Things seem to have settled down on the Scarlet Moon front. I think we’ve gotten most bugs fixed (though if you ever run into any, please let me know). So now we can start thinking in earnest about what comes next: Mischievous Misfortune.
As I start working on Mischievous Misfortune, I’ll be periodically posting some thoughts and questions. These will mostly be musings that I’m looking for feedback on. This is going to be another multi-year project, and I want to make sure it’s something that both I and all of you can get a lot of enjoyment out of.
The first question is what features can be safely dropped. It seems with every year I get busier, so one thing I will be looking at is if there is anything we can cut from Mischievous Misfortune compared to Scarlet Moon. At the same time, one of the big selling points of Scarlet Moon is the detailed character customization. I don’t want to lose that. The question is: Is there anything that isn’t worth the effort?
For example, you will still be able to pick your gender. I’ve interacted with quite a few fans who really like being able to make their character male. So gender selection will still be there. On the other hand, there won’t be any combat. While I have interacted with a few people who like the combat, many of you just skip it entirely, and combat is *a lot* of work. By dropping combat, not only will I no longer have to worry about implementing and balancing the various powers that each character possesses, but it also means I can use Twine, which will make Mischievous Misfortune *much* more portable than Scarlet Moon. So gender is in, combat is gone.
But what else? How important is bodytype and musculature to people? Would anyone be acutely disappointed if the PC has a big, soft bottom and (if they’re a girl) ample (though reasonably realistic) breasts? Letting the player change the bodytype might not seem like much, but it does make the spanking scenes a fair bit harder to write. I have a much harder time when I don’t have a clear image in my head of what the spankee looks like, and having to write small variations for each bodytype interrupts the flow. This scene in Samantha Stone gives a pretty good idea of how much better my spanking scenes are when I have a clear sense of what the spankee looks like: Samantha spanking.
Even if we keep bodytype and musculature I’d probably want to limit both to just two options. bodytype will have “slender” and “voluptuous” while musculature will have “soft” and “fit.”
Height we will definitely keep, but will probably be simplified to “short”, “average”, and “tall.” Outside of some of the buildup, and when describing other characters, height doesn’t generally have a huge impact on the spanking scenes, so that one’s very low effort for me. Similarly for hairlength, hairstyle, and skin color.
Clothing definitely isn’t going anywhere. Clothing can be a lot of work, but clothing is a big part of a spanking for me, and something that other people tend to gloss over, so I want to make sure people have plenty of options there.
On the flip side, is there a customization option that people wished we had in Scarlet Moon, that they would like to see in Mischievous Misfortune? Clothing they would like to see? Hair styles? Now is the time to ask!
AKA
New version uploaded that fixes a crash when fighting Buzzsaw (any Buzzsaw) with the average AI.
New version has been uploaded with a fix for a crash when meeting Bright in Episode 6 while using the Average AI. Get it at the downloads section!
Many thanks to the fan who e-mailed me with the bug report!
Got a couple of bugfixes here, including one for a crash waaay back in Episode 5 when you’re exploring a house (hopefully!), a crash in Episode 7 during your first encounter with the villain, and a bug that was causing the game to display the male character clothing text even when playing a female. Relatedly, there was a bug where I wasn’t correctly displaying the new option: clothingstyle.
So, we have a new option now: clothingstyle. This allows the player to tell the game which gendered set of clothing to put on when putting on clothing automatically. So for example, when the game automatically puts the player in their work clothes, if the setting is “genderbased” (the default), a female PC will wear a skirt, a male PC will wear pants. However, if clothingstyle is set to “female” then the PC will equip a skirt even if they are male. If clothingstyle is set to “male” the PC will equip pants even if they are female.
Furthermore, as a part of these bug fixes, I got the transcript-generating code working again, so we now have a transcript up that contains the last episode of content. Enjoy!
Another bugfix version, this time for an old bug in Episode 1 that was causing the game to stall if you wore any variety of jeans.
Many thanks to Beragon56 for the bug report!
A new version up with a bugfix for a crash reported by Wildfire on the route you take if you lose the first battle.
When I posted a link to the cutting room floor (here), I forgot that the files were using a custom filetype “story” that Scarlet Moon works with. They’re just plain text, so you can open them with any text editor. However, that still seems unnecessarily complicated, so below you can find a new version, where the filetypes have been changed to “txt” which your OS will recognize.
I would recommend using WordPad rather than Notepad on Windows. Notepad may not display line breaks correctly, and you’ll end up with a badly formatted blob.
New version of the cutting room floor with the filetype changed: cutting room floor
New version with some small bug fixes pointed out by Wildfire. No crashes, just a couple of typos, and one inconsistency.
New version uploaded that fixes a crash caused at the end when attempting to equip a male swimsuit. Thanks for the report Wildfire!
First, a reminder that Scarlet Moon is now complete, barring inevitable bug fixes. You can get it over at the Downloads section. Check out this post for more details.
While talking to Blubb2 one day, I mentioned that I’d started at least one sex scene between the PC and David, before abandoning it because I didn’t feel like it really fit in with the rest of the game. He voiced an interest in seeing it, and I still had it, plus a few other abandoned scenes lying around, so I figured I’d share it here
for people who are interested.
There are three scenes:
1. The aforementioned scene with David. It takes place at the end of the scene at the club in episode 5. It doesn’t ever actually *get* to the point of penetration, but there is some dirty talk, buildup and David acting all dominant and stuff.
2. The current villain for Episode 5 is Leopard. However, I’d originally planned to have a woman who could grow to giant size and has rather strong views on how women should dress. This scene is the start of “Big Mama’s” introduction. I abandoned this villain partially because I don’t particularly enjoy the “spanked for being slutty” premise (slut shaming is that unholy intersection of abhorrent and ubiquitous, so I have a hard time enjoying it in a spanking scene), and partially because I decided that when I did introduce a “Big Mama” character, I wanted her to be a bit more ambiguous than the out-and-out villain she is here.
3. A fragment from an early version of Episode 7, where Scarlet Moon and her companions would be trapped between the friendlier (but still spank-happy) Big Mama, and a giant villain named Trinity.
You can get them here
I have other such abandoned scenes and plotlines floating around in my version control, so if people are interested, I might be able to find some time to go dredging those up.