HELLGAME

This week: mostly just more writing. Now I'm working on the slime guy and minotaur miner encounters, so those have been partially coded and I've been writing up the scenes. If you're a $7+ backer on patreon you'll be able to see the scene excerpts I've posted from both of those.

Currently they're both around 6k words long, and the slime scene has been fully indexed (so it's just a matter of writing the missing scenes) and looking at them... given how long the hellhound encounter ended up being, to get these done in any kind of reasonable time I'm gonna have to keep the sex scenes short.

My original goal for HELL GAME was "very branchy but short sex scenes, with each full scene in the 1-2k range", since while working on, uh, DEEP WITHIN THE FOREST, an unfinished twine game that was in a few ways the precursor to this, I realized that if you're playing a game that's all about short passages and fast transitions and you get smacked in the face with a 3k word sex scene that's kind of... too much? too long? it really breaks the sequence of gameplay. So I wanted to keep the hell game sex scenes pretty short and have them broken up a lot with choices. But I haven't held to that goal very well -- "the entire branch should be 1-2k" rapidly turned into "each text chunk between choices should be 1-2k", and even then I end up going over frequently for the longer scenes.

Basically all that is to say I'm probably gonna try to cut down on longer sex scenes, and go back to writing like, two or three paragraph chunks, since otherwise it'll take me forever to finish all this, and yknow I'd kinda like to have the next dev poll before, like, March.

Anyway next week: more writing! These encounters aren't gonna be done by next week, but they might be the week after that? No promises though.

update live! this post is on a saturday and not a friday since i was kind of slacking, but now it's all done.

what's new in-game:

• there's a new encounter! it's a hellhound knight. it ended up being uhhhhh like. ~13k words long, which is substantially more than i was expecting, but whatever that's how it goes sometimes. that being said, it still doesn't have any sex branches for floating orbs, floating heads, or floating dicks. they'll happen eventually, just, not right now.
• also a few minor typo fixes in some other scenes

also there's a new entry on the header: "project goals", which is a... slapdash and meandering summary of some planned game systems. i'll probably update it periodically as people ask more questions or i realize i need to clarify something.

what's next:

mostly: working on the minotaur miner and slime guy scenes. i'll also be working on the other stuff remaining to get fleshed out and coded in: void snakes + their associated quest, the various minotaur/slime threesomes, and the new map code. not really sure how long any of that will take.

This week: more writing.

uhh I was hoping to be able to post the hellhound knight scene today -- it's at around 10k words now total, though a little bit of that is code boilerplate or duplicated prose in separate branches -- but it's not quite done yet, so, I guess I'll do that update sometime this upcoming week. Or maybe just on the next status update; I haven't really thought about how to synchronize game updates with these posts yet.

(A huge chunk of the delay is that the encounter is gonna require a nearly entirely separate branch for if you're a snake. There's overlap between biped & naga scenes, and there's overlap between centaur & quadruped scenes, but the snake/worm blocking is sufficiently different that it ends up requiring wholly unique scenes. This is maybe more of a problem since I think nobody is even playing as a snake. Listen. I would be playing as a snake. Well maybe once I get [BONE] and [POISON] nodes in.)

I feel kinda bad it's been like a solid month-and-a-half since the last dev poll. This last update has definitely been me biting off more than I can chew, or at least chew in a timely fashion. Turns out that uh... four new monster encounters plus a few quest scenes plus a bunch of mix-and-match voyeur threesome scenes PLUS a new map PLUS a bunch of internal event code changes takes a while to code up! I'll try to get a handle on that going forward, probably just by scaling back the amount of stuff in each update. But for the time being we're LOCKED IN to editing all these scenes for a while... I guess the order here is a series of updates that look like:

1. hellhound knight
2. minotaur miner and slime guy encounters just dropped into the factory
2a. event code fix so I can put in the mining barracks, also just dropped into the factory
3. map update so that I can actually put the void snake quest in and move the other encounters to the new map

The hellhound knight scene is basically at "tier 1" at this point, which is to say that it's got basic bodytype branches (excepting snakes), but that it doesn't really handle material types (fur vs. skin, muzzles vs. mouths, what if you have a flared horse dick or a twisting bull dick, that kind of thing); that's what I'll be doing next to finish it up.

Oh yeah, and I've noticed a few body/encounter bugs: currently having four arms and nothing else gives you a "complex"-typed body, and then you get to see basically every scene explode and break in various ways; floating dick bodies still don't have any scenes, so basically everything errors out for them too; the dryad/farmer threesome errors out if you have a formless orb body. So at least know that I'm aware of those problems, even if I'm still focusing on writing new scenes rather than fixing weird bodies for old ones.

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Oh yeah, and I plugged hell game a few places recently, which made me realize that I should probably at some point write up a comprehensive game plan and stick it somewhere permanent. It's just... well, I'm extremely very aware of how many people wanna make a porn game and can only put together feature lists and not do any of the actual work, which has made me kinda leery of putting together a feature list myself, since "elaborate and sprawling todo lists" is kind of a hallmark of a project that's going nowhere. But seeing as I have a playable demo, even if it's pretty rough, now might be the time to put together an outline so other people have a better idea of what the finished version of this game might look like: what's still filler and what's working as planned. So the "development TODO" thing might get split up into something like "planned goals" and "currently working on" or something like that.

What I Did This Week:

• i finished (for the most part) wrestling with the map code; it's in a lot better shape to start, y'know, generating maps that have some structure to them. specifically i got its path-drawing and graph expansion working a lot better, so the maps should be less just a big flat open area. a lot of the plan for encounters going forward involves putting them together in clusters (hellhounds in barrens, factory mobs in factories, dryads in glades, etc etc etc) so this makes that possible. things that still need to be done with maps: updating the room painter (to have better low-level detail), actually concretely figuring out how to place encounters, fixing the final few bugs in the line-connector code, figuring out if i really wanna add in walls for this next release and how to deal w/ them if i do, drawing a bunch of programmer art for new map tiles.
• i outlined and flowcharted all the encounters i was working on last month, so now i know specifically which scenes are still to be written and can make better todo lists.
• i started filling in the missing scenes for all those encounters. most of them need a lot of work! when i was writing i mostly wrote a basic "monster x biped pc" version for all the scenes, and now i have to confront the part where you can just be a horse or a snake or whatever if you want. (i'm not looking forward to the work involved if/when i add [OCTOPUS] or [SPIDER] nodes since whoops you could then just... be an octopus. w/e that's not happening any time soon.)

so the plan from here is... write a bunch, basically, while continuing to tweak the map code and outline the changes i'll be making to the event code. on a related note, i updated the development todo, since i had kind of forgot it existed. i also touched up the info blurb a little.

i had written a little bonus "hellhound knight" scene, and it turns out because it's short and self-contained it'll probably be the first thing to get finished; i might put that in the game before everything else and then do another few weeks work to get the rest of the update together, since the rest requires... a bunch of stuff: a whole new map, some internal changes to how events work, and a bunch of densely-interlinked new encounters.

well first of all, the patreon hit $80/m (which is great!! ty everybody this is really appreciated!) so now i'm CONTRACTUALLY OBLIGATED to make weekly status posts. probably i should devote some time towards an administration facade so i can make these posts easier. these posts will be FRIDAYS and maybe sometimes SATURDAYS, and are generally gonna cover the specifics of what i did last week as well as a vague projection of what i'll work on the upcoming week.

this time, it's covering all of last month. which was basically entirely writing, and i did... pretty okay i think. i wrote about 23k words total, which is definitely not nanowrimo quantity but still a decent chunk.

this breaks down into:

• ~4.5k words of a hellhound knight encounter
• ~6k words of a minotaur miner encounter
• ~3.5k words of a slime guy encounter
• ~3.5k words of a big void snake quest / potential gangbang
• ~4k words of misc. voyeur/threesome mining barracks scenes, w/ minotaurs and/or slime guys

all of which still need some work; some of which need substantial work and revising of the event code to actually be able to be coded up. (specifically the barracks scenes, which would involve sending various encounters to the barracks and then watching them fuck, w/ different scenes depending on their internal variables -- but that requires some shuffling-around of encounter data that i can't do generally yet. this is the same reason the dryads you send to a farm don't end up at the farm with their random traits intact.)

i also took a few days to rework the map code. the expansion there isn't anywhere close to being finished but SHOULD let me make more complex maps: ones with a bunch of encounters close together, or encounters with related map tiles around them (dryads spawning in glades; clay men spawning on shores; bigger, more isolated chunks of 'factory'; blocks of 'hellhound territory', etc). this might include an entire separate "map" (mining tunnels beneath the swamp) for most of the new encounters to live in, but that would require me to slap together a whole mess of new tiles and some map storage/transition code.

oh yeah plus somebody mentioned there was an issue with the description code, and it was silently failing to generate any snake-type body descriptions. so i hotfixed that, a few days ago. hopefully it should be working now.

next week, probably: getting all this writing into actual code files, making lists of which scenes still need to be written ("does this event have a branch for this kind of body", etc), and then doing the remaining writing in a more structured environment. also continuing to work on the map code, since i'd really like to see more coherent maps arise.

the last dev post was a tie, so dev effort was likewise split. i made a lot of progress on both of these things, but neither of these systems has a lot of polish on it.

what this update includes:

• a bunch of added description lines, bringing the description quality up to (imo) "generally okay, mostly"
• all the underlying combat mechanics in place, and two basically-pointless combat encounters
• you get skills and stats based on yr body configuration! there are intended to be a LOT of skills, without much in the way of "oh you have to have such-and-such body to get this super OP skill", but that's half a balance thing and half a design thing of me adding dozens of entries to the skill list, so things might be kinda choppy for the moment. i don't think it's possible to end up with no skills; tell me if you get a body that doesn't have any. also, if you have any skill suggestions, feel free to tell me.

what this update doesn't include:

• any new nodes or new combinations of nodes (still no tail-cocks, horn-cocks, etc)
• balanced combat. wow is that combat not balanced.
• also, the existing scenes probably don't have branches for the new 'floating dick' body type, so if you run into scene errors with those that's a known bug. it'll be fixed whenever i next tweak the existing scenes.

the next poll is already ongoing, and it's currently a tie (between "more hellhound content, w/ the addition of feral & knight hellhounds" and "factory minotaurs + void snakes + maybe a corrosive goo slime-guy"), and i am ABSOLUTELY NOT gonna call another poll as a tie, so if you haven't voted yet now would be the time to, if either of those options sounds markedly better than the other. (or yknow vote for some of the other four options, since there could potentially be a swing for those too.)

still working on the next update -- which, for those of you not following the patreon, was a tie between "work on rpg elements: stats and skills and combat" and "improve the pc description generator". it's mostly done -- challenge events work, and i've done all the description tweaking i think i'll do. mostly what's left is a bunch of smaller details -- writing up big lists of possible skills the PC can have and how to get them, updating some UI to show possible stat boosts in the body-building view, making skills actually do something when they level up, writing damage formula, that kind of thing. well, and also making any real events that use the challenge system.

so, first of all, here's the demo of the challenge system, which is basically a proof-of-concept. so that's gonna be basically how "combat" will work -- and also things like searching or hunting or debating, when they come up. (this was a patreon backer reward a month or two back, but i figure since it's gonna be in the game i a week or two i can share it with everybody now.)

secondly, here are some actual in-game descriptions i wanna show off, to give people an idea of what most descriptions going forward should look like. the thing with the description generator is... i could easily do nothing but work on it and continue to make it better and better, since i have some lofty goals for the kind of stuff i want it to generate, but there's always other stuff to work on, like "actual game content", so eventually i gotta just say "this is good enough for now" and stop. so anyway, here are some good enough descriptions:

You're a naga, with your snake half sprawling out for a ways behind you, curled into chunky curves. You've got ruddy red-brown skin. Your lower body is covered in patterned green and yellow scales.

Unlike a proper snake, you've got fat sheath hanging along your underbelly, bloated with twin cocks, and beneath that you have an asshole, as a dusky seam between your scales. Your dicks are bloody red and fattest in the middle; they narrow to a point, without any clear cockhead, and your flesh mottles and fades to a patchy pale color near the sharp tips. You got knots at the base of your dicks; when you get hard, they inflate to nearly fist-sized lumps.

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You're a towering bestial minotaur, with thick bull legs. You've got ruddy red-brown skin. Your head and legs are covered in a stiff grey coat. You have thick tufts of hair along your shoulders and forearms.

Between your thighs, you got a sheathed dick and four fat low-hanging balls. Your cock is long and thin. Your sheath hangs down low from your body, swaying slowly from your movement. The tip of your dick is a gnarled lump of gristly flesh, extending out to a long narrow spike, dimly flexible.

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You're two floating snake dicks flopping through the air, conjoined at the base. You've got patterned green and yellow scales.

You have twin dicks and four fat balls.

(this one could use a lot of work, but look i've already spent more time than was really necessary making the new "floating dick" bodytype work.)

anyway so that's about it! expect the update to drop... uh, fairly soon? a week so, i think.

okay so update up.

the plan moving forward is to have more frequent, smaller updates, so ideally with each release taking less than a month. so the poll winner was "events (quests, plotlines, story stuff, giving you ways of getting items and nodes for real)", and this uh contains some barebones fulfillment of that. half of the dev time was spent just getting the event code into shape so that i could actually store event flags.

specific changes:

• there's an actual intro now!
• there are some items scattered around the map you can pick up
• the dryad and the flame demon encounters have a chance of being shops where you can buy node parts
• a new 'farm' location, with a very barebones quest (+ sex scene) attached
• a new 'gate of hell' location, that is mostly a huge exposition dump.

bonus tweaks:

• i made some extremely filler 'character portraits', just because the broken image was kinda getting annoying
• most of the encounters have actual talk options now, and most of the talk options include talking about other encounters you've met so far
• hamar-tabal and dyrad encounters have a different intro on revisiting them
• at least one of every event should generate now, unless you get really unlucky and end up with one of those maps where the factory is like nine tiles large.

that being said, the demo shop is still in there b/c there aren't any meaningfully-repeatable events that get you items

this is pretty minimal, but basically the current state of the map code constrains what i can do -- the goal is to section the map up into distinct subareas with chokepoints between them and intelligently place various kinds of encounters as blocks, and i totally can't do that yet, so until 'mess with map code' wins a poll probably all the game content is gonna be aimless wandering-around-an-open-area stuff like this.

though that brings me to the next subject, which is "what is this game even going to be like". i haven't really talked about what my goals are, and now the game's starting to come together i should probably... do that. so here's something of a projected gameplan for hell game plot/gameplay content.

(uh spoilers for the update, i guess)

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there's not really going to be a "main quest" as such; mostly what is going to happen is you're going to stumble across and embroil yourself in other people's drama already occurring. i'm drawing a lot of inspiration from the PSX game "legend of mana" here, a game where (effectively) you play as a dumb lackey/bodyguard who just happens to be tagging along while other people do important quests and resolve dramatic plotlines.

so a lot of quest stuff -- a lot of the game period -- is going to basically be... well, like that farmer/dryad interaction, only a lot moreso, and with mechanical bits and level ups etc in between.

some repeatable generic quests like: random errands of the dryad/farmer form that branch into two or three variations depending on the traits of the various actors; tasks that play out differently if you've done a different kind of task for somebody else; etc. imagine farms potentially having one of three different requests and also some other encounter involving you asking a farm for help and their response changing on what request they had and whether it's filled. stuff like that. IDEALLY with a bunch of variation within events, and a bunch of distinct events, and easy enough advancement that nobody has to repeat the same interactions over and over for grinding.

one-time plot-advancement quests: sometimes placed in the world ar locations a la the gate to hell, but most would probably be 'unlocked' by interacting with generic encounters enough -- one of the things i'm really gonna be aiming for is giving the generic encounters a "introduce yrself" option that will generate a unique name for them, and then effectively treat them as 'named characters' from then on (e.g., have them potentially show up in other interactions when relevant, or let the PC invite along an NPC (one at a time) and have them involved in various interactions, including sex scenes).

plotwise, i have some stuff sketched out involving 'factory boss' characters, who would each be unique characters, and some actual interactions with cerberus and the feral hellhounds. ideally this would evolve to include actual new locations opening up on the map, but like i said the map system as it currently exists definitely can't support that, so i'd have to make do with something simpler for a while at least.

some stuff upcoming, eventually: smuggling operations at the factory; 'sidequest' stuff involving the sobek sheuts and the as-of-yet-to-be-written big gross muscular zombies; stuff involving shadow mages and animate shadows, to go with the flame demons; the actual unicorns that are mentioned in dialog a few times but are not yet in game... basically a lot of the "plot" can't really be done yet b/c the stage is still very much being set. hence, uh, all the clumsy exposition in the few scenes currently written.

but yeah hey that's the plan!

and the updated scenes are up! that took longer than expected; i've been working on these eight events for the past, like, four months and i'm definitely getting sick of editing them and re-editing them. but hey, all done for now! also, the code i'm using to put together scene branches is actually starting to come together, so that will be one less thing i have to handle when writing future events.

if yr giving on patreon, the development poll should be up there. in the mean time, i'll probably work on boring system stuff. maybe finally getting that title card and options menu i've been saying i'll do.

for the list of things included in this update: scroll down to the last post, i guess. hm, having already posted that i don't really have much to say.

there are still some weird issues (some of the naga scenes equivocate about whether you have a cloaca or an asshole in certain cases, since i changed my mind how i wanted to represent that halfway through and figured i could fix that later on instead of delaying the update even further) but for the most part this should just work. tell me if you get any busted blocking or just general wrongness; i'll be fixing small things here and there going forward.

okay, so all the scenes have been fully written and marked up with all their changes, and now the thing remaining is for me to (completely) code them up and then test them with a bunch of different bodies before actually releasing the update.

the additions here include things like:

• snake/worm scenes for the ganzer worker and clay man encounters
• a different hellhound oral scene w/ some better blocking
• restructuring the hamar-tabal encounter so 1. the fisting scene (which has been rewritten) is a lot more reachable and 2. so the handful of he-tops branches are more obviously there
• there's some cloaca-fucking scenes to replace ass-fucking ones, if you happen to have a body where that makes sense (currently only nagas and snakes)
• general parametricity: some basic substitutions for things like feet vs. hooves / teeth vs. fangs / hands vs. paws; some more advanced branching on things like "what kind of skin/fur do you have on your head/chest/legs/etc" or "do you have a muzzle" or "what kind of dick do you have"

notably not including:

• if you don't have a head, you won't be able to do oral scenes, but probably there are still gonna be references to you kissing people and/or makeout scenes. sorry that's complex & would extend this update even further, for only a tiny payoff of "people who want to play as a headless monster". ditto w/ having two heads. these will get addressed at some point but not right now.
• cock length! scenes that vary on cock length are still not a thing, since that requires a bunchhhh of different variants. it's coming, but not in this particular update. plus, there's not a lot of ways to meaningfully change your cock length yet, so.
• cock plurality. generally abstract touching will properly deal with having multiple dicks, but once penetration happens the scenes start silently using one dick. a lot of the reason why this isn't handled is that it interacts a lot with the above; cock size + cock count opens up so many potential branches for even the most pedestrian sex.
• knotting scenes. there's currently some very patchy stuff written for things like knots or medial rings or different kinds of cockheads, but it's not at all uniform across all the scenes, and what's there isn't particularly in-depth.

i don't know precisely how long this will take, but probably not, y'know, ages. another week or two, maybe? i still have a very vague sense of how long any of this will take me to complete.