Tuesday, December 01, 2020

House of Hellish Harlots ver 0.013 (Gift revamp + 3 new harlots)

 (x-posted from Patreon)

Version 0.013 of House of Hellish Harlots is out.

This release introduces 3 new harlots to the House:

Sorpresa Ombra - A lamia that likes smothering men with her boobs.
Zuripai Suponji - A large succubus that gives a full-body paizuri service.
Cibi Somnia - A sleepy sheep girl that likes to cuddle and give relaxing massages.

All three are slightly tricky and will likely kill you a few times before you figure them out.  Sorpresa Ombra in particular is designed as a mid-to-late round harlot.  She is survivable, but has some fairly narrow and cryptic requirements.  Cibi's scenario might also come as a bit of a surprise.  I was talking about going back to simple scenarios and Cibi's, as you'll find out, has a lot of player interactivity.  Weirdly, I also found her fairly quick to write, type up and implement, so the productivity problems I did struggle with for a while are not in creating this type of scenario.  I did try to make her nice and friendly and non-threatening... and failed utterly as I'm helplessly addicted to horror.  Sorry.

There are also some other additions that were done a while ago before I switched to working on short stories for a couple of months to recharge my batteries.

One is hopefully a bugfix to the slowdown problem people were reporting.

The other is a revamp to the gifts.  Under the hood I switched everything to just use a reference to the gift Id rather than gift object to be more efficient.  The other change was to group gifts into categories and have some harlots only care about the category rather than specific gifts.  It only affects a few harlots, but it should open up a few more options in the future.

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Yeah, this is the first update in six months.  I was shocked myself when I realised it.  That little digression when I went off to write short stories for various Literotica competitions was much longer than I thought.  Anyway, I'm back on this now and with another 5 harlot scenarios written and ready to be implemented, hopefully I can get this project back on track again.

Currently, this is still a Patreon exclusive.  I want all the NPCs in place and enough harlots for it to be playable before I put a proper public alpha out.  If you want to keep up with the progress, please support me here.  It only costs $1 (+ tax) a month to grab all the previous builds plus various short stories.

Friday, November 20, 2020

Another Look At: Monster Girl Dreams

I blogged about this game last year, then forgot about it for a while.  It was while checking out some other H-games I remembered it and decided to take a look at how it has been developing.

Very promising, I'm delighted to say.

Monster Girl Dreams is an RPG battlefucker.  It's currently being developed by Threshold and you can find both the game and their Patreon here.


You play a hero that sails off to a land to fight the demon queen, only to find out when he gets there that the land is covered with an enchantment that prevents regular combat and 'fighting' is about fucking sexy monster girls and succubi into submission (or the other way around, if you just wanna have sexy fun times).

It's fairly light-hearted.  Even if you lose, the monster girls and succubi get to have fun with you for a little bit in a pseudo Bad End before you're yanked back to the church in town.

It's still mostly text-based, but what's changed since I last looked is that nearly all the characters have artwork now.  Even though it's just character sprites rather than CGI h-scenes, it does add a lot and they complement the writing well.

Currently the game is unfinished, but has plenty of content.  There are five locations to explore, plenty of side quests and sexy encounters galore.

"Your fetish for hot ninja succubi has intensified"

What makes it stand out to me is the battlefuck combat, and I think this is largely down to the stances system.  Similar to Monster Girl Quest, each of your succubi/monster girl opponents will try to wear down your resistance with a battery of pleasure attacks, but it expands on that with a variety of sex stances that either the player or succubus can lock their opponent into.  This then opens up further sexy moves while in that stance.  It's similar to Succubus Rhapsodia, but without the nuisance cursor-pressing mini-game.  As with Shrift, the most enjoyable 'fights' are those where the monster girl/succubus gradually gets more and more control over the player until they finally succumb to bliss.

Of the encounters, the ninja succubus Shizu is still a favourite.  She's supposedly a masochist, but that probably won't be apparent while she's busily fucking you into submission with a whole smorgasbord of erotic moves designed to drain both will and energy.  In her boss fight she creates two clones to triple the sexy fun.

Another one I really liked was the blue oni, Mizuko, which surprised me as oni are usually a meh monster girl for me.  She's all about hypnotising you with her gorgeous booty and I found that fight pretty sexy as she uses her ass and then anal sex to melt the player's will away.

Defeated by dat booty

Now onto the criticisms and suggestions.

One obvious area of improvement would be to add Bad End H-scene artwork and change the character sprites to give a visual representation of the various stances.  I also think this might be too resource-intensive to be practical.  Similar to Succubus Rhapsodia, there are fights with multiple succubi that usually end up with a variety of stance combos (face sit + sex, boob smother + paizuri, etc).  Representing all that visually would require commissioning a shit-ton of different art, so I wouldn't really expect it in this case.  The text descriptions plus character sprites are already fine.  Anything on top of that would be a bonus.

Other things I wouldn't mind seeing are various quality of life improvements to the interface.  Inventory management is a little fiddly at the moment.  Area exploration uses a 'string of beads' system in that the player travels through a series of encounters and events in sequence (fixed at first and the pre-selected by the player and randomised for subsequent runs after defeating the boss).  It would be nice to see this represented visually (something like Slay the Spire's map or even as simple as what some of the later Violated Hero games did).  Whether it would be practical to do these things I don't know.  I'm guessing the game is being developed on a visual novel creator (Ren'py?) and there are probably limitations as to what can be done with the engine.

Overall, seems pretty damn promising at the moment.  I look forward to catching up with the game again further down the line as more content is added.

(I also need to get off my ass and get my own game project, House of Hellish Harlots, moving again!)

Thursday, November 12, 2020

Art Commission - Setouchi's Illustration of Volumpula

A while back I set aside some money for an art commission of Volumpula. That fell through unfortunately. Fast forward to about a week or so ago and one of my patrons (thanks Stephen!) pointed me in the direction of Skeb, a Japanese site that facilitates commissions of various artists, including some of the artists of Monster Girl Quest. I love Setouchi's work, especially his gooey slime girls, and put in a request. This is the result:


   

It's lovely. Volumpula does make for a nice soft comfortable bed while she gently drains away all that... tension. If you're not aware of who Volumpula is, she's a pink cushionblob. About a year or so ago, while first experimenting with Twine, I created a couple of monster girl CYOAs. One of which was "Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly". That can be played here: Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly Setouchi did a great job here. I love his monster girls in Monster Girl Quest, so to be able commission him to draw one of mine is a dream come true. I'll talk a bit about Skeb.jp, in case any of you are interested in commissioning pieces for yourselves (which I highly recommend). It's an intermediary site. You put in a request. It's put to the artist. They say yay or nay, and then you get the piece within a certain time period. Setouchi was very very fast with both acceptance and delivery. Some things to note. You deal through the site and not with the artist directly (In fact it is frowned upon to contact them outside of the site). English requests are translated to Japanese with DeepL. As with all machine translation, it's a good idea to run the output Japanese through the translator to make sure you roughly get back to the original English. (I originally described Volumpula's colour as "cherry-blossom pink", which came out as "cherry red" - glad I caught that one!) Payment is taken on submission of request and then held until the artist delivers the piece, so make sure you have the money up front. The work is for personal rather than commercial use. I think that means it's okay to stick it up on a blog or social media site, but not okay to package it up in a game for sale without asking the artist for additional permissions beforehand. This means I'll need to find a different approach if House of Hellish Harlots progresses to the point of needing artwork. If you have a favourite monster girl from MGQ and would like to see more pieces of her in action, I'd recommend dropping in a request. As you can see from Setouchi's page, there are a lot of MGQ pieces requested by fans. There are also other MGQ artists on Skeb such as Shiki (although currently closed to commissions) and Xelvy. Overall I found it an easy and professional site to use. I think I might commission a few more pieces in the future. Never hurts to have more artwork of sexy monster girls and succubi floating around!

Thursday, October 29, 2020

New Short Story for Patrons - "The Subway Succubus"

This was originally intended to be for Literotica's Halloween contest, but I tried to finish two stories before the deadline and predictably failed to finish both.

Currently it's patron-only, but I've just submitted it to Literotica and it should appear there in 3-4 days (assuming it doesn't get rejected - this one is a little nasty).

The inspiration was a viral video I saw floating around on social media.  I turned it into a little succubus horror tale for Halloween.

Enjoy!

"The Subway Succubus"


Update: 1st Nov 2020

As I feared might happen, Literotica rejected it for being a little too horrifying.  Probably a good thing I didn't finish this one in time for the competition!  Sometimes I can chase up on these things and get the decision reversed, but I think I'll leave this one as a temporary patron-exclusive until I find a home for it in a collection.

Thursday, October 01, 2020

New Story on Literotica - "The Succubus in Mr Herbert's Summer House"

 As I said in the last post, the new short story, "The Succubus in Mr Herbert's Summer House" has been entered into Literotica's Halloween contest.  The contest has begun and the story is now live.  You can read it here:

The Succubus in the Summer House

Two local toughs in a seaside town are given a job by a grizzled old mobster.  They must 'babysit' Mr Herbert's summer house for the night, and the mysterious woman tied-up on a bed inside...

(I had to truncate the original title as Literotica story titles have a character limit.)

Quick note on Literotica contests.  Because of the way the scoring works, voting lower than a 5 for anything is actually worse than not voting at all.  Also, don't do anything silly like downvote other stories to help mine.  While there is a prize, the contests are a bit of fun and not to be taken seriously.  I doubt this one will be a contender anyway because of the nature of the story. ;)

Also, yes, I'm aware of the formatting problem with the sentences in italics.  There shouldn't be two extra lines of white space after the sentences.  I'm guessing it's because the closing italics tag was put on the next line and Literotica formatted it oddly.  So, sorry about that.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

I don't think this particular story is finished just yet...


Friday, September 25, 2020

New Short Story - "The Succubus in Mr Herbert's Summer House"

 I have a new short story available to patrons:

"The Succubus in Mr Herbert's Summer House."

Two street punks in a seaside town are given a strange job watching over a house and a mysterious girl tied up on a bed.

The timed exclusivity is shorter on this one as I'm planning to enter it into Literotica's Halloween Story Contest next week.

It was originally planned for Literotica's Summer Contest, but took me too long to finish and I missed the deadline (my succubi like playing with their food far too much!).  It's a conventional erotic horror succubus story, so it should also fit the theme for a Halloween contest as well.

If you can't wait, the lowest (and only) tier on my Patreon is just a $1.  (plus tax, I think they're starting to hit people with that now.)

Otherwise I'll post again in a week or so with a link to the story on Literotica.