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
Spankers, Spankees and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
Cranking away at the second part of Episode 4. It’s been a pretty productive month, and I’m about halfway through, so if I can keep up the pace, I expect I’ll have the new content posted in early to mid November.
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.
In a truly shocking development, the new content is ready, just like I
promised at the start of June. This version includes the first day
of content for episode 4. Get it at the Downloads section!
I’ve made a *lot* of changes to other things since the end
of episode 3, both in the UI and in gameplay. Some of these changes
were introduced in later version of the day 3 content, but if you’ve
been holding off on downloading until you get new content, here’s
the tl;dr:
1. Keyboard commands haven’t changed, but everything’s been given a mouse
clickable button, and moved to other screens to keep the UI from being
overcrowded.
2. Easier to look at the powers for each character.
3. Your bum status is shown via emojii rather than sentences.
4. Spankings disrupt the spankee’s best buff.
5. Each point in speed grants .5 damage, and .5 defense.
6. Buzzsaw and Succubus can now inflict Grabbed, which reduces your speed to 0.
7. For Windtunnel, you now select the character whose next attack you’d like to
redirect, and the character who should be the new target rather than the
*target* of an attack you’d like to redirect.
The more long-winded version:
* UI
– The various utility commands (i.e. (T)itle Screen, (O)ptions) have been
moved behind a mouse-clickable button, and been given mouse-clickable
buttons as well. Same for the more dynamic combat commands (like (a) attack,
or (b) power), and story choices (like 1. Punch her in the face!).
*None* of the keyboard commands have changed. I’ve simply moved a few things
around to make the main story and combat screen less crowded.
– The UI is now fully navigatable with the mouse. It’s a bit awkward. You
typically need two mouse clicks for one keyboard command, but it’s doable,
and looks pretty okay on smaller computer screens.
– It’s now *much* easier to look at character powers, because you don’t have
to go back to the main screen to look at a different power. For example, if on the combat
screen you press (F1) to look at Scarlet Moon’s powers, then press
(a), then (b), it’ll show you the information for s-armor, and then s-beam.
You can then press (1) to look at the powers for the villain you’re fighting,
without having to go back. Furthermore, if you’re inspecting
the powers for the currently active character, you can press (Enter) to use
it.
– The game no longer prints the power descriptions in the main
combat feed when you select one through (p)ower. I found that to be painfully
noisy while I was testing. However, I also have every power baked into my bones,
so if you liked the old behavior, raise a stink, and I’ll either revert the
behavior, or (more likely) add an option that allows you to toggle it.
– Rather than displaying rather long winded sentences describing your character’s
bum status, the game now uses emojis. They’re much more concise, and I find them
amusing. The emojis are, in order from least sore to most sore:
1. (^_^)
2. (-_-)
3. (o_o)
4. (>_<)
5. (x_x)
6. (;_;)
7. (T_T)
I still write sentences behind the scene (the game just counts up how many
sentences Scarlet Moon has), so if people prefer the descriptions, raise a stink.
I can either revert the change or (more likely) add yet another option.
* Gameplay
– The formula for damage from basic attacks (and shoots) has been changed.
Before, it was max(1, attacker.strength – max(0, target.speed –
attacker.speed)). However, this made speed a rather baroque, and powerful stat.
Basically what this means is that if your character is slower than your
opponent, increasing speed increases the damage you do by 1. If your character
is faster, increasing speed decreases the damage you take by 1. I
felt like there was never any reason to take a strength point if you
understood speed, which was hard to understand. After all, speed basically
gives you the same thing, or increases your defense if you’re already fast.
The new formula is: max(1, attacker.strength + floor(attacker.speed / 2) – floor(target.speed / 2)).
In other words, every even point of speed grants you one additional damage and one additional
defense. This is much easier to understand, and makes both strength and speed viable.
Increase strength and you’re all but guaranteed to do an extra point of damage. Increasing
speed may or may not give you anything just yet, but when it does, it’s a pretty big payoff.
This also means that characters are doing much more damage than they were before.
– Spankings no longer increase the spankee’s strength, while reducing their speed and power.
Instead, spanking does two things:
a. Inflict the spanked status. Spanked doesn’t actually do anything on its own, but is
looked for in other parts of the game. For example, Succubus’ AI won’t use her OTK power
(where she tries to get the player to bend over her knee) if she’s been spanked.
b. Reduce the duration of the target’s best buff by max(1, spanker.strength – spankee.strength)
– Buzzsaw’s chainwhip power inflicts the new status Grabbed. Similarly,
Succubus’ OTK power inflicts OTK and Grabbed. Grabbed is a nasty status that
drops the target’s speed to 0. That doesn’t stop you from
increasing your speed after you’ve been grabbed though.
– Tempestas’ Windtunnel has been tweaked a bit. First, it’s much cheaper now (10 energy
rather than 20). Second, instead of selecting an ally who could be targeted, you now
select the enemy (or ally, whatever) whose attack you’d like to redirect, followed by
the target you’d like to redirect the attack to. Windtunnel was intended as a way of
turning Prometheus and Poseidon against each other. Fling some of Prometheus’ fireballs
at Poseidon, and laugh as some of his buffs get disrupted. However, I found it nigh
impossible to use effectively the old way because you had to predict who Prometheus
would attack first, and hope Poseidon didn’t get to them before her (or vice versa).
Now, you can guarantee that
Prometheus’ powerful fireball is going to be redirected, rather than Poseidon’s
weak(er) Attack.
Hopefully these are all for the better, but if anything rubs you the wrong way,
or feels unbalanced please let me know.
Finally, I would greatly appreciate it if you all posted your stats at
the end of the new content, and let me know which powers you rely on, which ones you
ignore, and which ones you use situationally. This will help me determine if some
powers/stats are over or underpowered. Could also help players who are struggling with the
combat.
It will also help me make sure the stat checks are as hard/easy as I intend them to be.
Here’s my character’s stats:
strength: 10
speed: 9
power: 9
spanker: 5
spankee: 19
victory: 0
defeat: 6
She tries, bless her heart, but Scarlet Moon just can’t seem to catch a break. Every
villain’s spanked her at least once at this point, and it seems like she can’t go
ten minutes in her normal life without being upended. That being
said, she always manages to come through in the clutch.
She relies heavily on Scarlet Focus to get buffed quickly. Generally, she’ll
use scarlet-fists, scarlet-feet, or scarlet-eyes before using a power that
relies on those stats to get the most out of them. Scarlet-armor and Scarlet
Cords are her bread and butter, and make her very resilient. She’s been relying
heavily on scarlet-staff lately because of all the multi-target battles she’s
been in. Scarlet-spring and scarlet-paddle are a bit more situational,
depending on how nasty her opponent’s regular attack or buff is. She doesn’t
use scarlet-beam much, though she will pull it out for a bit of extra damage
once she’s otherwise buffed.
Despite my character’s *dismal* record, I do try to make sure every battle
is winnable. I just get a kick out of watching Scarlet Moon get her righteous
ass smacked all over Generica, so I’ll generally let myself lose once I’ve figured
out how to win.
Spankers, Spankees and Switches,
I’m cranking away at the first day of the next episode. I’ve finished writing all the content, and I’m currently working on implementing the powers for the new villain. Then I’ll need to do a pass of editing the story content, followed by debugging the new content, followed by balancing the new villain. I’m also making a few tweaks to some of the combat that will be included with episode 4 day 1:
1. Speed will just straight up reduce the amount of damage you take. Currently, most damage is calculated by computing max(1, attacker.strength – max(0, (target.speed – attacker.speed))). This had the effect of making Speed a bit too weird. If you had a low speed (relative to your opponent), increasing it by 1 increased your damage by one. If you had a high speed, increasing it by 1 reduced the damage you took by 1. This meant that some powers (like Scarlet Fists) weren’t as useful as they appeared. Sure your strength goes up, but your damage output doesn’t go up as much as your strength does, unless you already have a very high speed. The new formula is max(1, attacker.strength – target.speed). So the trade off is much more straightforward.
2. All the spanking powers (so Scarlet Paddle, and Succuspank) now also reduce the duration of the spankee’s “best” buff. If the duration gets reduced to zero or one, the buff gets removed. I’ve hardly ever used Scarlet Paddle in my play testing, because while Humiliated is nice, I’ve never really found it worth the turn to setup, except against Succubus. Granted that will probably change as more heroes show up who can take on the damage dealing role that Scarlet Moon currently fills, but even so I want all the powers to be useful now. Anyway, once the new version comes out, you’ll be able to use Scarlet Paddle as a means of controlling enemy buffs (might be very useful against Prometheus and Poseidon, whose buffs are needed to use their powers). Important thing to note: spankings reduce the target’s best buff *even if the target is already Humiliated*. In other words, buff reduction stacks. This should hopefully make Scarlet Paddle a much more interesting power, and perhaps worth losing a bit of damage per round.
3. Buzzsaw’s chain pull method will be inflicting a new, more dangerous status called “Grabbed.” Grabbed reduces your character’s speed to zero, and makes you immune to Away. The second effect isn’t a big deal yet, but the first basically strips you of your defense. However, Grabbed doesn’t *keep* your speed at zero. So you if you use a speed increasing buff after Grabbed, you can regain at least some defense. Just be careful, because speed buffs don’t stack (stacking just increases the duration)!
I’m hoping to have the new content out by the end of the month. The changes above will be backwards compatible.
AKA
Spankers, Spankees and Switches,
I had several reasons for deciding to create and release first Potion Wars, and then Scarlet Moon. One of the most important (and selfish) was how very few spanking games there were out there when I started. You had the start of a few on animeotk, you had Robin Pierce’s gamebooks, and a few old AIF with some minor to decent spanking content, but that was it. I was hoping that if I could create a good enough game, other people would be inspired and would write games that I could play, much as Pierce inspired me.
Well, it looks like in at least one case, that has born fruit: Welcome to Puttsdale by Victor Mammoth. At least, according to a message from the author (I can be bribed with flattery is what I’m saying). Welcome to Puttsdale has been in development for a few years now (if you frequent animeotk, you’re probably already aware of it). It’s a text-based game written in Twine, with quite a bit of narrative depth to it. There are a lot of characters in Puttsdale all living their own lives and experiencing their own spanky drama. The purpose of the game is basically to explore the town, meet the townsfolk and see how many scenes you can unlock.
I say “unlock” because there’s much more to finding scenes than wandering around town and talking to people. Some scenes can only be found at certain times of day. Others require certain stat levels or equipment. Some are only unlocked after unlocking other scenes. It feels a *lot* like old-style adventure games where you had to wander around, discover puzzles, find items, and find clues that hint at how to use the items to unlock the puzzles (which unlock spanking scenes). The writing is also very engaging and the spanking scenes are sexy.
I only have two gripes. The first is that I’m not a big fan of the “wander around and find the spanking scene” format. Partly, this is because most spanking games currently out there (i.e. on animeotk, the only place I’m aware of where there is any sort of spanking game making community) are of this format, so it’s gotten a bit old for me. Partly, this is because I find scavenger hunts to be kind of tedious. My second gripe is that there aren’t a whole lot of opportunities to roleplay (at least that I’ve found, I haven’t gotten very far though). While the game is highly interactive, it’s more of an old-style adventure game than a choose your own adventure, and like old-style adventure games your character doesn’t really interact with people beyond a rather superficial level. Basically, your character feels kind of like the narrator from the Great Gatsby: a narrative device more than an actual character.
The first gripe however just boils down to taste. Some people don’t like RPGs either. Doesn’t mean my game is bad, or that people shouldn’t at least try it. The same applies here. My second gripe is simply the reality of hobby projects. Victor Mammoth only has so much time, and they have to be very careful about what they work on. They’ve chosen to create rich item puzzles rather than roleplay opportunities, and that’s a perfectly valid design decision. Indeed, you could argue that my game’s “roleplay opportunities” are dialogue options that do *nothing* anyway, so it’s not like my game is full of rich roleplay either. More like half-assed roleplay that’s more marketing than fact, because I’d rather write purple prose about Juliana’s bouncy bottom and develop a really weird combat system than build out more than two real choices at a time.
A recent version of the game has introduced a map that allows you to leap directly to various places in town, which had been a *major* source of tedium in earlier versions. Furthermore, this is an excellent example of the “find the spanking scene” genre. So I would strongly encourage everyone here to check it out.
As far as pairings, most of the game appears to be X/F, though you can choose your player’s name, gender and age (18-23 years old).