Monthly Archives: February 2015
Pretty Painless

Spankers and Spankees,

Welcome to the fancy-shmancy new home of Pandemonium Cycle: The Potion Wars! It is very fancy. And shmancy. Anyway, the blogspot blog is still going to be there, polluting the internet, but all new updates will show up here. Feel free to explore, and let me know if anything broke in the move.

I’ll post a longer post later this weekend. I have a screenshot of the new automap, and a few thoughts on the future of first-person vs. third-person, and thoughts on how to overhaul the combat mechanics in future episodes.

The Prude Police Get Spanked and Put in the Corner

In case you haven’t seen it:

http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/27/technology/google-porn-blogger/

Still gonna shift to a WordPress site, though. If only because

a) I don’t trust Google not to pull this shit again at some point, and
b) a WordPress site will give me a bit more flexibility, since WordPress is geared towards generic sites, while blogger is geared to (surprise surprise!) blogs.

The Prude Police Strike Again

So I just got an e-mail from Blogger, informing me of changes to their content policy. Apparently, they are no longer allowing publicly available blogs to contain “sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video.”  Because their “content policies play an important role in maintaining a positive experience for you, the users.” And since America has a royally fucked up culture where brutal violence is OK, but men and women enjoying sex is not, “sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video” don’t contribute to a positive experience.

The new policy will go into affect March 23.

Now, this doesn’t affect me, yet because I don’t have any sexually explicit images. However, what this means is that if some artist toddles along, really likes my work, and offers to draw a few pictures (like titlecards for my episodes) for me, and those titlecards contain any nudity,  I can’t post them on this blog. Also, since my game would contain those images, I’m not sure I’d be allowed to post a link to my game, either.

Furthermore, I went digging a bit more deeply into their current content policies, and found this gem:

Adult Content: Do not distribute sexually explicit content or graphic depictions of nudity. Do not drive traffic to commercial pornography sites.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking my “content” is pretty sexually explicit. Which basically means that I’m at best skating on thin ice, at worst I’m already in violation of their content policy. So, since I a) don’t want to support a service that supports the “sex is bad” bullshit, b) don’t like violating contracts that I sign, and c) don’t want to wake up one day only to discover that my blog has been locked down because some prude stumbled upon and flagged it as being in violation of Blogger’s terms of service, I’m going to be moving to a different service.

I’ll probably shift over to a WordPress driven site, since  their terms of service don’t seem to make any mention of prohibiting pornographic content. Basically, they just don’t want any hate-spewing blogs or websites loaded with viruses. I’m going to try to see if I can get it set up this weekend, and I’ll make an announcement here when I do. It’ll be pretty bare at first, but I do plan on shifting the content currently here to that site (copy-paste is my friend!). And I will be posting all new content there.

Sorry about the inconvenience. I’m probably making a mountain out of a molehill, but I’ve heard too many stories about websites taken down randomly and without notice by people trying to score points with the “Think of the Children!” crowd to risk it.

Modifying the Stat Gaining Mechanic

Spankers and Spankees,

We’re still cranking away. Bonemouth has gotten most of the text written for the in-combat spanking text of the Episode 1 enemies, and I believe I’ve successfully implemented a simpler, one-round version of the new spanking mechanic (I still have to debug it). In terms of the Episode 1 content, just waiting on Emily (though apparently she’s super busy IRL right now, so bear with us).

I’ve also stolen some time to play Lords of Xulima, an old-school RPG in the style of the old Might and Magic games that came out recently. Good game. I’d highly recommend it if you’re into old-school RPG’s. It’s challenging, but I don’t find it super frustrating either, and it has a lot more convenience features than old RPG’s. I definitely think I’ll add it to my shortlist of potential Let’s Spank games after I’ve finished Etrian Odyssey.

Anyway, as I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve made a lot of changes to a lot of things in the game. Today, I’m going to go into detail about one of those things: the level-up mechanic.

I’ve been thinking about the level up mechanic lately, as well as people’s early experiences with it in Episode 1, and I’ve grown less and less satisfied with it. In particular, I don’t like the randomness of the whole thing. This leads to several problems. First, the more important randomness is, the less control the player has, the more frustrating it is. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any randomness, but I think that it should be minimal, and there should be ways for the player to rig it (say through spells, or special abilities).

However, the player has very little control over the randomness surrounding stat changes. Yes, the player can improve the chances of increasing a stat by using it often in combat, however the chances of a character gaining a stat resets after each combat. Therefore, the player is encouraged to drag out combat as much as possible (say by spamming status spells, or purposefully using physical attacks on a warrior, and magic attacks on a spellcaster). This is stupid. In actual combat you want to defeat your enemy quickly and decisively. The longer they’re fighting, the more chances they have to defeat you. Any game mechanic that encourages this kind of inanity is a bad mechanic and needs to be fixed.

Second, it’s hard as balls to balance properly. This can be seen in the boss fight at the end of Episode 1. Either the boss goes down easy peasy, it’s a fun, closely-matched fight, or you get steamrolled, all depending on how graceful the RNG god was. Initially I handwaved that away by saying “Meh. The boss fight is optional.” However, getting steamrolled, especially if you want to win, is tremendously frustrating. Meanwhile, steamrolling is equally frustrating if you want to lose. So, the boss battles should be closely fought. First, there’s a lot more uncertainty that way, making it much more fun. Second, a closely fought battle shouldn’t require more than two or three attempts to win (unless you’re really really really unlucky). Third, it’s still easy for you to purposefully lose without breaking character. It’s one thing for a person to make a small mistake that costs the battle. It happens all the time. It’s another to have your party just sit around and wave at their opponent because that’s the only way to lose. With all the randomness, creating those kinds of closely fought battles is nigh impossible. However, if I make things more deterministic, then I have a much better shot.

Third, the randomness encourages grinding. I don’t want to encourage grinding. It should be an option of course. We all have different playstyles. But in my opinion, any time the game forces you to grind, the game has failed. I should never, ever, ever be forced to stop advancing, and fight the same fights over and over again. For any reason. This is a game. It’s supposed to be fun and challenging (and sexy). Not tedious. Never tedious.

However, I don’t want to use levels and experience either. I do still want to maintain the basic “stats improve based on my actions in combat” mechanic. For one thing, it feels more organic to me than leveling. In the real world, if you run long distance you develop a very strong cardiovascular system, strong legs, and thicker bones. However, your muscles don’t grow much. If you swing a baseball bat your shoulder and back muscles develop, but your cardiovascular system does not. So, I think that it makes sense that in a world where fight-or-flight triggers a surge of magic that grants you superhuman strength and speed, then a particular strategy of combat (one based on stabbing someone with a spear, or unleashing hellish fireballs, or grappling and throwing your opponent) would develop your body’s magic system in a way that make you better at those things.

So instead, I’ve implemented a change based on different types of “action points.” Each action in combat nets you some amount of some type of action point. When you achieve enough action points, you gain a stat point. For example:

Suppose you have 5 dexterity. Then, you need to accumulate 10 “dexterity action points” to increase dexterity by one. You get dexterity action points as follows:

1. Attacking with your weapon gives you two dexterity action points.
2. Grappling your opponent gives you one dexterity action point.
3. Throwing your opponent gives you one dexterity action point.
4. Getting attacked by a physical weapon gives you one dexterity action point.

Furthermore, these action points carry over across battles. So if in one battle you attack twice and get attacked once, then at the end you have 5 dexterity action points. In the second battle, suppose you attack three times and get hit in the face with a firebolt twice. Then at the end of the battle you’ve accumulated 11 dexterity action points and two talent action points. Since you have more than 10 dexterity action points, you gain a point in dexterity, and have 1 dexterity action point left over.

Now you have 6 dexterity. So you need 12 dexterity action points to gain a point of dexterity.

I like this for a few reasons. First, because action points carry over from battle to battle, fights that don’t give you stat gains are no longer a waste of time, health and mana, so there’s less incentive to drag out the battle needlessly. You can of course still do so, and there’s nothing stopping you. However, the only way to completely discourage that would be to put restrictions on how many stats you gain per fight. I’m loathe to do that, because that makes it harder to adapt to a new situation. I’d much rather have a system that can be abused, but still allows players to adapt to unforeseen problems, then one that is harder to abuse, but makes it easier for unexpected obstacles to completely screw the player.

Second, your stat points grow more slowly as you get stronger. This is important for both story and gameplay reasons.

1. Story: I may need to be able to explain how your character in the endgame can hold her own against people with much more experience. By having stats grow more slowly as they get higher, it provides some in-world justification for this. Now, the rate of growth in game will probably still be too fast for this to be a perfect justification, but I don’t need total gameplay-story integration. All I need is to keep the gameplay-story separation small enough to stay within people’s willing suspension of disbelief.

2. Gameplay: I want a player who balances their stat gains to gain roughly 3-5 stats per stat per episode. However, the dungeons are going to get longer as we get further. So by slowing stat growth, I can have larger and larger dungeons while maintaining the 3-5 points per episode. This should also (hopefully) keep one-stat specializations from growing out of control, ensuring a jack-of-all-trades route is no more challenging than specializing.

Third, I also plan on removing random encounters, and replacing them with scripted (in the programmer’s sense, not necessarily the story sense) battles, and enemy-spawning squares for people who want to grind (I’ll discuss my rationale behind this in a later post). By having a fixed number of battles, and a fixed gauge for improving stats, stat growth will be much more deterministic. This will make it a lot easier for me to gauge how strong to make the bosses for the kinds of evenly-matched battles that I want.

Of course this leaves two questions:

1. What about health and mana?

2. What about spells?

For the first one, suppose the player has 10 health. Then, in order to gain health, the player needs to lose at least 10 health.  Then the player gains some base amount of health, plus a bonus. However, this is not all at once. For example, suppose in one round of one battle, the player loses 7 health. So, the player casts Heal on the next round to restore all 7 points, then loses another 2 health, then defeats their opponent. So at  the end of this battle, the player has 8 health, but has lost 9 health. Now suppose in the second fight, the player had lost 8 health. Then, the player lost 17 health. Furthermore, suppose (for now) that the player gains a base health of 5 each time their health increases. So, the player gains 5 + 7 = 12 health. The 7 points are because she went 7 points over the minimum needed to gain health.

Now, what should the base health gain be? Obviously it can’t be a fixed number. 5 health is a huge jump in the beginning, but it will be insignificant at the end. So the number needs to scale. I think the base number should be 25% (rounded up to the nearest point) of the player’s current health. So, if the player has 50 health, the player gains 13 points plus overflow the next time their health goes up. If they have 10 health, they gain 3 points plus overflow. That’s enough to be significant, but not so much that a single gain in health will suddenly make your battles easy as pie.

Mana however is a little bit trickier, because the player has control over how much mana they use by casting cheaper or more expensive spells. So if I used the same system as health for mana, then players would be encouraged to only use the most expensive spells, which is stupid. If you’re in a real fight, and you know that you might have to face more fights soon after, you’ll want to try to conserve your energy as much as possible. This also means that the downside of the combat spells (their expense) wouldn’t actually be a downside. Sure they’re more expensive, but a combat spell specialist would have so much more mana than say a status spell specialist that they’d both be able to cast the same number of spells anyway. In fact, the combat specialist would come out ahead, because she could cast more status spells than the status specialist! So clearly we need a different system for mana.

I think the best solution for mana is to tie it to your gains in Talent. Everytime you gain a point in Talent, your mana increases by 150%. So, if you have 50 mana before you gain a point of Talent, then after you gain a point of talent you have 50 * 1.5 = 75 mana.

Now, for gaining spells. Every time you cast a spell you gain spellTier + 1 type points for the spells of that type. So if you cast Firebolt, you gain 0 + 1 = 1 combat points. Meanwhile, it takes (spellTier) * 10 type points to learn a spell of a particular tier and a particular type. The only exception to this are tier 0 spells. Those take 5 points to learn. So Icebolt takes 5 combat points to learn, while Lightning Bolt takes 1 * 10 = 10 combat points.

Learning a spell consumes points. So you can’t learn Lightning Bolt 5 casts after learning Icebolt. You learn it 10 points after learning Icebolt.

And that’s my new level up mechanic in a nutshell. In short, the idea is to create a deterministic system with a clear progression that still has the same feel as the random stat gain mechanic, without the frustrations and wild oscillations in difficulty associated with it.

Etrian Odyssey Episode 3

Spankers and Spankees,

Etrian Odyssey Episode 3: Rage is posted.

Having successfully mapped the first floor, the party make their first foray into the second floor, and come face to face with murderous herbivores. Will they survive? Or will a certain Siren’s recklessness get everyone killed?

Also, getting some fun bugs from my beta testers (apparently there’s something wonky going on with the new level up mechanics. Joy.). So progress is happening on the Potion Wars front.

My Script Works!

Spankers and Spankees,

This is not this week’s post. I’m just really excited because my LaTeX->Python translation script works. Not only does it work, but the logic actually makes something approximating sense, the code is something approximating elegant, and I can extend and modify it without too much hassle (I’ve already had to extend it a few times)!

As proof, check out this screen shot. This is the first block of text in episode 2 that you’ll see if your character was a bit overwhelmed by the bar at the end of episode 1:

Of course, the text will likely change a bit between now and when the game gets posted (writing is rewriting after all). But I’m so excited. Been working on that wretched translation script for months, and the damned thing looks like it’s finally working.

February Update

Spankers and Spankees,

No Etrian Odyssey episode for you guys today, sorry. I’ve got most of it written, but I still need to write the fallout, and edit it, and all of that’s not happening tonight.

I would have had it written (though possibly not edited) by now, except rather than spending the morning working on it, I spent the morning tweaking the latest version of Potion Wars so that I could get it to my beta testers today. I’ll shoot for having the next Etrian Odyssey episode ready for next Sunday. Again, sorry about the delay, but I’m busier these days than I was for most of January.

Anyway, I’ve made big progress on Potion Wars in the past few weeks. All that’s left to be written for the first act of Episode 2 are a scene by Emily involving a subplot with Carrie, and a scene with Ildri that Jeffrey is writing. My plan for this week is to run my translate script through the content I have now, and make sure the translation works on non-trivial input. Since it certainly doesn’t (code never works the first time you run it on non-trivial input), I predict a week of very frustrating bug fixing ahead of me. But suck is life.

I’m hoping to get a new version of Potion Wars out complete with new content by the end of February unless my writers are too busy to write and don’t tell me (*cough* Jeffrey I haven’t heard anything from you *cough*) or we run into a lot of problems during beta testing. It’d be awesome if we could get something out sooner, but this is software. Software always takes longer than you plan. Always.

I’ve also made a lot of changes to the level up mechanics of the game to make them much less deterministic. I’ll post a big-ass blogpost describing the new mechanics in a few weeks (I want to give my beta testers a chance to run through the first episode a few times, so that we can tweak things as necessary). Hopefully between the new more deterministic level up mechanics, and the elimination of random encounters, the first episode will be much more balanced.

Oh did I mention? I’ve also eliminated random encounters and replaced them with static battles. Most of the static battles are invisible on the map, but they have a fixed number, type and gender of enemies, and once you win them, they don’t refresh. Note that you will still have the enemy-generating squares however, in case you find yourself in need of some grinding. I’m going to try to balance the game so that that isn’t necessary, but I am also trying to make the game challenging. So you might find yourself needing to grind if you’re not much of an RPG player, but you don’t want to lose all the boss fights. Plus, some of you may just enjoy being ridiculously overpowered.

One final thing: I’ve ditched the whole dinosaurs thing. I do still think that the Jurassic period makes a perfect setting for a fantasy game, but alas dinosaurs make things more fantastical, which clashes with the more grounded tone of the main story. There are enough tonal clashes as it is between the story and the spankings. I don’t need any more. Perhaps a future, more lighthearted game will be set in a Jurassic period with people.