Update 4th Jun '23

I'm gradually getting free of this annoying lingering plague.

Last week I got the usual HoHH update out.  I hope people enjoyed playing with the new harlots.

I started typing up the Squishy Slime Girl pair.

Bratty Succubus has a name, Brittnee, and has been fully edited and is ready to be implemented.

The reason I haven't started implementing her is I remembered I'd forgotten to make Eve Satana an irresistible pick for characters with the Boob Fetish ailment.  A regrettable oversight for the harlot with 'the biggest tits in the world'.  In doing that I noticed what I believe some patrons have already pointed out - during the reorganisation something appears to have broken with ailments and force picks no longer seem to work.  I'm digging to find out what's gone wrong and will hopefully have that fixed by the time Eve Satana's release goes out at the end of the month.

The other thing I did this week was give myself a crash course in HTML and CSS.

When I first looked into Twine the common consensus I saw was that including pictures and audio files slowed the whole thing to a crawl.  I think this is because people were hard-coding them into the project as base64 files and making it enormous as a result.

However, as its output, Twine basically just produces a big HTML file (same as a web page).  On further research I found out you can fairly easily change the appearance by adding HTML tags to the passages and giving the project a CSS style sheet.

I've always struggled with properly laying out HTML elements as in my experience, what you think you tell the elements to do and what they actually do is often quite different.  Yes, you can nail them in place and specify exact positions in pixels, but I suspect people are playing HoHH on different devices with different screen sizes and so that approach won't work.

There was nothing for it but to spend 4 solid days getting over my mental block with CSS until I learned exactly what all the various tags did.  (FlexBox FTW in the end.)

The results are starting to look a little promising as can be seen from the screenshot above.

I think one of the things holding the project back is that it's still using the default look for Twine Sugarcube, which looks like ass.  If I can pretty the project up a little, I might be able to attract the attention of more players and get them playing long enough to realise the project does have a lot of sexy content (over 70 harlots as of the last release).

Currently I'm just using AI art backgrounds and snippets of character art people have commissioned as placeholders.  HoHH is always going to be more pure text than visual novel, but it would be nice to have a background to represent where the player is in the House and also portraits of whichever NPC the player is talking to.  Maybe even full art of the harlots when the player goes up to their room.

It's early experimentation at the moment.  First step is to make the main text display look a little more interesting.  Then remove the sidebar and hide the character stats in a collapsible 'character sheet' display.  I'll see if I can throw out a few limited demo versions to see if the display holds up on different devices.

Let me know your thoughts anyway.

I'll give myself a few more days of extensive experimentation until I feel more comfortable with hacking the Twine style sheets.  After that I'll switch it to my usual 'programming' daily time slot and get back to writing.

Thanks for the support.
- manyeyedhydra