Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Many-Eyed Hydra makes a Monster Girl Hentai Game: CYOA with Twine (part 1)

I’ve been saying for a while I’d like to make a monster girl hentai game.  Rather than just thinking and talking about it I thought I’d finally get my finger out of my ass and get around to creating something.  As I thought it might be an interesting topic to blog about you’re going to get the whole gory process right here.

I do have programming experience, but it’s mainly with generic languages such as Java and C#, and mainly making dull-but-functional desktop applications for manipulating probabilities and other maths.  One of the reasons why I’ve always thought about making games rather than getting down to actually making them is an unfortunate tendency to dream up projects that are stupidly complex and ambitious.  This time I’ll start with something small and simple.

My main strength lies in writing.  I’ve written a lot of stories featuring kinky sex scenes with succubi and other monster girls.  Because of this it makes sense for me to start with a text-heavy game.  Unfortunately text-heavy won’t attract as much attention as games with nice artwork of sexy monster girls, but it will give me something to start with (and I can always source artwork from other sources later).  Examples of popular text-heavy monster girl hentai games can be found over on Fenoxo’s site.  I’m sure most of you out there know of the existence of Corruption of Champions.

I won’t try to make anything as complex as CoC to start with.  First off I’ll start with a simple Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA).  This will allow me to take the type of scene I normally fill my stories with and juice it up with a bit of interaction for the reader.

Next up is to look for tools.  In the past another of my weaknesses was to bang my head against a wall trying to build game engines from scratch.  There is no need to reinvent the wheel if someone else has already put a perfectly decent toolkit together.

Twine is “an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.”  It was created by Chris Klimas in 2009.  I have no real experience of working with it.  People recommended giving it a look on the MGU forums and a quick check of the wiki revealed it has additional functionality should I want to move on to something more complex than a simple CYOA.  This is important as I do have some ideas for adding player stats and other variables.  From what I read, Twine should be more than sufficient in creating gamebooks along the lines of the classic Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf series (Personally I always had a soft spot for J. H. Brennan’s GrailQuest).

That will be the next step.  For now I’ll keep to a vanilla CYOA.

Now I have a toolkit to play around with it’s time to think about what story I want to tell.  As I want to keep it simple this will be a single interactive encounter with a sexy monster girl.  Originally I thought it might be a slime girl similar to the one I wrote about in "Jackson in HRPG-World 3" (Japanese monster girl HRPGs always seem to have a blue slime girl as the first encounter – a nod to Dragon Quest, I think).  Then I remembered thinking about this before and the plan had been to base it on a short story of mine: “Ways to Break a Good Man, #1”.

Unfortunately, that story is exclusive to my last collection, A Succubus for Remembrance and other tales, so I can’t just link to it as I would to any of my other tales up on Literotica.  It’s a good story to use as a template as it has an ontological mystery-esque start and a clearly defined challenge.  In summary, the protagonist wakes up in a hotel room after being drugged and . . . actually, let’s go right to succubus involved.  Here's the gorgeous and charming Ceptophthorié with the full details.

Hi.

Now Ceptophthorié, you’re a princess of hell?

Yes, that’s correct.

That means you’re an extremely powerful succubus, right?

Yes.

And you know a lot of sexy tricks?

I know many ways to cause intense sexual pleasure.

Um . . . yes . . . interesting.  *adjusts collar.*  So can you tell us what this game will be?

It’s a really simple game.  The easiest possible.  All the player has to do is go the whole night without choosing to have sex with me.

Hmm.  Are you sure?  That does sound a little eas . . .

. .

. .

. .

Ceptophthorié, please don’t suck the soul out of this human.  We need him to spread our corruption through this world.

Okay.  As you wish.

. .

. .

Um yeah, where was I.  Right, yes.  “Ways to Break a Good Man, #1”.  This will form a nice template for my interactive story.  The player will be placed in a similar predicament to the unfortunate (fortunate?) Norris King.  And obviously we’ll give the lovely Ceptophthorié a few more tricks with which to tempt the reader.

It should be fun.  Keep an eye on this blog!

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Many-Eyed Hydra's 2014 (It wasn't the best . . .)

2014 kind of sucked for me personally.

I had to scrap plans to put out a new collection in March as it wasn’t ready and then ended up not putting out any new books at all for the entire year.  While I did keep the Succubus Summoning series moving, I still fell short of my plan to make it a stable, monthly serial.

On the real life front the second half of the year was especially disastrous.  I lost most of August to stomach flu from hell and then September delivered a bigger whammy as I lost the job I’d held for the last seven years.  This was especially whammy-ish as I’d been working abroad.  No job meant no work permit and no work permit meant I had to leave the place I’d been living for the past five years and move back to grey old Britain.  If you’d been wondering why my #DailyWriting updates had dried up over the past couple of months then here’s your answer (unsurprisingly, losing your job tends to be bad for the self esteem regardless of how much money they give you to fuck off).

Tacking back to more positive waters, I did manage to get a fair bit of writing done in 2014.  While updates to Succubus Summoning were typically sporadic, I did get four new chapters out (208, 209, 210, 211).  I’ll look to complete the current arc early 2015 with the collected eBook version following soon after.  In 2014 I also put four brand new short stories up on Literotica: “A Real-Life Goo Girl”, “Busted Bankster”, “The High-School Sweetheart Removal Agency” and “What Kevin Did Last Summer”.  These weren’t the only short stories I wrote.  Currently I have another eight short stories waiting on my hard drive for suitable collections to include them in.

On the blog I tried out something new with some detailed playthroughs of monster girl hentai games like Violated Hero.  They didn’t help too much with book sales, but they did boost traffic to the blog, were fun to do and people seemed to like them.  I’ll be doing more of them next year, but I’ll be a little choosier over the games I pick as the Let’s Plays do soak up time and effort that could be devoted to writing as I mentioned here.  If Monmusu Quest: Paradox comes out next year I will be covering that for certain.

On the subject of time that is one thing I will have considerably more of next year.  While losing a regular source of income sucks dogs’ diseased dicks, I was at least sent on my way with a reasonable severance package.  Or Many-Eyed Hydra’s writing grant for 2015 as we like to call it.  At the moment my projects file is currently brimming with ideas for short stories, serials and novels.  I’ve been itching to get at it before those ideas go stale.  Next year will give me an opportunity to hammer out a lot of new material.  I’ve also got some other monster girl/succubus ideas I want to try out.  If the year works out and I’m able to balance the finances, I’ll keep going.  If not I’ll dust off the CV, re-enter the job market and be thankful I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to try out something as crazy as this.

Anyway, let’s hope 2015 will be a blinder of a year filled with plentiful sexy succubus smut!

Friday, December 26, 2014

Hentai Game Review - Vampire and Hunter

What do you get for 89 cents?  In Vampire and Hunter’s case a short mini-game and a longish H-scene with a sexy vampire.


The mini-game is a bit scrappy.  You run around a single hall trying to tag the vampire seductress while avoiding the various spells and flames flung in your direction.  The collision detection is a bit wonky and the text windows slow the pace down with frequent interruptions.  It’s an example of using the wrong tool for the job.  RPGMaker clones are designed to create RPGs – generally slower-paced games with turn-based combat and tons of stats – and this feels like it’s trying to be an action game.

Not sure RPGMaker-type tools were designed for this...

The H-scene isn’t bad.  For their previous game I though the text descriptions were imaginative but could have done with some art.  This time we get the art – an animated sequence of the big-titted vampire having sex with the hunter while drinking his blood.  The scales are a bit weird – either the vampire princess is disconcertingly large or the hero very short – but other than that the animation gives it a bit of life.  Unfortunately, it’s the only scene.

Double slurped...

The whole thing feels like a demo or proof of concept.  Then again it is only 89 cents.  If sexy blood- and semen-sucking vampiresses are your thang it might be worth a look.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Hentai Game Look - In the Castle of Succubi

Text, text and yet more text.  That’s the short summary of In the Castle of Succubi.


Like its predecessor, House of Monster Girls, In the Castle of Succubi is less a game and more a visual novel with the occasional choice (usually along the lines of ‘Would you like this particular succubus to bonk your brains out?’).  Also like its predecessor, In the Castle of Succubi is aimed squarely at fans of big breasts.  All of the succubi are blessed with super-ginormous norks and there is an emphasis on paizuri (titwank) scenes.

The plot has you play an adventurer of some description that falls foul of a trap in the demons’ castle.  This puts you at the mercy of a succession of lovely succubi who are all very keen to take good care of you.  Their idea of care seems to involve wrapping their soft mammaries around your dick and rubbing up and down until all that inconvenient tension floods right out.

Much much much rubbing up and down.

There are six succubi in total.  The first part of the visual novel goes through each giving you paizuri in turn.  The second part has some choices and a wider range of sex acts.

Unfortunately, like its predecessor, In the Castle of Succubi has an ungodly amount of text.  This is definitely not shying away from the novel part of visual novel.  Be prepared to do a lot of clicking, and clicking, and clicking, to move to the next juicy big-boobed succubus pic.  In the end I lost patience with trying to follow the machine-translated text and resorted to clicking through like mad just to get to the next scene.  To me it seemed like there was about four times as many lines of description as there needed to be.  I appreciate this is probably an unfair criticism.  If you were to take one of my stories and bung it in a visual novel framework with a couple of naughty pics to illustrate it, I’m sure it would be just as frustrating for a non-English-speaking Japanese person to attempt to read.

No matter how well endowed you are, she's still going to smother it.

One for big boob lovers, although the amount of text to wade through is daunting.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Hydra's Inspiration - A Succubus for Valentine's Day (part 3)

This is a look behind the scenes at how the stories of my second collection, A Succubus for Valentine's Day, came to be.  The first part is here.


Venus of the Red Lights

I’ve visited Amsterdam a few times and De Wallatjes (better known as the main red light district) is an evocative location for a horror story.  In fact this idea is a leftover from my days when I tried to write “normal” horror.  Most of the non-supernatural elements of this story are based on firsthand experience or stories I’d heard.


The Soul Worm

I have no idea where the monster girl from this one came from.  They bubble up from the depths of my imagination every so often and I think it’s best not to pry further.

At the end is a blink-and-you’ll miss appearance of a character you’ll see more of in the future.


Foam Shower

This is the follow-up to “Bubble Bath”.  The unusual succubus from that is just as pleasant to share a shower with as she is with sharing a bath.  Sadly, those pleasures are invariably fatal, but we can’t have everything.


A Summer Dance with a Succubus

One of the pleasures of writing is when a story comes together and all of the elements slot neatly into place.  I’d read a few articles about sex workers who provided services to disabled persons who would otherwise not experience the pleasures of sexual intercourse.  This was something I could see my “good” succubus escort character, Nicole, doing.  I also needed a story for a summer-themed contest and one of the things about summer is it’s ephemeral – all summers end to be swallowed by the dark and cold of winter.  Some lives are also tragically short and ephemeral.  But rather than obsess over the coming cold and dark, we enjoy the sunshine and long lazy days while they last.  And life is no different.  That’s how I pictured Terry – proud and defiantly making the best of an unfortunate hand.

This was the first of my stories to place in the Literotica contests and I used the money from that to buy a Kindle from Amazon.  It’s still one of my favourites to this day.


I hope you've enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at how some of my stories came to be.  I'll do the same for A Succubus for Halloween at some point in the future.