hell game 2 devlog

[xax]

this week: mostly parser tweaks and fixes. there's basically one big parser change i'll have to do in the future, that i'm kind of putting off, but in the mean time there are a bunch of minor fixes that need to get done. like: nested if/else and switch statements. those just did not parse correctly. now they do!

i also made the dialog npc name/portrait code actually work right, so now it's possible for npc dialog to have pictures. this means i will have to draw a bunch of portraits for the encounters. that's gonna be a challenge. i never got around to that with hell game, but this time i'm trying to be a little more aggressive w/ creating art assets.

also i made it so event files failing to load correctly creates a giant red error message. it is important to know when things go wrong. this involved actually loading all the misc. event files i'd written, & making a few more. i guess that counts as "writing scenes for the game" even if in practice it's currently mostly descriptions and dialog.

i also tweaked the challenge code a little so that it's actually, you know, doing anything. you can block attacks now. i'm debating how in-depth i want to make it, but i am considering adding in full dark souls style stamina and poise mechanics, just to have some example data to test all the bar code & state management stuff. i'm not planning for this to be the dark souls of porn games, or in fact to be 'difficult' as such at all, i just think it would be very funny to use that as some testing data.

(i have been considering releasing a 'demo', just... at the current point in coding there's not really much there, in terms of 'playable content'. maybe in a few weeks i'll polish it up a little and make sure to remove some of the old glitchy code and then post a link to it or something. as you might have noticed i'm not very good at keeping people up-to-date with my development process, and i don't really want to get into the mess of 'releases' every x weeks right this moment, especially when i'm currently (re)building the engine. regardless, any releases for a while would be more for debugging code & testing ui, not for actualy providing a game experience that people could play.)

also in my continual slow process of announcing that i am working on this thing, i posted a new news post on the hell game site. i have very little clue how many people are still playing that. i guess i'll find out.

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oh yeah and here are a few of the monster descriptions i've written, to give people a sense of what the content spread will be like. there will also definitely be some returning encounters from hell game, tweaked in various ways probably.

There's an Abomination here: a collection of organic parts, mostly bone and muscle and chitin, formed into something approximating the locomotion framework of a particularly large hyena-wolf. Fruiting bodies sprout from across its back in white-blue tendrils. Its head is the most directly analogous: a cage of rotted bone, worn away into irregular, asymmetrical pits, each of which opens into a glowing yellow eye, half ruptured and oozing ichor down its face. Below that, there's an articulated mandible -- a jaw -- that yawns open, a mess of fat tentacles spilling out like frothy tongues. That's an accommodation to human foibles; they don't need a centralized sensory locus the way humans do. But humans like having something to look at when they talk to someone.

This isn't a Hell thing; these were on the station before the disaster.

You come across an Asakku.

He's a giant of a man, who would tower head-and-shoulders over the average human. He's inhumanly muscular, with blocklike arms and legs and a heavy sagging belly. His skin is leathery and callused all over, almost rhino-like in its heavy, stiff layers. His hide peaks up into blunt horns across his shoulders, down his back, and across his forearms. {piercings in %a.variants -> He has loops of black metal pierced through him: hanging heavily from lips and tongue, nipples and belly-button.} His skin thickens even further at his hands and feet, grey-pale hide turning mottled grey-black, and his nails are dusty black talons.

His face is a mess, with sharp horns bursting out from his brows, eye sockets, cheeks; it's impossible to tell if he ever had eyes or nose, or if they're simply lost in the gnarled growth. His head is haloed in the tangle of horns. His mouth is a mess of jagged, snarled tusks. {rings in %a.variants -> Chunky rings of black metal band his horns and tusks, matched with similar bands worn as rings across his fingers and toes.} {paleflame in %a.variants -> His head and hands are wreathed in a pale, rippling fire that billows up like candle flames.}

{%a.fucked -> He's naked, and his fat, pendulous cock juts out beneath the hefty drape of his gut. Two immense balls, each bigger than a human's head, are shoved forward, unable to fit between his massive thighs. {rings in %a.variants -> He's wearing a thick black-metal cockring, banded around his shaft and beneath his balls, that shoves his immense package further forward, making it protrude out obscenely from beneath his gut and keeping his cock perpetually half-hard, foreskin peeled back and cockslit constantly oozing slimy greyish pre. / They shove his cock out between his thighs and gut, distending it into a fat, puffy sheath, with the tip of his dusky grey cockhead peeking out between his bulging foreskin.} {piercings in %a.variants -> His foreskin is stretched wider by a final piercing: a twisted black-metal ring through his cockhead, three fingers thick, that still looks demure on his giant form.} {paleflame in %a.variants -> The same wraithlike flame that shrouds his heads and hands billows up around his balls, spilling along the sides of his sagging belly and limning his fat cock in pale light.} }

A demon in some kind of sealed space suit. The helmet is elongated into an oval shape, and clear; the interior of the suit is full of opaque red-orange gas, in churning clouds. It surges and billows steadily, with the entity inside's breath.

The suit is off-white, a kind of greyish-tan { battered in %s.variants -> , and marred with ash and black streaks, with parts of the material etched in blotches as if from acid}. It's relatively form-fitting, moving with the demon. The form revealed is only human in the vaguest sense. The legs have an elongated ankle, like an animal's, with a broad, reptilian paw for a feet. { tail in %s.variants -> It has a chunky tail bulging out behind it, movement restricted in the suit, that curve out and back down to mid-thigh. } Its hands are oversized and clawed. There are gleaming orange-red claws that bulge through the suit on its hands and feet; you can't tell if those are part of the suit or its actual claws sliding through gaps. { halo in %s.variants -> There's a bulky swell of machinery across its shoulders and back that links to a free-floating ring attached behind its body, like a turbine or a halo. The ring hisses and revolves, and the interior surface glows.}

The suit itself has cords of fire running along it, in circles and lines. There's a circle of fire across its muscular chest, with three gleaming pearls of fire embedded halfway into the rubbery materials. The lines form strange alien constellations across the suit, linking across its shoulders and hips, over the crotch, and running down the arms and legs. Bigger pearls are sunk into its palms.

{ garland in %s.variants -> Its sole article of clothing, if it could be said to be that, is a necklace of fist-sized pearls of fire, in a cord hanging around its neck and draped down its chest. }

A figure floats down the hall. It's humanoid, shaped like a muscular man with a unicorn's head. His body is made from fibrous purple-black material, striated across his form like raw muscle. Shrouds of glowing black fog wreath his body, forming a shrouded mantle across his shoulders and coiling around his hips in sheets like heavy skirts. Around mid-thigh, the fog becomes so thick it's impossible to see his body through it, and when the fog clears across the floor, there are no feet. He's floating along above the fog.

His eyes are a burning, gloaming purple, and flames streak up from his eyes across the animal planes of his face. His gaze is fixed on his instruments surrounding him: thin planes of glowing glass, in a multitude of shapes, ringed and lined in unknown glyphs. He is constantly adjusting the panes, constructing telescopes and orrerys, aiming them in different directions, writing glyphs on some and reading from others.

He notices you before you approach, and some instruments aim towards you, outputting unknown information in an unknown language.

also, there's the zombie blurbs from an older devlog post