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
I’m perfectly fine with whatever changes you make, as long as I can get some handprints left on my butt by a domineering villain.
Glad to hear that your life is going well! Keep up the good work.
Since you don’t have as much time to work on the game, have you considered moving development to a different engine? From what I’ve seen on animeotk, most games seem to rely on rpg maker.
It probably wouldn’t be ideal, but I imagine it would take a lot of the stress and time away from the task of making the game. You’d be able to focus on writing and crafting interesting choices rather than wrestling with the engine.
I don’t want to use RPGMaker for a few reasons:
1. RPGMaker’s combat is full of unnecessary delays. It takes way too long for the animations to trigger. Slow combat drives me crazy.
2. RPGMaker is best for primarily graphical games with small snippets of text. My game…does not have small snippets of text.
3. In order to preserve my combat engine, I’d probably have to do some very heavy customizations of the combat engine anyway.
4. While I wouldn’t (maybe) have to do as much coding, I would have to design maps. That is quite tedious.
I could use something like Twine instead (which is designed for gamebook style games), but that doesn’t really buy me that much. Combat is far and away the most complex part of the game, and I’d have to fully implement my combat engine in Twine anyway (mostly with embedded Javascript…ewww).
Engines like TADS and Inform are meant for Zork style adventure games, not gamebook-style games like Scarlet Moon. I tried creating a CYOA style game in Inform (in fact the very first version of Potion Wars was written in Inform), but it was clunky and awkward and I had to do some pretty crazy stuff to keep it performant.
Besides, I love to program and one of my primary motivations behind creating this game is to give me a chance to play with programming languages and tools and the like. I have learned a _ton_ about Java, and Groovy and writing a Java program with immutable data and all sorts of things from this game. I’m also currently using the lessons I learned from this to play around with the programming language Lua and the LOVE engine when I want to take a break from writing to do some coding, and that has a lot of potential.
Good to hear from you this month! Anything to make things go smoother is a great choice.