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).
Spankers, Spankees and Switches,
So I finally worked up the guts to let a local friend who knows what I’m up to take a look at my game. It’s been very enlightening watching over their shoulder. This version contains a bug fix they stumbled across when trying to load their save file. I believe it’s only triggered if you try to change font size (particularly body font size) through the Options menu.
Furthermore, I’ve cleaned up to the office park scene at the beginning of the game, and rearranged the buttons some.
It became clear while watching my friend futz with the game that the UI is way too busy. In particular, there are too many buttons along the bottom row on the story screen. While they were added so that people could know what to do, it does mean it’s difficult for them to notice things like the scroll buttons. Plus, it just makes the screen look really crowded on their small laptop screen. So the utility style buttons ((T)itle, (O)ptions etc) have been moved behind “(Spacebar)Commands.” The key commands all still work the same as you’d expect, but you can click on Commands or press “Spacebar” to view the list of available commands, and from there click on the buttons.
Furthermore, I’ve also used that idea for story choices. So now, you can click on “(#) Choices” to see a list of buttons containing each choice, and then click on the appropriate choice. Which means the story screen is now 100% useable with the mouse! It’s a little bit clunky, but it’s the mouse. Mice are always clunky.
The next update will see the same treatment applied to the combat screen.
Again, *none of the key commands have changed.* You can still press 1 or 2 or 3 to select a choice from the story screen. You can still press “c” on the story screen to view your character. The buttons have just been hidden.
Also, the statistics have been moved off the character creation screen. There’s no reason for it to be there anymore, since your stats are now displayed on the story screen, and you can’t edit them anyway. Plus they were taking up valuable screen real estate on my friend’s very small laptop.
Let me know what you think of the changes.
AKA
Spankers, Spankees and Switches,
I’ve just uploaded a static, HTML version of the game. This is basically a transcript for the game, with some default choices made for the main charater: she’s female, her name is Scarlette, she has red hair, she wears a t-shirt, jeans, and a thong, she’s fit, slender and of average height.
I would *strongly* recommend actually downloading and playing the game instead. The game’s transcript is intended to be consumed by a computer, and it shows. Furthermore, you don’t get any customizations, you have to keep track of your own statistics and keywords, and you won’t get access to the combat. However, this will still let you enjoy the content if:
1. The game doesn’t run properly on your computer for whatever reason and I can’t figure out the problem.
2. You’d like to take a peek at the content before committing to downloading and playing the game.
3. You don’t feel comfortable downloading and executing a program from some random website on the Internet.
Note: If you just don’t want to deal with combat, but want the computer to keep track of everything else for you, you can disable combat on the Options screen instead. No need to use the static and rather awkward HTML version.
Get it over at the Downloads section
AKA
Spankers, Spankees and Switches,
Just uploaded a new version Scarlet Moon 3.2.9 with two changes:
1. First a bug fix to the player spankable option. We weren’t loading it correctly, so that the game was always treating “player spankable” as true after loading. You’ll need to start a new game for the bugfix to take effect though.
2. A new option has been added “combat” with two settings: “Yes” and “No.” This allows you to enable and disable combat. If combat is enabled, then nothing’s changed for you. However, if you disable combat, then you’ll get some silly (textual) sound effects. If the combat is optional, you’ll get to decide whether you win or lose. This is intended for those of you who want to enjoy the smexy spanking goodness without having to deal with all that awesome RPG turn-based combat goodness, because not every spanko’s into smexy spanking RPG turn-based combat goodness. However, I would *strongly* encourage people to at least try the combat before disabling it. It’s the primary form of “gameplay” in this game.
Get it at the downloads section (or don’t if like seeing the player get spanked, and you enjoy the combat).
I participated in the Spring 2019 Game Jam over at animeotk this past week. For it I created a small gamebook:
Madison “Mischief” Malone and the Dish Best Served Cold
You take on the role of Madison “Mischief” Malone, private eye in a 1930’s-esque America-esque. You’ve got a little bit of magic. Just enough to keep things moving smoothly in your favor, except when it backfires painfully anyway… However, all is not well in Maddie’s life, for a rival private eye
Rex “Smokin'” Gunn, keeps interfering in your cases! Well, it’s time for a little payback.
You can find the game under the Spanking Mini-Games tab along the top.
This is a gamebook in the same style as the gamebooks by Robin Pierce (Master of the Manor, and Dianne’s Promotion) except obviously much smaller (since it was written in a week). The key gameplay mechanic is the use of magic, and the management of Karma. Basically, karma is a measure of how annoyed the Universe is with you. The more karma you have, the happier the Universe is and the easier it is to use your magic in your favor. However, doing so uses up your karma, and when your karma gets low, suddenly things become a lot harder.
You’ll need the following to play:
1. Someplace to track your state (a simple text file in your favorite editor is sufficient).
2. Either a six-sided die or some other way of generating a random number between 1 and 6.
Go take a gander, and let me know what you think.
AKA
Spankers, Spankees and Switches 18 and above,
Uploaded a new version of Scarlet Moon 3.2.8. This fixes addresses a few criticisms kindly provided on animeotk:
1. Due to a bug, the game was forcing *everyone* to be attracted to David regardless of what choice they made at the start of the episode. You shouldn’t be
attracted to David unless you pick one of the fantasizing choices. However, “Look around” was routing you to the same event as one of the “I’m attracted to David” choices. That has been fixed. So if you don’t want to be attracted to David, I’d just suggest downloading the latest version and replaying episode 3 from the very beginning of the episode. Sorry about that.
2. The game now supports swapping between windowed and fullscreen. Just press Ctrl+Enter. You can do this on any screen, even though only the title screen lists it as an option (I didn’t want to clutter up the rest of the UI). The button doesn’t work, because I just slapped this together real fast, and I’ll probably remove mouse support completely at some point anyway, because I’m lazy and don’t like the mouse.
3. Adds the ability to spank Prometheus or Poseidon at the very end of episode 3. It’s kinda short and half-assed, but it’s there.
Get it over at the downloads section.
Uploaded a few version that fixes a crash thanks to some malformed text. That’s what I get for not running the previous version before uploading it.
Spankers, Spankees and Switches 18 and above,
I’ve uploaded a new version of Scarlet Moon, 3.2.6. It contains a few bug fixes kindly pointed out to me by somebody whose handle I forget because I accidentally
deleted the e-mail. All fixes deal with a male player character, so if you don’t play a male character, there really isn’t any reason to download the latest version:
1. The game crashed if the player chose to wear regular swim trunks in episode 1, instead of a sexy sexy thong speedo. Come on guys, this is a porn game! Strut your
stuff! That has been fixed. 😉
2. Fixed a whole *mess* of places in episode 3 where we were using “his” where we should have been using “him.” Guess what the female equivalent of “his” is? “her.” Guess what the female equivalent of “him” is? “her.” Guess what gender I use when writing and debugging? “her.”
As far as current work, I’m cranking away at episode 4 day 1. I’m much happier with this episode than I was with episode 3. The villain is infinitely more fun to write. Hopefully she’ll be more fun to read too. We’ll also be seeing the introduction of new superheroine, and a little bit of (boring) insight into Keiko’s past! I’m hoping to have content ready by the end of the month, but we’ll have to see.
In case you don’t remember, Keiko’s the melodramatic Canadian roommate. She hasn’t really shown up since episode 1, so I figure it’s past due to feature her a bit. Especially since I’m not quite sure what to do with her. She’s fun to write, but I haven’t figured out an arc for her.
I’ll also be participating in the game jam that’s being hosted the week of the 15th over at animeotk. I’ll be posting it here as well once it’s ready.
AKA