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?
I generally find non-human body types most interesting. Especially since you put quite a bit of effort into describing them, and how they would impact sex. TFs with an unusual number of limbs are my jam. I've also played as more conventional body types, since you put so much effort into describing them that they're also interesting. Transformation by itself I find neither arousing nor off-putting, but I strongly appreciate authors (such as yourself) who take the time to give detailed descriptions of the characters and their experience together. Since Tf porn *must* include a description of the change, I find that the genre has a minimum-standard of writing that I just don't find with other fetishes, even the ones I find sexy in and of themselves.
tl;dr: evocative descriptions of bodies and sex scenes are what I'm here for.
I think the tfs that add more exotic stuff to the dick and balls are the most interesting to me. For body types, the ability to make yourself into a musclegut, and generally just customize how big your bits/body parts can get is really nice. Customization-wise, I hope to more equipment wearing, like the with the ball-chain cock cage you can equip, so more sex toys would be awesome.
I personally find Transformation itself to be arousing and enjoy descriptions of it. In terms of bodies, I like exotic and inhuman kinds of bodies. I particularly like the snake body in the current game, but I would like to see more exotic body types like something insectile with its genitals located at the end of its abdomen or maybe being able to be something similar to a tentacle monster/octopus.
Oh hey, nice to hear people are enjoying all the different pc body types; one of my frequent thoughts during writing the initial encounters was like "yeah sure humanoid/hellhound or snake/humanoid could work, but how many people are really gonna want to see snake/hellhound?" but I guess the answer is: a reasonable amount of you :V
To vaguely respond to all three comments at once:
One of the major goals for the PC description generator is to have something that's less... madlibby than most descriptions are, and with more of a focus on a coherent through-line of prose. So this turns out to mean having a lot of kind of interstitial transition lines, or lines that only show up sometimes, rather than forcing everybody to read things like "you have one human asshole on your human ass". So that level of detail should only improve as more stuff gets added in. (Hopefully!)
I've been wanting to have _some_ kind of build/tone options, if only so I can start throwing in some adjectives in the descriptions and sex scenes, but I haven't puzzled out exactly how I want to do it -- the simplest way would be to have some nodes like [BUILD]»fat [BUILD]»muscular [BUILD]»lanky etc, and then just being able to attach them to your body (or maybe even specific limbs), but that seems a little less... elegant than I'd like. But that's definitely something I'd like to add in one way or another.
There are gonna be at the very least some additional 'weapon' nodes, though those tend towards the violent -- the [WEAPON]»spear attachment line is something like "you've got innumerable spear-shafts stuck into your flanks and back, and your sides are streaked with dried blood". I'm not sure how many other 'equipment'-type attachments there are gonna be, since there's not gonna be equipment as such. But more stuff like the chains is definitely _possible_; I'm not exactly sure where I really want to draw the line at gear nodes.
I've been waffling on adding in more fundamental body types, in part because that would mean going back and adding in separate branches for all existing events. Or rather, I'm all for going back and doing that, I just don't really know how the player distribution falls, in terms of wanting new encounters vs. wanting new bodytypes; that'd be something to put on some future dev poll, I guess. It'd be really nice to be able to take the time to add in some kind of insectoid body with a proper abdomen ovipositor/cock, and maybe even proper spider/scorpion arachnid-style bodies. There's actually already a 'wyvern' body type recognized in the code (two legs, no arms, two+ wings), and that's most of the reason why [WINGS] hasn't made an appearance, since I haven't written any of the wyvern scene branches.
Writing content is a bit of a balancing act -- there's a lot of overlap in the humanoid / quadruped / centaur / naga branches, so it's not super difficult to write those, but things like the snake/worm body or floating heads or dicks end up needing a huge amount of branch-specific writing. Octopus might be a little too distinct to be practical -- octopus-headed characters though, or prehensile tentacle cocks, sure. It's kind of the curse of the body system I've constructed that there's no real way to let people have octopus tentacles or octopus heads without also having to support people being giant octopi (or some kind of octopus naga). Which is fine, just, whoops then I gotta go write a dozen different octopus sex scenes.
Anyway yeah, hey, thanks for the responses!
Thanks for taking the time to write such a thorough reply, xax. One thing I forgot to mention my first comment is that I'm happy Hell Game doesn't have much in the way of combat/classic rpg stats. I've yet to play a porn game where the combat was an interesting part of the experience. At best, it becomes a way to determine who becomes the rapist and who becomes the victim. Since HG doesn't have rape (which is itself a breath of fresh air), I think combat would be rather vestigial.
I definitely take your point re: the amount of work involved with new bodytypes. Already I'm amazed at the time and effort you've put into those variations, both the ones the player can have and the ones the NPCs have. I can definitely see how it would be more time-efficient to let the NPCs be the ones with the most divergent body types, since then you "only" need to write scenes for that one NPC, rather than for every fuckable NPC in the game.
I definitely think you've done a good job making player descriptions less mad-libby than in other porn games. Frankly, sometimes the descriptions in other games might as well go "you are shaped like yourself, as tall as you are tall and as long as you are long. You have a cock shaped like your cock, and it is appropriately large/small/medium for any encounter you may have." Which is very non-indicative and also kinda funny. And when porn ends up funny rather than sexy, you know someones made a mistake somewhere :-) You don't fall into that trap, and your writing is better for it.
i think the Ideal tf stuff in my opinion is less recognizably animalistic and closer to some of the truly excellent creatures you've put into this ... like, this is all just daydreaming, because i know it would probably be Extremely difficult to implement, but getting to play something that's like that excellently messed up slime you put in would be awesome. i'm always a little disappointed that i can't just mess around as some weird disembodied head or vague spirit because that'd be fun. But again. like i said. i know that would be nigh impossible to really do esp at this stage of the game
i just love the weird stuff. but honestly i tend to pay less attention to my player character in situations like this than i do to the other one, aside from like 'do i have hands' and 'is there a dingus on me'