Author Archives

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Release v0.30

This release was mostly internal changes so that when I open the site to the public, the server’s database and cache won’t melt down. I also added a crude monitoring system to know when the server is giving people errors.

Other tweaks:

  • Beast mutations now occur by chance, rather than occurring once per upgrade.
  • Added/changed beast mutations so that there should always be a couple of options that aren’t completely grotesque.
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Release v0.25

Changes:

  • Split minion transformations into a new ‘Laboratory’ screen.
  • Fixed a few bugs where caches downstream from my server could serve stale pages.
  • Halved the frequency that you can pick up tomes.
  • A handful more transformations relating to horns and tails.
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Release v0.20

Features:

  • Tomes have been added. Tomes unlock new transformations. Because the player picks which tomes they want, I don’t have to show them absolutely everything in the shapeshifting screen, which should keep things sane as I add more and more variety. This release doesn’t add any new transformations though.

Bugfixes:

  • If meters are too wide for the screen, display a scrollbar instead of freaking out.
  • Fix crash penetrating very loose orifices.
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Release v0.16

I spent the last week adding an antagonist to the game, namely the Baron of Hell. Every turn an event card is drawn from a deck, much like a board game. Some of the cards advance the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist. Whether you succeed or fail in these encounters is a result of who you’ve recruited up till that point.

The plot arc isn’t completely finished yet. Still gotta make sure the game has enough variety to keep players entertained that far into it.

This week’s plan: making equipment items more distinct from shapeshifting effects, spell tomes.

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Release v0.15

I’ve finished my big change to the save format. Existing characters can’t be loaded any more, but it’s for a good cause: making sure I can add features without breaking existing characters in the future.

Bug fixes:

  • Tease should never result in horror meter exceeding limit.
  • Don’t show the warning that your apprentices are idle before you have any apprentices.
  • Don’t show options on the minion recruitment menu that aren’t relevant yet.
  • If you click through the age confirmation page, it should now remember that for a year.
  • More flavour text on the shapeshifting menu.

 

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Hobby Project #6

The next game in my continuing series on game concepts that led up to Fleshcult:

Sexbot Manor (2008, concept)

In this game the player would run a brothel of sexbots. You’d have an inventory of body parts with differing properties that you’d assemble to please a series of clients. Each client had a set of tastes that you could cater to for larger tips. This would provide an incentive for the player to build a range of sexbots and try out a wide variety of parts, rather than advancing along a linear progression of parts that are the same but better.

Since several prototypes had gameplay with a completely different emphasis to what I’d planned, I took to writing out a sample play session as a kind of mock-up before coding anything. It’s a useful technique. It forces you to consider what the user’s options will be, and also gives you a taste of how much content you’ll need.

Writing the sample, I discovered that fulfilling someone else’s fetishes isn’t very erotic. For example, if you only like blondes, you’re probably not going to be delighted if the game generates a client that has a huge redhead fetish. I don’t want people to be torn between their sexual preferences and a winning game strategy, so obviously the client fetish mechanic wasn’t a good way to set goals for the player.

If you remove the client’s preferences, what challenge remains? I played around with some resource management ideas inspired by mech games. A limited power budget. A limited weight budget. All it did was dilute the sexual aspects of the game and centre the game’s challenge around the non-sexual aspects. I couldn’t find a satisfactory solution so I shelved it.

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Near-term Plans

  • Firstly, hit the prerequisites I’ll need for it to be suitable for public consumption:
    • Profile extensibility.
    • Improving workflow for writing submissions.
    • Server performance improvements / reliability monitoring.
  • More beta invites!
  • Writing, writing and more writing. Fleshcult needs more characterisation in particular. A harem is no fun if all the inhabitants are indistinguishable. A lot of the writing effort I have planned is going to go into making the characters react in individual ways in the sex scenes.
  • Random equipment drops at encounter start.
  • Spell tomes as prerequisites to shapeshifting categories, perhaps? I’ll play with some ideas here.
  • Rework concubine & beast upgrade trees to be more interesting and less gross respectively.
  • Special high difficulty content.
  • Initial public release. A soft launch, start out small?

Longer Term

  • Boss invasion events.
  • More variety in partner encounter actions.
  • More player actions.
  • Random turn events.
  • Encounters with multiple subjects.
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Progress since the last round of testing

Back in June, I recruited some testers off FetLife. Here’s what I’ve added since then:

  • The player can be an incubus. The gender of other characters is also now selectable. I added some masculine clothing items too.
  • New graphic design.
  • Seduction now explicitly shows the likelihood of your success.
  • A wider variety of descriptions.
  • New minion types: the otaku and the antiques dealer.
  • New player actions:
    • Administer vibrators, clamps and needles.
    • Lube, loosen, fist or ride your unwary partners.
    • Grow an ovipositor or lube tentacle.
    • Implant creatures.
    • Lactate.
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Release v0.14

This is a boring one. I’ve spent nearly a month working on a user account system. It has all the usual bits you’d expect, except that you can also play for a limited time without signing up for a full account. I want to let people get a taste of the game before I hit them with a form to fill out.

Next release is going to be a big internal change to make sure I can add features to the game without wiping peoples’ characters. During prototyping I was saving the game using Python’s Pickling system. It allowed me to experiment with different game ideas without rewriting a whole heap of save code, but it’s utterly under-equipped to handle loading a save from an older version of the code. I’ll be surveying some alternatives and trying out a half-wit idea I have to extend Pickle*.

After that, some actual game features, finally: Random equipment drops when you visit new locations outside the underworld.

* Keep a version number in the pickle for every object. Write a table of conversion functions from each version to the next. Hopefully most of these will boil down to running the new constructor to make sure there’s a complete set of attributes, then deserialising over the top of the result. There’s gotta be a reason why everyone regards object databases as sketchy bleeding edge technology, and I have a feeling I’m about to discover why. But who knows? Maybe it really will be as easy as it looks.