Unfortunately, I'm not going to make the end of the month with Slime Smother Nun. I'm still feeling under the weather, she's a problem scenario that's locking me up, so I took a few more days off to try and clear the block. Annoying, but I've had periods like this before, which are usually followed by periods of hyper-productivity when I break out of the slump. I will put her out as soon as I get her finished. Hopefully soon!
Thankfully, I am able to post something nice at the end of the month. Marwmellow's latest batch of art has come in and this included something a little special. CrimsonCrown took advantage of my "adopt-a-harlot" program and commissioned an extra piece of Tete Khantu in action. Normally, I would have sneaked her into the game as a surprise, but Tete is a high-tier harlot, so it will be a while before she's added to the art version of HoHH. I asked CrimsonCrown if I could preview her early, and he graciously agreed.
So here we are, enjoy a pic of Tete Khantu smothering a lucky guy beneath her lovely ta-tas.
I hope to add more actual H-scene art. If people want to help out by "adopting" their favourite harlot, get in touch and we'll work something out with marwmellow.
Even though it will leave me a little out of pocket, I think I can stretch the art budget to commission some more H-scenes. It will be my "fine" for writing/implementing the scenarios so slowly marwmellow has nearly caught up on the pinups.
Thank you to CrimsonCrown for commissioning this one and allowing me to show it off early. I hope you all like it!
Another slow week unfortunately, not helped by me being under the weather and out of sorts for half of it. I think the Slime Smother Nun scenario is going to drag its feet all the way.
I'm hoping that the end of the month rapidly approaching will give me a prod to get it wrapped up, but there's also a real risk it will lock me up and make it worse. So, I'll be careful and not make any promises. It is being typed up and once that's done the implementation is usually very straightforward. I will try to get it done and out ASAP, so expect it soon.
After that I think I'll put full focus on the Imp Harem mini-boss. I think the slime smother nun problems are because it's been on my in-progress list for too long while I had to work on other things such as the graphics overhaul and notebook functionality. I've had this happen with short stories and other scenarios in the past - the idea goes stale and it becomes a real effort to drag the thing over the line. So imp harem and nothing but sexy imp harem when I get to them. The notebook functionality for the harlots is also important, but I think that needs to also be given full focus when I get back to it. I might go back to that after Imp Harem is done with an eye to getting a full demo out that covers the whole of the first third of the game (ending with the round 5 mini-bosses).
Unfortunately, because it's one of those weeks, there may be problems there as well. My initial plan was to drop the HoHH 1.5 demo (with all the artwork and notebook functionality) on itch.io, but, well...
This has not been a good week for adult content creators or fans of adult entertainment. My country (UK) has just passed a very wrong-headed Online Safety Act, which looks like it's going to result in portions of the internet region-blocking the UK rather than deal with their idiocy. The payment processors have also decided to bully Steam and Itch.io from selling some/all sexy adult content. These are not good times.
Currently I'm not sure how this will affect me (and you). I still have a Patreon account. And if that gets taken down I have a SubscribeStar as backup. If I vanish from any of them, I'll post updates to twitter (sorry X) or my blog (just google manyeyedhydra and you should find it).
I don't know if this will also spread to my books. I have received comments from someone saying they've had problems buying them. I've checked and they still appear to be listed on Amazon, but I don't know if the problems occur when it comes to finalising payment. If you run into problems, please let me know. There are other places where my ebooks are available (such as Smashwords). The links are in the pinned comment (Patreon) or up on my houseofhellishharlots website: https://houseofhellishharlots.com/mehydra/
The one thing the Internet is good at is routing around attempts to censor it, so hopefully this disruption is only temporary while we wait for enterprising individuals/orgs to find a way to circumvent nanny-stateish payment processors and governments. In the meantime, I'll continue working on HoHH and trying to get that next update out.
The slime smother nun mini-boss scenario dragged its feet all the way, but I finally have the first draft written. Currently I'm in the process of typing it up, which I hope to get done by the end of next week. That is a little on the tentative side. With this I think I've run into the old problem of things being left on the side for so long they go a little stale and become a chore to write (and drag their feet). I think I'm through the worst of it, but I'll see how next week goes when I'm typing up the second draft.
While the scenario was dragging its feet, I did start scribbling away on a couple of story ideas. This was so I was at least getting something done for the periods where work on HoHH felt very gummed up. I'll keep adding the odd page to those when I get a chance.
I'm a little concerned the notebook coding has also been a pushed back a bit. I might need to give that a solid day or two to get it moving again, but for the moment my top priority is getting the slime smother nun scenario out.
Thanks for the support and interest! - manyeyedhydra
Yeah, so like everyone else and their dog the last couple of weeks I got sucked into the hype around the horse girl game...
It's pretty good, but more "bring-your-daughter-to-sports-practise" than more overtly fanservice anime games (like Nikke). I do like to keep track of these gacha games for professional reasons as well. I also currently have a large roster of attractive female characters and it's always worth looking at what other people are doing to see if I can explore new ways of using them.
I suspect I'm always going to be hamstrung by my girls being a little too explicit on the sexual side and also my love of horror having them do things that are a little bit more extreme than the regular sexy anime waifus. (Please stop eating the customers!).
I thought it might help as I noticed I was dragging my feet on writing the slime smother nun scenario. It's been a recurring problem with the longer mini-boss scenarios and it probably hasn't helped that the nun scenario has been in progress for a while and constantly shunted to the side by more pressing programming concerns. I did try to throw everything at it to get her finished. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it fails and I end up banging my head against the wall and get nothing done. That's how it is with me unfortunately. There are fast weeks and there are slow weeks.
Next week I'll go back to partitioning the day into strict time slots again. That way even if the writing is slow, I'm still getting work done on something else in the other time slot. I'll just keep an eye on it in case I feel like I'm getting burned out.
I do have a mitigation plan for this. If I do need to switch gears and work on something else for a short while, my plan is to get the next short story collection finished up. I was going to spend a month on this anyway at some point this year (likely after I've released the last mini-boss - the imp harem troupe). If needed, I can bump that up if I really need to clear my head by working on something else for a short while.
I'll see how next week goes. I do know what I need to write for the last scenario. My brain is just being a little stubborn and uncooperative when putting pen to paper. (The current heatwave in the UK probably isn't helping there).
In much better news, one of you did decide to "adopt" a harlot, and marwmellow has finished the piece, which means I have some art of a harlot doing slightly more exciting things than the regular pinup piece. I might preview that early (with the commissioning patron's permission) or sneak it in as a surprise treat. If other people would like to do the same for their favourite harlot, contact me and hopefully I'll be able to set something else.
Apologies for the lack of progress this week. Sometimes I have good weeks and sometimes I have not so good weeks. Slime nun is so close to getting done, so hopefully tighter discipline will get her over the line next week.
Whoops. This one is a day late as I thought I'd hit the end of the batch and then realised I'd forgotten Cibi.
Cibi Somnia is a tricky one. Outwardly she looks like a fairly sweet and harmless sheep girl. Look at her too long and you realise there is something very off about her. She's best described as an eldritch abomination in the form of an innocent-looking sheep girl.
Marwmellow's approach was to make her a cute sheep girl standing in a very ominous background, which works I think.
This is the end of the batch of mid-tier independents. I've been posting regular Harlot Spotlights of the next batches for $5 tier and higher patrons. I normally want about a 2-3 month gap between the art reveals, so there will be a slight pause for the regular art reveals to maintain that buffer period. On the plus side, I've got back to posting the harlot spotlights weekly, so when I get back to the $1 tier reveals, I will have enough content to keep it weekly for a while.
Also, because I screwed up and posted Cibi a day late, I'll move this week's harlot spotlight (Which I think is Boobella) to Friday.
Work on the Slime Smother Nun is coming along nicely.
I felt I was flagging mid-week and started writing a short story as a change of gear. Rather than finishing it, it got me moving on the Slime Smother Nun again, which was what I was hoping for.
As for the Slime Smother Nun, I finished the first draft of her boob smother sub-scenario, wrote her vagina smother sub-scenario, and I'm nearly done with her ass smother sub-scenario. That just leaves her kiss smother sub-scenario. I'm hoping to get that done early next week and then got most of her typing up done. Depending on how long the typing up, implementation and testing take, I'm tentatively hoping for a mid-month release for her.
I also prepped up the next batch of harlots to add notebook functionality. I think that's just going to be fiddly as I'm trying to retroactively add it to already-implemented scenarios. I'm hoping it will be less painful when I port the mid-tier and future harlots across as I'll be adding it from the start. The low-tier harlots will be fiddly and a pain, but I'll keep working on them until they're all updated.
As for the short story, it was a random idea about "Black Maidens" rising up out of the street to snatch people and only one person is able to see them. I think I'm trying to channel a bit of Juni Ito weirdness for that one. I've written the first third-to-a-half and I might finish it off when I come to the typing up for the Slime Smother Nun.
Thanks for the interest and support. - manyeyedhydra
Continuing with the art previews for the mid-tier independent harlots, here is the House's "mindflayer" girl N'gleria Sepiida.
She likes a nice big brain...
Art by marwmellow. N'gleria actually turned out more coquettish and seductive than she is in the scenario. Marwmellow suggested I write more tentacle girls. :D
I continued work on the Slime Smother Nun scenario. I finished the first draft of her hand smother sub-scenario and I'm currently in the middle of writing her boob smother sub-scenario. Progress is a little scratchier than I'd like. I still don't think I've quite nailed her character. But that's what 1st drafts are for. I'll get a better idea as I write her remaining scenarios and will then update the 1st drafts when I type them up.
Nicolette and Chén have been updated with full autosave, notebook, and replay functionality in the online harlot tester. Nicolette was a little fiddly as I needed to add a custom clue type for one of her abilities. Chén was much more straightforward, which gives me hope the process will speed up as I update more harlots.
I've only done light testing on the notebook functionality to make sure it's not blowing up in an obvious manner. I'll go back to give them some more thorough testing later. If you do notice anything weird while playing around with them, please let me know as that will help the testing process.
Next week I'll continue to work on the Slime Smother Nun. As the mini-bosses are essentially 5 or 6 scenarios in 1, my release schedule is going to be as and when they're done rather than regular end-of-month releases.
Thank you for the support and interest! - manyeyedhydra
A bits'n'pieces week with a few IRL disruptions to keep me from getting a good run on things.
On the plus side, I think I've sorted out my disorganisation over the art previews and harlot spotlights. Those should now be back to weekly until I've run through the stockpile.
If you'd like to "adopt-a-harlot" and commission a H-scene for a favourite harlot, marwmellow is up for it and I can facilitate getting the money and details across. There is one on the go at the moment and I'm eager to see how she'll turn out. Once all the pinups are done, I might also look to commission some myself, but that will depend on how much is left in my art funds war chest.
Writing for the slime smother nun was a little stop-start, but I have finished the first draft of her Bad End sex scene. I'm hoping to properly get stuck into her sticky smother scenes next week. She has five and I have a rough idea on how each will go. Maybe to my own detriment, I refuse to cut corners, so I'm going to stick with the plan of each mini-boss being 5 scenes-in-one to give them replay value.
Implementing notebook and replay functionality for the harlots is still a little fiddly. I thought I could pick that off during my nightly programming sessions, but I'm finding I'm not getting much done there. I might need to set aside a full day or two each week until I'm more comfortable with adding the various bits of code.
Nicolette is nearly done. She just needs a custom clue for her ability to cure ailments.
I also need to find some time for some thorough testing for the harlots I have given the new functionality. I think there might have been some bugs I've missed. The harlot tester is currently online on the houseofhellishharlots website for people to play with, so if you've also noticed any weird behaviour, letting me know will help out a lot.
Things feel like they are moving again. Thanks for the support! - manyeyedhydra
The Lies of P DLC dropped unexpectedly and as it's probably my favourite game of the past couple of years I got sucked into that.
Then, just as I was done with that, I was called up for an archaic English tradition known as cricket, which took up all of Saturday.
As the usual penance for being less active than usual, I've dropped an early preview of art from the latest batch. This is the lovely Anna Boa, who loves giving men a good squeeze.
Breaktime over, anyway. Batteries recharged. I'll be back to it next week. Currently I'm working on slime smother nun and the notebook functionality for Nicolette.
Thanks for the interest and support. - manyeyedhydra
Art preview for today is The Trapperess, who I might have already showed off. I did drop some out of sequence, so I can't remember. Anyway, this is where she would be as I'm currently showing off the Round 5 mini-bosses. (I also have art for the slime smother nun, but I'm going to wait until I've actually written her.)
I maybe also commissioned The Trapperess art a little early. When I envisioned her, it was as a rugged outdoor type that specialises in living in the wilds and trapping prey. When I came to write the scenario she came out more as a devious trickster type, so I'm not sure if my initial descriptions and the art fit.
I still think marwmellow came up with a lovely piece of art and it was nice to vary the body types to have a lean and mean looking succubus rather than the usual big-boobed types (which I also adore).
If I decide to switch art, I'll make sure to create a new succubus character, so this doesn't go to waste.
I hope you like it. Let me know what you think down below.
This was a fairly productive week even if a lot of it was on tidying up duties.
Not all, thankfully, and I am happy to report I'm currently back on writing the slime smother nun scenario. I typed up some of her intro to pick the thread back up again and I'm currently in the middle of writing her Bad End sex scenario. I was hoping to have that finished, but there was a bit too much other work I needed to get done this week. My plan is she'll have 5 "smother" scenarios and 1 straight sex (sort of) sub-scenarios, similar to The Trapperess and Temptacia.
I also sent off the next batch of art descriptions. These are the high-tier independents. Rather more exciting is one of my patrons has "adopted" a harlot, so this batch also included a harlot "in action", so to speak. More details on that to come, but I'm very eager to see what marwmellow comes up with for this.
As part of the tidying up, I also wrote and prepared a few more harlot spotlights. During the coding slog I constantly found myself in a position where I couldn't take time away to put a new spotlight out as I was currently in the middle of something else (usually a tricky coding segment). To avoid this happening in future I decided to prep and queue a batch so I'll always have one ready to post. This week I did the mid-tier sensuality harlots, so that's the next couple of weeks sorted. I'll write a few more next week so I can continue to have a stockpile queued and ready to go.
The biggest tidying up was implementing notebook and replay functionality for Friesya. I'd written up her notebook paragraphs but had only just started implementing them before I put out the Harlot Tester last week. I'm very glad I didn't rush her out for that as the implementation ended up being a little fiddly and I'd have probably screwed something up if I'd rushed it.
Even though it took more hours to implement than I was expecting, I needed to cover a new clue type for Friesya and tweak the notebook and replay functionality to handle repeat scenarios. Thankfully, I now appear to be at the tweak-and-add things stage rather than the rewrite-everything-because-it-doesn't-fit stage that caused me so many problems from March to May.
It's still a little fiddly to implement notebook/replay functionality for the existing harlot scenarios. I think I might need to set aside a couple of days per week to work on each harlot. I think this will get quicker as I get more used to it and iron out the bugs in the process.
I've added Friesya Holstun to the online Harlot Tester up houseofhellishharlots.com. (See previous posts for details on what the Harlot Tester is.) I've given her light testing to fix the obvious things that were blowing up, but there will probably be some things I've missed. Let me know if you encounter anything weird while playing her scenario.
My plan is to keep updating the online version when each harlot is ready, which I'll mention in these update posts.
Thank you for the interest and support. - manyeyedhydra
The art preview for today is the round 5 mini-boss for the artificial beings faction - Rwberia Godr-0-sgwid. She has a variety of specialised appendages for... ahem... extracting semen.
I think this is the first time showing her off to all paid tiers. ($5 and higher got to see her a few months ago as part of the Harlot Spotlight series.)
Art is by marwmellow. Let me know what you think below.
The weekly update post was kind of covered by the release post yesterday, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to post the updated roadmap for HoHH instead. The old one got knocked a little off course by all the recent work on HoHH1.5!
My main goal is to have proper working demo of the art version of HoHH that goes up to and includes the round 5 mini-bosses. I need to get that out to gauge whether I can increase my art budget to give the harlots proper H-scenes on top of their pin-ups. (Anyone willing to adopt-a-harlot will help a lot here!)
(I appreciate we've been stuck at round 5 for a while, but once the last two mini-bosses are written it should be a quick jump up to round 9 for the next batch of mini-bosses.)
TEXT-ONLY HoHH I did have plans to sunset this once the art-version caught up, but I think I'll keep it going. I know some patrons prefer it and implementing the new harlots in this version first and then porting over seems to work. I'm down to pretty much just the mini-bosses and queens, so I should probably see this version out to completion. It won't have all the features. This might affect how the Queen scenarios go as I have an idea to make them care about notebook unlocks, which the text-only version won't have.
Programming - Port across existing mini-bosses (Trapperess, Rwberia, Temptacia). - Extend notebook functionality to all low-tier (round 1-5) harlots. - Add a check before entering a harlot's room that gives the player the option to fast-forward through any harlot they've previously solved.
- Save version compatibility. Now that the game has some persistence between runs, I don't want every new harlot addition to force a reset of the player's current progress. This might be tricky to implement, but I have some ideas on how to do it.
- Standalone launcher. This is something I need to do some research on. Currently the game plays fine in the player's default internet browser. I need to look into what games on itch.io and steam do to make themselves more "standalone". This is especially important for mobile users as currently their only option is to play it from the houseofhellishharlots website.
Art - Title page This is mostly okay. I'd like to experiment with some animation such as sliding the curtains apart. I think I have all the assets now to make banners, thumbnails, etc.
- Start menu This needs to be prettied up as it's just a barebones placeholder at the moment.
- UI Semen gauge needs decent art.
- NPC Shop icons. Charms are fine. Potion bottles need the art to include icons giving better representation of what the potion is (STR, AGI, DEX, etc). Ailments need more uniform art, but the current ones are just about okay, so I can probably get away with it if I don't have anything better by the time the rest of the demo is ready.
- Notebook progression score. I had an idea to include a watermark background of the faction symbol once it is discovered for the harlot. This could show up as a background for the score number, or maybe for the main text.
SOUND/MUSIC -???? I feel like I should have something, but I have so much to do everywhere else this is going to have to take a backseat for now.
And I think that's it. If there's anything you think I've missed that could do with improvement, let me know below.
Now that the bulk of the notebook functionality coding is done, my main focus for June will be writing the remaining two Round 5 mini-bosses.
Thank you for the ongoing support and interest! - manyeyedhydra
End of the month and I do have a release, of sorts.
The past couple of months working on the notebook functionality has made me conscious I'm trying to work 2 jobs simultaneously. 3 if you count QA testing. Ideally a project like this would separate the roles of writer and programmer, but it is what it is. I just have to work harder. :D
Where I can find additional help is with the testing. The repeated cycles of having to go back and test everything again after a change in the notebook framework code ate up a lot of time. What I've decided to do is make my harlot tester program available for patrons/subscribers to play around with. This removes the overall game part and allows the player to select each harlot directly and run through their scenario. There is a fairly simple page beforehand that allows the player to directly set their character attributes before running the scenario. While this wasn't intended for public use, it should be reasonably straightforward to use. It's also really convenient if you just want to skip everything and go right to the harlot scenario of choice!
It does make some things a little spoilery, such as listing what each charm does. I was a little reluctant to release it, but I think the benefit I'll get from having additional eyes on each scenario is worth it. It's also a nice treat and thank you for the patrons/subscribers who are funding the project development. This does give a little peek inside what's going on with the game.
I've attached the program here as a .zip file. As with the other HoHH releases, PC users should unzip it and the .html file should play in their web browser of choice. This won't work on mobile so I've updated the houseofhellishharlots website to add a "Harlot Tester" button to the experimental section. Follow that to find the release.
I was hoping to release it with the notebook sections done for some addition harlots, but the week ended up being pretty hectic. I have 3 in progress (Friesya, Nicolette and Chen), but they're not quite ready and I didn't want to panic-rush given how many problems that's given me recently.
For now the only harlots with notebook functionality are Morticia, Bebi, Asphya and Sapoonis.
I will update it with more harlots as they're finished. I'm hoping to get 2-3 done a week until I'm caught up with the full low-tier roster.
It should be a fun tool to use. Let me know what you think below.
Right, time to get the HoHH art previews back on schedule.
Here is the lovely Temptacia. I think Marwmellow completely nailed her overwhelming sexuality. She looks like she eats men for fun in the bedroom.
I'm going to try and get back to the same rough schedule as before, which is Harlot Spotlights (including raw scripts + some background lore) for $5+ tiers, then a reveal to all tiers 3 months after that, and then for the general public some time after that. I want to continue to create MGE-style profiles for each, but I think I'll save that for the public spoiling, as I want to write those when I port the harlot scenarios over to the art version of HoHH, and it's going to be a while before I get to the mid-tier harlots (which I pretty much have most of the art for now).
Hopefully, I haven't screwed up and posted Temptacia a second time.
I hope you like her. Marwmellow is also keen to draw more explicit pics of the various harlots. If you have a favourite and would like to commission a piece, get in touch.
The first half went really well. I think I'm now done with the bulk of the coding for the notebook features. I went back and updated Sapoonis, Asphya, and Bebi. That was fairly straightforward. They now have scoring and replay mode.
Overall, in contrast to the proof-of-concept last year, scoring and replay mode is far more streamlined and easy to implement. Scoring goes off the clues and other notebook aspects, so once those are done for a harlot, the scoring is done as well. Replay mode is pretty much all generic functions and very easy to add for most harlots. I'm pretty pleased with how that's turned out. I think I should be able to add that very quickly to the harlot scenarios.
The notebook clues are slightly fiddlier. That will be a couple of hours per harlot as I need to go through the scenario to work out what the major clues are for the player to uncover, write the 500 words or so for the notebook section, then add and test the various clues. I'll just methodically work through the existing harlots until I've caught up.
I was in the middle of updating Friesya and Nicolette when some IRL stuff knocked me off track, so I wasn't able to get much done for the second half of the week.
The good news is that the major coding work for the new features is pretty much done and I can just work through the individual harlot scenarios. My plan now for May's release is to put out my harlot tester so players can try out the notebook functionality for each harlot as they're updated.
After that I should be able to get back on track and push on with the last 2 remaining round 5 mini-bosses.
Thank you for your patience and continued support. - manyeyedhydra
Replay Mode has been implemented. The main difference from the proof-of-concept version is I wanted the replays to preserve the player stats used to unlock them, which would make them a sort of custom save for the player. Ironically, this is easier than the proof-of-concept version as it would just require taking a snapshot of current player stats rather than having to individually create multiple player profiles to force each particular harlot replay. I'll need to keep an eye on the overall save data size, but we're talking about a simple table per player, which should be tiny in comparison to things like pictures, etc.
I also wanted to give the player some customisation, so that if they unlocked the replay a subsequent time, they could pick which snapshot they'd like to use for that replay in future. Some harlots have minor changes to their dialogue depending on the player's disposition, so the player can pick which one they prefer. It also solves the multiple-routes-to-the-same-Bad-End problem as I really don't want to create separate replay options for Out of Semen, Black Rose, etc.
I did run into a snag with how it interacted with Autosave. If the player has multiple data for a potential replay, the plan was to give them the choice of whether to go with the new or stick with the old after they selected that replay option. However, nothing in the Notebook autosaves. This is intentional to allow the player to dip into it mid-game and be able to jump back to where they left off in the game without corrupting any data. Unfortunately, this includes whatever choice the player makes on which data to go with for their replay. Yup, this one had me pulling my hair out and screaming at the screen for a bit until I figured out what was going on.
Clumsily hacking the autosave for this particular corner case felt very dangerous, so I was resigned to not having that functionality - I'd have to pick either going with the first data that unlocked that replay, or the most recent. Then I figured I could do it in the scenario itself without being too intrusive. The player is informed when they unlock a particular replay. If it's the second or subsequent time, the message changes and they get a little checkbox to give them the option to set this particular run as the default for that replay.
The nice part about it is it's completely generic. One line of code at the right point in the harlot scenario and tada, it's all done.
Fingers crossed, I think I'm mostly done with adding the core notebook functionality now. Displaying the overall score needs some minor tweaks, but I'll put that back with the other tasks that need improvement tweaks (the main game menu, etc). I'll also need to work through some harlot scenarios to make sure nothing trips me up (as unfortunately happened with the clue framework for the notebook).
My plan is to use next week to tidy things up. I'd like to add the functionality to some harlot scenarios to make sure everything is working properly. To aid in testing these, I will make my harlot testing program available on the houseofhellishharlots website. I'll let people know when that goes up.
I'm also aware I've been struggling to keep a regular schedule for the harlot art reveals (spotlights and profiles). There have been a few occasions when I've been in the middle of coding or testing something and felt it wouldn't have been productive to break away to write a new harlot spotlight. To get around this problem I'll see if I can pick a day or two next week and write a bunch of them up in a batch. Maybe some harlot profiles as well.
It's been a bit of a slog, but I think I might be mostly through it now.
As I slowly drag myself out of the programming swamp, hopefully a return to a normal schedule.
This is the last of the NPC batch - The Doctoress.
She's a lot more weird and eccentric then the others. I still don't know what to do with her. I have a good idea what's going on with her faction and some surprises in store for the player, but as for the Doctoress herself... Still working on it. I guess her closest comparison would be Promestein from the MGQ series. I'm not sure The Doctoress is quite mad enough to mutate her own body into some type of lust abomination. The most likely approach is she'll watch while various "toys" go to town on the player's body. It is still undecided at the moment (unlike the Elegant Woman and Buxom Lolibaba, where I have a rough idea of what their scenarios will involve).
As for other harlot art, I now have a sizeable backlog to show off to regular patrons/subscribers. Initially, I wanted the art reveals to come in the form of harlot profiles. My plan was to write the profiles as I ported the harlot over to HoHH1.5, because porting the scenario over would refamiliarize myself with it enough to help writing the profile. Adding the notebook functionality has mucked up that plan as it will be a while before I get to porting the mid-tier harlots across. I don't really want to hold the art reveals back until then as the notebook functionality has already disrupted my posting schedule enough as it is. So you might get profiles, or it might be just the art. Watch this space!
As with the others, the art is by marwmellow. He's assembled quite the roster of harlot art now. I can't wait to show it all off!
But before that, I've had a few responses to the Adopt-a-Harlot idea for commissioning spicier H-scene artwork (see previous post). Main wrinkle at the moment is sorting out a payment processor that is completely anonymous. I'm still trying to figure out how to do this. At a pinch I guess something could be worked around here by temporarily raising the subscription by +$100 per month and then immediately dropping it back to what it was before after payment. That feels a little clumsy, so I'm open to suggestions on the best way to sort out a one-shot payment to arrange a commission.
As for the weekly update. I'm still in that dilemma of I know I've been spending too much time programming, I know people would like to see some writing (or just about anything else), but I'm also conscious I need to get this done now rather than coming back later and losing a lot of progress. I don't like it, but I think the best approach is to just get it done and out of the way. It's hit my sub count a little, which is understandable as I've been bogged down for about 3 weeks longer than I would have liked. My hope is I'll get people back once I'm through the other end and HoHH is moving nicely again with the nice new notebook features.
This week I took that much needed step back to properly go over things. I removed a lot of needless complexity and fixed some problems I was having. The notebook updates on the end of scenario, so no mid-scene spoilers. I think I've solved the black rose problem and overall I've simplified a lot of clue update calls so there are less hidden "land mines" to worry about.
Because I want to get it all out of the way in one go, I'm now working on the scoring and replay mode. Scoring is pretty much done and I have ideas on how to do the replay mode. (This is the other reason I want to keep at it - I've already figured out how to do some of these things in my head and so want to actually implement them now rather than coming back in two months and realising I've forgotten how I was going to do it).
The repeated testing was eating up a lot of time, so I've cut that back to a lighter, run it and fix the obvious things blowing up. I also don't think the game as a whole is the best way to test this, so I'll be making my harlot tester program available on the houseofhellishharlots website fairly soon. That will allow people to pick harlots directly and be able to run through their scenario over and over, which is what is needed to test the notebook functionality. I'll try to get that up in the next couple of weeks as soon as I have replay mode working.
This has obviously completely blown up my initial plans for the year. I think the new features will be worth it, but it's definitely been more of a slog than I anticipated to add them. I'm really hoping the payoff is worth it!
Thank you for your continued patience and understanding. - manyeyedhydra
Last time I tried this the crowdfunding site Marwmellow used to get paid got taken down, which made it very difficult for anyone to commission him.
I've been meaning to try again, but the last month or so has been a grim slog through the code guts of HoHH, keeping me a little too busy.
So, let's try again...
The lovely picture above of Suka in action was not actually commissioned by me. You have smithlfarrel to thank for that (cheers dude!). I tweaked some code and was able to add it to the game with his kind permission.
Marwmellow is open to drawing some more explicit pieces of favourite harlots. I think I might be able to stretch my personal art funds to commission a few myself (and will probably need to while covering the gap to write the last remaining harlots). Those funds are getting a little thin right now, so I'm not sure how many juicier pics I'll be able to commission. Maybe once I get a proper demo out that might result in some renewed interest and financial support.
In the meantime, if people want to help out by commissioning a piece of their fav harlot in action and would like it to be included in the game, I will be only too happy to include it! I've had a few enquiries asking if this is possible and I'd like it to be.
The main issue is sorting out the payment. After boosty was blocked I was able to figure something out with crypto, but it's still fiddly and I wouldn't be surprised if it put some people off last time. The easier option might be to go through me as I already have a payment system in place that's working (for now) to commission marwmellow. I'm fine with acting as a go-between - give me the money plus details of the harlot and which scene, and I can pass that on to marwmellow. If you're on discord, I can also put you in touch with him directly through there.
It does feel a little cheeky to ask backers to also directly fund art for the project, so I hope you'll excuse me for that. Originally, I never thought HoHH would have any art at all. I maybe wouldn't have planned for 100 harlots if I'd known! Even then I didn't think I'd be able to get more than one pinup piece per harlot. Currently, I'm following the example of Monster Girl Dreams, which started text-only, then added character art, and now has a few more juicier pics. We might be able to give all harlots proper H-scene art, or it might just be a few of them. Any is a bonus.
As a mark of gratitude I'll find a place in the game to credit who commissioned the art (unless they wish to stay anonymous). Maybe it can be a sort of Adopt-a-Harlot scheme!
What are people's thoughts on this? I don't know how Patreon or SubscribeStar are for single payments. I can probably accept it through PayPal if that works as well.
The standard amount I'm paying per pinup is $100, although it might be more for a full scene depending on how complex. The commissions usually take about 6 to 8 weeks. I batch them up into groups of 4 to 5 and pay half up front and half on completion.
A fairly important ETA here. While I am paying $100 for most of the pinups, the rate is $100 + $50 per additional character (eg Huntress Diana + her hound was $150). This might bump up the price for H-scene art as there's probably going to a lucky bloke having sexy stuff done to him in there somewhere. It will depend on what marwmellow wants for the commission. Best approach is to give me the description first, I'll run it by him and get a quote.
It does feel a little cheeky asking to crowdsource the spicier art like this. People have asked, though, and I'd definitely love to add some proper H-scenes to HoHH (and we don't have to worry about me being side-tracked by feature creep in this case as the code for additional art is already in place!).
If you're interested comment below or DM me privately. Hopefully we'll be able to sort something out.
I thought I'd fixed some of the framework problems, only to get bogged down while updating the individual harlots. I did drop a release on the 1st, but I wasn't really happy with it.
The main goal of putting something - anything - out was to relieve some of the pressure I was putting on myself so I could pause, step back and try to identify what wasn't working. I thought I might need to take a break from coding, but after putting the release out I found some renewed enthusiasm and was immediately able to fix some of the things I wasn't happy with.
Unfortunately, this only lasted until Saturday, when I hit another snag and sank right into the bog again. What I'm trying to do isn't all that complicated, but some poor design decisions early on have added some unnecessary complexity that keeps tripping me up. Yes, I can bodge around it, but projects that do this eventually run into problems further down the line, so it's important I get it cleaned up properly now.
People have asked if there's any help they can do with the coding. Unfortunately, while appreciated, I suspect this would only make the problem worse. In this case, it's not about getting it to work, I can already do this, but having it stable enough I'm not thinking about the underlying framework at all 20+ harlots from now. Needing workarounds for things like the black rose is a red flag to me that indicates there are still some flaws that need to be ironed out.
Where people can help is with the regression testing. What took up a lot of time last week was having to go through the same harlot scenario over and over again. The full game isn't really conducive to that. I do have a separate harlot tester program I use to test each scenario separately. What I will do is make that available on the houseofhellishharlots website so people can give each harlot a thorough look over once I've updated them with the notebook functionality. Look for that in a week or so.
Now for plans for next week. I'm conscious I've been bogged down trying to program this feature for much longer than I'd like, which isn't particularly interesting for patrons. Some have suggested to get a new short story out, which I'm considering. I was also planning to take a month off from HoHH this year to finish the last couple of stories needed for a new short story collection. So I could maybe do that.
On the other hand, while I am struggling a little with the current problem, I am fully immersed in it and gradually fixing the various things that need to be fixed. Taking a break risks resetting everything back to square one and another lengthy period of trying to figure out what I was doing when I come back to it in a month or so's time.
I dunno. I'll see how I get on today. I thought I was damn close on Friday before another snag popped up.
In much better news, I received the latest batch of art from marwmellow. I dropped Eve Satana on the discord as what was going to be a temporary teaser I was planning to delete later. Instead I think I'll leave her out as an early treat. I think we all need it!
This one is more for my benefit. The notebook clue framework for the harlots is pretty much close to done. It's still a bit fiddlier and time consuming to implement for each harlot than I'd like, but it is mostly giving the behaviour I want. I'm hoping it will get quicker as I apply it to more harlots and get all the templates in place.
I do have a lot of templates in place, but there are still some rough edges and pieces that don't quite fit correctly. I was testing today and spotted the Black Rose gift resulted in some strange behaviour where the notebook recorded Sapoonis as having melted the player's hands off, when she hadn't. After last week and several constant days of testing I wanted to scream.
And I think that's the problem. I need to get something out because it's been a while since the last release and I said I would. I think once I've got that monkey off my back, I can take a deep breath, just do some writing for a couple of days and then go back and patiently pick through the awkward corner cases.
So this is that release. It's a little scrappier than I'd like, but I felt I needed to crap something out to get things moving smoothly again.
It's a bit of an iceberg release, as most of the changes are under the surface. There is a reasonably solid framework to handle the various clue types. Some are solved the moment they're experienced. Others require repetition and picking up hints from The Elegant Woman and other places. I wanted it to mimic what the player would be thinking, so it should show the solutions roughly about when the player would have figured them out themselves.
Currently there are 4 harlots that now have autosave and notebook functionality - Morticia Rose, Asphya, Sapoonis and Bebi Ansikt-Sitta. You should see the notebook section update as you play those sections.
I've also updated it to keep track of most harlot's gift preferences.
Now for the bad.
It's still not quite stable, so I've set it to start a fresh save file each time it's started up. This means autosaving will only work within the current play session. This is just a temporary measure to prevent older version data overwriting the new version. I've got some plans for version controls, so that your save data will be useable for new versions (important given how I'll be doing incremental releases with new harlots added). It will be a little rough until I have that implemented.
Some cases might result in odd behaviour. The Black Rose gift continues to be a source of problems and probably the one thing I wouldn't have in the game at all if I did it again.
Currently the notebook updates as the player is reading through the scenario. I'm not convinced this is the behaviour I want. The clue data is mostly stored on the decision points, which often results in the notebook telling the player how they're about to die, before they die, which is not quite what I want. I do have an idea that I think will fix this.
Overall this is an odd release, which is probably appropriate given it's the version number 13 after a very cursed April. Most of the changes are under the hood and not visible to the player. I will keep continue to keep updating the harlots and hopefully it will become less painful and time-consuming as I do more of them.
For now I felt I needed to get something out to clear a jam, and this is it.
Here's to hopefully a better May!
The HoHH website has also already been updated for people with mobile devices. The password is the same as before (Burba1k4).
As you might have gathered from previous posts, last week was a bit of a disaster.
Thankfully most of it seems to have resolved okay now.
The bug that caused everything to explode was a minor one. Just a sequencing error on start up that took longer to find and fix because I'd been trying to rush some harlot notebook code. I've added some test code to catch things like that in the future.
I'm going to go back to a more methodical approach and do them one-by-one. Once I have a few examples, I'll put out a small release for people to check out and test. Ideally by the end of the month, but I'm not going to jinx things, again, by setting a hard date.
Basically my plan for next week is what I was planning to do last week before chaos derailed me.
To show the week wasn't a complete bust, here's the WiP sketch for Boobella marwmellow sent me.
Thankfully, the IRL situation is mostly resolved with the family member being released okay from hospital.
Unfortunately, when I switched Morticia Rose back in this morning to test her (both her and the Clue-Test Dummy I use to test all the clue types share the same harlot ID of 0 in code), everything exploded.
While I'm sure she'd relish being responsible for the chaos, it could easily be a malformed init array of one of the other harlots. I don't think it will too hard to track down and fix.
However, this is happening because I'm being stupid and trying to rush to meet arbitrary self-imposed deadlines. It's introducing needless bugs into the code. Because of this, I'm going to take the pressure off and remove that arbitrary deadline that's causing me to lock up and make mistakes. I'll go back to the original plan of methodically working through the harlots and adding their notebook functionality. Once I have 3 or 4 ready, I'll drop a test release for people to try out. Ideally before the end of the month, but I'm not going to set a hard date as that is causing me problems at the moment.
I will once again renew the "don't set an arbitrary deadline that causes you to lock up and get nothing done" note on the fridge. :)
Apologies and thank you for your patience and understanding. I'll get things back on schedule ASAP.
A family member needed a trip to the hospital so the chaos was more on the IRL side rather than programming. Nothing too serious, but I'll push back the update to Friday to give myself more chance to get it done and tested properly.
The last couple of weeks I've been struggling trying to get the harlot notebook code right.
What was causing me issues is I'd made a few design mistakes with the architecture, so every time I'd try and check some other clue type, I'd go to reuse existing code only to find out it was corrupting a variable for a subsequent call or missing a required check. It was not a good framework.
I spent Sunday and Monday going through and reorganising it so that there was a clear distinction between function calls (as much as I could mimic function calls in Twine) from the harlot scenarios and the underlying calculations. This cleaned it up and looked much more stable.
I took Tuesday off and then spent Wednesday and Thursday testing it and squashing the many many bugs from various typos and other nonsense.
It looks a lot more stable now and was able to apply it to one of the harlots (Asphya). Her clues are in place, I just need to write up the notebook section so it's not just a bunch of "clue solved" messages.
Since then I've been working through the other harlots and adding autosave while I figure out what information their notebook page should display to the player.
Originally, I was going to try for a weekend release, but rushing was the cause of things going badly wrong a couple of weeks ago. My plan now is to keep working through the harlots, get about three or so done with fully written up notebook sections and put that out Wednesday for people to test.
With that major hurdle out of the way, next week I'll go back to my usual balanced work schedule of writing scenarios in the day, and updating the harlot code in the evening.
Apologies for the delays on this. That was a bit too much hacking away in the code thicket than I anticipated!
I was hoping I'd have a sneaky little HoHH 1.5 release to put out here instead of the usual update post, but the clue framework is still refusing to settle down. I thought I had it, moved over to implement it with Asphya as a first test case, and then ran into a stat check the overall framework didn't handle particularly gracefully.
Overall, my thoughts of a couple weeks back that I was mostly through the code-hacking have proven a little premature.
The good news is that the underlying system I've come up with I think is fairly good. I will go into it in more detail in a later post, but the main change from the proof-of-concept version is the addition of incremental evidence and 2-step clues. This seems to be working fine in testing.
Where I've been running into trouble is trying to shove it all down and compartmentalise it into a nice neat framework. Twine is meant for people with limited programming expertise. I've done some sneaky things like make passages mimic functions and brought in some object data structures, but there are some pitfalls that can be a nuisance, especially in regards to variable scoping. I also don't want a solution that requires cut'n'pasting 100s of lines of code into each harlot scenario.
It's getting there, but there are still some points where it's rickety and that might be a problem later. Mostly because I was wanting to rush something out and cutting corners where I shouldn't.
At this point I think I might have been on this for too long. I'm tempted to pull back, leave it alone for a bit while I write the slime nun scenario and then come back with fresh eyes to get it properly "right".
I'll give it today and Monday to see if it does snap into place. If it does, I'll put something out next week with a 3-4 example harlots. If not, I'll leave it alone for a bit and come back later.
