Fixes a crash caused when the game tried to equip the PC with their costume.

Spankers and Spankees,

At last, the second half of episode 4 is complete and has been released. You can get it in the Downloads section. This completes the fourth, count it, fourth! episode of Scarlet Moon. We finally resolve the cliff hanger I so evilly left you with last time.

There are a *lot* of changes in this most recent version beyond just the release of the next set of content. The highlights:

0. A new Loveless version of the game is now available for all three major platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux). There have been a small number of users who haven’t been able to play the game because of a bug in Love that affects old computers. Their plight filled me with sadness, so I decided to create a version that doesn’t use Love at all. More details below.

1. Speed now gives you a full point of defense, and half a point of offense.

2. Scarlet Feet has been removed, and now Scarlet Fists reduces power by x and increases both strength and speed by x/2. I found that those two tended to clash with each other, so I felt it best to roll them together and simplify Scarlet Moon’s powers a bit.

3. Small story retcon: You and Juliana are adoptive siblings. This doesn’t change much, but earlier episodes have been tweaked in places where it
was unnatural for siblings to talk (typically references to “your mother” vs. “our mother”).

4. A new heroine is introduced: Anklyana! You know those people who say “The best offense is a good defense?” well, Anklyana would slap them upside the head, except she’s too busy defending her allies with her awesome defensive powers.

5. In a *totally* unrelated note (totally unrelated), you can also start romancing a certain submissive young lady who may or may not be really good at defense. You only get the option to do so if you aren’t already attracted to David. Sorry, no bisexual threesomes. You will get the option regardless of which path you chose at the end of episode 4 day 1, it just shows up at different times. That being said, the climax is a bit chaotic (as climaxes tend to be when superheroes are involved), so I’ll also give the ability to start romancing the sexy lady at the start of episode 5 in case people somehow miss it.

6. The character screen has been reworked. Now, when changing clothing or character attributes instead of slogging one at a time through a sluggish list, you go to a separate screen. This screen displays a list of all the options you can pick from. You select one by either typing a number into the text box and pressing enter *or searching for the item you want*. For example, suppose you want to equip some shorts. Then you can go to the character screen, select lower clothing, and type “shorts.” The list will be filtered down to just items that contain the string “shorts.” From there, you can add additional words to narrow it down to just the item you want, or arrow key to beginning and type the number you want, or delete your search and type the number. A little bit awkward (it’s better in the console version) but it is still an improvement over the awful thing we had before.

7. A *lot* of ascetic choices have been added. This is mostly because the console version automatically scrolls to the bottom, and I found that to be a less than ideal user interaction. So I split up long events so that each event fits in a single screen in the Loveless version. Most of these choices follow a Snarky, Serious, Stoic pattern. Typically there will be a snarky option, a serious option, and a stoic option. Basically, it’s a next page functionality like we had in Potion Wars, except it grants roleplaying options. This should hopefully also address a criticism from the guy at puddinggames.blogspot.com a while back that my game just went too damn long without player feedback sometimes.

8. Hairstyle and clothing can now be changed from the story screen. Just press F1 to change hairstyle, F2 to change your upper clothing and so on. Saves you a keypress!

9. You can choose between an emoji bum status (in which your status is ^_^, >_<, etc depending on the state of your bottom) and the original short sentences.

Loveless Version

This version doesn’t use Love at all. Instead, it bundles a lua executable, and includes an executable script you execute to play the game. It’s basically the same as starting the Love version, except instead of double-clicking ScarletMoon.exe (in Windows) or ScarletMoon.app (in Mac), you double-click ScarletMoon.bat (in Windows) and scarletmoon-mac.sh (in Mac).

Get it in the Downloads section!

Next Steps

Once things stabilize, my next plan is to overhaul combat. Something I discovered working on this episode is that the combat code is quite complicated, and it’s also hard to follow the combat. The first one is a problem for me (especially since my life is only getting busier), and the second is a problem for players.

In particular, I have all this complexity to support damage redirection. However, the ability to redirect damage is really hard to balance in a game like this, and it’s not even the most interesting thing in my system. The most interesting parts of my combat system is the rich action economy (i.e. the fact that your character can do any combination of their actions each turn, instead of having to pick one), and the ridiculous number of statuses. So I want to double down on these, and simplify everything else.

My plan is to simplify things significantly by adding some more secondary statistics (attack, defense, shield, etc), remove the ability to redirect, and focus instead on giving the player more tools to control the action economy and buffs. For example, instead of Wind Tunnel, Tempestas may have a skill that lets her throw a character at another character and scramble their statuses. Similarly, she might get a power (Wind Switches!) that removes *everyone*’s statuses. Plus, not everything necessarily needs to be a status. For example, Scarlet Fists and Scarlet Eyes don’t necessarily need to be statuses. So you could potentially wipe the board of everyone’s statuses, and still leave your characters more built than your opponents.

While doing so, I’ll be chewing on the next step in the story and start working on that once I’ve got combat where I want it.

Enjoy!
AKA

Spankers, Spankees and Switches 18 and above,

Sorry about missing the November update! IRL things were keeping me pretty busy around then, and I never got around to making one. Things have gone a bit slower than I hoped (so, you know,a day ending in ‘y’), however all the content has been written and the powers for the new superheroine have been implemented. So all that’s left now is playtesting, debugging and balancing. Hopefully I’ll have the final half of episode 4 ready within the next week or so. Things I still need to do:

1. Debug/playtest/balance
2. Update my deploy script so that it generates a “Loveless” version of the game for Unix and Mac, as opposed to just Windows.

AKA

Not a whole lot to say this month. I’ve made a few tweaks to the LOVE-less version of the game that should make it user friendly, but seeing as how I haven’t even officially released that version yet, I won’t be releasing any new downloads today. This month in general hasn’t been super productive, but I have been chipping away at the second half of episode 4. Don’t have an ETA yet though.

AKA

I’ve implemented a first pass of a version of the game that doesn’t use the LOVE game engine. I’ve had two people now encounter a bug in LOVE that keeps it from properly rendering text on their Windows machines. Windows version. I haven’t released a console version for the Mac and Linux yet, mostly because it was built explicitly for people encountering a bug in Windows. The Linux and Mac versions will be released with the new content once that’s ready. The Love-less version uses the console, so it has some pros and cons vs. the Love version:

————Pros:—————–

Way more efficient – The game boots up significantly faster, and the UI is also much snappier.

Miniscule download size – The console version is not even 2MB, whereas the Love version > 10.

Better character creation – Rather than slogging through a list one at a time, the whole list of outfits for each slot is displayed. You can even filter by typing in a search string!

Can copy the text directly (so you don’t need to post screenshots to show me bugged content)

Can resize the cmd window better than you can resize my game.

Can handle “weird” resolutions, where “weird” is defined as resolutions neither of my two test machines use

Autoscrolling!

————-Cons:—————

You have to press enter after each input. This UI doesn’t respond to keypresses immediately (though this also enables things like the search strings).

The game doesn’t overwrite the screen every time you input a command. Instead, it appends the new screen to the bottom of the player session (and the command prompt then autoscrolls). If you don’t scroll up much, it’ll look like the screen’s being updated in place, but as soon as you start scrolling up, it gets weird. On the other hand, this does give you a nice log of your play session that you could copy and send me if you were helping me debug.

The autoscrolling is overzealous, and you’ll have to scroll up if the content is greater than your screen. The solution to this I think for me to work harder to keep each event short enough to fill no more than a screen. So this could end up being a blessing in disguise.

No pictures or sound effects. This isn’t a big deal though, because except for the titlescreen, my game doesn’t have any pictures or sound effects, nor do I plan on adding any.

I personally prefer the console UI, but my command line fetish is almost as big as my “big female bottom in a thong getting soundly spanked” fetish, so you know. I’m biased.

So the console version is recommended if either the Love version isn’t printing text for you (but is otherwise running fine), your machine is old and cranky and can’t handle the Love version, or you’re a command-line junkie like me.

I’m also reworking the character creation screen in the Love version. Once that’s done, rather than having to manually scroll through your options one at a time, whenever you select something (like gender or underwear), you’ll be taken to a different screen. That screen displays a list of all the options that you can select either by providing their number, or by typing in a search string. This should make customizing your character much less of a pain. I’ve found it much more performant so far too.

Finally, I’m cranking away at the content for the second half of episode 4. No ETA yet though.

A fan, Dloohi, has been kind enough to enhance the Master of the Manor content that I posted a while back. Now, not only do you have access to a plain text and ebook version, but there’s also an HTML version. This version lets you track your character’s state right there next to you, rather than in a separate program/piece of paper. You can “save” your state by right-clicking on the page and selecting “Save Page As.” This will save the HTML locally, and you can then open that file with your web browser. It doesn’t save your page location though, so you’ll need to come up with a system for that (either including the page number in the file name, or putting it somewhere else or something). Thanks a lot Dloohi!

If windows users want to go ahead and try out the console version linked earlier, I would be quite grateful. Especially if you’ve had problems with the game not displaying text, so you’ve been reading the HTML version.

AKA

Just a quick update with a few fixes to bugs kindly pointed out by Gojira01 and 42idiot over on animeotk. Thanks!

Bug fixes:

1. Fixed a few occurrences of [name], rather than {name}, so the PC’s name wasn’t being resolved correctly.

2. Removed some lingering text from the old YAML-based story format.

3. Added the missing save/load buttons to the story commands screen.

Another quick update. A few people voiced preferences for the textual descriptions of your bottom rather than the emojis. I prefer the emojis, so I decided to compromise by adding an option! It defaults to emoji, and should be fairly clear which option does what. If it isn’t, let me know. You can get the new version on the downloads section.

See the previous post for more details about the many changes introduced since episode 3.