Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of Adult Ages,
My first monthly update on Scarlet Moon 2! Ooh, it feels all fresh and new and exciting.
Anyway, I’ve been working steadily on the second half of Episode 1. The episode kind of got away from me, and will likely end up a fair bit more elaborate than I expected. Don’t expect this to continue! The mechanics I’m using are proving to be a bit of a dream to work with, and writing these characters feels comfortable, familiar, and relatively easy. Also fun. I’m having a lot of fun.
Anyway, there are two main paths in the second half of the episode depending on whether Prometheus and Poseidon successfully stole the Big Ruby in the first half or not. I’ve finished the path where Prometheus and Poseidon successfully steal the Ruby. So now I need to work on the path where your team successfully kept them from doing so. I expect that path to be much shorter and less elaborate, but seeing as how in the first half you get an entire bridge sequence if you defeated Prometheus and Poseidon, I think it will roughly balance out. Also, players are more likely to fail anyway, so I think giving the failure path a bit more love is reasonable.
It’ll probably take at least a month to write up the rest of the content, plus I’ll need to do some debugging and editing and the like. So don’t expect anything before end of September at the earliest.
I’m also still wrestling with how I want to handle the romances. I think I know how I want to introduce and handle Midnight in a non-romantic context. But I don’t want to erase the romances from your character’s backstory either. Some of my favorite scenes from the first game are in Midnight’s romance, and I don’t really want to “lose” them. The question is whether I can work the romances in in a way that will minimize their burden.
David won’t be showing up again, regardless. He was conceived of back when I imagined the game being a bit more like Silver Age Spider-Man: a single heroine (plus her sister whispering in her ear), and the game spends as much time on her mundane life as it does on superheroics. However, that isn’t really what happened. The game ended up converging on more of a DC Justice League style with a team of heroes and a strong emphasis on the superheroics, with perhaps a scene or two of their mundane lives thrown in here and there. There really isn’t room for David in that kind of setup.
On the other hand, both Anklyana and Midnight are heavily involved in the superheroics. So it would be relatively easy to have them involved regardless of romance. It’s a lot easier to introduce slight variations on a scene depending on whether you’re romancing a character or not than it is to write entirely different paths based on it. I can also, relatively easily, have little transition scenes. Maybe PC and Natalie have their date interrupted by a bad guy if they’re dating, instead of being at home or whatever. The PC can be hurrying back home at the end of the episode because she has a date with Tania if she’s in a romance, and because she has homework that needs to get done otherwise.
So, yeah. I may have a little scene with Natalie in the second half where the player will have the opportunity to tell the game “I was romancing Natalie in the first game.” We will see.
AKA
Hey everyone,
So an Anonymous fan has encouraged me to make a post giving some insight into what I’m working on right now, and I figured, hey why not. It’s been almost a year since I last posted, and I imagine most people have given up on hearing much else from me (I’ve like 90% given up myself!).
So, anyway, I’ve spent the last year mostly not working on spanking game stuff, but only mostly. I have been dicking around with different ideas. Some I wrote up a few initial passages, some never got past the “this could be a fun game premise” musings.
Starting last November, and then very sporadically since then I’ve started working on a sequel to Scarlet Moon. Scarlet Moon 2: Eclipse Rising.
I’m on my third(?) significant rewrite of the first big scene of the first episode (equivalent in scope to the chase at the start of Episode 1 of Scarlet Moon) as I try to feel out where the characters are now, what kind of stories I want to write, and what makes for interesting-but-relatively-easy-to-manage game mechanics.
That being said, it’s started to slowly pick up steam. I’ve got about 2500 lines written. For context, the first day of episode 1 in the first game was about 3500 lines. But line count is only a very rough comparison, I’d say I’m probably around halfway done, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less.
Three developments have helped spur my return to Scarlet Moon.
First, I missed them. Their story is by no means finished, and they were a joy to write. Some, like Bright, were really only starting to develop when the first game ended. I’d love to see what additional escapade Juliana drags them into.
Second, I was playing around with the avatar generation features on spicychat. Basically, spicychat’s image generator for profile pics is an impressively good pinup generator. I wanted to see if I could create our intrepid heroines. They came out wonderfully, and it helped inspire me to return to their world. I’ll probably toss in some AI pin ups of various heroines and villains as we meet them, though don’t expect anything more elaborate than that. AI image generation is *terrible* at being consistent, and trying to do anything more elaborate than a pinup is going to be tricky and time consuming (and even generating these pin ups can take a while. For every good image, there’s dozens that are just straight up bad and incoherent).
Thirdly, I hit on a game mechanic that I think has the potential to be interesting, help inspire ideas for choices players can make, but shouldn’t be too onerous to make impactful. The mechanics work like this:
You have four stats: power, craftiness, charm, and heroism. Power, craftiness, and charm are your main stats, heroism is special.
The game will periodically give you a stat check, where you’ll have to choose between 2-3 options, each one tied to a stat, just like in Scarlet Moon. When you make that choice, a d6 is rolled and the result added to your stat. If the result is greater than or equal to 6, you pass. Otherwise you fail.
Not so different from the stat checks in the first game. But, this is where things get different. Regardless of whether you pass or fail, the stat you chose goes *down*, and one other stat goes up. If you pass, then in addition to whatever good things happen in the story, you get to choose one of the other two main stats to improve. If you fail, then something bad happens in the story, and the
game chooses one of your other two main stats to improve at random.
So if you have the choices:
Power: Punch him in the face.
Craftiness: Trick him into slipping on a banana peel.
Charm: Convince him to surrender.
And you choose Power: Punch him in the face. then the game will roll a check d6+Power >= 6. Power will then go down by 1 (can’t go below zero). If you pass, you can choose either Craftiness or Charm to increase. If you fail, the game will choose one of Craftiness or Charm to increase.
Heroism is special. Heroism will only improve when you make especially “heroic” decisions in the game. These decisions might be stat checks, or they might have a guaranteed outcome. Regardless of the outcome, if you make a heroic choice, you gain a heroism point.
Later, if you have at least one Heroism point, you will sometimes get an additional “Heroic” choice. If you succeed, heroism will go down by 1, and you can pick one of your three main stats to improve. If you fail, heroism still goes down by 1, and the game will pick one of your three main stats to improve.
So, most of the time you’re shuffling your stats around. There are two ways to improve your total stat count: Banking and spending heroism points, and picking stat choices with a stat at 0. Note you can’t choose a heroism choice if you have 0 heroism.
Of course, heroism generally means “absurdly reckless” and picking a stat choice with a stat at zero means you only have a 1/6 chance of passing. So my hope is that the game mechanics will incentivize players to occasionally do something that is liable to get them in trouble and spanked (the whole point!) to improve their stat pool. But at the same time, passing feels good, and is how you get successful outcomes for your character, so players will hopefully also generally want to do the things they’re currently good at.
Note that were won’t be any CRPG-style combat in this game. I definitely don’t have the time or mental energy for that. Rather, fights will be action scenes written in prose, and will be where you’ll have the majority of your stat checks. In this first scene, you’ll have to succeed on two out of three stat checks to win. A fairly tall order, since your stats will start out quite low (1 in each stat), but should get easier as you play if you’re smart about how you build your stat pool.
All that being said, don’t get your hopes up too much. There’s no guarantee I’ll finish this first episode, and even if I do, I don’t know if I’ll be able to write more. Treat this as vaporware for now, barely more than a sparkle in my eye.
Oh, and here are the images I generated of our intrepid superheroines:
and the two villains they’ll be contending with in the first episode (assuming it sees the light of day):
So I noticed a couple of people asking if my site is abandoned. A completely reasonable question, since I haven’t really said anything since February.
The answer is sort of, yeah, probably. But it’s not because I don’t want to keep writing spanking games. I keep messing around with different gaming ideas, and then stalling out before they get anywhere, most of them before I even put pencil to paper.
The problem is that fundamentally, RPGs and RPG combat are my true love. So any efforts to do anything else, generally just don’t hold my attention for very long. Writing CYOA and nothing but CYOA can get very monotonous for me, especially when I try to add gamification elements to it. This is what happened to the Cat Burglar game I was working on, as well as Samantha Stone.
One nice thing about Scarlet Moon was that I was able to bounce between the combat and the writing, so there was usually some part of the game I was in the mood to work on. The combat mechanics also gave me a nice way of tying in some character development into the CYOA part, so that even if there weren’t a whole lot of impactful choices in the fiction, players could at least influence how their character developed.
However, RPG combat is *difficult* and it can very easily get quite complex. Plus, of course I have yet to find any game engines that can handle a mix of CYOA and RPG combat well (all efforts I’ve seen in something like Twine have felt awkward to play, and very complicated to code, meanwhile RPGMaker is *terrible* at handling walls of text). So I have to roll my own. But UI’s are *hard*, and time consuming and I’m terrible at them. Meanwhile, real life is just getting more and more demanding as I get older.
So if I did write another game, it’d probably just be on the terminal, and most people don’t really go for that. Second, of course I’d need to figure out some RPG combat mechanics that can be fun, but also easy to work with. Scarlet Moon’s were fun, but rather difficult to work with.
So, yeah. I’ll keep maintaining the site of course, and I’m sure I’ll keep fiddling with stuff in the background, but who knows if and when I’ll ever make something else. But if I do, I’ll post both here and animeotk!
Alright, so I think I managed to take everyone’s *wonderful* ideas and condense them into 7 aspects that I think capture everything people were wanting to see, based on the aspects they posted.
Here’s the list:
Steal Everything Nailed Down: You steal stuff. Even when it’s nailed down, and especially when you’re anxious. A normal person might pull out a fidget cube and futz with it when she’s nervous. When you’re nervous, you steal her cube. This also means you’re very very good at theft. So good in fact, you can steal her cube without her noticing. Right away. Unfortunately, people tend to eventually notice when you’re constantly stealing their stuff.
The Good Is The Enemy of the Perfect: You are a master planner with acute attention to detail, and a strong work ethic. You will plan a caper down to the smallest detail, and think of (almost) every possible way things could go wrong, and devise a plan for that too. Unfortunately, even you can’t think of everything and you really can’t handle it when things go sideways. You also detest settling for “good enough” and will strive for “perfect” even when you don’t have time or are otherwise under pressure to get something done.
Born Dom(me): You are smooth, sexy and able to convince damn near anyone to drop their pants, and/or go over your knee(for fun or otherwise). Very useful when you’re looking for information, need to distract a guard, or just want to blow off steam. On the other hand, you’re sometimes a little *too* confident in your dominant sexiness. As a result, it’s not that hard for crafty individuals to turn the tables on you either because they saw through your act, aren’t interested (and may, in fact, be a little insulted), or are a Born Sub whose just plain better at seduction than you. Also, your natural dominance may rub some people the wrong way, intimidate them too much to be helpful, or cause you to ignore them even when you shouldn’t. This is the dominant version of Born Sub.
Born Sub: You are playful, sexy and able to convince damn near anyone to jump your bones, or put you over their knee for a little bit of fun. All it takes is a little wiggle of your round, full, excessively spankable ass, and a taunting wink. Very useful when you’re looking for information, need to distract a guard, or just want to blow off steam. On the other hand, you’re sometimes a little *too* confident in your cheeky sexiness. As a result, it’s not that hard for crafty individuals to turn the tables on you either because they saw through your act, aren’t interested (and may, in fact, be a little insulted), or are a Born Dom that’s just plain better at seduction than you. Also, you have a hard time telling people “no” and may find yourself doing what they tell you, even if you don’t want to. Usually you can turn this to your advantage. But not always. This is the submissive version of Born Dom(me).
Vixen Smile: You’ve got one of those smiles. You know the ones, full of mischief and naughty glee. People look at you and immediately assume you’re up to no good. Someone put a pin on the teacher’s chair? You’re the one who ended up over her knee and howling whether you did it or not. This has gotten you into all sorts of trouble. But it also means you have lots of experience being in trouble, and are thus very well equipped to handle it. You have also learned to use your mischievous grin to distract people away from your *real* mischief to something small and inconsequential. This is the naughty counterpart to Puppy Dog Eyes.
Puppy Dog Eyes: You have big, soulful eyes, and the best damn pout this side of the Atlantic, and you know it. People take one look at you and your innocent, cherubic face and they refuse to believe you could possibly be up to any mischief. Unfortunately, your cute, youthful face makes it really hard for people to take you seriously. Adorableness dialed up to 11 is great when you’re getting out of trouble, not so great when you want people to take you seriously. This is the innocent counterpart to Vixen Smile.
Luck Favors the Clumsy: You are simultaneously the clumsiest, most unlucky person on the planet, *and* the luckiest person on the planet. If there’s something fragile nearby, you will fall and break it. If there’s a patch of ice, you will slip and fall on it. Probably into something fragile, even if makes no damn sense for a fragile vase worth thousands of dollars to be sitting on a marble stand next to a patch of ice. Of course, because you slipped on the ice, the superheroine flying towards you at superhuman speed zoomed over you instead of into you, and got herself stuck in a wall. Meanwhile, Steel Jaws of Doom snapped from the ceiling and would have captured you if they weren’t being wedged open by that marble stand you knocked over. And sure, you dropped the precious jewel you stole, but it bounced off the floor, conked its owner on the nose and landed back in your lap.
Of these, Born Dom(me) and Born Sub are dominant/submissive variants on the same scene, and will tend to apply in the same situations. They’re really just dom/sub variants of a generic “Seducer with Spankings.” Heavily inspired by When In Doubt, Sub It Out, and tries to incorporate some of the seduction themes of a few suggested aspects.
Meanwhile, Vixen Smile and Puppy Dog Eyes are my take on the Guilty Aura and Innocent Aura respectively. Steal Everything Nailed Down captures the kleptomania that Wildfire suggested and The Good Is The Enemy of the Perfect tries to capture most of the ideas suggested for elaborate plots, being an egghead, and not handling things well when they fall apart.
Note that *none* of these are the aspects I started with. So, thank a lot everyone! Your ideas really helped me come up with some good, fun aspects I think, and I’m excited to start writing.
Here is also a link to the easiest part of the game to create, its intro screen! This screen provides a (mostly) brief explanation of the game’s mechanics, and allows you to create and customize your character. I would be grateful if people could take the time to look it over and provide feedback.
Blubb2 was kind enough to look over it a while back, before we’d come up with aspects, and helped me squash a bunch of bugs, so many thanks Blubb2!
AKA
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
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
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.
Spankers, Spankees, and Switches,
Haven’t been super productive this month, real life has been keeping me busy. But I’ve been chipping away at the next episode when I’ve got the time. Blubb2 over at AnimeOTK has been kindly helping me with some editing and feedback. Their suggestions have been very good, and very helpful, thanks Blubb2!
I’ve also been starting to give some thought to what comes after Scarlet Moon. I’ve been tight lipped about my longterm plans, mostly because they tend to change and I don’t want to set up false expectations. My current plan is to complete the first big myth arc (the “mysterious evil person”) in episode 10. So we’re getting pretty close. While I’ve been laying the foundation for some additional arcs, I think once I complete this arc I’ll slap a “Done!” sticker on it and call Scarlet Moon complete.
The question will be what comes after. Most likely, I’ll start up a Scarlet Moon 2. I still have plenty of story ideas, and I’m having lots of fun writing these characters. The advantage of starting a new game is that will give me the freedom to futz with things a little. In particular, I’m thinking that for a second game, I’ll move away from the current Wizardry-style RPG combat and to something more narrative. So “combat” will just be a sequence of narrative then skill check then more narrative then skill check. The player passes enough skill checks, they win. They fail enough checks, they lose.
This is mostly a time saving thing. As I get older, I have fewer large blocks of time. I can write prose a little bit here, and a little bit there. But writing and debugging code…for that I need a big chunk of time where I can’t be interrupted. So if I want to keep developing games (and I do!) I need to find a mechanically satisfying way of having less coding.
Fortunately, I think I have an idea! My inspiration is the Fate Roleplaying System. I think this is a *great* system for a spanking game for one very simple reason: It rewards the player for letting their character get in trouble! Basically, the only resource you have are “Fate Points” and you use fate points to help you pass skill checks. You get more fate points by taking “compels” which are basically “If you let this bad thing happen to your PC, you’ll get a Fate point that lets you be awesome later.”
This is actually really great, because I’ve struggled really hard to figure out how to incorporate PC spankings into the mechanics of a spanking game. The obvious thing to do is make the PC get spanked for failure, or doing something dumb, since spankings are punishments. This is more or less what happens in Pierce’s books (though you also get spanked for just existing). The problem is that this introduces clashing incentives: the player wants to do well at the game, but many also want to role play a brat whose constantly getting her ass smacked. That’s not satisfying. My approach for Scarlet Moon was to punt. Spankings have no mechanical impact, so you don’t have to play poorly to get your character spanked. However, that’s not satisfying either.
But if the player gets *rewarded* for letting the *PC* get punished…Hmm. Now your incentives align. You want to do well at the game, you’re gonna need Fate points. You want to get Fate points, gotta let your PC fail (or do something stupid) and get their ass smacked.
Furthermore, your character would also have “Aspects” that represent facets of your character, for example “Absent Minded Genius.” You need Aspects, because you can’t just spend and gain Fate points willy-nilly. There needs be an Aspect that justifies spending (or receiving) the Fate point. So for example, if you’re taking a test, you could spend a Fate point to “invoke” “Absent Minded Genius” to get a bonus on your roll to pass the test. If on the other hand, you’re in class, you can gain a Fate point by being “compelled” on “Absent Minded Genius” so that you’re not paying attention. These are really nice, because I’ve found that these aspects really get my creative juices flowing. If a possible aspect the player can have is “Absent Minded Genius” I find myself constantly asking the question “What kinds of challenges might the player encounter that an ‘Absent Minded Genius’ would excel at? What kind of situations would get such a person in trouble?”
To play around with the idea a bit, I started a side game that does what I have in mind. It’s nowhere near completion, but it should do a good job of giving people a taste: Samantha Stone. This is just a straight HTML file, so you’d have to track the state yourself. Obviously, for a Scarlet Moon sequel, I’d tweak the engine a bit (which won’t be hard) to track your Spankens and what not for you.
What are people’s thoughts? Does this seem like a fun idea? Any problems with it?
I know some people really like the combat, but my hope is that this system will allow me to give people a game that is both mechanically satisfying, and doesn’t require a ton of constant coding work on my end.
A new version has been uploaded. There isn’t any new content, instead a new
combat system has been introduced. The big changes are the introduction of
secondary statistics:
1. Attack – This is how much damage you do. It’s base value is strength +
speed/2.
2. Defense – This is how much damage you reduce enemy attacks. It’s base value
is speed.
3. Shield – This is effectively temporary hitpoints. Whenever an enemy damages
you, it reduces your shield stat before it reduces your energy. For example,
suppose you have a shield stat of 5, and an enemy does 3 damage to you. Then
they will do 0 damage, and your shield will be reduced to 2. If they do 3
damage to you *again*, then they will reduce your shield to 0 and do 1 damage
to you. By default, shield is 0, but powers can be used to increase it.
4. Retaliation – This behaves just like shield, except instead of blocking
damage, you retaliate. For example, suppose you have a retaliation of 5 and an
enemy does 3 damage to you. Then, you take 3 damage, do 3 damage to them, and
your retaliation is reduced to 2. If they do 3 damage to you *again*, then they
do 3 damage to you, you do 2 damage to them, and your retaliation is reduced to
0. Note that retaliation ignores defense, so it can be a great way of damaging
enemies with high defense. However, it is blocked by shields.
Buffing and debuffing powers now increase and decrease attack, defense, shield
and retaliation. Most of Scarlet Moon’s powers are the same, except:
1. Scarlet Chords now increases attack and defense based on your Power stop,
rather than increasing your speed based on your Strength. Furthermore, if you
are inflicted with Away at the start of your turn, Scarlet Chords automatically
cures you of it at the start of your turn (rendering you effectively immune to
Away).
2. Scarlet Fists and Scarlet Eyes work the same they did before, except they no
longer inflict a status. This means that they don’t increase your attrition,
they cannot be disrupted by spankings, and they remain in effect until you
cancel them.
3. Scarlet Beam uses your attack stat, rather than your Power stat. This is so
that Scarlet Fists more obviously increases your damage output (before it
increased your Attack damage, but reduced your Shoot damage, which was lame).
Shoot does not trigger retaliation, but is not affected by your weapons.
4. S-Armor – Now increases Scarlet Moon’s shield stat, rather than increasing
her defense.
For Tempestas:
1. Tailwind – Increases all allis’ attack.
2. Headwind – Decreases all enemies’ attacks.
3. Wind tunnel – increases Tempestas’ retaliation.
4. Twister no longer inflicts damage on a character when they are inflicted
with Away. Instead, it does damage at the end of their turn if they are
inflicted with Away. What this means is that Scarlet Moon is effectively immune
to Twister if she is inflicted with Scarlet Chords, because that removes Away
at the start of her turn. Twister also cures Tempestas of Away and gives her a
bonus to her attack that lasts one round.
5. Airburst – Works the same way it did before, except it inflicts Away for a
minimum of two rounds.
Anklyana:
1. Armor – Increases Anklyana’s Defense.
2. Bubblesaurus – Reduces her energy, and increases an ally’s shield by the
same amount (basically, she gives her energy to someone else as temporary
hitpoints). Note that this *does not* inflict a status, which means it stacks,
and it cannot be disrupted by spankings.
3. Wallsaurus – Increases a target’s defense, and decreases their attack by the
same amount.
Also, the game now tells you at the start of every combat whether or not
winning that battle is optional.
Hopefully, people find this combat system fun and well-balanced (Lord knows
it’s a lot simpler to implement at least). Feedback is much appreciated.
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.