Spankers, Spankees and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),

Sorry about the delay in posting. Had a busy weekend. I am damn close to finishing the content of episode 2. Just have a few more events to write, and then I’ll be going through and making the text dynamic. Then I need to balance the combat and do general debugging.

I’m thinking I’ll probably have the rest of episode 2 ready for release by the end of February.

AKA

Spankers, Spankees and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),

November wasn’t as productive as I had hoped, for a couple of reasons including getting my hands on Batman Beyond the Complete Series (never saw it), and the second season of Justice League.

However, I’ve also been struggling to write episode 2’s climax: a cat and mouse through Phillipa Silver’s office tower. The other day I finally, *finally* figured out why. Originally, the plan had been to have Scarlet Moon running up and down the office with the queen of a Generic European Constitutional Monarchy. Unfortunately, said queen isn’t introduced until just before the cat and mouse and she’s your generic bratty princess.

So I was going to spend an *entire* quarter of an episode on a character we’ve never seen before, will likely never see again, and whose entire personality is a setup for a spanking scene. It’s no wonder her dialog was stilted, two-dimensional and forced. She’s stilted, two-dimensional and forced. So I’m reworking things some, so that we spend more time with an actual character and less time on spanking props.

Spankers, Spankees and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),

Sorry the November update is so damned late. The past few weeks have been keeping me very busy.

Anyway, October was a fairly middling month as far as productivity goes. I took a couple of weeks off from the game after my latest release like I always do, and I’ve only been working on it sporadically since (had a bit of a creative slump).

That being said, I’ve still managed to write just shy of 3000 lines so far. Basically, there are going to be two components to the third day, a Preamble, and the Main Event. In the preamble, you’ll be offered a choice that will send you down two very different paths, before converging again for the Main Event. Each choice will shed a bit of light on different aspects of the game world, and both will give you the opportunity to make the Main Event easier, though in very different ways. The Preamble is pretty much written.

As far as the Main Event, that hasn’t been written yet, so it’s in too much flux for me to be comfortable talking about here (don’t want to get people’s hopes up). With Christmas and Thanksgiving approaching, I should have more time to write than I usually do though, so I’m thinking that we’ll probably be able to get the next day out sometime in January, maybe in December if I’m productive.

Furthermore, for the past year or so, when I haven’t felt like writing I’ve been working on a yet another engine in Lua, using the Love framework. It started as an excuse to learn Lua, but I’ve kept at it because Lua is a gorgeous little language. Seriously, it amazes me just how *simple* the language’s mental model is. Furthermore, Lua itself is tiny, has very few dependencies, and encourages you to keep your programs the same way. This is important when you’re working on a relatively simple program (i.e. my game) that you want to distribute to a variety of other computers without too many headaches (i.e. my game). Furthermore, it looks like Love makes it _super_ easy to build platform-specific executables without actually owning one of those platforms. So I may actually be able to provide a Mac app in addition to Windows and Linux executables. The game will also be _much_ smaller, and hopefully much easier for people to run.

At this point, I’ve got the bulk of the framework implemented. There is one small rework of the combat engine (mostly how to display it) that I want to do, and then I’ll be whipping up a toy “game” that I can use to do some very preliminary testing. I’m on track to release a beta with the new engine sometime in the spring, probably April or May.

Accompanying the new engine will be a streamlining of the combat engine (of course!). The idea was to craft an engine that provides enough flexibility to make things interesting for the player, but enough rigidity to make halfway decent AI easy to write. The engine is heavily inspired by the various deck games out there (Smash Up, Sentinels of the Multiverse) where you build up your character/team over time, and each round you’re able to perform multiple things.

The two biggest changes are the following:

1. Elimination of “positioning.” I don’t think the positions (armslength, distant, grapple) really contribute much to combat, but they do make combat significantly more complicated, especially the AI. While positioning can be used to craft simple, yet deep combat systems (see: Battle for Wesnoth, Blackguards), you really need to craft your entire combat system around it. I have no interest in that. Instead, I want to base my combat system completely around interesting powers.

2. Every character will have two base actions: “attack,” and “power” *both* of which you’ll be able to use every round, in any order. So you could use the Scarlet Armor power to increase your strength, followed by an attack, allowing you to do extra damage, all in one turn. Or you could attack first, and then use Scarlet Boots to increase your speed, perhaps providing a defense boost, all in one turn. Most characters will only be do each 1 once per turn, but some characters might be able to do one of them more (or less).

Furthermore, a lot of powers will revolve around giving you additional options. For example, Scarlet Beam will actually be a buff. It’ll give you a new action “shoot” that you’ll be able to perform *in addition to* your attack and power actions, though it would also increase your attrition by 2.

The idea behind this is to make combat more dynamic as it progresses. As the tension rises, combat will get more intense, with characters growing stronger and more dynamic with every round. I also want Scarlet Moon to be a self-buff based hero. However, in the current engine buffing is so slow. You have to spend an entire round buffing yourself, while your enemies whale on you, and attrition eats away at you. By allowing you to perform other actions as well, we can keep combat moving swiftly without making a purely self-buffing character obnoxious.

Naturally, we can have powers that take away actions as well. For example, a power “Scarlet Force” that makes it so that for one round, all attacks or shoots reduce the target’s attack down to 0 (i.e. your enemy can’t attack, though they can still use any other actions at their disposal).

Note: Spanking in combat won’t go away. It’ll be unlocked by various powers (like say, Scarlet Paddle). My current thoughts around spanking is that they’ll reduce the damage of the target’s next attack by 1, and provide a “marker” status that could affect other powers. For example, some of Succubus’ powers could only target (or be more effective against) targets who have been spanked recently. By the same token, she might be able to use one less power per turn if she is humiliated, or something.

The AI will also be very different. First, they will be much more deterministic (though not completely so). The dumb AI won’t actually use powers, it’ll just attack (so Buzzsaw might still be a bit of a *little* bit of a threat, but Succubus not so much). The average AI will attack the same way as the dumb AI, but will also use a random power each turn. Finally, the smart AI will have its own strategy for every supervillain, allowing them to take full advantage of their gimmicks in a way the current AI really can’t.

So the dumb AI will be for those of you who just want to get off, and are sick of watching me masturbate over combat systems. The average AI is for those of you who want combat to be fun, but not too challenging, and smart will be for those of you who really want to dig into the combat system and learn how to use it effectively.

Thoughts? While this combat system is very different from what you’re used to seeing in RPGs, I do think it’ll be simpler than my current system, while also much more interesting.

Uploaded a new version that fixes a whole mess of bugs kindly pointed out by a couple of commenters on the previous post, and a few people on AnimeOTK.

— The game now automatically equips an outfit when changing out of
costume, because *some* people were very naughty and refused to change
out of their costume. As a result, the game violated a core assumption:
when the player is in their civilians, they are wearing either pants or a
skirt. The player is of course free to change the outfit at anytime.

— Fixed a bug where the player didn’t get a willpower point for
sneaking into the abandoned business park while looking for Buzzsaw.

— Fixed a reference to South Park.

— Sam is now correctly referred to as a dude.

— Fixed a few typos.

— Scarlet Moon now correctly learns Scarlet Eyes when she successfully
bursts into the restaurant.

— Scarlet Moon’s bottom is now referred to correctly when wearing the
boring conservative costume.

— Combat now starts when the player selects the “Fun’s Over” dialogue
option after successfully bursting into the restaurant.

Spankers, Spankees and Switches of All Ages,

The next round of content is finally released: the first two days of episode 2 (the first day is very short). Scarlet Moon faces off against a brand new villain, armed with a new power: Scarlet Eyes (increases willpower at the expense of speed and strength). I’ve also made some balance tweaks to the first episode, fixed a few bugs where the player wasn’t gaining stats properly, and somehow made older saves subtly incompatible. They may load correctly, but Bonemouth ran into some instabilities when using an older save file. So it’s recommended that you start a new game (honestly you’d want to start a new game even if the save files were compatible. Otherwise you’d be shy a few statistic points, and that could make a huge difference).

Changes:

* Added a new power: Scarlet Eyes, the willpower version of Scarlet Armor and Scarlet Boots

* Introducing a brand new villain with a host of her own powers.

* Characters all now have a fixed gender, except for the player. I know it’s a step back, but life is getting busier, so I’m trying to cut back where I can. Making character genders fixed is a huge time saver. Most characters are women, though Sam is a man.

* A whole mess of new content including six or seven spanking scenes? I don’t know. They’re hard to count and I’m lazy.

Bugs:

* During the course of the episode, the player will change out of their work clothing, into their costume, and then back into their work clothing. However, the game doesn’t remember what underwear the player was wearing before changing into their costume (and adding that will be a pain in the neck), so for now I have the player equip the thong if they’re a girl, and boxers if they’re a boy.

Get it over at the Downloads page.

AKA

Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),

I’ve managed to successfully complete the content for episode 2, and I’m fairly happy with it. I’ve got my beta testers playing it now, and naturally they’re finding bugs and other crashes.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to post the next version by the end of the month. Maybe sooner, but I don’t want to promise anything.

AKA

Spankers, Spankees and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),

So June wasn’t super productive, at least not on Scarlet Moon. That being said, I have finished making the bulk of the current text dynamic. There’s a little bit more that I need to make dynamic, and I’m waiting on some scenes from someone who was gracious enough to write a few for me. Then I need to define the villains, and the supervillain’s powers. Then comes the playtesting. My current plan is to release the next update by the end of August. We might get earlier than that, but I’d rather people be pleasantly surprised than unpleasantly.

However, there is some bad news. Due to certain positive developments in my life, I have far less time to work on my game than I did when I started. So, I’m going to be scaling back the game some. In particular, I’m going to be making the following changes:

1. No music. Picking the right music is extremely time consuming, especially since I need to go through the various free music archives out there and hunt for things that might work. On the bright side, this will make the download _much_ smaller.
2. The player will only be able to choose their character’s gender, everybody else’s gender will be set in stone. Making the text dynamic (meaning it changes depending on certain options) is very time consuming, even for something that seems simple like gender swapping. Effectively, what this means is that the vast majority of characters will be women, though there will be a few male tops scattered throughout.

I may also rethink the player’s choices. The next update is going to have a one or two fairly elaborate spanking scenes with quite a bit of interaction from the player. However, spanking scenes are some of the most time consuming and exhausting to write, especially when they are variations on the same scene (coming up with a new scene and writing it in the spur of the moment as a part of how the story flows is fun and invigorating, writing the sixth variation of the same scene gets pretty tedious pretty quickly). This usually means that I don’t have the energy for creating interesting dungeon-exploring choices. So the spanking scenes may be a bit more set in stone in the future.

Scarlet Moon will also likely have a more well-defined personality. After writing the spanking scenes, coming up with choices is the next most time consuming and mentally draining part. So I will likely try to be a bit more judicious about what kinds of choices the player can make.

AKA

Super busy right now, so I don’t have a lot of time and energy to say much. I’m still plugging away. Almost finished with the final few scenes for the first half of the episode, and then I need to go back and write some spanking scenes.

Then I need to make the text dynamic, create the villain’s powers (which won’t be too hard) define the various bad guys you’ll be going up against and then do some playtesting/balance tweaking.

AKA

Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages (18 and up),

I’m still cranking away when I’ve got time (which isn’t often, this spring has been _crazy_). I’m on the final scene of the first half of episode 2 (the first round of fisticuffs with the villain of the episode). Once I finish that, I need to backtrack and fill in the spanking scenes that I skipped. I’m also receiving some writing help from the supreme overlord (I think? I’ve gotten my dumb ass locked out of my e-mail account on my main computer, so I can’t check double check his username). I’ve been quite happy with the scenes he’s written for me so far.

Once all of the content is written, I then need to define the villain stats, implement the villain’s powers (which shouldn’t be too hard thanks to the massive refactoring I did in the previous release), and test it. So we’re still a fairs way off unfortunately. June is also going to be a highly variable month. I may get a ton done. I’m taking a long vacation in June, so how much I get done depends on how busy my vacation ends up being.

AKA