A belated November update

Apologies for the belated update.  I've had some dental work done which has knocked me about a bit (having bits of metal screwed into your skull will do that!).

So, what has Hydra been up to?

As part of my commitment to patrons, I've been looking at posting story ideas from my ideas file and behind-the-scenes looks at some of my stories.  I wanted to do a piece on H-space, but I wasn't really happy with how that piece was turning out.  Mostly, I was unhappy with how long it was taking.  When I'm in slow, scratchy periods of writing, pieces like that sometimes eat up far too much of the day.  That's time that should be spent writing fiction or creating CYOAs.

(This is the reason I stopped writing the more general blog posts on other subjects – I'm not very quick at writing them and it's time that should be spent writing more useful things.)

I don't want to stop writing those pieces, or the game reviews, walkthrough etc.  Currently I'm experimenting with zoning off bits of the day so I can write these bits'n'bobs without suddenly looking up and realising I've wasted most of the day dicking about on some less-important paragraphs when I could have been bashing out another short story/chapter.

I'll come back to the H-space behind-scenes-stuff article at a later date.  I've been trying to think about what to do with the H-space bestiary.  I think I can make a good collection (or collections) with the material I have, but I think the current stories need a little more fleshing out before I'd be comfortable publishing them (and others) as an ebook.

In the meantime, I've set aside an hour a day.  I'll use it for the more general posts to keep both the manyeyedhydra blog ticking over with new content as well as give some nice behind-scenes insights for patrons.

(Although, for the next week it's mostly going to be needed for filing my tax returns.  Blegh.)

As for actual writing.  That was a little spotty about the time of having dental work, but is moving quite rapidly again.  The first draft of the boob monster girl story is pretty much done and I'm about 2K words into typing it up.  I'm hoping to have that done in the next couple of days.  It will be a patreon exclusive, I'm afraid, but only a temporary one.  I'm getting close to enough material for another ebook, and it will be included in the next collection.

I put the CYOA on the backburner a little while I was focused on getting the boob monster girl sort story written.  That should jump back to the forefront now the first draft of said boob monster girl story is done.  I'm targeting end December/early January for that, although it might slip depending on how difficult the central mechanic proves to implement in Twine.

And that's that for this week.  I'm still looking to find the right day for these update posts, so expect them to slide around a little until I find a slot that fits.

-manyeyedhydra

A brief look at Toro Toro Resistance's new thing

Toro Toro Resistance (とろとろレジスタンス) is the person (people?) behind Monster Girl Quest and Monmusu Quest: Paradox.  You might be familiar with those.  I've talked a lot about them in the past.

Toro Toro Resistance has a new thing on the way.

It's... uh... different?

This is going to present a challenge.  How to talk about this without coming off like an overly judgmental prick or have the rozzers knocking on my front door tomorrow morning with a warrant to examine the contents of my hard drive.

I checked out the demo (it can be downloaded from Toro Toro Resistance's blog).  In structure it seems very similar to the Monster Musume HYAKURAN Vol. 1 product TTR put out between MQ:P 1 and MQ:P 2.  i.e. Rather than being a game, it's more a collection of illustrated Bad End scenes selected from a menu.

Choices... choices...

The demo has two encyclopedia entries and an introductory section showing off the artwork for some of the other things that will likely appear in the finished product.  I don't have access to machine translation at the moment, so I can't give more information than what's in the blurb or can be google-translated from Toro Toro's blog.

The main difference to Monster Musume HYAKURAN vol. 1 - and I imagine this will be the main deal-breaker for a lot of Monster Girl Quest fans (it is for me, to be fair) - is this time the monsters don't have the girl part tacked on.  Instead of cum-hungry succubi, harpies, slime girls and the like, there are cum-hungry leeches, insects, plants, worms, slimes, and other oddities.

I think nope.

I'm guessing each will have a encyclopedia entry detailing their stats and a Bad End scene/story.

The central framing device is an unusual shop selling sex toys, with the witchy owner telling stories about their use in a variety of settings.

That in itself doesn't seem a bad idea.  I can see the erotic potential in a witch selling a variety of unusual and living sex toys, which are just a bit too good at sucking semen out of their unsuspecting users.

Slurp? Mmm... nope.

This is not exactly new territory for TTR either.  Their earlier voice dramas had some scenarios where the femdom villainess would set some crazy biological cum-sucking device loose on the hapless (lucky?) hero.  I just didn't think those scenarios were as hot or as sexy as when the villainess set a sexy spider-girl or alraune loose on the hero.

But... diff'r'nt strokes for diff'r'nt folks and all that.

Nope nope nope nope.

However, there is a massive elephant in the room concerning the age of the (un)lucky individuals getting to try out these exotic sex toys.  The work's title is The Encyclopedia of Tentacles for Boys Vol. 1.  The artwork I've seen definitely puts it into the shota-esque category.

While I am intrigued to see what bizarre and exotic organic sex toys TTR's devious mind can come up with, I wish they'd set them loose on a cast of gormless eighteen-year-old university or college students.  It's hard to enjoy a good wank over a sexy witch and her selection of fantastical sex toys when you're concerned someone else (the authorities especially!) might consider the Bad End scenes child porn.

WTF!!!!  Nope!

Kudos to TTR for trying something different, but I think I'll pass on this in these outrage-hungry times and wait for MQ:P 3.

(There's also not enough hawt femdom succubus boobage for my liking.)

Nop...  Hmm, wait.  How much...?

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.