Spankers, Spankees and Switches,
Just uploaded Scarlet Moon 7.1.0, and Scarlet Moon is officially complete! At last, the team comes face to face with Roots, the mysterious crime boss who has watched Scarlet Moon’s career unfold from the shadows. What dastardly plans does Roots have in store? Play and find out!
The last episode is fairly short, but there is a scene at the beginning that has several different paths, and two major paths through the episode (plus a third fairly large one for people dating Midnight), so hopefully it won’t feel too phoned-in. It’s also (I think) fairly climactic, so I hope it proves satisfying despite its brevity.
You can get the now full(!) game over at the Downloads section! Unfortunately, the code for generating the HTML transcript has decided to stop working, on old content no less -_-. So I don’t have a transcript available, sorry. I mighty try to find some time at some point to figure out what’s wrong, but right now, I’m pretty done and just can’t bring myself to dig through years-old code.
Naturally, I expect a week or two of bug fixing as people find bugs that I missed. Once it’s stabilized, I’ll probably take a break from game development for a few months. To set expectations, I probably don’t expect to do any serious heads-down writing for about six months. Could be shorter, who knows. Won’t be any longer than that though.
In the meantime, I’m going to ruminate some more on Mischievous Misfortune and Spacewoman Spice, and I’ll probably be playing a bit with Twine. Since my future games won’t include any real combat mechanics, there really isn’t any reason *not* to use Twine. It’s much more portable than my own engine, and will require much less programming on my end (a big deal now that I’m so much busier). I’ve already played with it a little bit and verified that I should be able to do everything I want to do fairly easily, but there’s definitely more I can learn about how to do things.
I doubt I’ll be silent over the next few months. I’ll probably periodically post my evolving thoughts on Mischievous Misfortune and Spacewoman Spice. None of this is set in stone, it’s all pure brainstorming at this point. Still, it will be nice to see people’s reactions and suggestions over the next few months. These are going to be multi-year commitments, so I want to make sure the premise is fun for everyone (especially me!).
Take Mischievous Misfortune. One idea that occurred to me is to set it about ten years after Scarlet Moon. Then, make Juliana, now in her late twenties to early thirties, the player’s employer. Basically, instead of the PC being a secretary at some biggish company or other, they are hired as a lab assistant by Juliana as she attempts to establish her own company based on her own inventions. Juliana is a fun character to write, and it would be interesting to see what she’s like ten years down the road. We could also introduce her as a (much!) Lighter and Softer Batman-esque superhero: one without physical superpowers, but lots of gadgets and really good hand-to-hand combat techniques. I was already imagining Moonlight as this sort of Superman-esque hero, so you could have some fun tension and rivalry between this highly experienced hero (Juliana) and this new up-and-comer, with the PC caught in the middle and just trying to make off with the shinies. And the shenanigans in Juliana’s laboratory would write themselves.
Spankers, Spankees and Switches,
Plugging away at the first part of Episode 7. Been working on the new content, and I’ve implemented a few features that I think will make the game much more enjoyable. The new features you can look forward to when the new episode is released.
1. Several players like to play cross-dressing males. However, currently if you select male, the game will occasionally force you to wear (American) culturally male clothing (in particular, your costume and your work uniform). Naturally, this is unsatisfying for these players. Therefore, I’ve added a new option that allows players to specify what gender of clothing they want to wear independently of their actual gender. So you’ll be able to be a male character, whom the game puts in female clothing, or a female whom the game puts in male clothing. Yes, this does mean that if you’re a girl, and you select male clothing that your costume will be a thong and some boots and nothing else. No, nobody will comment on your tits hanging out. Sorry.
2. I’ve added a new template that allows me to write different text depending on which choice (first, second or third) you selected in the previous event. This will allow me to make the game much more reactive to the many roleplaying (aka pointless) choices I throw at you. Most exciting, it will allow you to have much more control over how your character reacts to a spanking. Do you take your spankings stoically? Turn into a giant crybaby as soon as you’re upended? Something in between? Do you start stoic, but quickly start blubbering? It’ll be up to you!
I’ve also added a new panel above: Spanking Adventure Gamebooks
This includes links to both the Master of the Manor and Dianne’s Promotion books written several years ago by Robin Pierce. They’ve disappeared off the internet. This filled me with incredible sadness, because they were incredible spanking games that inspired me to start creating my own games. So I decided to make them available on my website. Both books are very well written, and quite challenging. I don’t like the cane, and Pierce loves the cane, most of the spankers are much nastier than I prefer, and I don’t like how you have to choose between winning and being a total brat. However, they’re still incredibly sexy, and engaging and I’d highly recommend everyone who enjoys my game to go and try them out.
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).