Spankers, Spankees and Switches,

Just uploaded Scarlet Moon 7.1.0, and Scarlet Moon is officially complete! At last, the team comes face to face with Roots, the mysterious crime boss who has watched Scarlet Moon’s career unfold from the shadows. What dastardly plans does Roots have in store? Play and find out!

The last episode is fairly short, but there is a scene at the beginning that has several different paths, and two major paths through the episode (plus a third fairly large one for people dating Midnight), so hopefully it won’t feel too phoned-in. It’s also (I think) fairly climactic, so I hope it proves satisfying despite its brevity.

You can get the now full(!) game over at the Downloads section! Unfortunately, the code for generating the HTML transcript has decided to stop working, on old content no less -_-. So I don’t have a transcript available, sorry. I mighty try to find some time at some point to figure out what’s wrong, but right now, I’m pretty done and just can’t bring myself to dig through years-old code.

Naturally, I expect a week or two of bug fixing as people find bugs that I missed. Once it’s stabilized, I’ll probably take a break from game development for a few months. To set expectations, I probably don’t expect to do any serious heads-down writing for about six months. Could be shorter, who knows. Won’t be any longer than that though.

In the meantime, I’m going to ruminate some more on Mischievous Misfortune and Spacewoman Spice, and I’ll probably be playing a bit with Twine. Since my future games won’t include any real combat mechanics, there really isn’t any reason *not* to use Twine. It’s much more portable than my own engine, and will require much less programming on my end (a big deal now that I’m so much busier). I’ve already played with it a little bit and verified that I should be able to do everything I want to do fairly easily, but there’s definitely more I can learn about how to do things.

I doubt I’ll be silent over the next few months. I’ll probably periodically post my evolving thoughts on Mischievous Misfortune and Spacewoman Spice. None of this is set in stone, it’s all pure brainstorming at this point. Still, it will be nice to see people’s reactions and suggestions over the next few months. These are going to be multi-year commitments, so I want to make sure the premise is fun for everyone (especially me!).

Take Mischievous Misfortune. One idea that occurred to me is to set it about ten years after Scarlet Moon. Then, make Juliana, now in her late twenties to early thirties, the player’s employer. Basically, instead of the PC being a secretary at some biggish company or other, they are hired as a lab assistant by Juliana as she attempts to establish her own company based on her own inventions. Juliana is a fun character to write, and it would be interesting to see what she’s like ten years down the road. We could also introduce her as a (much!) Lighter and Softer Batman-esque superhero: one without physical superpowers, but lots of gadgets and really good hand-to-hand combat techniques. I was already imagining Moonlight as this sort of Superman-esque hero, so you could have some fun tension and rivalry between this highly experienced hero (Juliana) and this new up-and-comer, with the PC caught in the middle and just trying to make off with the shinies. And the shenanigans in Juliana’s laboratory would write themselves.