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
Spankers, Spankees, and Switches 18 and above,
An Anonymous fan pointed out a crash in Tempestas’ wind tunnel ability today. This version should fix it. Sorry about that.
Also, this version includes a intro page before the story starts, but after character creation. It details in my standard
long-winded manner the kind of game this is, and what kind of content you can expect to see.
It’s obnoxious to me when I’m slogging through the bowels of the internet looking for porn games that might have decent spanking
content, and the games are coy with what kind of content you can expect to see. Maybe it’s not as big a deal when you’re writing
a very single fetish-focused game vs. broad smut, but there is a pretty large variety of spanking styles, so I figured I’d highlight
my game’s niche within the niche.
As far as this month’s update, I’m cranking away at the next episode. Just got to the point where the supervillain is introduced. No
idea yet when new content will be out. Maybe the start of next month? No promises though.
Edit: I also recently discovered how to let people download the game directly from my website, which means no longer having to go to a third party like Dropbox or Mediafire (which probably track you) to get the game. So now each download link is literally a download link instead of a link to Dropbox. I have no idea if it’ll affect download speed at all. My server isn’t anywhere near as beefy as Dropbox, but it also gets waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay less traffic. Plus, the files are so small it shouldn’t matter anyway (yay text!). Still, if you have any problems with the new download, please let me know.
AKA
Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
Sorry I’m so late in posting. Been kinda ignoring Scarlet Moon lately and obsessively playing roguelikes (Angband and Tales of Maj’Eyal FOREVER!). I needed a break from all the spanking, so decided to explore other avenues to satisfy my masochistic needs. But I’m back at it. I’ve got the next episode planned and I’ve started working on it. So, yay for progress!
But that’s not the true purpose of this post. After a lot of consideration, I’ve decided to make Robin Pearce’s book Master of the Manor available. I have very strong misgivings about distributing someone else’s work like this, but Pearce has unfortunately gone dark, and they’d already had Master of the Manor available for free on their website before they went dark. So I’m mostly restoring the status quo.
Besides, Master of the Manor is an incredible game. For as long as I’ve been able to write an “Hello World” program, I’ve thought about creating a spanking video game. I tried several times over the years, never really getting very far. I never really had a good sense of what a good spanking game would like. What kind of format would keep the game reasonably scoped for a personal project, but still be rich enough to be properly considered a game?
Then I found Master of the Manor. A CYOA adventure with statistics, special abilities and a keyword system for remembering past actions. An incredibly rich, immersive and *interactive* game that would be dead simple to implement in a program. Almost from the day I finished my first play through of Master of the Manor I started working on what would eventually become Potion Wars, where I learned a lot of lessons that led to Scarlet Moon. This game inspired me, and one of the greatest tragedies of Pearce going dark is that people no longer have access to it.
So I’m making the game available in two formats. One, is the classic Epub format, that should be readable on any EBook or EBook program:
Master of the Manor – EPUB
.
The other is in plain text: Master of the Manor – Txt
I’m a plain text junkie. It lets me read the game in my terminal, and it’s very easy to search, take in-line notes if necessary, etc. Besides, Master of the Manor doesn’t do any anything fancy. So you don’t lose anything by reading it in plaintext vs. epub, except perhaps it’s not as easy to put on an EBook Reader (I wouldn’t know, I don’t own one).
One problem with the version that Pearce released as an Ebook was that it didn’t include any links. So you’ve got to do a lot of page flipping. I’ve included a special tags file with the text version that’s been generated by ctags. If you know what ctags is and how to use it, cool. Don’t read any further. Just download the text version, open it up in your favorite editor and take advantage of all that tags goodness to jump directly to page numbers.
If you don’t know what ctags is well then read on. Ctags is an old, venerable program that lets you build an index of one or more files containing plain text. It was originally built to make it easier to jump through software code, but it can be used for any plain text (I use it to navigate Scarlet Moon’s story content for example). I’ve generated an index of all the page numbers, so with the right editor if you put your cursor on/in front of a page number, like this: Turn to page |34, then with a simple keystroke you can jump immediately to page 34. No manual page flipping!
If you want to do that, follow these direcctions:
1. Download and install the Atom Text Editor (as an aside: I think Atom’s a bloated POS, but it’s the only text editor on Windows that isn’t Vim or Emacs *and* can natively read tags from an externally generated tags file).
2. Download and unzip the plain text version of Master of the Manor.
3. Open `master.txt` with Atom.
4. Read the book with your hand down your pants/skirt (VERY important).
5. When you reach a directive like `Turn to page 34`, place the cursor just before `34`.
6. Press Ctrl+Shift+r (I *think* it’s Cmd+Shift+r on a Mac).
7. Type 34 in the popup that appears.
8. Select the result that has just 34 on a line by itself.
Voila, you’ve now jumped to page (really section) 34.
If this is too many steps (it kinda is, really), then just read the plain text file and use your editor/Word’s search capability. Or download the epub and flip manually/use your epub reader’s search capability. Whatever makes it easiest for you to enjoy the spanky goodness.
As a final note, I will *not* distribute Dianne’s Promotion in the same way, so don’t ask. Pearce made a few noises about eventually releasing Dianne’s Promotion on the website like Master of the Manor was, but they hadn’t done so when the site went dark, and I’m not about to do it for them. If you want Dianne’s Promotion (I heartily recommend it, it’s almost exclusively spankings whereas Master of the Manor is spanking-heavy BDSM), then buy it on Amazon or Goodreads, and throw a few bucks at Pearce.
Oh, and I have a new e-mail: aka@spankingrpgs.com. I’ll probably keep the gmail around for a while longer, but I’d encourage you to e-mail me at my new address instead. Google’s been creeping me out lately, and I want to get away from them as much as possible.
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
Uploaded a new version. This one doesn’t have any additional content, but does address a concern from Magus Eternal. Now, when you select a power to use in combat, the game will display a brief description of the power. It means one extra key stroke to actually use a power, but it should also help people keep all the powers straight.
AKA