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.