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),
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),
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
Spankers, Spankees and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
Not a whole lot to report. RL has kept me very busy for the past month. Right now, I’m focused primarily on writing. I’m probably about halfway through the content for the first update.
I’m trying a slightly different strategy for writing this episode. Basically, I’m writing all the story scenes first, and then going back to write the spanking scenes (unless I’m really in the spanking-scene zone, in which case I write the spanking scene). I’m doing this because writing spanking scenes is disruptive and exhausting (it’s really hard to stay focused when you turn yourself on). This also allows me to let the story lead me where it will, without having to worry about dropping spanking scenes that I worked really hard on, but no longer make sense.
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
Spankers, Spankees and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
Sorry the February update has been so late. The past few weeks have been kinda crazy, and I haven’t had a ton of time to work on my game (though I have been working on it when I can).
I’ve finished the bulk of the code for a fairly significant combat rewrite, and am currently working on fixing my tests.
Basically, what I’m trying to do is streamline combat some, and make it easier to have a variety of interesting powers in the future, though you guys won’t see many changes. In fact, there are only three:
- There is no longer the notion of a forced grapple. Grappling still moves both the grappler and the grapplee into the Grapple range, but it no longer forces them to be in range for a certain number of rounds.
- Spankings are no longer multi-round affairs. They are now a single round action that inflict the Humiliated status, and has fun flavor text.
- Combat will be truly turn-based (as opposed to round based). What this means is that you will give your characters their command, and specify the order in which the commands should be executed, and then the player’s characters will execute those actions in the specified order. Then your enemies will execute their actions.
The first two are changing because the previous mechanics just complicated my refactoring too much, so I decided to simplify them. Also, the multi-round spanking mechanic doesn’t mesh well with my current vision for combat.
The third change is because I have a better handle on how I want combat to work. Basically, I want each hero to be very focused and have very different powers that allow players to chain them together in very interesting ways.
However, in order for this kind of chaining to be truly satisfying, the player needs to have complete control over which action executes when.
Grand plans falling apart because of bad luck are great in stories, but they usually just lead to frustrating gameplay.
AKA
Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
Sorry about the website being down for however long it was down. A plugin that I wasn’t really using was misbehaving, so I’ve removed it.
Anyway, a new version is available for download. It fixes some bugs that were introduced by the previous version, as well as a few more subtle bugs that I’ve only just now noticed. The upshot is that you should be able to use powers now without crashing the game, and when you select the same gender for spanker and spankee, switches will automatically be set to the same gender as well.
Get it over at the downloads section!
And of course, many thanks to those of you who were kind of enough to report bugs and crashes to me.
AKA
Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
I’ve just released a new version of Scarlet Moon, with fixes for the bugs that people have so helpfully pointed out. Note that I wasn’t able to replicate the NULL bug that one user was experiencing, on either of my machines. I did find a different bug while investigating that one, and fixed that however. Get the latest version on the Download page.
Anyway, here’s a detailed changelog for those who are interested:
## Fixed
- Some missing dynamic gender text.
- A place where the sexy costume event should trigger, but wasn't.
- Scarlet Cord no longer does damage, and applies its cost to the user.
- A bug where mulit-slot equipment was having its risque effectively
doubled.
- A few missing gender checks, causing the player to have to select
a gender for Vanessa even if she already has one.
## Added
- Players can now access the character customization screen at any time.
- Male players also equip a t-shirt when equipping their bathing suits.
## Changed
- Removed some unnecessary continues and singleton choices.
Also, don’t forget that I am looking for anyone with any skill/experience in costume design to help design superhero/villain costumes. Details can be found in the previous post.
AKA