Thursday, April 01, 2021

House of Hellish Harlots ver0.017 (Full Intro and Madam's Tour)

The new version of "House of Hellish Harlots" is available for patrons and can be found here:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/house-of-hellish-49457831

Here's a list of the new features:

FULL INTRO
The game has a beginning.  I adapted the very old intro and streamlined the options.  Yeah, the car breakdown scenario is a little hackneyed, but it's the classic.  There are also multiple options to set character dispositions as well as chat to some NPCs for some background.

MADAM'S TOUR
On entering the House, the Madam will give the player a tour which has a primary purpose of explaining her 'rules'.  It also introduces a succubus I'll be giving a scenario to at a later date.

The full versions of both the Intro and Tour are quite long.  They exist to set the scene a little better than just throwing the player into the first set of choices.  Because they're long, I also added options to skip through them quickly, so on subsequent playthroughs you should be able to get right to the first harlot selection in about 5 clicks.

FLESHED OUT PASSAGES
The main game loop passages have all been fleshed out, so it should feel more like a continuation of reading a book rather than the barebones instructions that were there before.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to complete The Barman NPC in time, so the hub passage for pre-room actions is still clearly a placeholder.

NEW HARLOT
The stoner caterpillar girl, Kanna bi Grafolita, makes her debut in the House.  This was an attempt to write a monster girl a little different to the usual ones.  I hope people like her.  I'll post something on her creation later when I'm not frantically trying to beat a deadline, because it opens up another harlot idea.

MADAM REVAMP
This is just part of the regular updating and improving I do to the NPCs.  The main change is that the 'Buy Mulligan Token' option unlocks a little quicker.  I also put in support for harlots that are multiple girls such as the Muchadh Sisters, so that The Madam refers to them naturally as "they" instead of "she".

HARLOT MAINTENANCE
I carried on updating the harlots I didn't get a chance to finish for ver0.016.  This means that Calliophi and Queen Colubridis will now reveal their true forms earlier if the player has the right charm among other interactions.  I didn't get them all done, so Suffocatrix Mamilla won't interact with the anti-smother charm even though it might seem like she should.  This is queued up to be done.

What isn't in ver0.017:

THE BARMAN
Too many rewrites and awkwardness this month.  I have rough drafts of his segments, but they still need a bit of editing to hit the right tone.  I'm hoping to get him out of the way early April.

SOME HARLOT MAINTENANCE
I'll save you some time and experimentation.  Suffocatrix Mamilla, Cibi Somnia and Sorpresa Ombra have not been updated to interact with charms, so don't torture yourself trying out combinations.  Mamilla will have an interaction I'll add later.  Sorpresa may have an interaction.  I forgot to create an anti-sleep charm, so Cibi still has free rein to eat your dreams.

SOME BUGS AND ODDNESS
These are things I've noticed and queued up to sort out.  They're corner cases that shouldn't come up very often.  An obvious one is the 'true vision' charm.  If the player picks it up, the text will behave as though they've seen the true form of the harlot at the presentation stage when this didn't happen.  The fix will be delaying its effect to the start of the next round and I'll add that for a future release.

I'm not far off what I want for a public demo.  I still need to add the Barman and replace the 4 remaining placeholder harlots.  I'll be looking at options to get the file hosted somewhere in the next couple of months.

In the meantime, all support is appreciated.  I'd love to be able to hire artists for this and give people a game as good as Monmusu Quest and the others.

Friday, March 19, 2021

Hentai Game Review - Succubus Academia

I do still review the odd hentai game that tickles my fancy and Succubus Academia very much tickled my fancy.

Succubus Academia is an RPGMaker game made by SQDT.  If you've been around a very long time you might remember SQDT was responsible for Succubus Quest.  I think the original Succubus Quest might have been the first game of this type I played after being lured in by the original Monster Girl Quest demo.  I'm not sure what happened to SQDT after that.  I think there was a follow-up game that fell through and they fell off my radar until coming back with Succubus Academia.

I played this using text hooking and very sketchy machine translation, so you'll have to forgive me for not being able to go into as much detail on the plot and game mechanics as I'd like.  Thankfully, even with sketchy machine translation, I was able to get a good way into the game.  I haven't yet completed it, for reasons I'll go into later, but I have seen pretty much all the content apart from the final boss(es?).

Turn her from this to...

The plot is interesting from a protagonist perspective as rather than playing a single character, you play multiple.  From what I can gather, a college has been sucked into a dream world and the surviving students are being picked off one-by-one by semen-hungry succubi.  Some of the female students have either been replaced by or turned into succubi.  They can't be defeated.  The only way to make them go away is satisfying them sexually.  Unfortunately, satisfying a succubus sexually is the end of the (un)lucky volunteer tasked with doing so.  Thankfully, we have reserves (but not many), as you find and unlock future succubus sacrifices throughout the game world.  All progress – levels, items, money – is transferred to the next (un)lucky sacrificial lamb.

It's an unusual mechanic, and one I wish more games would use.  From the non-H world of games, the only one I can recall is Eternal Darkness.  However, the player does need to be careful.  Each succubus can only be properly satisfied by a specific character, and if that character gets all his juice sucked out by a dryad beforehand, it's no longer possible to complete the game.  It's not as terrible as it sounds.  There are five 'boss' succubi and three optional succubi to satisfy, and eight playable characters to pair them up with.  I did follow a guide, but the game makes it reasonably obvious who should be fed to who – the swimmer to the mermaid, the runner to the track-team bunny, and so on.  For the optional bosses the game will hint you have the right character for them as they'll drop ID cards in front of them.  It's also short enough that even if the player screws up, it's not too onerous to play through again.

Pay attention to the ugly demon shopkeeper that shows up early in the game.  He sells key items to remove certain obstacles (eg gasoline for a motorbike).

...this, and satisfy her (and then die).

There are five areas for each of the succubized student bosses, some being unlocked later.  Each area has two regular encounters (pixies and dryads for the 1st forest area), a mini-boss encounter (usually a pair of one of the regular encounters), a 'notorious' succubus (more on them later), and the boss.  If your character dies to anyone other than the boss, reload.  If the character dies to the boss without her transforming into a succubus form and giving the "And she is satisfied" message, reload.

'Combat' is sort of battlefuck.  Sort of, in that the objective isn't to win, but to hang on for dear life until the succubus is satisfied.  So, it's mostly about raising their mood while not letting them drain your life and semen too quickly.  There is a bar on the left for the succubus representing their mood.  There are two bars on the right for the player.  The first is the ejaculation meter, which the succubus will fill by using various sexy moves.  The red bar is the player's life, and that will get depleted every time the succubus gets them to ejaculate.

This is where I'd like to go into more detail, but the vagaries of machine translation prevented me from getting a full understanding of the game mechanics.  There does seem to be some kind of stance system and also spells that cost life to cast.  On Normal difficulty I was able to muddle through most of the game by just picking whatever option looked sensible and using the occasional item to restore life or lower the ejaculation meter.  The upgrade system looked interesting enough I'd like to get my hands on a proper English translation for a less completely-blind playthrough.

Drowned or drained, your choice...

And mainly to stop the 'notorious' succubi draining me to a lifeless husk second time around.

Recently there have been a few collaborations between eroge game devs/artists that have resulted in characters guesting in other games.  There are five 'notorious' succubi in Succubus Academia.  I recognised Alma Elma (Monmusu Quest), Shiki's Sophia and Succubus-chan.  The other two (Elfride and Fulbeua) are unfamiliar.  I'm kind of interested where Elfride is from, for... uh... research purposes.

Initially, I was a little disappointed with the Alma Elma and Sophia scenes, and then felt I was probably being a little unfair and coming in with too high expectations.  I also thought they were guest cameos without much link to the rest of the plot.  Which turned out to be wrong.  After doing all the sacrifices correctly, the game opens up for an additional chapter and you get to 'fight' the notorious succubi again, and those scenes are a lot hotter.  So, if like me, you sped through the game to find them, only to be a little disappointed, fear not.  They return again later and those scenes will likely lead to you getting satisfyingly drained.

(Perhaps a little too drained.  I still haven't figured out how to get past them!)

Alma Elma, animated! Get a ride from the Succubus Queen.

The art in this game is gorgeous.  The bosses and notorious succubi also have some animation, which adds a lot of appeal.  It's a shame that the regular encounters get overshadowed because their images are static, because they also have really nice art as well.

One thing I liked, which won't be to everyone's tastes, is the streak of cheerful morbidity running through the game.  Nothing exemplifies that better than the scene after the first boss.  After draining her childhood sweetheart to a skeleton, she tells him she's going to take him home with her, only to just snap the arm off the skeleton and leave with just that.  I couldn't figure out if it was supposed to be romantic and touching, with the spirit somehow united with the succubus forever more, or a funny bit of cruelty mocking such romantic delusions.  Either way works for me.

It is quite a morbid game.  The characters are all doomed to death by snu snu and new abilities are learned by burying relics of dead classmates.  The succubi are pretty much all on the predator end of the spectrum.  So, if you like your monster girls fluffier and waifu-esque, you might find the tone of Succubus Academia a little too dark and cruel.

(Obviously, I loved it, but that probably isn't a surprise to anyone that's read my stories!)

The monster girls and succubi are also more on the vanilla end of the spectrum (in design).  There are the usual staples such as harpies, lamias and mermaids, but nothing too crazy.

Overall, I found it a really nice game.  Luscious sexy succubus art.  Interesting plot (from what I can glean).  Enough game mechanics for it to feel like a game without being complex enough to be frustrating, especially with the language barrier (although it would be nice to know why Succubus-chan gets bored so easily and then mercilessly drains all my life away – merciless predator indeed).

She's cute until she gets bored.  Don't let her get bored...

Definitely worth a look if you like this sort of thing.  Maybe around Succubus Prison level in terms of quality.

Sunday, February 28, 2021

House of Hellish Harlots ver0.016 (Charms)

The new version of "House of Hellish Harlots" is available for patrons and can be found here:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/house-of-hellish-48099339

Here's a list of the new features:

THE BUXOM LOLIBABA
She's a new NPC that sells various charms to the player.

CHARMS
Charms last for the duration of a run (until the player dies or runs out of harlots).  They have a variety of effects.  The Buxom Lolibaba will give vague hints as to their use, but you'll have to play around with them to figure out what they do.  All but one have been implemented.  A lot of them are protective in nature but won't do anything for now as the abilities they protect against will be added with future harlots.  The other ones have a few interesting effects I hope you have fun finding out.  There are 36 in total.

NEW HARLOTS
Three new harlots have been added to the House.  They are:

Veronicalla - a squishy slug girl.
Asphya - an enigmatic harlot dressed fully in black latex and wearing a gas mask.
Pêl-O Sugn - A synthetic being that wants to give you a sexy bounce on her big rubber ball.

All 3 are oddballs this time around.  I'll try and mix in a few regular succubi/monster girls for the next release.

MAINTENANCE TWEAKS
There have been quite a few of these.  The Portly Gentleman and Elegant Woman have been tweaked to bring their structure in line with the other NPCs.  I'm hoping this will finally fix the occasional infinite Action bug that leaked from The Elegant Woman.  I've also gone back and tweaked some of the older harlots to fit changes to The Portly Gentleman as well as interacting with the new charms.

And some notes: 

"Why doesn't Charm X affect Harlot Y?"
I'm still going through the existing harlots and updating them.  Some have been done, but I wasn't able to do all of them (hence why the remaining charm is only partially implemented).  There will be occasions where you might wonder why a charm didn't reveal a harlot's true form, or protect from an ability you thought it should protect from.  It's because I haven't updated them yet and it will likely be fixed in the next release.  Thankfully, it's only a small handful of interactions.

"The economy doesn't seem balanced."
Portly Gentleman payouts and prices of potions, charms, etc. are mostly back-of-an-envelope calculations.  This will be tightened up as I add more content.

I'm getting closer and closer to a public demo version.  The main NPCs and mechanics are all in place.  I need to add a few more 'real' harlots to replace the placeholders and flesh out some of the interior descriptions.  A couple of months at a guess.

The hope then is to get more people interested and maybe start think about adding sexy CGs and the like.

Thursday, December 31, 2020

Wrapping up 2020

So, 2020 was... a year.

It was mostly an up, then down, then up year for me.  As a writer, I didn't think the lockdown would affect me too much, but it turns out being confined to a rural village and only going out to the local supermarket and back would put the head in a little box.  All things considered, that was likely an above average experience compared to everyone else, so I can be thankful for that.

Writing productivity for the most part was good at the start of the year, went a bit messy in the middle of the year where I had one month where not a lot got done at all, and then finished strongly at the end of the year.

House of Hellish Harlots
This was my big project for the year.  I'm still excited about it as I think it will make a good H-game.  I made some good progress at the start of the year, the wheels fell off in the middle, and then I refocused and got it back on track in the last few months.  Currently I'm up to version 0.014.  There are 21 harlots for the player to choose and 4 of the 'mechanics' NPCs are implemented.  In writing content alone, it probably already matches most H-games, although I will need to look at commissioning art at some point.  In 2021 I want to get that public demo out to try and gauge what kind of budget I'll have to play with if I do want to evolve it beyond a text game.

Where I erred was underestimating the complexity.  The core game loop was fairly simple.  Letting each harlot scenario get more and more complex was not sustainable given how many the game needs.  That was what caused me to lose focus.  Thankfully, I had a rethink, and have been steadily writing new scenarios since late October.

H-space Bestiary
This was the escape project of sorts.  I want to flesh out those stories and turn them into a themed collection.  The Sun Lamia received a 3rd rewrite and became "Sun, Snakes and the Great Uncle Fergus Stash."  There will be more.  That will likely be something I fit in between work on HoHH, with an aim of finally getting a full collection together.

2020 was also a year of finishing off some of the half-written short stories I have lying around.

"Breastfeeding as a Combat Art" was another H-space story I put out for patrons.  I was undecided on this one.  It didn't come out as well as I'd have liked, so I think it will join the others for a future tweak.

I felt much better about "A Sweet and Deadly Taste of Milk".  This is more where I want the H-space stories to be, although maybe not all 7K words.

General Short Stories
Length was a definite theme to the short stories I put out this year.  I didn't write that many new stories, but the ones I did were long.

I finally finished "The Succubus Heart Squad".  That was a story I intended for a Literotica Valentine's Day competition and failed to finish.  I ran it as a min-serial on the blog for a while and that too failed to finish.  But this year I went back and finally completed it for Lit's Valentine's Day comp.  At 11.5K words it was a bit of a monster.

So too was "The Succubus in Mr Herbert's Summer House".  That was a spur of the moment idea I wanted to enter Lit's Summer contest, but that ballooned to 11K words and went in the Halloween contest instead.  It also presented me with an interesting little novel idea I have filed away to be worked on later.

In continuing the theme of finishing off half-written stories, the main story I wanted to enter for Halloween is another story that's been hanging around for a while.  That one I didn't finish, mainly because I had another spur of the moment idea inspired by a viral social media video and foolishly tried to work on both simultaneously.  Unsurprisingly, I failed to finish them in time.

This turned out not to be that bad, as the one I did finish, "The Subway Succubus" was rejected for being a little too nasty.  With both "The Succubus in Mr Herbert's Summer House" and this, I was trying to use some more conventional horror themes.  In the case of "The Subway Succubus", a really icky fate for one of the protagonists.  I don't blame Literotica for deciding that was a bit too much!  It was also another lengthy story at nearly 7K words.

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So, a mixed year overall.

Most of these were Patreon-exclusives.  That will likely continue as it's now a regular source of income.  It's not much, but I'm fairly prudent and it pays the bills.  I would like to get some new Amazon ebooks out, though, as it has been a painfully long time since the last one.  While they've kept their Orwellian tendencies quiet for a while, having Patreon as a main funding source is still a big risk considering how randomly ban-happy they can be. In 2021 I might see if I can mirror things on Subscribestar, which will make the exclusives available for people that refuse to have anything to do with Patreon.

Anyway, the fireworks are going off, it's time to grab a beer or six.  I wish a Happy New Year to you all and let's hope 2021 is better!
- manyeyedhydra

Friday, December 25, 2020

House of Hellish Harlots ver 0.014 (succufairies)

(x-posted from Patreon)

Not sure if this is best day to release new dirty smut, but I suppose it's a present, of sorts... :D

Version 0.014 of House of Hellish Harlots is ready.

This is the succufairy release and adds four new harlot scenarios and switches player mindset over to fixed player disposition attributes.  I went over these in more detail in the previous posts, but here's a quick summary.

The succufairies are four new scenarios - Cèis nan Cridheachan, Balla-Balla an Buachar, the Mùchadh sisters, and Sgriosar Balgan-Buachair.

They all make use of the same 'trick', so if that trick leaves you cold, this release will be a bit of a blank.  That's the risk of a themed batch.  If that's the case, I hope the next batch has harlots more to your liking.

Their scenarios are fairly linear and have no repeat visit functionality.  This is in keeping my current plans of getting a lot of base scenarios out and then going back to build on existing scenarios to bring them to the same level as Suffocatrix Mamilla.  As for building on scenarios...

Sgriosar might be controversial.  If you're squeamish and wish I wasn't such a horror-addict gorehound, just pretend she isn't there.  Normally, I keep my cards to my chest, but I'll be open here.  She only has a horror end at the moment, and it's fairly nasty.  You can get some lore on her by chatting to the Elegant Woman.

I'm still undecided on her.  I like the character idea and the options it opens up for a questline players can undertake to "fix" her.  But there's also a risk her presence is a mood-killer and shouldn't be in the House.  I'll wait and see what the reaction is like (and to the succufairies in general).

Also, the Mùchadh Sisters is the first time I've added a harlot that is actually multiple harlots (there will be more).  This will screw up some text.  I've fixed the reference in the main game loop to refer to them as "they".  I haven't yet updated The Madam's passages, so expect a few odd references still referring to them as "she".  That's on the TODO list to update, so I am aware of it.

Lastly, now that disposition is set at the start and fixed, this will make some harlot scenarios unwinnable depending on starting attributes.  This is only temporary.  There is an NPC on the way that will allow players to alter stats to get past these harlots (for varying costs...)

---

It's still Patreon-exclusive.  I am back to making good progress again and hoping to get a proper public demo out in 2021 (so I can attract enough interest to make paying for artists financially viable).  In the meantime, it's only a $1 (+tax) per month to keep up with progress.  I'm trying to get back to putting out at least one release per month, although I still have the occasional "off" month.

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.

-

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.