More full art of the NPCs, this time of the enigmatic Buxom Lolibaba.
I showed marwmellow some of the charm card art and he was able to incorporate it into the piece, which is pretty cool.
The Buxom Lolibaba is currently pencilled in to get her scenario as the round 9 mini-boss, where she'll summon various... entities from her cards to do naughty things to the player.
Not much to report this week other than more intensive hacking away in the code thicket.
Implementing the clue system for the harlot notebook is a bit of an arse, but I want to get it right at the start rather than waste more time chopping and changing as I work through the harlots. It's possible, but fiddly to do in Twine and needs a fair bit of testing to spot and fix any typos. It's good that I have a good test system in place now as I've had to a lot of tweaking and rewrites to make it concise and easy to work with.
I think I'm getting there. Another rewrite parcelled off some common functions for the standard checks, so I'll only need to add a couple of lines for each check per harlot rather than cut'n'paste whole sections.
The nastiest check was managing the charms and ailments, as both tend to be very stealthy sources of Bad Ends, so I don't want to tip the player off immediately if they luckily meet the right conditions without being aware of it. I think I have that done now.
The last thing I'm fiddling with is a generic passage to combine Physical Stat, Ailment and Charm checks for those hidden checks where all can have an effect (which is most of the stat checks in the game). For that the main check is to determine which was the main factor resulting in the outcome and assign a higher evidence score for that "clue".
I think, fingers crossed, I'm pretty close now and will be able to try it out on a few sample harlots covering all the basic test cases. My plan is to get that out as a release and get feedback on it sometime next week. I'm finding the coding for this fairly tricky, so it might take a little longer.
After that I have a couple of options.
I can plough on with the new features. The things I need to add are Replay Mode, an overall progress score for each harlot, and some form of version control so the player doesn't have to reset progress every time a new release comes out.
I'm just starting to feel a little bit of burnout from all the hours of coding over the last couple of weeks, so I might switch back to writing for a break. I'll see how I feel after getting the clue system in place.
There's a lot of work going on under the surface. Hope to have something to show you all soon.
- mnayeyedhydra
First some art news. The latest batch came in from Marwmellow. This means all of the written Faction 3 harlots now have pinup art. I have art for 73 harlots now, which is about 3/4s of them.
I sent off the commission for the next batch, which is the faction 4 harlots. This includes Boobella and Zuripai, which will please people who were eager to see them.
On the code hacking, this week was a little... stodgy.
I tried a few different things with the clue system. Some were wrong turns, but I think it's coming together.
It's one of those awkward areas where it's not just about getting it to work. I need the code to be fairly sleek and organised so I can apply it to a 100 harlots without it looking like a tangled mess and taking 10x longer to implement per harlot.
I did try out some nested clue or multi-clue objects to handle the 2-step clues where the player first has to figure out what is causing the Bad End and then can identify what the safe value is. Twine isn't really a friendly language for those type of object-oriented tricks and the resulting code was a mess. I think having them as separate clues with the second one inactive until the first is solved might be the most sensible way to implement it.
To help with this I created a proper test harlot to try the clue system out on. That's a more stable working environment than going harlot by harlot, and then having to constantly backtrack and test every time something needed to change. I have a relatively stable test framework now, so that should help with creating all the notebook hints.
The end of the month is looming and I'm still code hacking. I ask people for a bit more patience on this. I'm having to stuff in quite a lot of new features, but once they're in and stable, it should make updating all the existing harlot scenarios a lot easier.
I'll keep throwing out new HoHH1.5 demos as soon as they're ready. My plan is to continue with the big push to get HoHH1.5 ready for a proper public demo release.
Apologies to people waiting for the slime smother nun. I haven't forgotten about her!
Thanks for the support.
- manyeyedhydra
More full harlot art of the NPCs. This time it's the Elegant Woman, a source of helpful gossip (most of the time...).
She will get a scenario as a regular high-tier harlot. I already have a rough idea of how it will work.
Art is by Marwmellow. I hope you like it. Let me know what you think down below.
I'm nearly through the frenzy of code hacking.
Last week I got the underlying CSS stable and usable across a wider range of screen sizes. I put out ver 0.012 of the art version of HoHH, which should hopefully be playable on mobile devices (let me know if it isn't).
The houseofhellishharlots website itself still looks pretty bad on mobile. I will tweak that when I get a chance.
After getting the display stuff done, I turned to updating the harlot tester to work with the notebook functionality. Originally I was planning to slow down here and update it on a harlot-by-harlot basis. I think if I make it too custom for each harlot it's going to take much longer to port them all over. Instead I decided to keep up the momentum and give it a big push to put some general functions in place that can be used by all harlots.
Gift preferences are now done. It's close to the code I had in the proof-of-concept. The main change was to put the gift preferences in the basic harlot array and have the notebook just track what gifts the player gives the harlot. This gives a better way to handle harlots with no gift preferences. Rather than reveal right away they have no preference, the player has to give them a certain number of different gifts and then it will unlock that they don't care in the notebook. This is a nice middle-ground between spoiling right away that gifts are not used by the scenario and not forcing the player to try out every single gift.
I've also added a semen drained section. This lists the sex acts the harlot does on the player and how much semen each particular act drains from them. The first time unlocks the act appearing in the notebook. Finding out the exact amount of semen drained requires the player repeating that same scene a small number of times. There is a charm that can shortcut that process.
This "do things X times to unlock the information" is the major change from the proof-of-concept demo and solves some of the problems I was having in how to determine whether the player has uncovered things when a lot of effects are deliberately kept hidden to maintain mystery.
At the moment I'm in the middle of implementing a "clue" system that works a little like this:
- STAGE 1: Something happened to the player and is recorded in the notebook.
- gathering evidence to unlock stage 2 (clues from socialising, talking to the Elegant Woman, etc).
- STAGE 2: What happened to the player was related to their Dex stat. (or gift, disposition, charm, etc)
- unlock gathering specific evidence such as stat boundaries.
- STAGE 3: Sapoonis melted the player's hands off because their Dex was lower than 3.
I'm hoping this will keep the right balance between not revealing things before the player would have figured it out themselves, and not forcing the player into choices that will kill their character just to try out every combination. The main change from proof-of-concept is tracking the number of visits/times the player has experienced something. Most of the information will unlock just by seeing the harlot enough times, but if they hit upon the right combination of factors, it will unlock faster.
e.g. Using the Sapoonis example. In the proof-of-concept it was fiddly with the stats. If the player visited her with Dex=1 and died, then visited her with Dex=4 and survived, they still wouldn't know if Dex=2 or Dex=3 is safe and shouldn't be told that right away. By introducing a visit count the player can unlock it in two ways. If they visited her with Dex=2 and Dex=3, the information unlocks immediately providing they know Dex is the relevant stat. They know this outcome relies on Dex, they died with one value and survived with another, so "Dex must be greater than 2" is established as the safe rule for visiting Sapoonis. However for the alternate example, the player knows Dex is the relevant stat, and they know 4 is safe, they can just play safe and make sure they always go in with Dex=4 for subsequent runs and after a certain number of visits, the relevant information will unlock anyway.
I appreciate some of you would rather I was writing and are impatient for the slime smother nun, so I'm asking for a little more patience. I'm running hot on this at the moment and I think one last push will pretty much set the HoHH1.5 version up so porting the harlots over is fairly minor work that can be carried out in the background while I'm writing the mini-bosses.
Thanks for the support and patience.
- manyeyedhydra
The long battle with various chunks of HTML, CSS and JS might finally be over. I levelled up my pitiful web dev knowledge to figure out how em units work and how scaling everything to current font size makes life considerably easier.
This is the updated art version of House of Hellish Harlots. Essentially, it's the features of v0.010 and v0.011 combined with a revamp of the CSS to enable the new NPC shop additions to display properly on mobile and other devices with smaller screens.
For full details of the releases, check the previous v0.010 and v0.011 release posts. The summary version is this now adds:
- Autosave (outside of individual harlot scenarios).
- Limited Notebook functionality (keeps track of how many times harlots have been visited, etc).
- Addition of new NPC shop interfaces and art for charms, potions, etc.
- Updated character sheet to display charms and ailments as icons.
This is still a work-in-progress. Some aspects of the display and art are placeholders to be updated later once I'm happy with their placement. Next week I'll put out a full list detailing what still needs to be updated. Those changes can be done at a slower pace while I go back to prioritise writing new scenarios again.
There are still some snags with how the autosave handles previous versions and with switching between the online and offline version. I changed the name of the story file, so it should start a fresh save. If you run into any weirdness (eg an online version trying to find offline pics), the Reset Progress option and restart is the safety valve I built in. I will be working on ironing out some of the problems there.
I've update the houseofhellishharlots website. You should be able to find the new version under "Private Demo" here:
https://houseofhellishharlots.com/experimental/
Password: Burba1k4
The houseofhellishharlots still looks a bit rough on mobile. It's navigable, but I'll be taking a look at trying to improve it in a few weeks after I've got the slime smother nun scenario back on track.
I've also attached all the relevant files as a .zip file, although that's more to keep PC users up to date. I still need to figure out a way to convert everything into a mobile app.
It's still progressing quite nicely. I hope you enjoy playing with it. Let me know your thoughts below.
In all the chaos of the HoHH (art version) revamps and switching the commissions over from the low-tier harlots to NPCs and mini-bosses, I did lose track of where I was with the art reveals. If I have it right, $5 and higher tiers have already seen the early previews of NPC art, but the $1 tiers have not. Which should mean this Nurse Honey art is "new" for most of you. I hope! If I've got it wrong, let me know.
For the $1 tier previews I was planning on bundling the art with a nice profile piece. The next few previews are for the NPCs, though. While they will eventually get full scenarios, I haven't got around to writing them yet. This means I'll just be showing off their full art for now.
Here is the lovely Nurse Honey. A very nice take from Marwmellow, I think.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
Another solid week of work on the art version of House of Hellish Harlots.
I've incorporated basic notebook functionality. The game now tracks which harlots the player knows about and some basic stats such as number of times visited, died to etc. I put that out as a release for people to try out.
After that it was back to getting the CSS in order so the game also displays correctly on mobile devices.
I thought I'd got on top of that enough to break away long enough to type up 1000 words of the slime smother nun scenario.
I hadn't quite got on top of the CSS, so went back to it for another couple of days of solid work. That was pretty much a full revamp to clean up the code and make it more responsive across a wider range of display sizes. That does, finally, seem to have done the trick. I still have some minor things to finish off, but I'm hoping I'll have the mobile-friendly demo out next week.
After that it will be back to the slime nun and her various methods of erotic smothering.
Thanks for the support!
- manyeyedhydra
This is a fairly small release to build on the last one.
I've added some basic notebook functionality to track which harlots the player has seen as well as some simple stats such as number of times visited, etc.
Before I go into it, I'll cover some of the more awkward workarounds that will likely be present for these early demo versions.
1. Some aspects will look like ass on mobile. I haven't created the html/CSS for new additions such as the title page and NPC shops, so they won't display correctly on mobile devices. I'm working on it, and hoping to get caught up on this in the next week or so.
2. To use the local download provided here, unzip it to somewhere on your computer and double-click the html file. Don't move the .html file from the folder or try to run it directly from within the .zip file. It won't know where the images are and be unable to display the art.
3. This is the most awkward workaround and one I want to get fixed ASAP. Currently, the way the autosave/load works is that the current browser save is automatically loaded on starting the game. There isn't any version detection at the moment, so what will happen is that any new additions will have their variables overwritten by the old save from the old version. This is why the "Reset Progress" option exists on the Start Menu. Unfortunately, while this does delete the current browser save, it will have already been loaded into the background. To prevent the older version overiding the newer version, you'll need to "Reset Progress", shut the game down and then restart it. This will cause it to open with no old browser save and you'll then be able to see the new additions.
This is horrible and fiddly and I will be a looking for a better way to fix it ASAP! For now, if you open a new version and it doesn't appear to have the new functionality - using Reset Progress to remove old saves and restarting the game should fix the problem.
Apologies on this. I will sort it out!
Right, onto what's included in this release.
It's fairly small. Rather than showing a construction site, the Notebook section now features a list of harlots (or rather ???????s).
As you encounter new harlots their names will appear on the list. A harlot is considered to have been encountered when she is presented to the player as one of the choices for the round.
Clicking on their name will bring up their stats page. Currently this just keeps track of how many times you've visited them, been killed by them, and survived them. These stats will kept track of in the autosave, so they should be present when you shut the game down and come back to it.
Some harlots may not accurately track number of times killed. This is because I forgot to update that particular Bad End to utilise the unified Bad End Container all harlots now share. It will be fixed when I go through the harlot scenario in more detail to add the notes the player can learn about them.
The player should be able to jump into and out of the notebook section while playing the game. The X button in the top right takes the player back to their current spot in the game. The back button on the top left goes back to the harlot list in the notebook section. Bear in mind autosave functionality has not been added to harlot scenarios apart from on the Bad End passage. Jumping out while a scenario is in progress will take the player back to the door to the harlot's room.
As before, I've attached it to this post as a .zip file as well as putting it up on the houseofhellishharlots website here:
https://houseofhellishharlots.com/experimental/
You can find it under the "Private Demo" button.
Password: Burba1k4
I hope you enjoy the demo. Please excuse the fiddlier aspects. It's still a work-in-progress and the autosave/notebook stuff is a little more complex than Twine is normally supposed to be.
Progress with HoHH 1.5 is still going very well.
I put the demo (v0.010) out last week with the new autosave and NPC shop features. That won't display properly on mobile devices yet. Still working on that, but I hope the people that were able to play it liked what they saw.
After I put it out I moved straight onto the notebook functionality. At the moment I'm aiming to do the simple stuff first. So for now it will just be a list of harlots that will track basics such as whether the player has encountered them, how many times they've visited, died to, etc. I might also put the preferred gifts in.
That might go out sometime next week as the changes are fairly small.
After that it will be a case of going through harlot-by-harlot, but I'll get back to balancing the work between coding and writing new scenarios for that.
The other thing I want to do is have a mobile-friendly version up and tidy up the CSS in general so it doesn't look like complete gobbledegook when I come back to it in 6 months time.
I think it might be one more week of focused html/CSS/code-hacking and then I'll get back to writing again.
The other thing I want to get organised is the harlot spotlights and profiles. I have new art. I just need to work out a staggered release schedule again. That slipped a bit, so I need to go through and get the dates updated.
It's been a few coding-heavy weeks, but I needed to get that codebase updated and stabilised and giving it full focus for a couple of weeks seems to have done the job.
- manyeyedhydra
Finally, after teasing various NPC shop interfaces, I can finally put them out there for people to use!
This is for PC and (maybe) tablet users. I had to hack a fair bit of html and CSS. Those hacks haven't extended to mobile-sized screens yet, so I suspect it will display like ass or be completely non-functional on mobile devices. Give me a week or so to catch up on that.
This demo is for the 1.5/Art version of HoHH. It covers the first 4 rounds and has all 36 low-tier harlots present with their pinup art. The main change is to add the autosave functionality from the last proof-of-concept demo to the core game loop. The other main change is to incorporate the charm card art I AI-generated a while back and give some of the NPCs more graphical shop interfaces. While HoHH will always be primarily Interactive Fiction, I'm trying to include more art assets to have it resemble a more typical indie game.
It's still very rough around the edges. The goal for this demo was to get all the various elements in place and working. I can always pretty them up and add better .pngs/.jpgs later.
I've attached it to this post as a .zip file that includes the .html file to play the demo in your internet browser of choice as well as the folder containing the images used by that .html file. Alternatively, I've also put it up on the houseofhellishharlots website here:
https://houseofhellishharlots.com/experimental/
You can find it under the "Private Demo" button.
Password: Burba1k4
With that out of the way I'll go over the changes in more detail.
Title Page/Start Menu
I added a title/splash page on starting the game. Clicking anywhere on this (as you would any other indie game) takes you through to the introductory blurb and then through to the start menu. The options there are fairly self-explanatory. "Clear Progress" is mainly to help with debugging as sometimes I need to delete the autosave. "Notebook" takes the player to the planned notebook section. That is just a stub for the moment. The only functionality I tested was to make sure the player can jump to that and then back into their game where they left off.
These parts are very crude at the moment. In future I might try to add some animation such as the curtains opening. The Start Menu could definitely also do with some prettying up. For now they're just there to occupy the right spots.
UI Menu (top left)
This is the cluster of icons up on top left allowing the player to access the character sheet and other things. I've added some code to hide it until it's relevant to show it. The player won't see it on the start menu. The player won't see it on the game intro either. It will appear when it is relevant at the start of the first presentation round.
The semen gauge is still a rough placeholder until I find proper art for it. The other art is pretty much fine except I might make the clock hands slightly bigger on the round counter. I've also added tooltips for each icon to indicate what it does.
The main changes are carried over from the proof-of-concept demo. The manual save option has been removed. The new icons are to take the player to the notebook or back to the start menu (exit).
Autosave
I implemented the autosave function from the proof-of-concept demo. The game now automatically saves to the first browser slot at the beginning of each passage. I've added this to the core game loop and all of the NPC sections. It's not yet added to any of the harlot scenarios. Exiting while in the middle of a harlot scenario and continuing will place the player back at the door to their room. I'll extend autosave functionality to them during their upgrades to add notebook functionality.
The autosave is dependent on web browser permissions. It might not work for things like incognito mode. I will return to buff it up at a later date, maybe see if I can put the save file on the device playing the game. For now it will be a little rough, especially with version compatibility as I put out future versions. This is something I'll keep working on to make as robust as possible.
Switching to autosave is a little controversial, but I always intended to HoHH to be more like a roguelike and not being able to jump back to a previous save should ratchet up the tension on some choices. I'm also aware it's a H-game, so it shouldn't be too difficult to get to the H-content of choice. I'll be exploring options to do this through the notebook. New harlots might be added with their replay mode fully unlocked for example if the player wants to try them out right away.
Core Game Loop/General
Some general changes. "Coins" are renamed in game to "Diabolicors". I like the new name. I tried to do the same for "Mulligan Tokens", but still haven't found a name I like. I've also changed some text display elements to highlight important game words such as "actions".
I changed how the action economy works for NPCs. It was a little awkward before. I wanted visiting an NPC to cost an action even if the player leaves immediately, so there was an awkward check if the player had done anything with the NPC and the game charging the player an action if they just visited and left. That's been simplified. The initial visit to the NPC costs an action, but it also gives the player a single free action with that NPC. Basically, visiting an NPC will always cost an action, but the first thing the player does with that NPC is considered part of that action.
If the NPC is unavailable due to RNG, that now costs an action. Roguelikes are mean.
I also fixed some of the RNG elements. Before, if a player reloaded the page on the harlot presentation passage, they would get a different set of harlots. This is because the algorithm was on the same passage and would give a different random selection on reloading the page. All RNG elements are now moved to earlier passages so their results are preserved when continuing after an autosave.
Intro
Aside from hiding the player UI and adding autosave, I've left this as is. For now. I might try to work a tutorial in at some point. I might also use meta saves to track what run the player is on and only present the accelerated options after the first visit to the House. The jump from start to first presentation round is also a little abrupt for the accelerated start option. There are some tweaks that can be made here, but for now I've left as is.
The Madam
Added autosave and that's it.
The Barman
- Added autosave.
- Tier 1,2,3 harlots are now called low-, mid-, and high-tier. I was using tiers to refer to early-, mid- and late-round harlots to indicate when they'd show up (in finished game). The problem with that is we usually use Tier 1 to refer to Top Tier, so I switched to using low, mid and high to avoid that causing any confusion.
The Portly Gentleman
Added autosave. He's large unchanged aside from having to fix a few wobbles with his free "buy a mulligan token" option on the first visit that could result in the player going into a negative post-room actions remaining count.
Nurse Honey
Added autosave. Initially I was thinking of giving her a shop window, but she has a slightly more diverse range of actions from diagnosis, curing ailments and energy tonics. Also, it's unlikely the player will pick up that many ailments during a run. It's never going to be a big list of things to cure, so I decided to keep using the list option in the regular text display.
The new ailment art is temporary. Unlike with the charms, I couldn't really get much consistency with the AI art. That will need to be redone at some point, but for now is fine as a placeholder.
The Buxom Lolibaba
She's the main reason for the new version aside from incorporating autosave functionality. I'm very happy with how the AI-generated charm card art and icons turned out. What I currently have will likely make it through to the finished game. Buying charms from her now opens up a special shop window where the player can see them represented as cards.
I've removed the option to use a mulligan token to buy a specific charm. This is partly to avoid needing to create a separate interface to show all the charms (the cards are too big, although it could be done with the icons) and also partly because I want the charm randomness to steer runs rather than the player using their starting mulligan token to pick a specific charm and repeat the same run over and over. This is not finalised. I might change my mind on it.
The Doctoress
Rather than the separate categories for her potions, I also gave her a shop display where the player can click on the potion to buy it. I had mixed results with AI-generated art here. While there are tooltips to indicate what the potion is (Strength, Intelligence, etc), for the finalised version I'd like the potion bottles to have some sort of icon on them to indicate what they are.
The Elegant Woman
I also gave her a new shop window. This is mainly for her post-room visits as that list can get quite long as it includes all harlots the player has seen rather than just the harlots of that round. As the icons for this are just the harlot's (and npc's) portraits, the art is pretty much already in place.
Because of the change in interface, the option to ask her for sex has been moved. It now crops up after you ask her for information on herself. It still does nothing. She will get a scenario fairly soon though.
She was also another to receive some RNG fixes so the additional information she gives on a harlot is always the same after autoloading.
I also finally got a chance to give her some new leaving messages. Expect her to wish a wider variety of ills on you as you leave without buying her a (another) drink!
Character Sheet
I tweaked the display on this to hopefully improve it. Charms and Known Ailments are now depicted as icons rather than a plain list.
And I think that's everything. It was quite a bit of work, hence requiring me to work on it fairly solidly for the past two and a half weeks. The core is now fairly stable again. I've added a lot of nice new art. The stubs are also present to start to add the notebook functionality for the individual harlots.
It's still rough in places, but I'm happy with how it's shaping up. I always thought I'd have to migrate the project to Unity or Godot to get it to look like this.
I hope you have fun playing with the new demo. Let me know your thoughts below.
This was a pretty good week. I knew if I gave the CSS and other code full focus it would get things moving again.
The Elegant Woman's shop window is done (aside from a proper background pic - the one in the screenshot is borrowed from The Doctoress's shop).
After that I moved onto the core game loop. That's been updated to add the autosave functionality. I've also fixed some of the rng elements. Before, it was possible to reload the page and get a completely different selection of harlots. I've fixed the rng part to make the choices before they're shown to the player, which means autoloading preserves those choices. I've been doing this for everything that uses rng to make sure the autosave/autoload behaviour is consistent.
I've also given the game a preliminary title page and start menu. Those are a little rough at the moment. I'd like to add some rudimentary animations such as showing the curtains swishing open, but for now I need to put everything in the right place so I can modify them later.
After that it was a case of reassembling everything and making sure it worked. I also checked the UI elements to make sure the player can bounce to the notebook section and back to where they left off without any problems. While this version is only adding the autosave and new UI elements, I want to make sure the notebook parts of the code are present in the right place to be filled in later.
Currently I'm in the middle of overhauling the Character Sheet. Once that is done there are a few more tweaks to do and then the demo will be ready for release. I think that will be Tues/Wed next week.
After that's done I'll move on to getting the basic notebook functionality in - maybe just track something simple such as number of deaths to start with. Then I want to give 2 or 3 harlots the full notebook functionality to figure out the most efficient workflow. After that I can probably stop it with the programming frenzy and get my writing hat back on again!
Nice to get things moving again!
- manyeyedhydra
End of the month is the usual time when I try to release something for patrons. This is the post to let you know something is on the way, but I need a few more days to work on it.
February ended up being a strange month. At the end of last year I figured out how to add some fairly important functionality (autosave and notebook). My plan was to split work time between writing new harlot scenarios and updating the 1.5 HoHH (the art version) code base with the new functionality. At the same time I wanted to add the charm art I'd created as well as giving some NPCs proper shop windows. This is all part of my aim to move HoHH from a purely text-only project to something resembling a regular indie H-game.
Midway through February I noticed progress was getting very sluggish. While I'm fine with hacking CSS and Javascript and adding it to Twine, if I stop working on it in a sustained fashion I find I easily lose the thread and it takes a while to pick it back up again. To get around it I decided to spend the second half of the month just focusing on overhauling the 1.5 codebase.
This is doing the trick. I'm making fairly rapid progress now. The NPCs have all been updated with autosave functionality. The Elegant Woman, Buxom Lolibaba and Doctoress all have nice graphical interfaces where players can click on image icons to buy items rather than selecting from a list. I've also updated the core game loop to incorporate the autosave functionality and changes to NPCs.
I'm currently in the process of adding a title page and more conventional game menu. Some of these things are placeholders, but having the pathways in place makes it easier to tweak and improve the items later. What I'm aiming for is to get the core back to stable with autosave and notebook functionality, and then start adding autosave and notebook functionality to the individual harlot scenarios. After the first couple are done, I can shift that back to a background task and start focusing on writing the new harlot scenarios again.
I'm aiming to get a demo out sometime in the next few days. This is mainly to test the core game loop and NPCs are still working fine. From the player perspective it will add a lot of new art in terms of the charms and similar things. Some of them (potion bottles) are placeholders. This version is mainly about getting the overall structure right. Switching .pngs later is fairly easy.
Thank you for your patience.
- manyeyedhydra
Back to it this week, sort of...
Work on updating the NPCs to add shop windows and autosave functionality has been a little sluggish. I normally give myself a designated slot in the day to work on it, but noticed I wasn't making much progress.
I want to get this done and out of the way so I have a stable core and can go back to porting the harlots over. So, to try and unjam it, I gave it full focus this week. Work was still fairly sluggish, but I've managed to get The Doctoress updated and you can see the results in the screenshot above.
It's still a bit rough and needs a fair bit of work, but everything is roughly in the right place. I think the underlying code is fine, so it's just a case of neatening up the display. Don't worry if you think it looks bad now. This is more placeholdery than the Buxom Lolibaba's shop. I'll come back to it and make it prettier later (or get someone in to make it prettier). For now I needed something in place that works. Which it does. I also had to redo The Doctoress's potion-selling section. I've tested that as well as her other code, so I'm mostly done with her.
I'm going to continue with giving the revamp full focus until I have the core updated. I'm currently tweaking the Elegant Woman to give her shop window and I want to add charm and ailment icons to the character sheet. While I'm at it, I think now might be a good time to add the title page as I have the art for it.
This has changed my plans somewhat as work on the slime nun had to go back on the backburner. My current aim will be to focus on the core improvements and get a new demo out sometime around the end of Feb start of Mar.
It's a bit chaotic, but I'd like to get the core HoHH code back to stable so I can start adding the harlots again.
Thanks for the patience and support.
- manyeyedhydra
Not much to report this week. I ended up taking one of those impromptu weeks off. Generally I tend to work 6-7 days a week as I enjoy what I'm doing, but you have to manage burnout with that strategy and normally I just drop tools for a week to recharge and then get right back to it. It also allowed me to get some irritating IRL stuff out of the way as well that had been sitting on my must-do list for a couple of weeks.
The Valentine's Day short story, "The Boobslug..." unsurprisingly didn't place in Literotica's competition. It did score quite highly - about 4.8/5 from 80ish votes, which is encouraging. I think there's potential there to expand that out, so I'll put it onto the pile to come back to later.
That's a really big pile. I really need to figure out how to write faster! :D
As my traditional apology for taking a week off, here's the artwork for Balla-Balla an Buachar. Marwmellow gave her a lovely pose for this one. I'll be giving the succufairy the full harlot spotlight treatment next week.
Should be refreshed and back to writing next week.
Thanks for the support!
- manyeyedhydra
One of those scrappy weeks to start the month.
I got the latest batch of art in. That covers the mid-tier independents. I also sent of the details and payments for the next batch. I've got a backlog of art again, so I might push the harlot spotlights up to every week again.
I edited and posted the new short story up for Literotica's Valentine's Day competition. It's called "The Boobslug" and you can read it here:
https://www.literotica.com/s/the-boobslug
The score started quite high until it got noticed and inevitably got bombed. Sometimes Literotica spots and handles the manipulations. Other times it sticks. I don't really care that much about it. I enter to advertise my other stories and books. The additional attention is the prize. I hope you all enjoy it anyway. There is scope to expand it out, but I'll let it sit for the moment. If the other 4 monster girl ideas come to me, I might see if I can make it into a novella, but there are greater priorities at the moment.
Most of the core for Slime Smother Nun is written and I'm currently writing the 'bad choice'. It's a little slow. I don't think I've quite got her character down yet. She has 6 sticky smother scenes, so I just need to rattle them off. Hopefully by the end of the month.
The real nuisance was trying to get The Doctoress's Potion shop display nailed down. I found a rough layout I was happy with, but it tends to screw up on resizing the window. I could do with getting a move on with the 1.5 version. Now I have the art coming in, I should probably be looking to add more mid-tier harlots.
Next week I'll be focusing more on Slime Smother Nun. February is a short month, so it will be tight.
Thanks for the interest and support.
- manyeyedhydra
This one went up a little faster than I was expecting. I only submitted it yesterday. As a result, I'll do this post today and the harlot spotlight I was planning to put out today, tomorrow.
The short story is up in Literotica's annual Valentine's Day competition. You can read it here:
https://www.literotica.com/s/the-boobslug
What is a horror story doing in a Valentine's Day competition? Yeah, that's something I like to do. A few years back I dropped one of my more savage horror stories into the competition for a laugh and it's become an irregular tradition for me to sneak in a horror tale as an Anti-Valentine's Day story.
This one has a very weird monster girl and leans heavily into boobs and lactation fetishes.
It was a weird one to write. The monster girl came first, and it was one of those scenes I knew I had to write while it was fresh in my head. Then I figured out the secondary viewpoint character and why they were there, and knew that was a strong idea that needed writing. After that I needed to link it to Valentine's Day, which was a bit of a stretch. The first draft was a bit rough with a big info dump at the end. Surprisingly, it came together fairly easily while typing it up. I chopped the ending info dump right down, but hopefully it should still be fairly clear what's going on.
As I was writing it, I also realised there is scope to expand it out further. Maybe a fairly straightforward novella/short novel, which will just be an excuse to showcase 5 (or 6) unusual monster girl sex scenes. I'll see what the reception is like.
This is my January release (sort of) while I'm hard at work writing the slime smother nun mini-boss scenario. I hope people enjoy reading it. Let me know what you think below.
It was another fairly solid week to round out January. I split my time pretty much equally between revamping the NPC code for HoHH and typing up the short story for Literotica's Valentine's Day competition.
The NPC Shop code and layout is pretty much done (for regular computer displays - I still need to do the mobile version). I need to create proper icons for the 'Buy' and 'Close' buttons and maybe something fancier than plain text for 'Sold', but I'm pretty happy with the layout overall. It nudges HoHH closer to looking like a indie game, which is very far from where I thought I'd get when I first started working with Twine.
I also updated Nurse Honey's NPC section. I decided against using the NPC shop layout for her. My aim is to have nice icons to represent the ailments on the character sheet (and icons for the charms as well), but Nurse Honey doesn't really have enough options to justify jumping to a shop window layout. In a normal playthrough a player will probably only be carrying a couple of ailments at once at any particular time, so the regular text display is probably fine.
Currently I'm working on The Doctoress's layout. Her potions could definitely use the NPC shop layout, so I'm fiddling around trying to find the best way to display them.
I'm also running into the limitations of generative AI art here and with ailment icons. These need a slightly more consistent look and it's quite difficult to get that and specific designs with AI art. The placeholders here will probably be very placeholder-y until I can replace them with proper, consistent art.
The other half of the week was spent typing up the Valentine's Day short story. I was a little concerned with this one as the first draft was pretty rough. Fortunately, it came together quite well while I was typing it up. I finished that yesterday and it's 6,500 words. It wasn't ready to release for January, but it should go up in time for the competition deadline. My plan is to leave it on the side for a couple of days and then give it a final edit before submitting it on the 5th. If all goes to plan, you should be able to read it around the end of next week.
It's very much an Anti-Valentine's Day story with quite a dour theme and weird monster girl. I suspect Literotica readers looking for the usual saccharine sweetness and romanticism on Valentine's Day are going to hate this one! :)
I do like my horror.
Anyway, onto next week, where I'm hoping to finally get a good chunk of writing of the slime smother nun done.
Thanks for the support.
- manyeyedhydra
Time for another hell harlot. I'm going to alternate these weekly with the full Harlot Spotlights for $5 and higher tiers. I think I might have already shown the art for this pair, but not the profile. Expect the schedule to be a little chaotic for a while until I catch up.
Broinn and Ciùin Mùchadh are a pair of succufairies. That type of lust daemon is spread across multiple factions. This pair have joined with the Sanctum of Strangulated Sighs (the smotherbuses) and are in training to become suffocatrices. Despite their diminutive stature, they are extremely strict femdoms and just love training the 'big beasts'.
The Portly Gentleman is also very wrong in assessing their danger. The only reason they haven't killed him is The Madam has been very careful not to present them to him.
There were fewer distractions this week, so I was finally able to work mostly interrupted.
I gave the Valentine's Day short story a couple of days and that was enough to get a first draft done. It's very rough and I probably stretched it a little too far to fit the theme of a Valentine's Day competition. There is an interesting monster girl and overall concept. It could potentially be spun out to a fairly short novel (50K words). I'll see how the short story goes.
After that I went back to playing around with CSS for HoHH NPC shop fronts. This had been holding me up for a while as I was having trouble understanding my own CSS from back when I put the Character Sheet together. I figured the only way to get over that was throw myself at it and put a couple of solid days of only working on it. That seemed to work. I have a rough layout mocked up that enables me to use the AI-art charm cards I created a while ago.
You can see a rough screenshot above. Ideally I'd like to bring more graphical elements in. For now I'll focus on getting a rough layout that works and doesn't look too bad, and maybe look to pretty it up later. Now I seem to have stopped confusing myself with CSS, I'll continue to work on this in my daily GameDev slot.
I've also figured out what the Slime Smother Nun game mechanics are. I've started writing her, so she's now in progress.
My plan for next week is to get the short story typed up, edited, and out. Originally I wasn't planning on releasing anything for January, but I think that might give me something to put out, although it will be a fully public release as I'm planning to enter it into Literotica's Valentine's Day story competition.
I'll continue writing the Slime Smother Nun. My target for her is the end of February.
I'll also continue working on the art upgrades for HoHH 1.5. I want to upgrade the NPC code to support autosaving and shop windows. Once that's stable I'll get back to working through the harlot scenarios to give them the new notebook functionality.
Thanks for the support and interest!
- manyeyedhydra
As I've just got back from being out for most of the week there's not much to report for this update.
While I was stuck on trains I did have a dabble at a short story idea for Literotica's current Valentine's Day competition. That one has a great monster girl idea, but is a little complex to write. I might give it a day or two next week to see if it's viable to get it finished in time.
What I'd like to be writing is the lovely slime smother nun pictured above.
Next week I should be back home and able to work a full week, so hopefully will be able to catch up and make up for the unexpected disruption at the start of January.
Thanks for the support and interest.
- manyeyedhydra
These are going to be a little more sporadic as I need to wait for marwmellow to catch up with the artwork. I'm aiming to put a new profile out every 2 weeks for harlots that have already had a spotlight. The spotlights are currently on the mini-bosses, so expect their Hell Harlot profiles in a couple of months. In the meantime I'll fill in with smotherbuses which have already had their art revealed.
This is Soffocaria Gattagrandi, the "rebel" of The Sanctum of Strangulated Sighs. While a powerful and adept suffocatrix, she derives too much sexual pleasure from the act of smothering, which is regarded as borderline heretical by the Sanctum. While she likes to play up her rebellious nature, she is not an outright heretic like her sister, Chelida Gattagrandi.
A bit of a quiet week. First off I was recovering from whatever winter virus was floating around. After that I got a bit bogged down in coding stuff.
I've added the new autosave functionality and tweaked half of the NPC modules. Giving it full focus was maybe not a good idea as I started to slow down over the last couple of days. Mainly because testing became a bit of a chore.
This is a little annoying as I was hoping to have a "shop window" to show off. I want to add more visual elements when it comes to NPCs like The Buxom Lolibaba, so the player actually sees art and icons of the charms they're purchasing. I have an idea of how to implement it, but I'm still trying to trudge through minor stuff such as making sure actions work correctly when the Portly Gentleman first tries to buy a mulligan token off the player (or jetons de fouldre, which might be their new name, although I'm still undecided).
I think this happens sometimes when I focus too much on a single task. Next week I'll start writing again (either on the slime smother nun or a Valentine's Day short story idea) and move the coding back to it's regular work slot.
Thanks for the interest and support.
- manyeyedhydra
I've been nailed by whatever flu or lurgy is floating around, so I'll try to keep this one brief while I'm coughing and sniffling from bed. Winter, bah!
I've received the art for the first batch of mini-bosses. This week I got the descriptions ready for the next batch. This is the mid-tier independents, with some very weird monster girls in that batch.
The other thing I've been doing is incorporating the autosave and notebook functionality into the HoHH 1.5 codebase (the version with art). All the various pieces of that are separated out into modules, so it should be fairly straightforward to modify and test each separately. The big step was cleaning up the start and where things are initialised. You can do some neat tricks with tweego where functionality can be overlaid with later modules, which is really helpful when testing.
I've also taken that opportunity to neaten and tidy up some bits of the codebase.
I've cleaned up how actions work, which was a little bit messy on where the action was paid with the NPC.
I've also taken a look at what to call Coins and Mulligan Tokens. These are placeholder names and I thought it time to change them.
Coins are now Diabolicors, which I quite like.
Mulligan Tokens are now Jetons de Fouldres, which I'm less certain on.
As with the NPCs, the names are set under a variable, so changing them is trivial if I decide to do so on a later date. In theory. This is slightly messier as I wanted to add some QoL highlights for some terms, and dealing with whether the word was singular or plural because such a headache I decided $currencyName was better as $currency.plural and $currency.singular. I'm having to go through the NPCs anyway, so now is a good time to update.
I'll probably continue with this next week and get all the NPCs and core game loop done. It's probably best to do it in one go while I'm familiar with what's going with the code. The individual harlots can be done over a longer time frame while I'm working on other things as I'll likely have a blueprint in place by then to update them.
What I might do for some of the NPCs is see if I can add some more graphical options. I created all the charm cards for the Buxom Lolibaba a few months ago. Now seems like a good time to try and incorporate them into the game.
Thanks for the interest and support!
- manyeyedhydra
First up, Happy New Year!
Initially I started this post with a recap of 2024, but it was making the post too long, so let's skip right to my plans for 2025.
As I've written 3 of the mini-bosses, and with The Trapperess also giving me a more standard blueprint, I can be a bit more realistic with timeframes. No more "I might magically be done by the end of the year and not think too much on how long things are taking to write". Temptacia is an exception. The others won't be as long as her scenario, but from writing The Trapperess I think it takes around 2 months to write and implement a mini-boss. Which seems about right given that they're around 15K words and 5 scenarios bundled into one.
There are 2 Round 5 mini-bosses to write, 5 Round 9 mini-bosses, and 5 end-queens (which will likely be the same length in words). 12 * 2 months is 2 years, which seems a good conservative estimate. That also factors in the remaining harlots + quest lines + assorted other implementation + and maybe some side writing as well. While writing The Trapperess I did also end up implementing all the demo autosave and notebook functionality. So that 2 months is probably more like 5-6 weeks on 1 mini-boss/queen + 2-3 weeks on something else.
Still, it's a lot of time and work. If I'd known I'd be writing 5K words+ per harlot, I would have gone with a standard 13-in-a-row sequential game rather than the roguelike design I ran with. I've got this far, so I might as well see it through to completion. Adding art and notebook functionality also really helps with this, as it pushes it more towards commercial game territory rather than a niche text-only Twine project that might struggle to attract eyeballs.
As for the remaining mini-bosses and queens, I have most of the ideas pencilled in, so this is what you can look forward to:
Round 5 Mini-Boss
- a slime nun devoted to erotically smothering men.
- a troupe of sexy imps specialising in different sensual sex acts.
Round 9 Mini-Boss
- a latex-weaving smother arachne.
- a kitsune expert in various sensual techniques.
- The Buxom Lolibaba summoning sexy things from her cards.
- a nautical huntress with some marine 'hounds' to hunt men with.
- [the missing one is from the artificial beings faction – I still haven't figured that one out].
Queens
- Her Suffocating Eminence, Pulvina Velare, the XIIIth Pontifex Maxima de Obruo Suspiria. She's an eldritch abomination of a monster girl. I have an idea of what she'll do to the player, but need to figure more stuff out.
- Priti Nāndyāh – a multi-armed pleasure goddess.
- The Madam herself. I'm still not sure on this. She does need a scenario. The other option I was thinking about for the 4th faction isn't impactful enough. What might move her out of here is if I want to use her as The Final Boss after the queens.
- The master huntress of the Huthswiven Manor, probably with a gauntlet of sexy 'hounds'.
- [Redacted. I have a strong idea of who this is for the Artificial Beings, but I'm keeping quiet about it for now].
There are not many slots remaining for regular harlots. Of the ones I need to fill, here are the ideas I have pencilled in.
- Nurse Honey (might be multiple scenarios depending on whether she's come to claim the player or not).
- Elegant Woman. I already have a strong idea of both her scene and mechanics. I might get her out early in the year alongside the remaining Round 5 mini-bosses.
- A wide-eyed waif and oral specialist. I've known her mechanic for ages. This one will have players pulling their hair out trying to figure out what it is.
- Saeva Diabolia. Sammy's tormentor. A brutal femdom foot scene. I was thinking of making her queen of the 4th action, but there isn't enough there.
- an evil supervillainess. Does a similar roleplay to Sister Squeeze, but really wants to kill the player.
- [open sensuality faction slot. Not sure on this one. The idea I had is better used elsewhere. I might come up with something new, or maybe give an existing favourite from the faction a repeat scenario.]
The other thing I'd like to add is a proper series of post-room events. These are randomised and may have beneficial or negative effects.
On the implementation side of things, I want to add the notebook functionality to the existing art demo. I'm currently creating a test framework so I can do that and test the various pieces separately.
I did want to put out a full public demo on places like itch.io as soon as I had the art for a title page (which I now have). The notebook ideas have knocked that back. I want to add that for all the low-tier harlots first. My plan is now to wait until all five Round 5 mini-bosses have been added to the game. This also makes a much nicer stopping point for the first proper demo.
The art assets I need are also nearly all in place. The title page will look similar to how the front page looks currently on the website (for PC and tablet users – I still need to fix it for mobile). The UI icons are pretty much okay now aside from the semen gauge. There are some other things I'd like to add such as art for the Buxom Lolibaba's charm cards, but these are extras. The pin-up art I have for the harlots looks great. Ideally I'd also like to give them H-scene art as well, but I'll need to see more interest and funding for the game for that as the money I set aside only covers one pin-up per harlot. (if patrons have a favourite they'd like to commission, marwmellow is more than eager to accept the commission and I can add this art to the game.)
Overall, my rough plan is to get the full proper demo of the art version out around May 2025. By then I should have finished the remaining 2 mini-bosses. Then for the rest of 2025 I'll be hoping to get 3-4 of the Round 9 mini-bosses written and implemented, and also port more of the mid- and high- tier harlots over to the 1.5 version of HoHH with the graphics (and hopefully notebook functionality as well).
I'm going to proceed with the assumption there will be 2 months between each mini-boss release. I still would like to have a regular monthly release, so I might look to sneak out a smaller release in between them.
My rough plan is for there to be no release for January as I expect I'll still be working on the [slime smother nun]. After finishing her, I will hold her until the end of February and switch to one of the smaller regular harlot scenes (probably the Elegant Woman). In theory I should get her ready in time for a March release while giving myself enough lead time to get [sensual imp harem troupe] finished for April's release. If I can keep to that schedule of small scenario-big scenario, I'm hoping I can maintain regular monthly updates for HoHH.
Now, I don't want to spend the whole of two years working solely on finishing HoHH. I want to squeeze some regular fiction writing in there as well. I will be taking one of the months off in the first half of 2025 to finish and prepare the 7th collection. And I'll probably be sneaking out other stories as well when I feel I need to take a break from HoHH to avoid burnout.
And that's my rough plans for 2025. It's a lot of work and might look quite daunting, but it's also worth remembering there are already 80 harlots in HoHH already, and each is a 5K+ word scenario. It's a much bigger project than I initially envisioned, but I have been mostly able to stick to a regular release schedule and keep working towards that end. (where The Madam might actually let you out of her House…)
Here's to a productive 2025!
It's a fairly straightforward update for the holiday season. I used the days I had free to write the rest of The Trapperess, type her up, implement her, and get the release out. Details of that are in a previous post. I hope you enjoy playing her scenario.
By happy coincidence, I also received The Trapperess's artwork from Marwmellow right as I was finishing testing. I previewed that for $5 and higher tiers.
The Trapperess is roughly what I want from the mini-boss scenarios - about 5 sub-scenarios of 2-3K words each. Rwberia has a lot of smaller sub-scenarios and I went a bit wild with Temptacia's sub-scenarios. The Trapperess will likely be the common blueprint for the remaining mini-bosses.
With The Trapperess out of the way, the question is what to work on next. I have a few options here.
I want to fully incorporate auto-saving and the notebook functionality within the HoHH art version. That will probably be an ongoing task and that will occupy my "implementation" work slot for the day while I'm writing new scenarios.
The smotherbus mini-boss is a slime nun. I have that locked in to the point she was added to the batch of mini-boss art commissions. What I haven't locked down is her mechanics. I have a rough idea of her 'bad choice' scene, and I think she'll also do a sticky boob smother, sticky ass smother, and possibly a whole body smother. I'm still trying to figure out what determines good or bad end.
The sensuality faction mini-boss is slightly looser. My current idea is for a harem of imps, each specialising in a different thing. As with the slime nun, I'm still figuring out what would be the good/bad end conditions.
If I do get stuck on either, what I might do is switch to the final two stories I need for the 7th collection. I did sort out its line-up a couple of months back and I am planning to take a month off early 2025 to get that done and out.
At the moment I'll stay flexible and work on whatever seems to be ready.
Thanks for the support and I hope you're enjoying the holidays!
- manyeyedhydra
The demo version v0.057 of House of Hellish Harlots is ready. This adds the 3rd 'mini-boss', The Trapperess, to the House.
I was thinking of doing the same as with the previous release - an early release for higher tiers and the regular release at the end of the month. However, The Trapperess, was supposed to be November's release until I got sidetracked with experimenting with new notebook functionality. I was also hoping to release her a little earlier in December. One of her traps ended up being a little too close to a future harlot idea I have, and needed a rewrite.
As it happens, thanks to a timely coincidence, I do have something for higher tiers. Marwmellow's artwork for The Trapperess came in last night just as I was finishing off testing, which was perfect timing. I'll be previewing that for $5 and higher tiers in the following post.
Back to this release. It's just a single 'mini-boss' harlot.
The Trapperess
The Trapperess works for the Huthswiven Manor. She creates traps to capture and procure humans for the huntresses to hunt. The Madam has given her a basement roomto try out her various traps on the clientele. The Trapperess's traps are erotic sex traps designed to incapacite by, in her words, "wanking the quarry into submission".
Her scenario is a little mini-game where the player navigates her maze and tries to avoid her traps. She has six different traps in total. Overall, she should be a fairly easy scenario to survive, in keeping with the mini-bosses of Round 5.
Mechanically, this is close to the basic blueprint idea I have for the mini-bosses - 5ish sub-scenarios of about 2.5K words each.
This is the text-only version of HoHH. I've attached it as a html file (or rather, a .zip file containing the raw .html file if you're reading this on Patreon). Double-clicking it should open it in your default web browser.
I've also updated the houseofhellishharlots.com website, so the private demo accessible from the front page is v0.057. I'll be updating the password at the end of the month, but for now it's the same as before:
saPo0n1S
I hope you enjoy running the gauntlet of The Trapperess's erotic traps. Let me know your thoughts below!
First up, I managed to find one of the two(!) films called Succubus that came out this year and wrote a little review of it that can be found on my blog here:
Film Review: Succubus (2024, the One With Ron Perlman)
It has some nice ideas and is quite good, but lacks a spark to make it great. I also went on a big digression about merging horny into horror, with a very dodgy prop/scene idea.
Now, back to the regular update.
We're getting into the holiday season so I had a few days disrupted. I'm still working away on the Trapperess scenario.
I got about halfway through writing the Gas Trap scene and realised it was coming out identical to a scene I had planned out for another harlot. As the harlot version of the scene is much better and I think she's a stronger idea - like Eve Satana, she puts on a show in the bar - I didn't want to waste it here. Currently I'm tweaking what I wrote to swing it back to the other idea I had.
The Tentacle trap is typed up. Most of the Boob Wall trap is typed up. I've also implemented most of the core and the first trap (Slime Pit). I was hoping to drop the release in time for Christmas, but the Aphrodisiac Gas trap going down the wrong path is probably going to knock me off that plan by a day or two. I do have the next few days completely free, so I'll see. However, I think it will be more likely to drop Fri/Sat.
Thanks for the support and Happy Christmas!
- manyeyedhydra
Right, after talking about the notebook itself last week, time to look at some functionality it allows – scene replays.
Scene replays and gallery functionality are pretty important for H games. Players will have favourite characters and scenes that match their tastes, and will want to call them up again as easily as possible for… ahem… reasons.
Currently House of Hellish Harlots is a little poor in that department. There is the mulligan token system, where the player can request a favoured harlot from The Madam, but that will only put her in the following round rather than take the player to her right away. This was because I wasn't sure whether the final game would have this functionality rather than it being test functionality. This left the implementation somewhere awkwardly in the middle. My preference would be to take it out eventually, but not until all harlots are added. I think it's still useful as a tool to enable players to get to new harlots quickly right after they're added.
My idea is to have the replay functionality put in the notebook. Not only would the player be able to see information they've learned about a harlot, but they would also be able to replay favourite scenes. The unlock criteria is fairly simple – the player just needs to have gone through the scene in the game.
This is also fairly easy to track as the notebook is already doing that as part of determining which information is displayed in the notebook.
The basic replay functionality is fairly straightforward and already implemented in the proof-of-concept demo. Once you've seen a particular ending or path, that path will then be available to see again from the notebook.
One thing I wanted was for the replays to not interfere with the base game. There is a "replay mode" flag. The game doesn't autosave while playing through a scenario in Replay Mode. This means the player can duck out of the main game, replay a favourite harlot scene, then duck right back into the game where they were before.
The other thing I wanted is for the Replay Mode to be a strict Replay Mode. The player should not see anything or learn any new information on a harlot while in Replay Mode. While a lot of harlots use hidden stat checks, some give the player choices that sometimes matter. My thinking was that the player should not be able to make a choice they haven't already made in the main game. You can see the implementation of this in the demo. If the player chooses to replay one of Sapoonis's paths, the option to refuse to massage her breasts and leave early is greyed out and can't be selected.
This is the easy stuff and I've already figured it out and implemented it in the demo. From here on it starts to get a little complex.
If the right conditions are met, some harlots will drop hints on other harlots. I'd like to make more use of this as part of the clue system I mentioned last week. There is an RNG element to this. The harlots that do it have about 3 or 4 harlots they can drop a hint on and which particular one is selected at random. I don't want the player to be able to see new information in Replay Mode they haven't seen while playing the game, and this should include those hints. This probably isn't too hard to deal with – keep a record of which hints have been shown and have the replay only pick hints that have already been seen.
This then drops us into thornier territory of what a "replay" is.
The current implementation is not strictly a replay. It makes use of the Harlot Tester functionality I implemented to test harlot scenarios individually. A test "player" is created and the scenario runs as normal, but with redirects on leaving the room (either through Game Over or leaving normally).
The Replay Mode does the same, but with some player stats changed in order to get the desired end or path. If a stat is relevant, it will be fixed to whatever value triggers the End/Path. If it isn't, it will be set to a random or neutral value. This means that rather than see an exact replay, there will be minor changes. The replay "player" will turn up with a different gift. There are also minor text variations for some player dispositions that aren't important enough to track, so those might be different.
Also, while a harlot might have a single Bad End, there are usually multiple ways to trigger that Bad End. It could be through the harlot's mechanic, or an ailment, or because the player ran out of semen, or because they brought the harlot a Black Rose to force the Bad End. I don't think it's feasible to give 4 different replay options to the same Bad End. The current system keeps track of what caused the Bad End and so uses that one for the replay. If the player has triggered the Bad End multiple times, the replay prioritises them in the order of harlot mechanics, running out of semen, and finally the Black Rose "surrender" option.
The question then is, is this important?
I don't know on this. It might be just a minor 'huh' moment to have the replay turn up with a different gift or have slightly different text because this "player" has dominant rather than submissive disposition.
It might have more of an effect with Bad Ends. If someone is turned on by the thought of a succubus increasing the drain to force them to come even when empty, they'd rather have the replay do that than the one where the player brings a Black Rose to "beg" for a Bad End.
It's this aspect of the Replay Mode I'm still undecided on. I have some ideas:
- It's not important, so go with what I have now.
- Have a separate options screen after the player selects the Bad End replay so they can fine-tune what caused it (bad stat check, lack of semen, Black Rose, etc).
- Create a simple copy of the player's current stats when they unlock the Replay and assign those values to the Replay "player" when replaying the scenario.
The last one is the more complete option and one I'm tempted to try out. It wouldn't be particularly hard to implement. I think I could also give the player options to fine-tune it in that if they trigger the same unlock on a later playthrough, when they come to replay it the game will give them the option of replacing the existing "replay" with the new one.
My main concern there would be bloating the save file, but as the data saved would be a fairly small object (maybe 20 numerical values), it might not be an issue.
Those are my more detailed thoughts on the replay functionality. The basics are very straightforward. Handling some of the variations might be trickier.
What are people's thoughts?
L'iaculatia is the House's sporty spider. While as dangerous and predatory as other arachnes, L'iaculatia has embraced The Madam's concept of 'fair play'. She'll let her visitors go with just a light and pleasant suck, but only if they beat her game first...
And now I've caught up with the profiles. That is all the low-tier harlots covered that have art within the '1.5' version of HoHH.
The batch after this is the NPCs, which I'm holding for later (until I've written their room scenarios). Marwmellow is currently working on the round 5 mini-bosses, which I'm also in the middle of writing.
I do have all the art for Faction 1 (smotherbus) harlots that have scenarios. That has been previewed. I just need to write profiles for them. Expect them to appear in January, but maybe not as frequently - maybe one every two weeks.
I also have all the art for the second faction harlots (artificial beings). I'll be doing harlot spotlights for the ones that haven't yet been revealed for $5 tiers and higher in January, with their profiles to show up for all tiers a couple of months later.