended to put out, but I hope people have fun with it anyway!

Open version of "Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly" is live!

As I said I would last week, I've posted "Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly" up on philome.la for everyone to play.  You can enjoy it here.

I'm still not sure what is and isn't allowed on philome.  I put in a few links to my Patreon (because I do like getting paid to write these and it's a good incentive to make me write more. hint hint. ;) ).  Some websites can be a little iffy about that, so I'll keep an eye out and resubmit a linkless version if the first gets bounced.

Putting a week's delay on the general release seems like a good balance between rewarding patrons for their contributions while not shutting out entirely people that can't contribute for whatever reason, so I'll continue doing it (maybe eventually migrating the CYOAs to my own web domain).

I hope you enjoy playing with Volumpula.  Writing her took a little longer than I anticipated, but the scenario is out now and I hope the wait was worth it.  Please let me know what you think in the comments below.

As I mentioned before.  I'm in the brainstorming/planning phase for the next scenario.  However, there are a couple of short stories I'd like to finish first, so those will likely be my priority for the rest of the month.

In the meantime, I'm sure Volumpula will take very good care of you...

October 2018 plans

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

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

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

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

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

The CYOA development process consists of these stages:

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly" is done!

Whew, and breathe.

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

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

Pink Jelly CYOA Update: Scenes Typed Up

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

(Obligatory cheeky Patreon plug link.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can anyone recommend a good slime girl artist?

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

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

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

Here are the details of the piece:


Character Detail

Name: Volumpula

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

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

Any resemblances between Milfy and Volumpula are purely... ahem... incidental.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Updatery stuff on Escape the Pink Jelly Girl

Been bounced around on real-life work related things last few days, but on the positive side all the waiting around in airports and flying did allow me to get the 1st draft of the Escape the Pink Jelly CYOA written. It nearly filled the whole notebook. I'm curious to see what the final word count on this is going to be! Here's a list of what's been done and what still needs doing:

-Layout and Coding in Twine: Done-ish -1st Draft (freehand): Done-ish -2nd Draft (typing up + editing): 40-50% -Plugging the text into Twine: ToDo -Testing and Debugging: ToDo I'm still experimenting with what works and what is most efficient. I tend to find it best to map out the skeleton and code all the links first. Then I write the scenes out freehand before typing them up and editing them. The 1st draft part is usually the most time-consuming, so I'm glad that's out of the way. The 2nd draft is something I normally hammer through - the "Night of the Nude Succubus Orgy" short story took three days, despite being over 10K words. Plugging the text in is basic cut'n'paste with a little bit of editing to make sure the text links up through the different routes. Debugging is less easy to predict. I'm not doing anything hideously complicated, which should make it relatively straightforward, but I always have to allow for those weird roadblocks where a stupid typo has me looking at the wrong place for hours until the inevitable "D'Oh!" moment.

Not sure when I'll have a playable file ready. Next week hopefully, depending on how nasty the inevitable bugs are. This is a little behind schedule as I lost a few days to other stuff and underestimated how complicated I'd made the whole scenario.

Updatery stuff - Escape the Pink Jelly Girl

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

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

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

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

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

Literotica's Nude Day Contest Results

Are in.

I didn't place, but I think I came close.  I was on the site just as the results were announced (which tends to be important if you want to check scores as winners usually have their entrants bombed by jealous eedjits right after the announcement).  The 3 winners were all in the 4.83-4.84 range and I think my story finished up around 4.82-4.83.  So, close.

Closer than I was expecting to be honest.  Usually I have to throw in a nice ending and a satisfying twist like this or this to place.  "Night of the Nude Succubus Orgy" has 3 idiots who end up being very very lucky.  But it's good fun and I know the "nice-ending" fans have been a little under-served of late with all the grimdark H-space stuff.

The main purpose was to get back on Literotica, and that was achieved.  I'm hoping this will continue.  I have a story I didn't quite get finished for last Halloween and hopefully by next Valentine's Day I will have retrieved "The Heart Squad" from its current production hell.

And also, you'll notice on the right...

roughly about here if I got my placement right--------------------->
(Which I... uh... didn't)

...I have a link button to my Patreon.

Yes, I finally managed to set one up if you missed my announcement yesterday.

My Patreon page is here.

I'm going to be using this to fund things like writing the Literotica stories, the H-space monster girl bestiary shorts and the CYOA scenarios.

A big thank you to the people who are already backing me.

Today I've mostly been writing bouncy paizuri scenes with a lovely pink slime girl.  That CYOA scenario is back on the go, even if it has spiraled a little out of control.  More updates to come as soon as I'm nearer completion.

Many-Eyed Hydra finally has a Patreon

I've faffed around with this for a while, to be fair.

First up, I'm terrible at asking for anything, so writing what is essentially a begging "giz us cash" post is alien and uncomfortable for me.

Turns out a couple of big dentist bills on the horizon are pretty good for making one swallow his pride.  (I had a root ripped out today after the crown snapped off a few weeks ago.  Ow.  I'm not sure which is more painful - the pliers or the imminent damage to the bank account.)

Secondly, there was a smidgeon of doubt.  Last couple of years I've been a bit all over the place - The H-space monster girl bestiary stuff, the long (probably too long) Monmusu Quest: Paradox walkthroughs, the bits of novels you haven't yet seen because they didn't quite get there and are currently on hiatus.  I didn't want to open up a Patreon until I felt confident I could give people value for their subscriptions.

After publishing the "Escape the Arachne" CYOA scenario and finally getting back to Literotica with a 13K word monster short story, "Night of the Nude Succubus Orgy", I feel in a much better place productivity-wise.  Another story I got about halfway through before sticking on a backburner has recently popped up and punched me in the face with a "Finish me!"  One of the hopes I have with the Patreon is that it'll free me from thinking - "I can't do the short stories like before, I need to be writing novels and things I can put on Amazon for money," and I'll just get back to writing what feels right at the time (which usually ends up turning into a series/novel or short story collection anyway).

Finally, there was the fear.  Not starting up a Patreon is a bit like Schrödinger's cat.  As long as you haven't launched it, it can't actually fail.  Once you launch it, well... reality ensues and you have to face the prospect of it only making $5 a month.

Feh, if it happens, it happens.  No-one has an automatic right to be rewarded and recompensed for their creative endeavors.

(It would be fairly soul-destroying, though, so please support me if you can. ;) )

But we can swiftly move on past all that mewling.  I've finally got off my ass and got the Patreon up.  You can find it (and hopefully back me) here.

(Having a tooth ripped out does wonders for focus.)

Some nitty-gritty.

There is only one reward tier currently ($1).  According to Patreon this is taken out the moment you back me and then again at the 1st of each month.  I will add more tiers in future when I have a better idea of what I'm doing.

My plan is to give patrons early access to stories and CYOA scenarios.  As a test I've made available a later version of "Escape the Arachne" where I jiggled the math a little and added a "hard" mode (tests fail on ties rather than passing).

This will be my plan for future CYOA scenarios and regular (i.e. non-contest) short stories and serial chapters.  I don't plan to make any of these totally exclusive, mainly because it could come back to bite me in the ass if I really want to use a particular story in a future collection.  The period of exclusivity will likely be for a week before I post the story on Literotica or here.  For some stories it will be a lot longer as they won't be put on Literotica or the blog and instead will be earmarked for future ebook short story collections.

I'll probably also post snippets of various bit of works-in-progress.  Some might become something, some might not, but the individual scenes will likely still be enjoyable.  (I have a hot one with Nicole and Madam Voluptula having a lot of fun together lying on one of my hard drives somewhere.)

Anyway it's up.  I would love it if you could support me.

Also, as I'm new to this, I would love feedback on the page, tiers, etc.  If anything seems obviously broken, or awful and cringy, please let me know.  Expect the first couple of months to be a little amateurish while I figure stuff out.

I'm hoping this will motivate me to get some new fiction out.  It's about time I reclaimed Lit's Erotic Horror category...

EDIT: I've also added a handy button link.  It does appear to go to the right Patreon page through some black magic beyond my ken.  (I might be getting too old - I was convinced I had to hack the raw HTML in the button example somehow and yet it just goes straight where I want it to after pasting it into the blog's widget section.)

New Story - "Night of the Nude Succubus Orgy"

Yay.  I made it.

As can be seen from the list of entrants to Lierotica's Nude Day Erotic Story Competition, I did just manage to get my story in before the deadline (by about 45 minutes according to my reckoning - leaving it fine just adds to the drama).

Here is the direct link:

Night of the Nude Succubus Orgy

A bit about it.  I wanted to start with a traditional horror/ghost story opening going over the history of a spooky old mansion... and then it turned into a big old porn fest, probably one of the porniest stories I've ever written.  Oh well, I'll have to write that traditional spooky horror/occult tale some other time.

The opening is a bit long, cynically so.  There is a weird quirk to Literotica contests where it's better to have a reader give up half way through than have them read to the end and give the story an "ok" 4 out of 5.  Because of how the scoring works, it's better for a writer if they're given no score at all rather than a 4 (or lower).  Shorter stories have traditionally suffered for this in their competitions.  So stick with it, even if you don't care for the wobbly occult stuff, it gets a lot hotter and sexy later.

Another note on Literotica contests.  Please don't vote more than once or bomb other writers entrants.  One, it's not very sporting and two, Literotica has algorithms to spot that type of behaviour and the votes just end up getting scrubbed.

While I wouldn't recommend starting an erotic tale this slow, it was fun to play around with all the Crowley stuff.  Aleister Crowley is a real-life historical occult figure and tends to get name-checked a lot in this type of story to give them a pseudo-grounding in reality.  The indie adult game "Lust for Darkness" I talked about a couple of weeks ago clearly took some inspiration from Crowley's exploits.  A bust of his likeness can be found in the mansion and one of the books you can find mentions Crowley's Thelema religion.

Rather humorously, I botched my research and had to make some last minute edit changes as the original date I had for when the ritual took place was during a time when Crowley had already moved back to England.  The body double stuff is pure fiction on my part.

The succubi also developed stronger characters than I was expecting.  I'm tempted to use them again.  Maybe there's a full novel here once I include the other succubus scenes.  Obviously it will depend on how the story is received.  I enjoyed writing it, but that might not necessarily translate to people enjoying reading it!

If you did really like one (or more) of the succubi in the story, let me know in the comments below and I'll see if I can give them some more action in a future story.

Some good news, finally - a new Literotica story on the way

Some good news, finally, as the title says.

I've kept quiet about this one, mainly because I wasn't sure I'd get it finished in time and I didn't want to repeat what happened with "The Heart Squad" earlier this year.

Literotica is currently running their annual Nude Day Erotic Story Contest.  I thought I had a good idea for last year, then failed to finish it on time, because I've had a rough patch of struggling to finish stories.  I dusted it off for this year... and just about got it done, considering I posted it just now, about an hour before the contest deadline.

The main reason is I... uh... might have got a little carried away.  Normally I aim for around 6K words for a short story.  When I finished typing this up (in 3 days) it came to a whopping 13K words.  The succubi had a lot of fun in this one.

I don't know when the story is going live.  I think I entered it in time, but I have had a few problems with Lit randomly bouncing some of my recent stories.  It is is a little tamer than my usual death-by-sex stories, so I think it should be okay, but you never know.  There was a weird period where I did wonder if Lit had a rogue mod problem, so we'll see.

Anyway, if I do get bounced, I'll just serialize the story here.

Hopefully that won't happen and I'll put up a new post with the story link as soon as it goes live in the next day or so.

As my getting carried away put me under a little time pressure, I had to pause work on the slime girl CYOA for a couple of weeks to get this done in time.  To give an idea of how much time pressure - the first draft wasn't complete until Sunday, so I had to type up about 12,000 words in 3 days.  This does mean the editing window was much much shorter than I'd normally like, so there will probably be a few more typos and sloppy sentence constructions than I'd normally be happy with in the finished story.

Now that this is done I will get back to that slime girl CYOA.  I have a decent chunk of the 1st draft already written, but again, I might have got a teensy bit carried away with all the sexy action...

Short updatery post

...because I've been a bit quiet here again.

So, I, uh, got more than a little carried away with the pink cushionblob CYOA.  I'm still trying to get a feel for the right amount of content in these.  In this case she gets up to a lot of sexy slimy fun outside of the 6 or 7 Bad Ends, which has made it a lot longer than I was anticipating.  Writing the first draft is definitely the slowest part and I'm waiting until that is done before popping up the Patreon and starting with the panhandling.

There is something else I'm in the middle of, but I'm going to keep it cryptic for now as I'm not 100% sure I'll get it done in time, which will necessitate it being pushed back a year.  After more than a few project trainwrecks recently, I don't want to get people's hopes up only for another story or serial to go over the side of a cliff in a big fireball.

I was also going to post a bit of politics (or rather anti-politics), but I'm getting the impression people are heartily sick of politics being rammed into their entertainment at the moment.  To be honest I think we only have to put up with it for another year and a half or so.  The previously unsinkable franchise, Star Wars, doesn't look in a good way at the moment, and that going down will likely trigger a seismic shift in the entertainment industry.

But fuck all that.  I'm here to write sexy (and occasionally horrifying) succubus smut.  There are some nice juicy things on the way.  And I'm hoping I'll be able to unveil them in the next week or so (or month, still kinda slow at the writing thing at the moment).

Some Western Erotic Horror Games - "Agony" and "Lust for Darkness"

I'm still beavering away on the next "Escape the Cushionblob" (or Pink Slime girl or Pink Jelly girl) CYOA piece.  Likely because I'm getting carried away and writing too much for each segment, but never mind...

I normally talk about the Japanese sex games, but here are a couple of Western erotic horror games that caught my eye.

Agony is probably the more famous one as it also had a console release.

It's a first person survival horror set in hell.  The aesthetic looks pretty cool.  There are also succubi, other demons with big boobs, various bits of suggestive imagery, and lotz and lotz of claret 'n' gore, if the various trailers are anything to go by.

This one I haven't played.  I was impressed by the look of the game (and tits and succubi).  Unfortunately the reception after release has not been so positive.  From what I've heard the game play and technical stuff don't live up to the promise of the aesthetic.  I'll wait until a patch and sale before giving it a go.

The one I did play was Lust for Darkness.

This has been on my radar since seeing some let's play footage of the demo at the start of the year.  It takes the classic Lovecraftian tropes of cults and eldritch abominations and throws in some kinky sex stuff on top.  You play a husband trying to rescue his wife from a creepy sex cult that kidnapped her a year ago.  The creepy sex cult is attempting to bring a dimension of pure lust into our world with a midnight ritual.  It's first principles Lovecraftian horror, in that the game creates its own eldritch abominations and alien dimensions rather than name-checking Cthulhu and chums.

It also manages the odd feat of being both over-the-top and understated.  You can't walk five paces without seeing a salacious statue, finding a kinky sex toy hidden in a drawer or have a bare-breasted cultist (or demon) jiggle her tits in your face.  But it also seems natural.  You'd expect to see these things in the mansion of the psychopathic leader of a weirdo sex cult, so their presence seems organic rather than crowbarred in for shock value or titillation.

The look of the sex dimension Lusst'ghaa is a little mixed.  They clearly aren't fucking around as you can see right after entering the dimension for the first time:

For me it felt a little too "generic videogame alien world".  The devs chose to base it on the works of Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński, which are weird, but also the sort of weird that's been seen many times over in games with weird alien universes.  It's also your typical alien plane of death.  The booby alien demons seem more interested in slicing you in half and most of the cultists learn fairly quickly that Lusst'ghaa is more interested in tearing them apart than granting them all of their carnal desires.  I would have liked to have seen a sexier (but still dangerous) world.  There is a room near the end with plenty of debauchery on full display, which is fairly imaginative, but I think the game would have benefited from blurring more sexy into the horrific.  Maybe given the main character a few more detailed death scenes rather than a splash of red and fade to black.

Of course, go too far and you run into the problems the Agony people had, so devs have to tread a fine line if they want to be able to actually release and sell their game.

Overall I thought Lust for Darkness was okay if a little short for the price.  It's good to see games experiment with more adult themes/visuals in a way that fits the story.  I hope we see more game devs taking risks on this type of content, and maybe try to push boundaries further.

Update on Next CYOA/Gamebook Scenario

It's not working out.  Looks like I'll have to move onto something else.

/joke

(Although I have done that far too many times with other projects over the last year...)

It's actually moving along quite nicely.  I've planned out the scenario and mapped all the routes through it, along with the various tests the player character needs to perform.

It looks a bit like this:

Oh, and this:

Because I couldn't fit everything on one screen.

I definitely feel like I'm in a "hot" productive phase, so I'm going to keep mining it for as long as it stays "hot".

As I said in the last post, the scenario is going to feature a lovely lady very similar to this one.

Some people asked for it, so I've included some options for non-lethal sex this time around.  She's not quite as predatory as the spider girl, but she will quite happily suck all your good stuff out if the mood takes her.  Escaping with the trophy/statuette should also be a little more of a challenge this time around.

But what we really care about are those Bad End scenes.  Assuming this one pans out the way I've designed it, there will be 4 "good" sex scenes, 5 Bad End scenes and a couple of Very Bad End scenes if you manage to annoy her too much.

I'm now working on writing all the raw text.  I'm estimating it will take about 1-2 weeks to write, type up and edit the scenes and then another week to correctly test and debug the scenario.  The raw text is critical.  Once I've got the big scenes (those sexy Bad Ends) written down, then I'll be confident I'll be able to see this through to completion.  This will be the point I crack open the Patreon and start panhandlin'.  The plan will be to release the finished file to patreons first, and then post the story to philome.la for everyone else a week later.

One question remaining is what to call it.  The H-space Bestiary names I gave monster girls were... variable in quality.

"Escape the Pink Cushionblob" doesn't quite have the right ring to it.

I could use "Escape the Slime Girl", but I have a rough idea of another scenario with a slightly gooier slime girl.

"Escape the Pink Jelly Girl?"

"Escape the Pink Slime Girl?"

Post your thoughts below, as well as anything else you want to say on this.

Working on next CYOA/Gamebook scenario

"Escape the Arachne" has been live a week and has so far nearly racked up 8,000 plays.  I hope you enjoyed it.  If you have any feedback to make it better, please leave it below.

Also, if anyone feels suitably inspired to create some art of L'hesperusa having "fun", feel free to go ahead and send me links of the results.

I'm personally having fun with this and currently in the process of creating the next scenario.  I refactored bits of the arachne scenario to tidy things up and give me a nice generic template to start the next one off from.

I also added a difficulty mode.  All the stats tests are based off rolling 2d6 and comparing the result against the stat.  Currently you only need to roll less than or equal to your stat value to pass the test.  I added a hard mode which changes that to just less than (ties count as failures).

e.g.  Your Strength is 7.  You're asked to perform a Test of Strength.  In Easy mode a roll of 7 would be considered a pass.  In Hard mode a roll of 7 is considered a failure.  You need to roll 6 or less.

This should shift the probabilities around and give the monster girls more opportunities to have "fun" with you.

Changing difficulty mode isn't in the current "Escape the Arachne" scenario, but I will be adding it to future scenarios.

Now about those future scenarios.  As far as I know, there is no way I can package these up and sell them on Amazon, so I will (finally!) be setting up some sort of Patreon to beg for funding for my smutty endeavors.  It will either go live when the next scenario is ready (and I can prove I can deliver) or earlier if I think it will help motivate me to sit at my desk 8+ hours a day.

The Patreon will also include my short story writing, and I'll look at ways to release things early to patreons as part of the rewards (and hopefully get back to posting smut on Literotica again!).

Is there a game here with all this Twine stuff?

At the moment I'm just going to create them as separate scenarios until I figure out the best way to stitch them together.  By going modular like this, even if the whole game plan falls apart, people will at least still have had fun playing a bunch of separate sexy monster girl scenarios.

In case people hadn't already figured it out, the Gold Statuette in "Escape the Arachne" is a placeholder and serves no function other than extra bragging rights when you escape.

This could end up being replaced by a key item if I take the Fighting Fantasy approach of sending players through a fiendish maze and remorselessly killing them off at a checkpoint near the end because they missed the key numbers engraved in a rock in the very first cave.  That would be fun to create, but would require a lot more work to put everything together.

An easier approach would be to treat it as a more perverted Crystal Maze.  Each scenario is a puzzle room where the goal is to escape with a statuette.  At the end a succubus "rewards" you depending on how many statuettes you retrieve.  That would fit very well with a modular structure and allow for juggling of the scenarios so players are encountering them randomly and in different orders.

This is all for future consideration.  For now I want to get 4 or 5 scenarios under my belt first.

As for now I'm working on the next scenario.  It's going to feature a soft and comfy pink cushionblob like the one in this H-space story.  She's waiting to give you a lovely erotic body-to-body massage.

As with the arachne scenario there will be multiple sexy Bad Ends, and maybe some sexy Good Ends as well.

I probably need to give her a different name though.  "Escape the Cushionblob" doesn't have the right ring to it.  Escape the Pink Jelly Girl?

Anyway, let me know your thoughts below?  Do you like the idea of more Gamebook scenarios like the arachne one?

(I haven't forgotten about my other fiction either.  I want to get a serial started back up on here as well.  I'm trying to feel around for the right one.  But while I'm currently excited on this, it makes sense to channel the crazy manic phase into as much productivity as I can while it lasts.)

Along came a spider... Escape the Arachne is live!

Okay, now you can get excited (maybe).

"Escape the Arachne" is live.

I don't know much about the people behind philome.la, so I don't know how long it will be live.  They may take exception to the adult nature of the story and/or some political things I've said in the past and give me the boot.  My long-term plan is to buy some web hosting and post these where I won't have to worry about that sort of thing (or at least, worry about it less).

Now onto the story.  It's short, about the length of a short story.  I intended the scenario to be more a demo/proof of concept.  If you follow the optimal path you can reach the end of the scenario very quickly.  It's also designed to be relatively easy.  Even with average stats you should be able to blunder to the end without too much trouble.  It's also possible to escape without even passing a single stat test.

Of course, it isn't much fun if you do that, so I'd suggest letting L'hesperusa "play" with you a little longer.

There are 6 different Bad Ends available (and one Good End).  5 of these are fairly easy to find.  The last might require a little bit of trial and error (hint: nakedness is an attribute within this scenario).

The whole thing is written in Twine using the SugarCube story format.  As this is a demo/proof of concept I was focusing more on the coding and the text rather than the presentation, so yep, it looks a little basic.  Everything has to start somewhere.  Artwork, sound fx, a prettier GUI are things I can look at in the future.

The game mechanics are very similar to old gamebooks, the Fighting Fantasy series in particular.  If people find the scenario a little too easy and want to L'hesperusa to dominate them a little more I might switch the test probabilities around.  Currently the tests call for rolling equal to or lower than the stat on 2d6.  Giving L'hesperusa the tie (so a pass is only if the roll is less than the stat) would shift the probabilities in her favour.  That's something I'm considering doing.  The current stat tests are a demo version anyway and might be replaced by something more complex at a future date.  (Plus I don't know what patents/copyright/trademarks the Fighting Fantasy series still holds on d6 attribute checks.  My gut feeling is simple attribute tests like this are too generic to patent/copyright, but very stupid patents exist...)

Anyway, I hope people have fun playing with L'hesperusa.  I haven't done any coding for a while, so this was a fun diversion.  Please post feedback (and bugs encountered) below.

If the interest is there, I would like to write more scenarios featuring different monster girls.  Maybe even stitch those scenarios together into a full game.  I'd likely need funding for this (especially if it gets to the point of commissioning artwork etc), so it might be an excuse to finally get that Patreon up and running.  So long as the interest is there.  If people try it out and give it the thumbs down, well it was an experiment that didn't work out (although it was great to do some coding again).

I have no plans to stop doing the other writing.  Ideally I'll have a nice serial up and running next week (although probably not "The Heart Squad" as that's proving stubborn and will likely need to go back onto the backburner).

Hope people enjoyed this little game demo anyway.  Please leave feedback below.

Oh, and I probably should add.  If you like it, please spread the word.  :D

CYOA Testing Stuff

Test Link

DO NOT GET EXCITED.

This is just a test to see what a twine story looks like when hosted (And in this case is a bit of test code I wrote to randomise some choices).  I didn't want to post the demo and then find out it got scrambled on the the upload.

Current hosting site is philome.la.  Not massively enthusiastic about this considering they wanted me to use my twitter handle to login with.  I suspect it's also a platform I might be booted off at any time and will continue with the expectation of that happening at any moment.

I did want to post it here, but Blogger is not really geared up for this type of thing from what I gathered when looking into it.

The real demo is near completion.  I'm just ironing out some bugs and adding text for any segments I might have missed.  Bear in mind, this is a demo, so it will look like ass.  Hopefully the text will make up for it and you'll enjoy your (brief) time with L'hesperusa.


ETA:

Fuck.  Played 294 times.  Didn't I tell you not to get excited.  There's nothing there at the moment.  It's just some test code I threw together to check random choices work.  The real thing will be along in a couple of days hopefully.

And now... Spiders?

Chaos Writing strikes again.

This was supposed to be a continuation of the "Heart Squad" series.  I think that series can be salvaged, but I didn't get a chance to work on it over the weekend.  The reason being I currently have another project screaming very loudly "Work on me!" in my ear.  I did briefly consider ignoring it, but not working on things when they're red-hot in my mind is usually when my productivity goes to hell.  If you wake up and your brain is currently bouncing around going "let's work on this thing", it's usually best from a productivity standpoint to get as much work done on that project while the enthusiasm is there.  So, that's what I'm going to do.

I've got 3 days before I'm off for a work assignment for a week.  I want to see if I can smash as much of this idea as I can before then in case I come back and find the enthusiasm has waned.

I've had a look at where I got to with "The Heart Squad" and think it's retrievable, but I don't want to make it a chore by forcing myself to work on it when something else is screaming for my attention.

As for this mystery project, here's a clue:



You turn and see a monstrous spider woman—an arachne.  Above the waist she has the body of an exotic young woman with voluptuous round breasts.  Below the waist she has the shiny black abdomen and eight long jointed legs of a giant spider.  Straight black hair falls in curtains on either side of a thin and haughtily beautiful face.  Her sensually plump lips are stained black and curled up in a cruel smile.

“Hello, little cricket.  I am L'hesperusa the arachne,” she says.  “I’m going to suck up all your fluids...”

She pauses to run a moist tongue around her sensual lips.

“...through your lovely hard cock.”

Her words send both a shiver of arousal and fear through you.  You don’t think she’ll stop with just your semen.

No time to dwell on that now.  The arachne rears up on her long spindly legs and points the tip of her bulbous black abdomen in your direction.  It looks like she’s taking aim.

Test of Agility



This will probably be the only post this week as I'm going to hammer away on this thing while it's hot.  I have written a lot of text for it over the last few weeks, but I'm not 100% sure on how it will fit together.  At the worst, if my programming skills fail me, I'll post the raw text for people's enjoyment.

(L'hesperusa really really likes playing with her prey...)

Wrapping up Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] and moving on

I was going to go into a little more detail on the gameplay and mechanics, but I think people are getting antsy for me to move on... :)

Not much more to say.  As a game MQ:P just about holds up, mainly on the strengths of the characters, story and the wide variety of weird, wonderful and mostly sexy monster girl designs.  The JRPG elements are still too grindy IMHO, and not the best fit for the femdom-esque Bad Ends, although the series does have a harem element not present in the original series.  Overall, I think TTR's baby, while still very good, is in danger of being dethroned by other up-and-coming whippersnappers.  Tokinokogiri's Succubus Prison is probably the benchmark for hot succubus/monster girl Bad Ends now and even Dieselmine managed to raise their game with Monmusu Labyrinth.

She really likes to give you a good squeeze (Succubus Prison)

The main thing MQ:P lacks now is animation for the Bad End scenes and I'm not sure how easy that would be to add given that the Monster Girl Quest series' greatest strength has been the sheer number and variety of monster girls.  That's a lot of dicking around with puppeting tools to get all those boobies bouncing around in a pleasing manner.  Used selectively, maybe...  One of MQ:P [part 2]'s biggest weaknesses is that all the monster girl queens fought later in the game are repeat encounters from the original series.  A little bit of sneaky puppeting/animation might have given those old sex scenes a fresh twist.

Boobies bouncing around in a pleasing manner (Monmusu Labyrinth)

Anyway, that's enough on Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] for now.

I suspect you're more interested in the moving on part.

I definitely want to get back to some original fiction.  The odd blip aside, the thrice-weekly posting schedule I used for the MQ:P series worked pretty well for me.  I'd like to apply that same discipline to my original fiction and see where it takes me (ideally the raw material for a new book I can submit to my publisher every 4-6 months).

What is something I haven't yet decided.  I'm still in the middle of some upheaval as I have another trip (this time for work) scheduled to knock out most of next week.  Getting back to and finishing off "The Heart Squad" seems like a decent interim project before I decide whether to launch into Succubus Summoning 301 or something completely different.

If work on "The Heart Squad" starts flowing again, expect that to resume Friday (or Monday).  If it's still stuck, expect a bit of wibbly-wobbly inconsistency while I pick something else to work on.

There is something else I've been tinkering with recently, an old project dragged off hiatus.  That does appear to be going somewhere, but I'll hold off on posting more about it until I have something a little more presentable.

Does this mean you're done with Japanese monster girl games?

I think I'll lay off the extended "Let's Play" series for a while.  It's been too long since I last submitted a book to my publishers and I need to concentrate on my own fiction for a bit.

Ideally, I would like to keep reviewing the good ones as they come out, but there is an issue here unrelated to clashes with my other work.  Windows 10 appears to be in some kind of weird arms race with the tools I use for text-hooking and machine translation.  Every Windows 10 update broke my tools.  I was able to keep going by reverting the Windows updates, but in the end I was in a race against time to actually finish MQ:P before a deadline where I'd have to either accept those updates or leave my machine unsupported.  So, as of now, I'm back to having no means of hooking and auto-translating Japanese games.  This currently makes playing and reviewing them rather difficult.

Assuming I can fix this, I'd have to have a long think before doing another big series on MQ:P [part 3] when it comes out.  It would be nice to do it to complete the series, but I'd have to think carefully about how to do it in a way that doesn't swallow up all of my time.  Running two series alongside each other doesn't work for me (as you may have noticed when my schedule went to hell right after starting posting "The Heart Squad"), so I might look at some kind of one month on, one month off schedule to prevent my blog being completely swamped by MQ:P stuff.

I suspect that will be a long way off though.  I imagine TTR still has plenty to do before unleashing the final chapter of Paradox on the world.

Lest we forget MQ:P also has some very nice succubi (Monmusu Quest: Paradox)

Anyway, I hope those of you that enjoyed the series, enjoyed it, and apologies to those who felt it ran on for way too long.

Friday (or Monday) I think it's time we found out what happened to that software engineer on his very special Valentine's Night...

Is Away

I was hoping to prepare the final two bits on Monmusu Quest: Paradox in advance to post while I was away.  Unfortunately travel preparations and other stuff wrecked that plan.

I'll be back next Wednesday.

Closing thoughts on Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] - Plot & Characters

I’m off on other things for about half a week and as I was unable to prepare a week’s worth of new material in time to post here, I thought I’d have a quiet week wrapping up the Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] series with some thoughts on the game.

Yes, I know some of you are probably sick of this by now.  Don’t worry.  It’s done and I’ll be onto new stuff next week (hopefully back to some original fiction).

First up, we might as well take a gander at the story and characters.

Plot and story still seem pretty strong.  You could probably make an anime out of the game plot and it not be terrible.  This has always given the Monster Girl Quest series an edge over similar games featuring hapless (lucky?) heroes and nymphomaniac monster girls.

Part 2 threw up some answers for the weirdness in Luka’s paradox world.

The tartarus regions were caused by an experiment going wrong in Remina.  In the canon world, Ilias blew it up.  In this world their experiment summoned a Black Alice from the future.  This is the Black Alice from the original series right after her defeat at the hands of Luka.  Before that fight she’d devoured Ilias, but been unable to balance the forces of light and dark within her.  The version summoned to Remina does and ascends to godhood.

To be fought in part 3

The reason this is able to happen is because the Ilias of the original series stressed the laws of her universe by constantly rewinding time to pull Luka out of demonic vagina (all those Bad Ends were canon after all).  Then, when she was slain by Luka and friends, this poked holes all over the place and caused a bunch of bunch of alternate realities to bud off the main world, including the one where Black Alice was dragged back through time.

Paradox!Luka’s world was the first to bud off.  Black Alice ascending to godhood blew up Remina and spread the tartarus regions through the world (I think).  She also knocked a chunk of heaven out of the sky, which is how the snow continent came to be.

I think this is the Black Alice we saw in the mysterious tower back in part 1.  I would expect her to be one of the major antagonists if not the overall Big Bad of part 3.

We also got Lilith, Astaroth and Morrigan’s motivations.  Unsurprisingly they are sort of on our side.  Morrigan was recruited at the end of the part 2, and I’m guessing we’ll probably pick up Astaroth and Lilith at some point.  On the Alice route, anyway.  Those on the Ilias route will get their own exclusive angels.

The succubi are representative of a world where the monster girls came out on top.  Of those we’ve only seen an alternate version of Tamamo.  I expect we’ll see the other five legendary ancestors in part 3, as well as the other angel representatives from the world where Ilias reigns unimpeded.  These will likely be side factions we have to deal with about two thirds of the way through the final chapter.  (Not going to lie, looking forward to the monster girl ancestor scenes).

Also to be fought in part 3.  Who are you most looking forward to?

Sonya was revealed to be apoptosis, but is now back to normal (or a copy of normal if on the Ilias route).  I’m still not sure of the overall role of chaos.  They appear to be trying to fix causality by deleting all the deviating worlds.  Adramalech was better fleshed out as a world-ending abomination.  I expect we’ll see her again.  At this point I don’t know whether we’ll end up allying with this faction or fighting it as the over-arching enemy (over even Black Alice).  I could see it going either way.

Also, I’m not totally sure on this (machine translation etc etc), but I think paradox!Ilias might have been the source of the chaotization in paradox world.  There is some sense to this.  Black Alice arrived back in time with Ilias digesting in her stomach, creating a paradox of two Ilias’s being present at the same time in the same reality.  It’s a theory anyway.

Likely not appearing in part 3, this version anyway

That Ilias fell apart at the end of part 2.  We still have loli Ilias running around.  I’m not sure what part she’ll play in part 3 (or Alice if you picked Ilias at the start of the game).  She did sort of vanish from the plot after Grangold.  A more wayward prediction is you have to fight her (or Alice) at the end of part 3.

Nero and Neris’s role is still unclear.  Nero was keen to chase down the white rabbit and they did appear to oppose Tamamo.  I’m guessing most of these various factions will set aside their differences and unite versus either chaos or Black Alice in part 3.

Speaking of the White Rabbit, I wonder if we’ll see her again.  It was a little bit of a letdown that she turned out be nothing more than a creation of Ilias, and with paradox!Ilias gone, I wonder if that’s it for our annoyingly cryptic bunny girl.

Looking in doubt for part 3 unless she's something more than Ilias's tool

The one weakness I think the ending of part 2 had in comparison to other MGQ chapter endings is that it left the objectives rather muddy (unless I missed some nuance in translation).  Part 1 had us returning from a dying reality with the knowledge we had to do something awesome to save the universe.  The ending of part 2 feels a little aimless.  We were going to confront Alice 15th to prevent a war, but she’s dead, killed by Marcellus, and we find out the only reason she wanted that war in the first place was to try and save all worlds from being eroded away by chaos.

In the original series, chapter 2 ended with the twist of psycho Ilias and made it clear part 3 would be about stopping her.  As for the end of part 2 of MQ:P, we still appear to be heading to Helgondo, but at this point I don’t see a clear reason why.  Also, I really hope part 3 avoids the mistakes of MGQ and takes us off somewhere new.  I don’t want to be retreading the same path to pick up the elemental spirits again.

Going off in a new direction would also avoid what was the low point of part 2 for me—the repetition from the original series.  The monster girl queens were definitely less interesting because we’d already seen them before, including their Bad End scenes, in the original Monster Girl Quest games.

The high point was probably the tartarus version of Remina castle.  It’s hard to make RPGmaker creepy and skinned-alive people stuck in walls spouting random gibberish was definitely creepy (and again would make great scenes in an anime or more advanced game).

Creepier even than one of Delphinus's angel girls

Of the new characters, I liked Mephisto and Alicetroemeria.  Mephisto taking “to the letter” to extremes in order to aid us against Alice 15th while still being fanatically loyal to Alice 15th was nicely drawn.  Alicetroemeria, the past version of Black Alice, was also amusingly loopy.  She also seemed mischievous rather than malicious and I hope the plot makes use of her as we close in on her alternate reality counterpart.

For sexy smexy—Lilith.

More Lilith boobs for part 3 plz!

Oh yes, Lilith.  Yup.  I’m a sucker for big boobs.  Can’t wait for more Lilith in part 3.

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] - 63: Final Side Quests and Recruiting Alma Elma

Beginning

<- Previous: The Final Boss

Wotcha doing Hydra?  Isn’t the game done?  Haven’t the final credits rolled?

Well yes.  But there are a couple of side quests that open up after the final credits.  Yes, I know side quests aren’t normally that interesting or important, but these add some juicy background info, so I thought I should cover them.

La Croix

La Croix’s circus of zombie monster girl queens has various pictures in the graphics folder, so I knew they’d show up at some point.  As we got further and further into the game I was wondering if they’d be the final boss to mirror alt!La Croix being the last NPC encountered in part 1.  Then with the snow continent and all the angels it became clear that the plot had moved past that point.

La Croix can be found in the mysterious ruins southeast of the Bird God Shrine.

Here, again

The first time we came here, Alice warned us that the monsters were too powerful for our current level and advised leaving well alone.  Return here after the credits and she’s happy for us to explore as we’ve already encountered and defeated plenty of the same chimera monster girls in the Ilias Temple Ruins.

We also now have a way of opening the door to the old research lab.  It uses the same keycard that we picked up while being sent back in time to the catastrophe at Remina.

(I suspect it also opens the locked door in the Remina castle tartarus region as well, but I didn’t get around to trying as I still haven’t levelled up enough to open the tier III chests.)

There are a few chests and plenty of gravestones in the ruins.  La Croix can be found on the top floor.  You walk in on her while she’s in the middle of an argument with the doll master girl from the mysterious tower in part 1.

Professional disagreements

La Croix is trying to persuade the doll master, unsuccessfully, to not follow Black Alice as she intends to destroy everything.  The argument being “you create, why follow someone hellbent on destroying everything?”

The doll master remains unpersuaded and teleports away, leaving us with La Croix.

Who immediately sics her zombie circus on us, despite Chrome’s best efforts to get through to her sister.

First wave of zombie monster girl queens

The circus attacks in two groups of three.

Second wave.  We also have too many Queen Harpy entries in the database.

There is the same group Bad End as the original series.  Each member also has their own separate scene that can be requested after they’re recruited.  I can’t remember if these are new or not.  Also, while checking the graphics folder of one of the more recent patches, I noticed TTR has added artwork of the circus members in their original non-zombified forms.

Former Queen Harpy when she was looking a little... fresher

I’m not sure what they’re doing there, but it’s cool to see the old monster girl queens in their original forms.  Maybe we’ll encounter them in part 3.

After we beat her zombies, La Croix acknowledges Chrome has found some strong companions.  She still possesses the same doomed fatalism her original series version had, but Chrome is able to knock her out of this by telling her about her alternate reality counterpart - the one that held on to document the end of a doomed world in the hope that one day her research could be used by someone wanting to prevent the same thing happening to their world.  The only one that could understand these notes is another La Croix, so this La Croix takes them on and leaves to research their contents.  She bequeaths her circus to us in order to continue the fight.  Six more new recruits to Luka’s harem army.

Another top-level job unlock item can be found on the table to the right.  At this point I think I have them all apart from the one (or more) that need to be won off Lazarus in the pocket castle casino.

Funnily enough, if you talk to Titania (the zombie fairy queen) back in the castle with Alicetroemeria, she’s the only one that recognises and dares to acknowledge Black Alice for who she really is.  She even asks her why she’s disguised herself as a wizard.

“Mischief,” Alicetroemeria replies.

I do like this incarnation of Black Alice.  I’m really curious to see how she features in the plot of part 3.

Overall, I thought the La Croix side quest felt a little tacked on.  As if TTR knew he needed to include it, but couldn’t quite fit it in cleanly.

Morrigan’s Side Quest

Morrigan’s side quest is worth doing as it gives a lot of interesting background info, an extremely powerful new party member, and leaves us with a nice post-credits stinger for the next part.

Her side quest pops up on the main notice board after she joins the party.  She wants to go to the underground research lab in Luddite Village.  Promestein also wants to come along.

The quest objective is again the machinery at the back of the lab where we first picked up Hild.

Back again.  The 3rd time now?

Once you get there Morrigan will go into more detail about the shikibi’s plan, and why they didn’t run when the world looked utterly destroyed.

The simple reason is they couldn’t.  They cannot travel between realities.  Only Luka, Marcellus and gods can do that.  They got here through the same method they’re using to transfer all the souls back to their world.  When the soul is transferred, it merges with its counterpart on the monster girl world and they sort of amalgamate back into a shared personality.  This is what Morrigan and sisters did.  They merged with their counterparts here and broke them out of whatever was sealing them away.

And yes, that does mean what you think it means.  Morrigan confirms it right after.  In order to do this, they had to kill themselves in the other world.  This becomes especially poignant when you realise that even if their plan succeeds, they themselves would be unable to go back.  That is some unexpected insight into their character and motives.

This does leave a slight plot hole around alt!Tamamo’s appearance in Grangold Castle, but the game even thinks of that, although with machine translation I found the explanation a little hard to parse.  I think it’s a projection, or related to how Tamamo can break her seal to manifest in her weaker loli-fox form.

Oh, and that new recruit?  She comes along right after.

There's our gal

This answers something I was wondering about.  I’d heard Alma Elma could be recruited post-credits, but didn’t know how.

Unsurprisingly, she’s not going to let us do this without a fight.  She feels Morrigan is owed a good kicking and will not be persuaded otherwise.  Yes, she is technically on our side, but she’s also the Queen Succubus and feels strongly that she should not allow other succubi to behave with such brutality.  Morrigan tries to explain they had “reasons” (and fuck those assholes in the Luddite Village anyway), but Alma Elma is not going to be swayed.  So, fight.

This is a proper fight as well.  Alma Elma isn’t going to hold anything back, so you’re probably going to need the same party you fought Sonya Chaos with, otherwise Alma Elma will seduce everyone and trigger a mass orgy pile-on for lucky poor Luka.

After you beat her, Alma Elma will join the party for good.

There is also a nice stinger to prep us for part 2.  Promestein copies the files and as she does so she mentions they're called the “the Laplace Protocols.”  Interesting...

And that seems an appropriate place to leave it.

I hope you've enjoyed this series.  It took quite a bit longer and was a lot more work than I anticipated, but was still fun to do.  I don’t use a Patreon or anything like that to fund this, but I do have various books available on Amazon (and other online bookstores - I write under the name M.E. Hydra).  If you’ve enjoyed this series and would like to show your appreciation, please feel free to pick up one (or more!) of my books.  They are also packed full of sexy Bad Ends given out by delectable succubi and other monster girls.  If you like the MGQ series, you’ll also enjoy my books.

Next week I’ll tag on a few lightweight posts with my overall thoughts on the series while I work out what to move onto next (I'm fully aware I've been neglecting my own fiction of late and want to take steps to correct this).

Before I go, the Alma Elma fight did finally answer one question I'd had since looking up her Bad End scene artwork in the graphics folder.  There was one picture that wasn't used in her request scenes and I did wonder whether it had been scratched out for being a little bit too far.

Nope, it's used here.

The nicest of gals... the worst of fates...

Yep, Luka buddy.  I’d highly recommend not losing this particular fight.

And that seems a perfect footnote to end things on.  Thanks for reading!