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
Uploaded a new version that upgrades to Love 11.2. One user had reported being unable to open the game on Windows as an exe (though they were able to run it after renaming the exe extension to love, weirdly enough). Apparently there was a bug in previous versions of Love that could cause it to not run properly on some versions of Windows 10. Not sure if that was the cause of my player’s issue, but I figured I’d upgrade to the latest version of Love just in case.
So if you’re having difficulty running the game on Windows, I’d encourage you to download this version.
AKA
A new version has been uploaded with some bug fixes:
1. Fixes a crash in the character creation screen when options wrap around (i.e. you press up or down enough times). Thanks to a fan for e-mailing me a bug report complete with the error and log!
2. Fixes a crash in combat when using the average difficulty against Poseidon and Prometheus.
3. Fixes a bug in Tempestas’ new power.
4. Optimized the character creation screen some, though not convinced it makes a particularly large difference.
5. Miscellaneous cleanups, so please let me know if previously correct code starts crashing or showing otherwise buggy behavior!
Get it over at the Downloads section!
Uploaded a new version with a fix for a crash kindly pointed out by giant432 over on animeotk. Thanks a lot giant432!
The crash happened when you draw David’s ire at the gym.
Spankers, Spankees and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
The second and final day of Episode 3 is complete and available for download! Go and get it under the Downloads section.
I’m not too happy about it though. For one thing, you get railroaded like *crazy* this time around. Sorry. I kinda found Prometheus and Poseidon to be rather boring villains to write, and they’re bringing out a bit more of a serious side in Tempestas than I really wanted. So it’s been a bit of chore to even write this much, and I’ve been really wanting to just get this episode done and move onto different (and hopefully more fun) villains. I also didn’t do the extensive planning I did with episodes 1 and 2, and it shows. There was nothing getting me excited about this episode (like the Silver Tower scene did for episode 2), and I kinda didn’t really have a good sense of where I wanted things to go. So it meanders a bit.
That being said I *did* like how the battles turned out. I gave each of Prometheus and Poseidon new powers, and hot damn do they change their game. It’s a a bit brutal though, so please let me know if you’re having difficulty with the final battle, *especially* if you’re not doing a strength build. I’m concerned that other builds may not have quite the damage output needed in this fight and things might need to be nerfed a bit.
Hopefully it’s still enjoyable. Let me know if you run into any bugs, or have any feedback!
AKA
Spankers, Spankees and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
I’m cranking away at the content for the second day of episode 3. Not sure
yet when I’ll have it ready though, especially with the holidays.
I’m honestly not too happy about how
this episode is coming together. I don’t think I’ve got Prometheus
and Poseidon figured out yet. But I already threw things out and started
over once, so I don’t really want to do that again. Especially since I’ve
already released a day of content. Regardless, expect more opportunities
to fight alongside Tempestas in the next episode, and a little bit more
time with Natalie.
At this point, the code engine is pretty much complete, and we’re
transitioning into maintenance mode. What that means is that we won’t see
any big changes. There will be some new features, but
they will mostly be quality of life stuff (like auto scrolling combat).
Nothing that will fundamentally change the experience. Here is
my current task list:
1. Improve the performance of the character selection screen.
Sometimes flipping through clothing options, there is an apparently random
delay of a few seconds before responding the player’s input. I think this
is because of some old, poor implementation choices I made when I was first
learning Lua.
2. Cleanup the combat code. The code for combat is *way* more complicated than
it needs to be, mostly because of an abortive attempt to reuse some of the
story mode code. This is the only part of the codebase that I consider truly
gnarly. Simplifying that will make everything so much easier going forward.
3. Autoscrolling combat. This was one of the first feature requests I got, and
hopefully I’ll have an easier time implementing and fiddling with it once I’ve
simplified combat a bit.
4. An additional “help” screen where players can look up characters.
5. Expand the help screen with information on statistics.
6. Add power information to the help screen.
7. Change your outfit without having to go to the character screen.
I’ll accomplish each task between episodes. That should hopefully strike a decent
balance of generating more content, and keeping the codebase healthy.
Of course, this is just a preliminary list. If anybody has experienced
any pain using the game, please let me know. I’ll try to work with you to come
up with a solution, and add it to the priority list.
I’m *especially* interested in anything that makes you feel like you’ve wasted
any time at all waiting on the game, rather than the game waiting on
you. Every minute of your precious time that you dedicate to my game is an honor,
and I don’t want to waste any of them.
AKA
Spankers, Spankees, and Switches Of All Ages (18 and above),
I’ve finished the first draft of content for the first day of episode 3. Next,
I need to:
1. Do at least one editing pass.
2. Implement the two new villains, and brand new superheroine. The bulk of this
will involve implementing and balancing their powers. This will be particularly
interesting, because I’ll be doing some interesting things with statuses with
the two villains, and the new hero will be doing some damage redirection, which
we haven’t seen yet.
Also, I stumbled upon some criticism of Scarlet Moon while browsing
puddinggames.blogspot.com.Pudding Earl tends to lose interest when I throw
massive walls of text at them. To address that, I’m going to try a little
experiment with this episode. Effectively, I’m going to try to break up long
events with some roleplaying (i.e. fluff) choices. You’ve seen a few of these
already, mostly as Scarlet Moon. You can typically tell there’s a fluff choice
if the third option is some variation of “Say nothing.” I’m going to try to add
more such choices, even when you’re in your civilians.
These should hopefully break up ginormous walls of text, without adding
significantly to my workload, and it should hopefully give players a a bit more
control of their character’s personality, both in and out of costume.
As of right now, you can generally expect three choices: a snarky choice, a
serious choice, and a silent choice, just like when you’re Scarlet Moon.
If there’s a particularly personality archetype you’d like to have the
opportunity to roleplay, please let me know in the comments. I can’t guarantee
that I’ll include it, or if I do that I will with every fluff choice, but I can
certainly try.
Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
I’ve just uploaded a new version with a few bug fixes pointed by some kind folks
on animeotk.com. In particular, I’ve fixed a crash where a slender PC tried to
spit on Buzzsaw after being defeated by her the first time.
Also, something that I forgot to point out: The Page Up/Page Down, Home/End keys
all work like you would expect for both the story pages, and combat log. You
don’t have to scroll through the content line by line if you don’t want to. I
should make those more discoverable, I just don’t want to do anything fancy.
I could include additional buttons, but that’s *four* additional buttons. I want
to have as little as possible on the UI, because that makes it easier for the
UI to scale up and down on different sized monitors and it means more of the
screen can be taken up by text.
I suppose I could include a story page that points those out before the game
begins? I don’t know.
Anyway, get the bug-fixed version over at the Downloads section, especially if
you like playing slender, defiant characters!
AKA
Spankers, Spankees and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
We’re getting close. We’re getting very, very close. I just finished fixing some bugs in the new content that kept the game from even loading, and am now working on debugging it (making sure statistics increase like they should, events transition like they should, combat is sufficiently balanced, etc).
I also came across a host of bugs that in the episode 1 content that have been fixed. There were a few places were you weren’t gaining the stat points you were supposed to be gaining. Oops. No wonder Buzzsaw was giving people so much trouble. Those fixes will be included in the new content.
I am currently waiting for a few scenes from someone who was kind enough to write them for me, but they aren’t critical. So if they aren’t ready when the rest of the game is, I’ll just release the content I have and include the missing scene in a future update.
AKA
Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
I’ve updated the download page with the newest version: Scarlet Moon 1.0.8.
Alas, there isn’t any new content. What there has been is a massive rework of combat to better support interesting powers (i.e. powers that aren’t just “do damage” or “inflict status”). Most of the changes are a straight up refactor, which means that a lot of the code has been rewritten, but it still does the same thing. There are however a few changes:
- Grappling now moves both the grapplers into the grappling range, but doesn’t force them to remain in a grapple.
- Spanking is now a single turn action that inflicts the “Humiliated” status and has some sexy text. It no longer spans multiple turns.
- All ally actions are executed before enemy actions. When you have allies (which won’t be for several more episodes), you’ll also be able to control the order in which those actions execute.
- Chain Pull (a power that Buzzsaw has at the end of episode 1) now both pulls its target into a grapple, and inflicts the “Frozen” status on the target. A character with the “Frozen” status can’t move, though they can do everything else (attack, spank, use powers).
- Scarlet Slap is now Scarlet Punch, and can be used both at armslength and in a grapple.
These changes were made for a variety of reasons, but the big one is because I’ve got a much clearer idea of how I want combat to work:
First, there are only a small number of “atomic” actions that define all of combat. Each action resolves into one or more of these actions. The basic actions are:
- Damage (negative damage heals).
- Inflict a status for a given duration (negative duration reduces the status’ duration, or heals the status if the duration is dropped to zero).
- Move
- Grapple
Technically, grapple could be defined as two Moves, but that proved to be hard to keep consistent (i.e. there was a high risk of one of the grapplers entering a grapple, but not the other, which makes no sense).
Each basic (non-power) action is resolved into a single one of these actions. Attack is a single Damage, move is a single Move, spanking is a single Inflict, etc. Powers on the other hand can do one of two things: they could resolve into one or more of these basic actions (like Scarlet Beam), or they could react to basic actions in combat. For example, you could have a power that redirects the first 2 non-negative damages that target a character. Or you could have a power that allows a character to automatically attack the first 2 enemies that are inflicted with a status.
This gives you a cheap way of activating any power that reacts to other actions. You have a power “Kick ‘Em While They’re Down” that automatically attacks enemies inflicted with a status? Cool, activate the power, then spend the next few turns giving your opponent a spanking. Not only will you weaken them, but you’ll do a bit of damage to boot.
Supervillains will tend to be more powerful than your heroes, and their actions will tend to be more direct. You could already see this in Buzzsaw: all of her powers involve getting you into a grapple, and hitting you _hard_. However, heroes will tend to have more reactive powers, and the challenge in the game will be finding the right combination of powers that amplify your attacks, while mitigating your enemies’, and getting all that set up before your enemy gives a you figurative and literal spanking.
So, the first two changes above simplify your basic actions to make it easier to use them to set up chaining. The third change makes it easier for the player to set up their chains. They also make combat more deterministic which is a plus in my mind. The goal here is to find a good strategy and execute it, not pray to the RNG god. The hope is that with the wrong strategy, you’ll almost always lose, but with the right strategy you’ll almost always win. The last two changes are just balance tweaks. Chain Pull’s change allows Buzzsaw to nullify the “keep your distance and shoot her strategy” in the second fight that can now be used to _great_ effect in the first fight since your move action will always execute before any of her actions. The change to Scarlet Punch means you can focus on building up your strength without forcing you to go into a grapple to make full use of it.
I would appreciate it if people could take the new version and try it out. Let me know what you think of the changes to combat, and if there are any bugs. I was able to play through the full episode a couple of times without any problems, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any of course. Even a combat system as deterministic as this one has quite a bit of randomness.
A few bugs have also been fixed. The character screen now allows you to make changes to your character _without_ resetting all of her stats. Furthermore, I fixed two places where your willpower _should_ be increasing, but wasn’t. You can now take the Willpower options and still be strong enough to fight Buzzsaw!
AKA