Wednesday, October 09, 2019

1st Harlot in the House - Sapoonismenos Nerei

"The House of Hellish Harlots" has progressed a little further than the brainstorming stage.  I've prototyped the main game loop in Twine and now added the first harlot scenario.

She is the lovely Sapoonismenos Nerei.  She loves giving out soapy massages (but handle with care!).

So far I'm pretty happy with how things are going.  The idea dropped neatly into place.  And now the code looks like it's doing the same.

I'll probably hit some fuck-off iceberg somewhere, because there's always some big fuck-off iceberg somewhere in game development.  For now things look promising.  At least for the initial text-only version.

For now, regular updates are only on patreon.  I know not everyone can subscribe there, so I'll try to get those demos out to everyone else at some point.  Not sure how yet, but I'll figure something out.

I'm still fairly excited about this.  If it pans out the way I'm hoping it will pan out, it will be a nice framework to continually add new monster girls and succubi to.  (And somewhere to park the more interesting monster girls and succubi ideas until I have a proper story/novel for them.)

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

"House of Hellish Harlots" brainstorming

After talking about game ideas I can't build, let's have one I think I can build.  I'm excited about this one and currently bashing the code together in Twine.

(x-posted from my patreon)

I mentioned it at the end of the last post, so here's a bit more on how the "House of Hellish Harlots" brainstorming is going.

The original idea has changed a few times.  I plotted out the intro thinking it would be the start to a gamebook along similar lines to Fighting Fantasy's "House of Hell".  When I implemented it in Twine I was thinking it would be the introduction to a framing device to hold the "Escape the [monster girl]" scenarios.

The idea was this:

The player would find themselves in a supernatural brothel.  Every round the madam would give the player the choice of three succubus harlots.  Each succubus would have her own "Escape" scenario and the player would have to survive several rounds without being Bad Ended to win the game.  Various NPCs in the brothel would give the player hints on how to survive these scenarios.

I don't have a problem with coming up with sexy Bad Ends, but I was struggling to think up good puzzles, and the ones I had were starting to get too complicated.  I also didn't have any kind of progression system.  It was just a series of puzzles with no real link between them.

Playing "Lobotomy Corporation" was the lightbulb moment.  Inspired by the SCP Foundation, that game has a large bestiary of weird objects/entities.  These entities have relatively simple triggering conditions to determine whether they play nice, kill the employee studying them, or even break containment and rampage through your complex.  The difficulty comes from those triggering conditions being hidden from the player.

Which gets me back to my current ideas for "House of Hellish Harlots".

The background is the same.  The player arrives at the mysterious brothel.  They have an array of physical (strength, etc) and personality (confidence, etc) attributes.

Each round the player is presented with three harlots.

They then have a short phase where they can consult NPCs or buy items within the club.

After that phase they must pick a harlot.  (There will be options to 'mulligan' and pick from 3 new harlots, but these will be rare.)

After picking a harlot, the harlot will then go to her room.  Before the player follows, he has to select a gift to take up to her room.  Outside the door the player will have to decide on what attitude they will have on entering the room (dominant, submissive, funny, charming…).

Then they enter the room and the 'fun' stuff happens.  Depending on various factors, the harlot will give the player a good time, a very good time, a terminally lethal time, a bad time, or just eat them.  Sometimes there will be a puzzle option and choices (but not to the complexity of previous scenarios), but mostly it will be dependent on various factors.

Examples of these are the player's stats, the gift, the attitude they bring to the room, some decisions made in the room, certain items (charms) they might be carrying, player's semen level, girls they've visited previously…  A lot, in other words.  The game will also not be telling you why you get a particular scene.  The player will have to try and work it out for themselves.

On its own, this would be a little harsh, and likely involve the player being snu-snu'ed to death by various succubi over and over (like that's a bad thing!) until they figure out why they're being erotically extinguished.  This is where the phase between the three harlots being presented to the player and when they have to make a choice comes in.  The player will use this to ask around and find out information on the harlots.

They will also have time to find out general information about the house and its inhabitants, buy charms, alter stats through pills and potions, remove negative statuses, and also buy special drinks to replenish their semen counter (run out of semen in the room and the player gets a Bad End regardless of how nice the harlot is).  This time is fairly limited, so the player will have to make some tough choices on what to prioritise.

I did have a couple of sticking points.  The player would need some currency to buy things and I wasn't sure how to give it to them.  It should be related to the player's performance with the harlot, but the house is a brothel, so it wouldn't make sense for either the harlot or the madam to give money to the player.  The other problem was progression.  There needed to be a grand overall puzzle for the player to solve in order to escape the house.

Then both those things just dropped into place, also giving me a good chunk of background lore in the process.  I'm not going to reveal anything right now, because figuring out how the house works is going to be a major part of the game.

This also forced a change.  The stat checks had to go.  The reason being is that the hidden info part with all the possible variables is going to make figuring out what is important for each harlot difficult.  Making hidden stat checks and not disclosing the result to the player would probably make it impossible.  For that reason, the RNG part will mostly be restricted to which harlots are offered to the player each round (with options to mulligan acting as a safety valve in case the player is presented with 3 'certain death' harlots in the same round).

I'm quite excited about this.  The game loop and surrounding framework feels like it works.  The building blocks are also fairly simple, so it shouldn't be too hard to code.

The main thing is the extensibility.  Once I've built the skeleton, I can just keep adding more and more monster girl scenes as I come up with them, which is what I've wanted from a monster girl eroge idea since I first started trying to design them.

While, I'm currently very excited about this, I should probably step in to dampen down YOUR excitement.  This is very very early days.  I think I have a pretty good core design that shouldn't be too difficult to implement.

Shouldn't is a word that has buried many code projects…

I'm currently building the skeleton in Twine.  I suspect at some point I might break Twine, or the project may grow too big and unwieldy to maintain in Twine.  At that point I'll probably switch to something like C# (and maybe even something like Unity).

The next question mark is over the game loop.  While the idea sounds and feels good to me, there's always a chance it might not translate to a compelling and fun play experience.  At that point we'll probably be shit out of luck – just an idea that wasn't as good as it first seemed – but even in the worst-case scenario you'll still have a lot of sexy monster girl/succubi Bad End scenarios to read.

It's put me in an odd position.  I wanted to get back to writing some CYOA scenarios, but I didn't expect the whole game idea to drop neatly into place as it has done.  Now that it has, I want to work on it like a mad thing while everything is still hot and fresh in my mind.

Give me your thoughts below anyway.

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Ideas for a Darkest Dungeon-esque H-game - Being the Succubus Bait in H-space

Okay, after a brief pause while I actually put some new stories out, it's time to finish my random ramblings on hypothetical Darkest Dungeon-style games with monster girls.

Also, after another pause.  I didn't like how rambling the last piece was, and how this one was turning out, so I decided to rewrite it, hence it's a bit later than I planned.

And yes, I know these posts aren't to everyone's taste, and some of you would rather I binned this wannabe game dev stuff and got back to writing.  I hear ya, and I don't blame ya.  This is something I do to give the writing brain a bit of a break.  It also puts these notes somewhere where I can find them later.  (And for anyone else to use as inspiration.)

After talking about the Iratus approach, where the player controls a harem of lovely succubi, I thought I'd get back closer to Darkest Dungeon with the player-as-succubus-bait approach.

For this one I have setting and plot, unlike the generic warlock waffling I did last time (although, that's probably still the easiest and most likely to be successful way of implementing this sub-genre).

We're in H-space.  The player is a scientist-type leader of a military/research group.  That unit has been isolated deep in H-space because of a weird phenomenon and the goal is to get back home with as many people as possible.

H-space has weird physics that render most human tech, including guns, unreliable.  The main purpose of this is so we can upgrade the various conventional fantasy RPG classes (melee, tank, ranged, etc) to present-day equivalents forced to use improvised weaponry (basically, provide a plausible reason for a fantasy-RPG-esque battle system rather than marines running around with machine guns and blasting succubi Doom-style).

We'll want a good mix of front-line and back-line classes so the player can experiment with finding synergistic combinations (one of the strengths of Darkest Dungeon, and a weakness of Iratus, which doesn't quite get that right).  Tanks will be especially important as the main combat theme will likely be the succubi pulling party members out of formation to fuck their brains (and soul) out.  Instead of Darkest Dungeon's stress mechanic, our equivalent will be based around seduction and willpower.  This means we can play around with what constitutes a 'tank'.  Sometimes you'll want the frontline to be muscled marines to fend off physical attacks.  Sometimes you'll need it to be that skinny, iron-willed chaplain.

We'll need to be fair about what enemies the player faces.  It's no good hitting them with an all-physical-restraint party of lamias and then following it up with a party full of seductive, willpower-sapping succubi.  One thing we'll want to copy from Darkest Dungeon is multiple regions with their own enemies and flavour.  In our case it will likely be an excuse to pool similar monster girls together (a jungle region for plant girls, a desert region for lamias, etc).

The main gameplay loop for Darkest Dungeon is send a party into various dungeons to plunder cash and items required to build up the base camp (the hamlet).  This allows the player to increase the strength of their characters, plunder harder dungeons, and then finally challenge the darkest dungeon itself.

It's also very grindy.  Personally, I think 'grind' and hentai games don't go together very well.  Regular RPGs can get away with it to some extent as gradually building up characters is part of the core loop.  For eroges, the primary focus is the sex stuff, and if you're gating that off behind umpteen super-generic combat encounters (which might even be against regular rather than sexy monsters), you're only going to bore the player.  This is probably the number one reason why I don't review as many monster girl eroges nowadays – I get bored way before completing them because the devs threw in a bunch of needless grind out of a misguided need to pad out their game.

For that reason, we probably want our dungeon explorations to be more like Slay the Spire or Iratus – each dungeon being a single run to the boss, rather than going back into the same area over and over.  The main problem with this approach is that it forces the dungeons to be sequential where I'd rather the player had some choices over the area to go through.  I'm not sure how to resolve this.  From a plot perspective it would make more sense for the player to traverse the regions sequentially as they tried to get closer to the portal back home.

Now for the important stuff – the sex.  As with the warlock approach, a lot of the H-content is going to be pixel art of team succubus getting it on with the other (in this case our) team.  We probably also want Bad End snu-snu scenes if the party wipes, but this will force some design considerations.

We'll need to be sparing with the permadeath.  While I like the dilemma – it's almost an additional, meta, attack for the succubus to see if she can tempt the player into losing to see her sexy Bad End – forcing the player to have to throw away whatever time investment they've put into their party just to view the sex content seems unfun.

And also, who is being Bad Ended?  i.e. Where is the player avatar in all this?  In Darkest Dungeon you're the guy that inherited the creepy mansion and you're the one hiring all the idiots to go get killed by Lovecraftian horrors.  You're never on-screen and if the party wipes, you just hire the next lot of shmucks off the stagecoach.

I think we'll still keep the player avatar off-screen, but I think we'll let them have a little more 'fun' in our eroge version.  In this case, the player avatar is the scientist/commander guy in charge.  Now, if the party wipes, it'll be the player avatar getting the nice Bad End scene.  If we're running permadeath, I think we'll want the Bad End's to be less game-ending.  For this, I'd likely use a plot device where the succubi are forbidden from actually killing the main character.  The party wipes, the player gets a sexy Bad End scene, but it's a fake out where the main character is either found or rescued by whatever surviving characters he has left in the overall pool.  The player would lose the party characters, but they wouldn't get a full Game Over and would be able to continue (as long as they still have other characters – we'll get to that in a mo).

I would also involve the player character in other ways.  One of the things I liked in Domination Quest: Kuro & the Naughty Monster Girls, which they sadly didn't do enough of in my opinion, were the battles where the main character was snatched by the monster girl and the other party members had to rescue him before all his energy was drained (through various sexy means).  That could make for some sexy fights.  You, the player, are grabbed by a giant alraune or similar monster girl and the party has to fight to free you before the sexy monster girl fucks your life out.  It could even be the main focus of most of the combat encounters.

Rescue the leader before... uh... bad things happen to... hey, are you sure you want rescuing?

Then we come to the recruits.  Most games like this start you off with a limited number of characters, and then you get more as the game progresses (or you can just recruit new ones at any time to replace losses).  One thing I haven't really seen in a game, especially a horror game, is one that mimics the 'dwindling party' trope of horror movies.  i.e. Your units die and aren't replaced and when you run out of units it's Game Over.  Darkest Dungeon has a hard mode where you Game Over after a certain number of party deaths.  I think they could have also done a hard mode where you start with a finite number of characters and have to complete the game with just them.

That fits the setting for my hypothetical H-space game.  You're teleported to the starting location with a set number of soldiers, scientists and medics.  You might pick up a few prisoners along the way, but your starting crew is mostly all you have and you need to manage them in a way to get you (and as many others as you can) to the portal back home.

I think this also plays well for a game based around Bad End sex scenes.  Sacrifice can be a major game mechanic.  Tossing a soldier to a hungry succubus can be a legitimate strategy (you don't have to be a good commander!) and also another source of possible H content.  It also gets around another area where difficulty and eroges don't mesh well.  You want to get to the next succubus to see if she's fappable, but you're stuck because there's this irritating boss in the way!  Easy way to get around this is to have the ability to sacrifice squads to get around problem encounters.  While the succubi are having their 'fun', the player sneaks by with the rest of his forces.  This also meshes sexy Bad Ends into the gameplay better.  Rather than being punished for seeing that sexy scene, the player can use it as a cheap means to get past an annoying encounter and move on to the next one.

Whew.  That was a little more than I thought I was going to write.  As I said at the top, this is all hypothetical.  I just don't have the current skills or knowledge to create something like this.  But maybe it might inspire someone who does, and I think we'd all like to see more sexy succubus and monster girl games!

Monday, September 02, 2019

New Story for Patrons - "The Good, the Bad, and the Monstrous Beauty"

Another new story up for patrons:

The Good, the Bad, and the Monstrous Beauty

This one actually went up on Saturday, but people tend to rush in with the subs for new stories and I didn't want them getting double-tapped by Patreon, given it was right at the end of the month.

And yes, it's another temporary Patreon exclusive.  I know this sucks for people that can't sub for whatever reason, but that money is helping with the bills at the moment, so I have to do the cold-nosed commercial thing.  As with all these stories, I will be adding them to the regular collections at a later date.

My productivity is slowly climbing back up from snail's pace, so I'm hoping I'll also be able to get back to free-for-everyone stories on Literotica as well.  There is a Halloween story I've had in the works for a while I'm hoping to get finished for this year.

In the meantime, it's been a while since I've done any Twine stuff, so I might see if I can get another one of those "Escape the..." type scenarios written up this month.

Hope you enjoy this new story anyway.

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

New(ish) story on Literotica - "Let Sleeping Beauties Lie"

I say newish because those of you with good memories will recognize this as the Sleeping Beauty Mimic story from the H-space bestiary super short stories I put out a while ago.  I fleshed the story out to add more background and let Bate have a little more fun with the monster girl before his inevitable grisly demise (and it is grisly, that editor's note at the top is there for good reason!)

Let Sleeping Beauties Lie

The H-space bestiary shorts have given me a quandary for a while.  I'd like to put them in some sort of collection up on Amazon (and maybe reveal a bit more of the mystery around Bate and why he keeps dying).  I don't think the stories in their current state are good enough.  They were only originally intended to be placeholders to show off an unusual monster girl without having to develop a plot of how the protagonist ended up in the monster girl's sexy clutches.  I've been looking at taking the better ones and filling in the story to bring them up to the standard of the other stories in my collections.

It's a... trickier process than I thought.  Still trying to figure out the most efficient way of doing it as at the moment it seems even more time-consuming than writing a brand new story from scratch!  (On a more positive note, I have been chipping away at a few new bestiary stories - this time full stories rather than quick sex scenes ' n ' grisly death.)

The other thing I'm quite relieved about is that the story was accepted and is now live on Literotica.  Originally it was rejected and this post was going to be very different - me bemoaning how my usual Bad End stories were no longer acceptable and wondering if I'd ever have anything up on Literotica again.

I wouldn't have blamed Literotica for that, to be fair.  This story does feature one of my nastier bad ends and we live in the sort of outrage-hungry times where owners of sites like Literotica have to walk a fine line in what they allow.  Sucks, but that's how it is.  It would have also made continuing the Succubus Summoning series on there tricky.  At some point Nyte would be Nyte and then I'd have a chapter I couldn't put up.

Fortunately, rather than mope around in a funk, I reread the rejection note, saw that it mentioned "snuff" and then PMed Laurel (Lit's head honcho) for clarification.

While I have seen my good (vile) self referred to as "The Snuff Guy", I don't consider what I write to be snuff.  I think I've written on this before.  Snuff in erotic literature is generally writing from the perspective of someone getting their rocks off by killing someone else.  The sexual titillation comes from the act of killing.  You can do this in regular horror to depict a particularly nasty character, but it's a little trickier in erotic horror.  With erotica the purpose is to sexually arouse and titillate the reader.  If the reader is getting turned on by putting themselves in the shoes of someone killing someone else there is a real risk of feeding unhealthy fantasy.  Now, as far as I'm concerned, fantasy, even unhealthy fantasy, is still fantasy.  If it remains fantasy it's harmless, no matter how sick other people might think it.  The nightmare scenario is if someone indulges that fantasy, develops a liking for it, finds fantasy is no longer enough, and then - to try and recapture that same thrill - takes it into the real world.  With that risk, you can understand why a site like Literotica would not want to publish that type of story.

Then you get to my stuff.  There is sex.  There is death.  And while I do like to blur one into the other, the viewpoint is always from the victim, and the sexual arousal comes from the sex stuff the succubus is doing to them rather than the death stuff.  The death stuff is also nearly always supernatural in nature, and therefore impossible to copycat into the real world.  That to me is the important distinguishing feature between "snuff" and regular (even if extremely squicky) erotic horror - is there a risk someone might copycat this and cause a tragedy in the real world?

I didn't get a reply from Laurel (I imagine she's way too busy to be fair - Literotica gets a massive number of submissions every day), but as the story is now live it must have been given a second look and deemed okay.  This is an important thing to remember, if you're having stories bounced by Literotica, remember they get a ton of submissions daily.  Sometimes it's worth giving Laurel a (polite!) PM to check if a story got bounced by the filters by mistake.

I'm happy anyway.  The horror in erotic horror is still allowed at Literotica (although I should flag my nastier stories a little better next time!).

Hope you enjoy the new(ish) story!

Friday, August 23, 2019

Ideas for a Darkest Dungeon-esque H-game - Being the Warlock

Ok, here's some more random musings on the type of Darkest Dungeon-esque succubus H-game I'd like to see (because I don't have the technical chops to make it myself).

Last up, I talked a bit about the combat, which is going to have various smutty succubi and monster girls mucking up the standard 4-on-4 structure by jumping the bones of members of the opposing party.  This is where we have the excuse for lots of lovely and gratuitously xxx-rated pixel art (and hopefully some strategy to make the fights a little interesting as well).

The next question: Are we Team Succubus, or Team Succubus Bait?

I'll start with Team Succubus, as that's probably the most straightforward.

This is pretty much going to be like Iratus, but we're an eroge, so our banshees and vampires are going to be fucking the life out of enemies rather than spooping them to death.

The background setup is easy.  Perhaps a little too easy.  The player takes the role of a warlock or demon lord, and goes after the human realms with an army of sexy succubi.  From that starting point there is plenty of freedom with respect to humour, tone and lightness.  The Japanese games tend to push the slider towards goofy cute (although Monmusu Quest: Paradox can get very down and serious when it wants).  Personally, given that most of these games are fairly light-hearted, I think it might be interesting to try a darker tone – give our succubi some real fangs and an aura of sexy deadliness.  That would require some work on the main protagonist as goofball villain protagonists tend to work whereas deadly serious ones do not.

Maybe our warlock protagonist is the good guy, just using dubious tools to take down an army of corrupt and hypocritical shining knights.

There's also a fair bit of freedom with respect to the enemies.  Maybe they're your classic knights and D&D adventuring parties, but corrupt.  Maybe it can be a bit of succubus-on-succubus action.  While I think you probably want both sexes represented to appeal to a larger audience, this might necessitate extra work in the pixel art department as the monster girl may have different scenes depending on whether she's having fun with a man or woman.

I'd probably go with succubi vs knights, and start out with making the knights all male to avoid needing to multiply the art assets too much.  Then maybe adding female enemies to also attract ryona enthusiasts if resources allow.

One key difference to Darkest Dungeon is we'll want to hide a lot of those units behind some sort of unlock system.  In Darkest Dungeon all of the available units are pretty much available from the start and gated only by the RNG determining which ones show up on the stagecoach.  For a monster girl eroge, the focus is going to be on the sexy monster girls.  The lure of seeing new ones is what will (hopefully) keep the player playing, so we want to make them part of the progression system.  This then has an impact on balance.  The later unlocks should, in theory, be more powerful than the starter units, but then there's a risk of moving away from the finding synergistic parties aspect that makes Darkest Dungeon so damn good.  I think just making the later units more powerful than the starter units is back to the problem of boring combat mechanics.

Rather than more powerful, I think more strategic options might be a better thing to aim for.  Make the newer monster girls open up new options and new party configurations.  Just like Darkest Dungeon, the enemies are going to add more nuisance units to their roster, and that should prompt the player into trying out newer strategies to overcome them.

Another interesting consideration is whether we go roguelite or not.  Roguelite would have unlocks carry over into the next run (Iratus does this), whereas a more traditional RPG-type system would require the player to go through the same unlocking process with each new game (but, like a typical RPG, would only be playing one game rather than many randomized runs).

There's also the easy opportunity for more sex content.  One source of H-content is going to be in the battles as succubi "overcome" the enemies.  We can also have more conventional H-scenes of the succubi having fun with their warlock commander (i.e. the player) outside of battle.  Monmusu Quest: Paradox does this with the request scenes in the pocket castle.  This is also an additional form of player progression – the player raising affection with their monster girls (through levelling them up or maybe some kind of gift system) in order to unlock their H-content.

In general, I think the game would look something like this:

- The player plays a warlock/demon lord out to conquer various regions with sexy succubi/monster girls.

- There are different regions with different enemy unit compositions requiring different strategies to overcome in each.

- The player grinds short 'dungeons' in each region to unlock new units and strengthen existing ones (with the goal being to get strong enough to take down a 'final castle').

- The player unlocks new succubus/monster girl units.  New skills for the monster girls can be unlocked.  New H-content for the monster girls can be unlocked.

- The player has a 'base area' to develop with resources taken from the dungeon runs.

- 2D sprite strategic battles.  As we're an eroge, a large part of the strategy will be pulling enemy units out of formation or restraining enough of them so that they can be sexually drained.  Combat also has to always feel interesting.  There's going to be a lot of it, so the player needs to not feel like it's a massive grind.  Have different roles for each of the monster girls (but not too obvious and rigid).

So far, so vague.  But I doubt the various core gameplay loops can be nailed down until getting more serious about planning and development, and this tricky for me.  I have ideas, but I suspect I don't have the technical chops to take it all the way, so there's only so much time I feel comfortable to devoting to something like this.  I've always liked jotting down game design ideas, so maybe this is something I'll return to when I need a quick break from regular writing.

Thinking about this did remind me of a 2D sprite eroge that does do some of this stuff, but is real-time action rather than turn-based strategy – Attack it! Devil Legion.

Attack it! Devil Legion - Your demonic legions of... uh... doom.

I didn't get on with the demo, but did give the full game more of a try when I was thinking of existing eroge examples similar to the ideas above.  Attack it! Devil Legion does have some strategy in the form of various offensive, defensive and support roles, but it mostly feels a little too frenetic.  You control a little bat and can interrupt attacks and knock enemies over, but your monster girls and succubi mostly seem to do their own thing.  It does have an unlock system (but no H-content with your own minions - for good reason given the protagonist).

I'm not convinced on the real-time play aspects.  Most of the time you're too busy flinging your bat avatar around the screen to get a chance to enjoy your succubi double-teaming adventurers in various smutty ways.  It's still better than most of the other sexy monster girl eroges I've played recently, so I might give it the full Hentai Game Review treatment if it holds my attention long enough to complete the game.  The sprite artwork is really nice.  This, but turn-based was what I was thinking of as I wrote this post.

Hot succubus double team action.  I'm thinking this but where you can sit back and enjoy watching rather than trying to figure out where your bat avatar has been bashed to.

Maybe this will give some of you reading some ideas.  I'd love to see a game along these lines, but as I've said already, I doubt I have the technical chops to make it myself (or even organise a group of people that could).

Next up I'll brainstorm the other approach – Team Succubus Bait.

Monday, August 19, 2019

Thoughts (rough!) on how to do a Succubus H-game version of Darkest Dungeon

So where were we?  Oh yes, I was talking about Darkest Dungeon and sexy monster girl H-games.  Then I got side-tracked.  Briefly thought about posting something political (an urge thankfully resisted).  Then I rewrote a bestiary story to make it more of an actual short story (available to patrons now, but hopefully will be on Literotica later this week if it doesn't get rejected).

So, Darkest Dungeon sexy monster girl H-game.

First thing to clear up: if you're making a hentai game, the number one priority is the sex.  This is what people are going to be buying it for.  So that comes first – which means sexy characters, good art, hot scenes.

If everything is about the sex, is it even worth bothering with the game mechanics?

I don't know the answer to this.  Personally, I prefer to play hentai games that have a little more than a rudimentary combat system, but I might just be a weirdo.  I'm going to assume other people are weirdos too and write this from that perspective.  But if you are actually creating a sexy succubus H-game and have limited resources, put those resources into the sexy first, then start to think about adding clever game mechanics.

So, what does Darkest Dungeon-style combat give you over regular JRPGs?

Added strategic depth by making both party composition and character position very important.

Typical Darkest Dungeon combat - a party of 4 vs a party of 4 rendered in 2D

The basic JRPGs are very simple.  You have an attack(s), the enemy has attack(s).  Repeat until one of you is dead.  Damage goes up as you level up, but so does enemy toughness.  It works, but is bloody boring if it has no depth.

The standard way to add depth is to incorporate some kind of elemental paper-scissors-stone system.  With H-RPGs elemental is usually substituted with body parts, so the player character (or monster) might be more sensitive to boobs, kisses, sex, etc.  It's depth, but not much depth – find the weakness, hit weakness for bonus damage, rinse, repeat.

Adding a party adds more complexity, as the party members will likely specialise in different areas – healer, tank, DPS mage, etc.  Monmusu Quest: Paradox did this pretty well I thought.  It was fun trying out different monster girl parties as they all synergised in slightly different ways.

And this is also one of the major appeals of Darkest Dungeon – mucking around to find the party compositions that 'click'.

(Generally, the ones that don't click get savagely butchered fairly quickly – that game does not fuck around when it comes to difficulty.)

For regular RPGs, it's usually about putting the beefier classes in the front and the squishier ones in the back.  But then you get other synergies such as classes with skills that move them (or enemies) about or taking advantage of the 'marking' mechanic in Darkest Dungeon.

That's just for regular RPG combat.  We're looking at options for smutty H-game equivalents, which largely come down to: where's the sex?

Again, the easy option is to move it out to separate H-scenes, eg a Bad End scene if the player loses.  A lot of the monster girl hentai games do this.  You fight a regular battle and then, if you lose, you get treated to a nice scene of having 'fun' with the monster girl.

I think we can do more than that though.  Why waste the opportunity to create fun pixel art of succubi getting it on with hapless (lucky?) party members?

In Darkest Dungeon (and the other recent games inspired by it), you have up to four characters in your group facing off against up to four characters in their group.  Each character has a range of attacks that can only be used in the right position, and only target certain positions on the other side.  An example of this is Darkest Dungeon's Leper.  He's a tank with a big sword that can only hit the first two rows, and only if he's in the first two rows himself.  If he gets moved to the back two rows he's pretty much useless.

If we want to put a bit of snu-snu into our Darkest Dungeon-style combat we're going to need to break that 4-on-4 placement system and get the sexy monster girls in amongst the other party.  At first I thought about making it more complex with the characters being able to move freely through 8 to 10 slots and have attacks more dependent on adjacency than position.  I think that might be hellishly complex and move too far away from the straightforward 4-on-4 system.

An easier approach would be to make it possible for two characters to co-exist on the same spot.  That way the monster girl would either be jumping into the ranks of the party to jump the bones of the mage in position 3, for example.  Or a succubus/alraune would lure one of the opposing party to her position and then start having fun with them.  Darkest Dungeon already has some fights like this.  The Siren will steal a party member to fight on her side for a turn.  The Hag will throw someone in her pot.

As this is a hypothetical sex game, team monster girl grabbing someone is going to be a nice excuse to throw some pixel-art smuttiness in.  If anyone has ever played the FOBS game, that, but as part of a turn-based strategy game rather than a 2D platformer/metroidvania.

FOBS - picture this as taking a character out of combat

If a portion of the fight is going to be about party members being pulled out of the group or pinned by a monster girl within the group, then this might inform some of the combat gameplay.  Maybe neighbouring characters can help out pinned characters by knocking the invading monster girl off.  If a character is grabbed, then the focus can be about trying to pull them back from the monster girl group.

The other feature of Darkest Dungeon (and Iratus, but on the enemy side) is the addition of the stress bar.  Characters can be taken out via conventional HP damage.  Or they can be driven mad and stressed out enough to make them to succumb to heart attacks.

If characters are getting heart attacks in our H-game version, it's going to be of the overexertion-through-sex kind.

The stress system in Darkest Dungeon adds an additional layer to combat.  Stress attacks don't cause physical damage, but if you fail to manage the stress build-up, your party members will start behaving erratically and not follow orders.

It wouldn't make sense to use stress in a H-game equivalent.  But something like willpower or seduction would be a perfect replacement.  That way you'd have monster girls attacking with either physical or seduction techniques.  This could again force players to think about party composition.  Muscular types might be very good versus muscular monster girls, but very weak to succubi with strong seduction arts.  Generally, you want the player to be constantly thinking about chopping and changing their party composition in response to whatever the AI is throwing at them (whether it is monster girls or humans).

That's another interesting question.  Do you play as the monster girls (as a succubus-summoning warlock equivalent to Iratus's titular necromancer) or as the leader of a human squad trying to resist the unholy temptations of various succubi?

I think either would work, and I have ideas for both.  I'll detail those ideas in separate posts later this week.