HELLGAME

Status update time! Again!

This week kinda felt like it flew by for me, but I still managed to get some stuff done.

• Wrote and coded up the rest of the snake-body sex scenes for the minotaur encounter
• Wrote and coded the bottoming branches for snake-bodies for the slime guy encounter (but not the topping ones, yet)
• and also fixed some issues with one or two of the sex scene branches for the slime guy encounter just kinda stopping because I forgot to attach the closing scene, whoops
• Wrote up a bunch of sobek sheut variations (bringing the encounter from having one variation to having twelve), and then updated the sobek description and sex scene for the new bodies. And fixed it so that it properly handles pcs with fuckable cloacas even if they're not snakes.

Also I'm thinking it might be time to start polishing up the stuff I've done so far and packaging it up for an update. This update hasn't really been on self-enclosed things like "write a new event", so there's less of a natural stopping point, but I think I've accumulated enough fixes and additions to merit making an actual game update out of it. Not sure if I'm 100% ready to hold another update vote after that though, since I'd still like to tackle a little bit more of all the winning options on the poll before I refocus my attention.

So let's see, that makes my to-do list before an update is ready something like:

• Write the rest of the snake-body sex scenes for the slime guy encounter
• Snake-body sex scenes for the flame demon cock-cage encounter expansion; maybe expanding things so that you can fuck him even if he's not cock caged
• Write the new talk options for the sobeks, and add in the 'mental' variants that would have different talk options
• Write in the rest of the missing [METAL] [FIRE] and [ICHOR] tf mods
• Prune the body editor options so there are less weird open nodes slots for node types you can't get yet, and also add the new slots for where the element nodes should be able to fit
• I should probably write the [WEAPON]»chain description for bodies while I'm at it
• Add all the new nodes to the demo shop

So I guess that's what I'll be working on!

oh right today is an update post day

This week's work has been a little scattered; let's see...

• Finished writing and coding up most of the flame demon cock cage stuff
• Wrote most of the snake-body sex scene branches for the minotaur encounter
• Fixed up some of the weird blocking and dialog in the son of Hamar-Tabal event and incidentally added a few paragraphs to the fisting scene; also added support for one of the you-bottom branches so it's a lot more accessible (now it works for humanoids and nagas in addition to animals and centaurs)
• Started working on a sobek sheut event expansion, which will add some more monstrous variant types, expand the talk options, add proper cloaca support to the sex scene, and maybe expand the sex scene a little

A reasonable chunk of the work so far has just been updating the old encounter code when I go back to these old events, which... kinda sucks, but it's gotta happen sometime so I guess it's happening now.

By next week I'm aiming to have the rest of the snake-body scenes done and the one other flame demon sex scene written, and to be making headway into the sobek sheut expansion. Maybe touching more on those minor machine shop expansions I mentioned before, just like... seeing different events each time you drop in; that kind of thing. So I guess we'll see how that's gone in a week.

Oh yeah and... I'm always trying to think of variations, large or small, to add to the existing encounters, so they seem less samey; so do any of you have thoughts about tweaks or expansions to make for specific monsters?

This week: still working on that stuff I talked about last week.

I didn't get as much writing done as I wanted, since I spent some time streamlining the event code + doing some general brainstorming + just getting distracted by other things. The site got found by spambots, so I had to write a hotfix to change the way comments work, or else there would be several hundred spam comments all over the newsposts by now. So that kinda sucks. But I got large chunks of the flame demon cock cage variant done, plus a few bits of a small machine shop expansion. The former of those should be appearing as a patreon preview in a day or two.

Also I wrote a post about the internals of the hell game event system, in case people were curious. It's kind of technical, I guess? It's basically a code post.

Next week: still working on the stuff I talked about last time!

Uh let's see, what did I do this week.

• added in a bunch of dick size lines
• added in lines for [ICHOR] nodes
• added in some lines for [METAL] and [FIRE] nodes
• fixed up a few of the [HORNS] lines

I actually hit a roadbump for adding in all these element nodes, namely: I don't have a good plan for what they'd do in every slot they can go. They can be attached to any/all of: body, head, cock, balls, and horns, and so for each combination of element and part I need to have some kind of tf, and I haven't really figured that all out comprehensively; most elements have three or four down, but not the whole set. I should probably spreadsheet this before trying to do more.

Here's another description, this time showing off some of the newer nodes:

You're a satyr. Your skin is pallid grey, and black veins show clear through it. Your legs and tail are covered in oily black fur. Your head is encased in a abstract helmet, all geometrical planes. You have sodden clumps of hair along your shoulders and forearms, leaving oily smears across your skin. Your legs end in broad cloven hooves.

Your helmet is wrought from heavy, dark iron, and engraved with blasphemous sigils. You have a pair of nubby horns.

Between your goatish haunches, you got a fat sheathed dick with a pair of misshapen balls hanging beneath. Your cock slides from your sheath coated in gritty black tar, with more oozing out over the rim of your sheath perpetually. When you unsheath, your cock's goatlike, with a head that bulges out to a long squirming tendril -- your pizzle -- at the tip; it's bruised-looking grey-black, shiny and dripping eagerly. Hard, your bloated dick spans up across your chest, head digging between your pecs. Your balls are corded with bulging black veins and visibly pulsing with your foul issue. When you come, you come gritty black ooze, spilling from your cock in coagulated chunks.

There's still a lottttt I'm intending to do with descriptions, both in terms of content and in terms of prose flow (changing the order of some of those sentences, making them lead into each other more smoothly, and maybe doing stuff like breaking up particularly long cock/ball descriptions into separate paragraphs) but this is a big step forward, and hopefully it should give you something of an idea for where I wanna take pc bodies beyond just "yr a furry".

Anyway I'm gonna stop working on description stuff for the time being, and start working on events. Writing the missing snake-body scenes for the minotaur and slime scenes, and then... I think probably revisiting the machine shop location and letting you talk to some of the people there + a sex scene that you could trigger from there. Also adding in that cock cage flame demon variant.

All that is probably gonna take more than a week to do, so don't be shocked when the next week's update is like "still working on that", though.

Oh yeah and I'm thinking of ending these posts with questions, since it's hard to gauge AUDIENCE INTEREST from the fairly abstract poll vote counts. So hey: what kind of tfs do you want to see, anyway? What kind of bodies do you generally go for, & what kind of customization do you like?

This week was spent entirely working on the description code! Which was nice, since it really needed it. This should make the process of changing and fixing descriptions a lot easier going forward.

While I was at it I expanded some of the dick descriptions a little:

He's a tiger-man, maybe a little taller than the average human. His fur is orange and black striped.

Between his thighs, he's got a flushed cloaca, with his four dicks tucked away inside, and below that he's got four hugely fat external balls in a grossly bloated pouch overflowing the space between his thighs. His gargantuan knots are visible even soft as an internal bulge behind his balls, one that can hardly fit through his cloacal lips even soft. When his cocks spill out of his cloaca they're ridged and spiky, all covered in nubbly bumps like gooseflesh where they're conjoined at the base, and they branch up to form short, thick shafts that're ringed in a messy lacework of barbs, with ridges of stiff flesh between them. He's got double knots, in a row up each shaft; when he gets hard, they swell into swollen, mottled growths, too big to wrap a hand around, grossly oversized for his shafts, making his cloacal lips spread over the very base.

That is MAYBE a little bottom-heavy, in terms of, uh, dick description length. But that's also from a body that's got a bunch of dick and ball mods. Also, some of those sentences could stand to be reordered. It's still a work in progress.

Anyway so definitely in this next update will be the nodes [TIGER] [LION] [DEER] [BOAR], since those were basically implemented already, and also [MORE]»x3 [MORE]»x4 [LARGE].

I think for the next week I'll keep working on adding in new description lines and then just call whatever I have at that point "done" and move on to writing some event stuff. This will hopefully include some of:

• some more [HORNS] lines + [HORNS] lines for when they're attached on the body
• cock tails and cock tongues (which will also bring in [MOUTH] and [TONGUE] nodes I guess)
• proper dick size lines (or at least some correct adjectives) in descriptions
• [FIRE] [METAL] [ICHOR] [STELLAR] elemental nodes that actually do stuff
• a [HALO] part
• maybe some lines for [TAIL]? aside from just "tailless" coming up all the time.
• a bunch of other elemental nodes ([GEM] [POISON] [STORM] etc etc)

(In rough order of priority, so the lower-down stuff is less likely to make it in by a week)

Though keep in mind, while all of this stuff will be in the descriptions, very little of it is gonna make its way into the sex scenes; that'll take some more work further down the line. Some of that work might happen the week-after-next, but no promises.

Poll results are in! For everybody's reference, the results were:

• 9 descriptions
• 8 expand sex scenes
• 8 expand encounters
• 8 sahagin+zombies+sobeks
• 8 factory processing+crystal dragons+spirits of flame
• 8 void worms + minotaur/slime threesomes+voyeur
• 7 savegames
• 6 rpg elements
• 5 unicorns+dryads
• 5 alchemy+shadows
• 4 feral hellhounds+cerberus
• 3 ganzer fortress+expanded ganzer worker

A five-way tie for second-place. But I guess that's what I get for encouraging people to vote for a lot of options!

After I saw the way the poll was leaning I started looking over the description code. I'll spare everybody the technical details, but there are some structural flaws with the current setup I'm hoping to fix up, which should make adding in description lines easier. (This is maybe the third time I've said that, and it remains true every time: the original description code was downright nightmarish to try to use; I've gotten it to the point of 'kind of a hassle'.) While I'm working on that I'll flesh out some of the description lines and add in lines for some new nodes.

After that I'll pick and choose some of the items from the various 8-vote options, and I guess just... keep at it for a month.

Update!

Minotaur miner and slime guy are in! They're located in the swamp region right now, since there's just not enough room left in the 'factory' as it currently generates to fit two new encounters. Uh, there's a reason I'm working on updated map code, right. (I'm also thinking of sketching out some sprites for the specific encounters, since there are enough it's kind of annoying to have to mouse over each one to see what it is, since hellhounds and dryads are the only ones with their own images.)

Anyway the two encounters are around 14k words, each. At least for the moment, they don't have snake-body branches. Sorry about that, but time was running short and I wanted to actually make this deadline, and those are the variants (besides all the really weird ones) that take the most specific effort to write. I'll be working on them while the next poll is running, so they should go in along with the next update, whatever that is.

ALSO

Like I said in the last status post, I wanted to write up more concrete details about what each poll option would be, so for transparency's sake (and because the patreon post editor is garbage) I'll be doing that here, not on the patreon. The actual poll is available through this post on the patreon, for subscribers, so hey read this and then go vote!

---

SO a few notes before I get to the meat of the options.

One is that this (and probably all future polls) are gonna be using approval voting, so I feel obligated to say just this once that the most STATISTICALLY ADVANTAGEOUS way to vote is to vote for everything you think is good, rather than voting only for your favorite. So, you know, if you care about statistically optimal choices... :V

Secondly: okay so as I've been trying to put together story stuff I keep running into the fact that the event code as I've written it really isn't particularly robust yet. it's getting there, but I need to both get used to my tools and expand my selection of tools before I'll be able to make any serious story content. I'll be chipping away at that as I fix up and expand events (pending those options winning), but don't expect to see "new quest:"/"story progression:"/"new major character:" options in the polls for a while yet; the game will probably remain a one-shot sex scene navigator for a little while longer.

Lastly, depending on what wins and how easy the various winning items are to write up and encode, I might end up working on the top two, or working down the list. So it's not precisely such that the item with the most votes will get worked on.

---

Anyway, so, options:

flesh out existing sex scenes

this would include stuff like:

• adding a cock cage variant for the flame demons & giving them some caging/uncaging scenes
• fixing up the 'son of hamar-tabal' blocking and dialog so it actually stores the internal triggers it needs to make a few of the transitions in that event, like... comprehensible.
• fixing up naga scenes so that they all have cloaca-fucking variants, if you're the kind of naga that doesn't actually have an asshole
• potentially writing a few sex scenes for 'formless' bodies or floating dick (using you as a dildo, etc) bodies on existing encounters. at the very least writing comprehensive rejection branches, so none of the encounters error out on weird bodies.
• just adding some more branches generally
• putting in some sex scenes that branch on cock size (this would include some v. basic notes of cock size in sex scenes; just minor line changes like "your cock lolls across your thigh" vs. "your stubby cock juts straight out from your crotch" vs. "your cock drapes down to your knee") and then vaguely thinking of writing some alternate scenes: two 'penetration' variants for cock size, w/ two 'cumshot' variants for ball size, where the specific cutoff between them would depend on the specific encounter). this wouldn't cover alllll the encounters, just whichever ones I think could use it the most.

(incidentally, I've been thinking about how to handle the "some scenes might have bodypart-specific variations" issue; I'd like to make it fairly clear what all the options a scene has are without forcing players to run through every encounter with every possible body configuration. (one thing I've been thinking of is: have a little {scene tree} button in the corner for each event, which would show you the complete decision tree for the encounter, including branches on body variables, so then people could go 'oh this encounter has {gross fetish thing}, thats hot, lets do that'. but that might BREAK THE IMMERSION, idk))

flesh out encounters generally

this would include stuff like:

• 'introduction' dialog for some encounters a la the hellhound knight, where you're not instantly dumped into a "talk/fuck/leave" choice for everybody
• some effort put into some social variants for some encounters, so different people would talk about different things -- this would be some groundwork for more differentiation between encounters of the same type and eventually some quest stuff
• talk options & random sequences for the machine shop (and/or new locations that gather multiple encounter types together -- hubur dockworks, that kind of thing)
• some expanded talk options, potentially w/ some actual dialog trees
• this overlaps a little with the above, since it would also include new vectors & state for some sex scenes

throw in more rpg elements

this is kinda hard to do without making a bunch of general, all-around improvements all over the place, but to start with I could add in another monster encounter or two, or more combat encounters (fighting lesser hellhounds, that kind of thing) and actually properly set up some locations where you could recover health.

• also something to do with balancing stats and skills a little.
• respawning encounters are gonna happen sooner or later inevitably, but this would be the thing that would get them to happen the quickest.

oh my god add in savegames already

I haveee been pretty lazy about this, considering it wouldn't actually be a big challenge, and the game is slowly getting to the point where there's enough stuff that it's a trial to start over from scratch each time.

• also including: options, probably. a different color scheme and a different font; stuff like that.

make the pc descriptions better and add in some new nodes

basically if you saw that one 'here are some sample descriptions I wrote up' you know that I have v. high hopes for the kinds of descriptions I want to see in-game, that are currently not really... present at all. so working towards that goal.

• make horns work. do horns work? I don't think they work all that well yet. ditto tails, and arms.
• give the pc the ability to have cocktails and cocktongues and cockhorns, though no promises about being able to actually use them in any scenes for quite some time
• adding in actual support for nodes [FIRE] [METAL] [ICHOR] [STELLAR]
  also yknow [VEINS] [SPINES] [PUSTULES] [LARGER]

new content: unicorns, more dryad stuff, dryads getting fucked by unicorns, etc

• unicorn encounter in glade areas. unicorn description would be something like:

  It's a unicorn, with a brilliant horn that coruscates light in rainbow arcs. His coat is pure white, and across his flanks it's dappled with pearly crystal-rainbow iridescence. He's got a long flowing mane, unbound, that's shining with an ethereal silvery light; tail too. His teeth and hooves look like they're made from silver.

• a dryad/unicorn voyeur or threesome scene
• potentially getting gangbanged by a herd of unicorns??

new content: ruins of the fortress ganzer, scorpion-taur versions of the ganzer workers

• "ruins of the fortress ganzer" would be a location like the gates of hell location
• adding in ganzer worker variants based on their former rank
• also adding in six-legged chitinous versions of the ganzer workers? I guess? some kinda big variant; I'm not 100% promising scorpion-taurs depending on how things go.

new content: feral hellhounds (who btw you can't fuck), more cerberus intrigue

• feral hellhounds being smug jerks / potentially interactions with hellhound knights being condescending
• adding in a 'fight' lesser hellhound variant (and recategorizing the existing one as the 'fuck' variant)
• fixing up the gates of hell so that you can at least talk to a half-feral hellhound or two, some stuff like that. probably shuffle around cerberus' event a little

new content: swamp water section; sahagins, zombies, more stuff w/ the sobeks

• moving sahagin encounter to shallow water & actually writing the encounter
• zombies you can fuck, rather than just the one swordmaster zombie
• probably some sobek/zombie interaction that may or may not include a sex scene
• expanding the sobek encounter? I guess? it's really short.

new content: factory alchemy section; shadows & shadow mages, nightmare elementals

• alchemy shop location
• shadow monsters & shadow mages (shadow description:

  There is a shadow here. It has cut off its owner, if it ever had one, and now stands on its own two feet. It is a black silhouette from every angle, an opening into a realm of darkness cut out of the world.

  It is dimly humanoid, hands growing into thick clawed talons, feet growing into monstrous paws. Spikes erupt from its back; the claws of some strange beast, reaching out from the darkness that is its body. Its head is ringed with horns, twisting and curling into the air like tongues of flame frozen in time, and it moves like they weigh nothing at all.

  & shadow mage description:

  There is a shadow mage here.

  He is ghoulishly pale, white skin webbed with dark veins, blue-black blood clear under his skin. His shadow has wrapped itself around his body and sunk in teeth. It scours him like a burn, covering him in splashes and streaks, coating nearly the entire left half of his body. Where it feeds it has grown substance and form, teeth and eyes and tongues in grotesque relief, full of zigzag curves and whorling circles, dots of red eyes in lines and curves within the deepest folds of shadow. His shadow-burn splashes across his face, and his left eye has become a burning circle of pure red.

• not really 100% sure what nightmare elementals will look like but probably nothing good

new content: factory processing section; crystal dragonoids, spirits of flame

• (crystal dragonoid description:

  There's a crystal dragonoid smashing ores.

  He's mostly humanoid, with big haunches, broad clawed feet, and a sweeping tail. His head is a mess of overgrown crystal, with stiff crystals jutting down from his muzzle like a blocky beard.

  He's covered in rocky hide, chalky slate, that's partially crystallized: blotches and lines of upturned, broad scales grow across his shoulders, forearms, legs, and up his neck. In the center of the patches, where the crystalization is the most severe, thick bunches of translucent white-blue crystals bud out of his skin in craggy clusters.

  His hands and feet are all heavily crystallized, with thick spars of crystal cut and shaped into serviceable claws. His tail sweeps back behind him, and near the tip it develops spiral grooves and then splits apart into two sharp tines, like a tuning fork.

  He jangles like a metal windchime every time he moves.

  )

keep working on the void worm quest and on the mining barracks minotaur/slime guy voyeur/threesome scenes

• void worm quest! (void worm description:

  It's a void worm.

  It's an enormous snake, looking like a tear in the fabric of the world. It's glowing brightly, but no light you can see by: void body all lit up with unlight, leaving burning afterimages on your eyes. It moves fast, in stutters and stops, slithering across the ground and through the air, not so much moving through space as cutting through it.

  Its head is almost octopoid in construction: a broad, beaklike mouth, and a messy fringe of horns that spill back and out from its head, horns that squirm and writhe wildly but only when it moves. It's got seven slit eyes, all burning with unlight.

  ) void worm quest is basically just a handful of fights + a big optional gangbang after it ends.
• mining barracks minotaur/slime guy voyeur/threesome scenes
• most of what this would actually be is writing map transition code and fixing up the event code to make it possible to even run a quest. this would also make it easier to see all the slime/minotaur variations, since they'd have an entire separate map to themselves for now.

Okay so I'm better now!

This week: currently the slime guy scene is at 11k words and the minotaur miner scene is at 10k words. They're both mostly done, just missing the snake-body scenes and a few minor branches, as well as the bulk of the body-specific material/dick type/etc coding. Barring another upset like me getting sick AGAIN, they should be done by next week. I may or may not be able to finalize the map generation update before then, but if not it'll end up being bundled with the update after that; actually finishing these encounters is kinda the priority.

And speaking of next week, I'm thinking that at that point I'll make another dev poll, since with these two events done I'll have delivered most of what got voted for in the last poll, and if people really want some void worms they can vote for that again. It's been nearly three months since the last one, so it's kind of extremely past due for a new poll. I gotta stop biting off such big chunks.

Also I'm probably gonna start writing up more concrete outlines of what all the poll options will entail, both so people have a better idea of what they're voting for and so I have more of a blueprint going forwards -- some of the past options have been very vague, all "idk, some stuff??", and it was kinda difficult for me to turn that into CONCRETE, ACTIONABLE PROGRESS.

Anyway all that stuff: next week! Before then I still got a bunch of writing and coding to do.

This week: I got sick! It came on Saturday and Sunday, and I spent most of the week feverish and sweating through my sheets. So that wasn't great.

I'm on the way back to full health now, and I've been doing some writing, but I haven't really accomplished much of note so far. uhhh I wrote the quadruped/centaur topping oral and topping anal scenes for slime guys, and one of the mutual-jerkoff scenes for the minotaur; that's about it as far as measurable progress goes.

This week: more writing.

• Minotaur miner encounter is at 9k words
• Slime guy encounter is at 7k words

They're both approaching "stage 1" completion, with only a few scenes left to write (and of course the inevitable snake-body scenes).

Not much else to report, really. I've been wanting to get my weekly wordcount up, but generally my approach towards working on hell game has been... it's better to be slow and steady than try to take on more than I can realistically handle and end up burning out. I'm trying for low-variance here; a steady 4k a week seems better than sometimes writing 8k a week but sometimes writing nothing. Anyway, at this pace these encounters won't be done by next week for sure; I'm thinking while I won't be preparing an update for next week regardless I might go and also do some of the structural work for events and maps, since that needs to be done sooner or later.