Spankers, Spankees and Switches,
I’m cranking away at the first day of the next episode. I’ve finished writing all the content, and I’m currently working on implementing the powers for the new villain. Then I’ll need to do a pass of editing the story content, followed by debugging the new content, followed by balancing the new villain. I’m also making a few tweaks to some of the combat that will be included with episode 4 day 1:
1. Speed will just straight up reduce the amount of damage you take. Currently, most damage is calculated by computing max(1, attacker.strength – max(0, (target.speed – attacker.speed))). This had the effect of making Speed a bit too weird. If you had a low speed (relative to your opponent), increasing it by 1 increased your damage by one. If you had a high speed, increasing it by 1 reduced the damage you took by 1. This meant that some powers (like Scarlet Fists) weren’t as useful as they appeared. Sure your strength goes up, but your damage output doesn’t go up as much as your strength does, unless you already have a very high speed. The new formula is max(1, attacker.strength – target.speed). So the trade off is much more straightforward.
2. All the spanking powers (so Scarlet Paddle, and Succuspank) now also reduce the duration of the spankee’s “best” buff. If the duration gets reduced to zero or one, the buff gets removed. I’ve hardly ever used Scarlet Paddle in my play testing, because while Humiliated is nice, I’ve never really found it worth the turn to setup, except against Succubus. Granted that will probably change as more heroes show up who can take on the damage dealing role that Scarlet Moon currently fills, but even so I want all the powers to be useful now. Anyway, once the new version comes out, you’ll be able to use Scarlet Paddle as a means of controlling enemy buffs (might be very useful against Prometheus and Poseidon, whose buffs are needed to use their powers). Important thing to note: spankings reduce the target’s best buff *even if the target is already Humiliated*. In other words, buff reduction stacks. This should hopefully make Scarlet Paddle a much more interesting power, and perhaps worth losing a bit of damage per round.
3. Buzzsaw’s chain pull method will be inflicting a new, more dangerous status called “Grabbed.” Grabbed reduces your character’s speed to zero, and makes you immune to Away. The second effect isn’t a big deal yet, but the first basically strips you of your defense. However, Grabbed doesn’t *keep* your speed at zero. So you if you use a speed increasing buff after Grabbed, you can regain at least some defense. Just be careful, because speed buffs don’t stack (stacking just increases the duration)!
I’m hoping to have the new content out by the end of the month. The changes above will be backwards compatible.
AKA
Spankers, Spankees and Switches,
So I finally worked up the guts to let a local friend who knows what I’m up to take a look at my game. It’s been very enlightening watching over their shoulder. This version contains a bug fix they stumbled across when trying to load their save file. I believe it’s only triggered if you try to change font size (particularly body font size) through the Options menu.
Furthermore, I’ve cleaned up to the office park scene at the beginning of the game, and rearranged the buttons some.
It became clear while watching my friend futz with the game that the UI is way too busy. In particular, there are too many buttons along the bottom row on the story screen. While they were added so that people could know what to do, it does mean it’s difficult for them to notice things like the scroll buttons. Plus, it just makes the screen look really crowded on their small laptop screen. So the utility style buttons ((T)itle, (O)ptions etc) have been moved behind “(Spacebar)Commands.” The key commands all still work the same as you’d expect, but you can click on Commands or press “Spacebar” to view the list of available commands, and from there click on the buttons.
Furthermore, I’ve also used that idea for story choices. So now, you can click on “(#) Choices” to see a list of buttons containing each choice, and then click on the appropriate choice. Which means the story screen is now 100% useable with the mouse! It’s a little bit clunky, but it’s the mouse. Mice are always clunky.
The next update will see the same treatment applied to the combat screen.
Again, *none of the key commands have changed.* You can still press 1 or 2 or 3 to select a choice from the story screen. You can still press “c” on the story screen to view your character. The buttons have just been hidden.
Also, the statistics have been moved off the character creation screen. There’s no reason for it to be there anymore, since your stats are now displayed on the story screen, and you can’t edit them anyway. Plus they were taking up valuable screen real estate on my friend’s very small laptop.
Let me know what you think of the changes.
AKA
Spankers, Spankees and Switches,
I’ve just uploaded a static, HTML version of the game. This is basically a transcript for the game, with some default choices made for the main charater: she’s female, her name is Scarlette, she has red hair, she wears a t-shirt, jeans, and a thong, she’s fit, slender and of average height.
I would *strongly* recommend actually downloading and playing the game instead. The game’s transcript is intended to be consumed by a computer, and it shows. Furthermore, you don’t get any customizations, you have to keep track of your own statistics and keywords, and you won’t get access to the combat. However, this will still let you enjoy the content if:
1. The game doesn’t run properly on your computer for whatever reason and I can’t figure out the problem.
2. You’d like to take a peek at the content before committing to downloading and playing the game.
3. You don’t feel comfortable downloading and executing a program from some random website on the Internet.
Note: If you just don’t want to deal with combat, but want the computer to keep track of everything else for you, you can disable combat on the Options screen instead. No need to use the static and rather awkward HTML version.
Get it over at the Downloads section
AKA
Spankers, Spankees and Switches,
Just uploaded a new version Scarlet Moon 3.2.9 with two changes:
1. First a bug fix to the player spankable option. We weren’t loading it correctly, so that the game was always treating “player spankable” as true after loading. You’ll need to start a new game for the bugfix to take effect though.
2. A new option has been added “combat” with two settings: “Yes” and “No.” This allows you to enable and disable combat. If combat is enabled, then nothing’s changed for you. However, if you disable combat, then you’ll get some silly (textual) sound effects. If the combat is optional, you’ll get to decide whether you win or lose. This is intended for those of you who want to enjoy the smexy spanking goodness without having to deal with all that awesome RPG turn-based combat goodness, because not every spanko’s into smexy spanking RPG turn-based combat goodness. However, I would *strongly* encourage people to at least try the combat before disabling it. It’s the primary form of “gameplay” in this game.
Get it at the downloads section (or don’t if like seeing the player get spanked, and you enjoy the combat).
Spankers, Spankees and Switches 18 and above,
Uploaded a new version of Scarlet Moon 3.2.8. This fixes addresses a few criticisms kindly provided on animeotk:
1. Due to a bug, the game was forcing *everyone* to be attracted to David regardless of what choice they made at the start of the episode. You shouldn’t be
attracted to David unless you pick one of the fantasizing choices. However, “Look around” was routing you to the same event as one of the “I’m attracted to David” choices. That has been fixed. So if you don’t want to be attracted to David, I’d just suggest downloading the latest version and replaying episode 3 from the very beginning of the episode. Sorry about that.
2. The game now supports swapping between windowed and fullscreen. Just press Ctrl+Enter. You can do this on any screen, even though only the title screen lists it as an option (I didn’t want to clutter up the rest of the UI). The button doesn’t work, because I just slapped this together real fast, and I’ll probably remove mouse support completely at some point anyway, because I’m lazy and don’t like the mouse.
3. Adds the ability to spank Prometheus or Poseidon at the very end of episode 3. It’s kinda short and half-assed, but it’s there.
Get it over at the downloads section.
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