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this week was mostly drawing assets and challenge code elaborations. i drew a bunch more tile sprites and a few more monster sprites. i also fixed up the code so that it's finally using multiple spritesheets. previously i only had a single spritesheet loaded that was every map sprite together: ui, tiles, encounter sprites, you name it, all in one spritesheet. this meant there was a hard limit of 256 sprites total. now that is no longer the case, which is good going forward
the other thing i did was continue messing with how challenges work. the main problem the system has is just that it's... not very interesting? the various kinds of attacks you can do don't really do much different; it's not very engaging to play; that kind of thing. like i said a few weeks ago, i decided to put in support for dark souls style stamina & combo systems. i don't know if i'll keep it, but it does constrain the combat in a way that means you can't just spam combo as much. i still need to add in 'poise', which here would represent the ability of some attacks/states to fill up/deplete a status bar and cause attacks to be interrupted (because you got knocked down). again, not super sure i want to stick with this, but i'm just testing out the mechanics so far
probably i'm gonna try to focus on the more 'gameplay'-y stuff for a bit -- enemy encounter types, random encounter placement & removal, different body parts unlocking different challenge moves, whatever leveling up skills will end up looking like, challenge ui -- before i go back to working on, you know, the porn. it is funny to think about how the first public demo of this thing will probably contain almost no porn. i was a little dissatisfied about how hell game ended up just being a collection of one-off sex scenes, okay! i didn't really have the narrative+gameplay framework in place to do anything else. so with this, i'm gonna try to work on that part first, which might mean that there's a perfectly-playable non-pornographic demo release first.
i am also thinking about how i want to handle the sex scenes. one of my big issues with 'the new hive' is that sometimes it would just drop you into a nonrepeatable 5,000 word sex scene for a random encounter, which... did not help the gameplay flow. considering the huge modularity of 'hell game' sex scenes, too, writing something that long for all bodytypes would be a nightmare. so they'll probably be substantially shorter?
as with all game writing, it's more of a question of how to allocate the word budget. let's say you have a flat 8,000-word budget for an entire encounter. you could write one 8k-word sex scene for bipeds and then nothing else. or i could split it up across all the major bodytypes (biped, centaur, naga, quadruped, snake) to have a ~1.6k-word sex scene for each. maybe i split them both in two to have both topping and bottoming options for each; that would drop them down to ~800 words each. maybe i'd skim a little off each of those to write a short scene top-only variant for when the pc is a floating dick. or matched with a bottom-only variant for when you're a floating head.
this kinda stuff ultimately gets into, like, the calculation of where to put gamedev resources so that it makes the most content for the most people. that kinda stuff gets exhausting to micromanage, though, so i usually try not to care too much about how, say, probably not a lot of people are going to be playing giant snakes so do i really need to write all the scenes where a pc giant snake fucks a given encounter? whenever devs do polls for "should this content get added or not" people are usually like, yeah whatever, add everything, but in practice we all have limited resources, so it's more a question of how much development time will go into each given thing. i'm trying to keep scope in mind if i wanna keep working on this thing.
for hell game 2, i really would like to have encounters that, you know, evolve and change as you revisit them. sometimes literally! instead of just being a single static scene with a bunch of variations. so probably each specific scene will be shorter.
anyway all of that is a big complicated content-writing decision that i'm kinda putting off until other things are marginally more finished.
oh yeah, also i figured i have been posting these devlogs here for long enough that i might as well actually link them on the patreon. i have some complicated feelings about the patreon, namely, i do not trust patreon as a company at all, and i'm not really super interested in plumbing the depths of precisely what they consider to be forbidden content. at some point they are going to pull the trigger on making me send them a photo of my id, even though they already have my tax information. it's just kind of an exhausting mess. a bunch of the stuff i've been working on historically (the ff7 fangame, the superhero strip-blackjack thing, etc) featured things that patreon would probably get mad at for me posting about. but who knows! there are porn games happily making money on patreon featuring rape and bestiality and they seem to be fine! but wow the second you have a hypno spiral, good luck. so i haven't really wanted to post anything there for a variety of reasons.
anyway, working on 'hell game 2' now, check out all the prior devlog posts i guess.
going forward i will probably continue to not post much/at all on patreon. tbh i've been seriously thinking of shutting the thing down, just because... idk, complicated feelings about "making gamedev my job", basically, since historically that has been a great way for me to get super stressed and miserable. and if people are giving me money for it then it's definitely at least a little bit "my job". anyway.
the other thing i did was continue messing with how challenges work. the main problem the system has is just that it's... not very interesting? the various kinds of attacks you can do don't really do much different; it's not very engaging to play; that kind of thing. like i said a few weeks ago, i decided to put in support for dark souls style stamina & combo systems. i don't know if i'll keep it, but it does constrain the combat in a way that means you can't just spam combo as much. i still need to add in 'poise', which here would represent the ability of some attacks/states to fill up/deplete a status bar and cause attacks to be interrupted (because you got knocked down). again, not super sure i want to stick with this, but i'm just testing out the mechanics so far
probably i'm gonna try to focus on the more 'gameplay'-y stuff for a bit -- enemy encounter types, random encounter placement & removal, different body parts unlocking different challenge moves, whatever leveling up skills will end up looking like, challenge ui -- before i go back to working on, you know, the porn. it is funny to think about how the first public demo of this thing will probably contain almost no porn. i was a little dissatisfied about how hell game ended up just being a collection of one-off sex scenes, okay! i didn't really have the narrative+gameplay framework in place to do anything else. so with this, i'm gonna try to work on that part first, which might mean that there's a perfectly-playable non-pornographic demo release first.
i am also thinking about how i want to handle the sex scenes. one of my big issues with 'the new hive' is that sometimes it would just drop you into a nonrepeatable 5,000 word sex scene for a random encounter, which... did not help the gameplay flow. considering the huge modularity of 'hell game' sex scenes, too, writing something that long for all bodytypes would be a nightmare. so they'll probably be substantially shorter?
as with all game writing, it's more of a question of how to allocate the word budget. let's say you have a flat 8,000-word budget for an entire encounter. you could write one 8k-word sex scene for bipeds and then nothing else. or i could split it up across all the major bodytypes (biped, centaur, naga, quadruped, snake) to have a ~1.6k-word sex scene for each. maybe i split them both in two to have both topping and bottoming options for each; that would drop them down to ~800 words each. maybe i'd skim a little off each of those to write a short scene top-only variant for when the pc is a floating dick. or matched with a bottom-only variant for when you're a floating head.
this kinda stuff ultimately gets into, like, the calculation of where to put gamedev resources so that it makes the most content for the most people. that kinda stuff gets exhausting to micromanage, though, so i usually try not to care too much about how, say, probably not a lot of people are going to be playing giant snakes so do i really need to write all the scenes where a pc giant snake fucks a given encounter? whenever devs do polls for "should this content get added or not" people are usually like, yeah whatever, add everything, but in practice we all have limited resources, so it's more a question of how much development time will go into each given thing. i'm trying to keep scope in mind if i wanna keep working on this thing.
for hell game 2, i really would like to have encounters that, you know, evolve and change as you revisit them. sometimes literally! instead of just being a single static scene with a bunch of variations. so probably each specific scene will be shorter.
anyway all of that is a big complicated content-writing decision that i'm kinda putting off until other things are marginally more finished.
oh yeah, also i figured i have been posting these devlogs here for long enough that i might as well actually link them on the patreon. i have some complicated feelings about the patreon, namely, i do not trust patreon as a company at all, and i'm not really super interested in plumbing the depths of precisely what they consider to be forbidden content. at some point they are going to pull the trigger on making me send them a photo of my id, even though they already have my tax information. it's just kind of an exhausting mess. a bunch of the stuff i've been working on historically (the ff7 fangame, the superhero strip-blackjack thing, etc) featured things that patreon would probably get mad at for me posting about. but who knows! there are porn games happily making money on patreon featuring rape and bestiality and they seem to be fine! but wow the second you have a hypno spiral, good luck. so i haven't really wanted to post anything there for a variety of reasons.
anyway, working on 'hell game 2' now, check out all the prior devlog posts i guess.
going forward i will probably continue to not post much/at all on patreon. tbh i've been seriously thinking of shutting the thing down, just because... idk, complicated feelings about "making gamedev my job", basically, since historically that has been a great way for me to get super stressed and miserable. and if people are giving me money for it then it's definitely at least a little bit "my job". anyway.
