Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of Adult Ages,
My first monthly update on Scarlet Moon 2! Ooh, it feels all fresh and new and exciting.
Anyway, I’ve been working steadily on the second half of Episode 1. The episode kind of got away from me, and will likely end up a fair bit more elaborate than I expected. Don’t expect this to continue! The mechanics I’m using are proving to be a bit of a dream to work with, and writing these characters feels comfortable, familiar, and relatively easy. Also fun. I’m having a lot of fun.
Anyway, there are two main paths in the second half of the episode depending on whether Prometheus and Poseidon successfully stole the Big Ruby in the first half or not. I’ve finished the path where Prometheus and Poseidon successfully steal the Ruby. So now I need to work on the path where your team successfully kept them from doing so. I expect that path to be much shorter and less elaborate, but seeing as how in the first half you get an entire bridge sequence if you defeated Prometheus and Poseidon, I think it will roughly balance out. Also, players are more likely to fail anyway, so I think giving the failure path a bit more love is reasonable.
It’ll probably take at least a month to write up the rest of the content, plus I’ll need to do some debugging and editing and the like. So don’t expect anything before end of September at the earliest.
I’m also still wrestling with how I want to handle the romances. I think I know how I want to introduce and handle Midnight in a non-romantic context. But I don’t want to erase the romances from your character’s backstory either. Some of my favorite scenes from the first game are in Midnight’s romance, and I don’t really want to “lose” them. The question is whether I can work the romances in in a way that will minimize their burden.
David won’t be showing up again, regardless. He was conceived of back when I imagined the game being a bit more like Silver Age Spider-Man: a single heroine (plus her sister whispering in her ear), and the game spends as much time on her mundane life as it does on superheroics. However, that isn’t really what happened. The game ended up converging on more of a DC Justice League style with a team of heroes and a strong emphasis on the superheroics, with perhaps a scene or two of their mundane lives thrown in here and there. There really isn’t room for David in that kind of setup.
On the other hand, both Anklyana and Midnight are heavily involved in the superheroics. So it would be relatively easy to have them involved regardless of romance. It’s a lot easier to introduce slight variations on a scene depending on whether you’re romancing a character or not than it is to write entirely different paths based on it. I can also, relatively easily, have little transition scenes. Maybe PC and Natalie have their date interrupted by a bad guy if they’re dating, instead of being at home or whatever. The PC can be hurrying back home at the end of the episode because she has a date with Tania if she’s in a romance, and because she has homework that needs to get done otherwise.
So, yeah. I may have a little scene with Natalie in the second half where the player will have the opportunity to tell the game “I was romancing Natalie in the first game.” We will see.
AKA
Hey everyone,
So an Anonymous fan has encouraged me to make a post giving some insight into what I’m working on right now, and I figured, hey why not. It’s been almost a year since I last posted, and I imagine most people have given up on hearing much else from me (I’ve like 90% given up myself!).
So, anyway, I’ve spent the last year mostly not working on spanking game stuff, but only mostly. I have been dicking around with different ideas. Some I wrote up a few initial passages, some never got past the “this could be a fun game premise” musings.
Starting last November, and then very sporadically since then I’ve started working on a sequel to Scarlet Moon. Scarlet Moon 2: Eclipse Rising.
I’m on my third(?) significant rewrite of the first big scene of the first episode (equivalent in scope to the chase at the start of Episode 1 of Scarlet Moon) as I try to feel out where the characters are now, what kind of stories I want to write, and what makes for interesting-but-relatively-easy-to-manage game mechanics.
That being said, it’s started to slowly pick up steam. I’ve got about 2500 lines written. For context, the first day of episode 1 in the first game was about 3500 lines. But line count is only a very rough comparison, I’d say I’m probably around halfway done, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less.
Three developments have helped spur my return to Scarlet Moon.
First, I missed them. Their story is by no means finished, and they were a joy to write. Some, like Bright, were really only starting to develop when the first game ended. I’d love to see what additional escapade Juliana drags them into.
Second, I was playing around with the avatar generation features on spicychat. Basically, spicychat’s image generator for profile pics is an impressively good pinup generator. I wanted to see if I could create our intrepid heroines. They came out wonderfully, and it helped inspire me to return to their world. I’ll probably toss in some AI pin ups of various heroines and villains as we meet them, though don’t expect anything more elaborate than that. AI image generation is *terrible* at being consistent, and trying to do anything more elaborate than a pinup is going to be tricky and time consuming (and even generating these pin ups can take a while. For every good image, there’s dozens that are just straight up bad and incoherent).
Thirdly, I hit on a game mechanic that I think has the potential to be interesting, help inspire ideas for choices players can make, but shouldn’t be too onerous to make impactful. The mechanics work like this:
You have four stats: power, craftiness, charm, and heroism. Power, craftiness, and charm are your main stats, heroism is special.
The game will periodically give you a stat check, where you’ll have to choose between 2-3 options, each one tied to a stat, just like in Scarlet Moon. When you make that choice, a d6 is rolled and the result added to your stat. If the result is greater than or equal to 6, you pass. Otherwise you fail.
Not so different from the stat checks in the first game. But, this is where things get different. Regardless of whether you pass or fail, the stat you chose goes *down*, and one other stat goes up. If you pass, then in addition to whatever good things happen in the story, you get to choose one of the other two main stats to improve. If you fail, then something bad happens in the story, and the
game chooses one of your other two main stats to improve at random.
So if you have the choices:
Power: Punch him in the face.
Craftiness: Trick him into slipping on a banana peel.
Charm: Convince him to surrender.
And you choose Power: Punch him in the face. then the game will roll a check d6+Power >= 6. Power will then go down by 1 (can’t go below zero). If you pass, you can choose either Craftiness or Charm to increase. If you fail, the game will choose one of Craftiness or Charm to increase.
Heroism is special. Heroism will only improve when you make especially “heroic” decisions in the game. These decisions might be stat checks, or they might have a guaranteed outcome. Regardless of the outcome, if you make a heroic choice, you gain a heroism point.
Later, if you have at least one Heroism point, you will sometimes get an additional “Heroic” choice. If you succeed, heroism will go down by 1, and you can pick one of your three main stats to improve. If you fail, heroism still goes down by 1, and the game will pick one of your three main stats to improve.
So, most of the time you’re shuffling your stats around. There are two ways to improve your total stat count: Banking and spending heroism points, and picking stat choices with a stat at 0. Note you can’t choose a heroism choice if you have 0 heroism.
Of course, heroism generally means “absurdly reckless” and picking a stat choice with a stat at zero means you only have a 1/6 chance of passing. So my hope is that the game mechanics will incentivize players to occasionally do something that is liable to get them in trouble and spanked (the whole point!) to improve their stat pool. But at the same time, passing feels good, and is how you get successful outcomes for your character, so players will hopefully also generally want to do the things they’re currently good at.
Note that were won’t be any CRPG-style combat in this game. I definitely don’t have the time or mental energy for that. Rather, fights will be action scenes written in prose, and will be where you’ll have the majority of your stat checks. In this first scene, you’ll have to succeed on two out of three stat checks to win. A fairly tall order, since your stats will start out quite low (1 in each stat), but should get easier as you play if you’re smart about how you build your stat pool.
All that being said, don’t get your hopes up too much. There’s no guarantee I’ll finish this first episode, and even if I do, I don’t know if I’ll be able to write more. Treat this as vaporware for now, barely more than a sparkle in my eye.
Oh, and here are the images I generated of our intrepid superheroines:
and the two villains they’ll be contending with in the first episode (assuming it sees the light of day):
New version uploaded with a fix to a crash in Episode 5 Day 2. Thanks VikingSpanko for pointing it out!
Also, don’t forget I’m currently putting out a call for ideas for Aspects for the player to choose from in Mischievous Misfortune: Aspects of Mischieovus Misfortune
AKA
New version uploaded that fixes a crash when fighting Buzzsaw (any Buzzsaw) with the average AI.
New version has been uploaded with a fix for a crash when meeting Bright in Episode 6 while using the Average AI. Get it at the downloads section!
Many thanks to the fan who e-mailed me with the bug report!
Got a couple of bugfixes here, including one for a crash waaay back in Episode 5 when you’re exploring a house (hopefully!), a crash in Episode 7 during your first encounter with the villain, and a bug that was causing the game to display the male character clothing text even when playing a female. Relatedly, there was a bug where I wasn’t correctly displaying the new option: clothingstyle.
So, we have a new option now: clothingstyle. This allows the player to tell the game which gendered set of clothing to put on when putting on clothing automatically. So for example, when the game automatically puts the player in their work clothes, if the setting is “genderbased” (the default), a female PC will wear a skirt, a male PC will wear pants. However, if clothingstyle is set to “female” then the PC will equip a skirt even if they are male. If clothingstyle is set to “male” the PC will equip pants even if they are female.
Furthermore, as a part of these bug fixes, I got the transcript-generating code working again, so we now have a transcript up that contains the last episode of content. Enjoy!
Another bugfix version, this time for an old bug in Episode 1 that was causing the game to stall if you wore any variety of jeans.
Many thanks to Beragon56 for the bug report!
A new version up with a bugfix for a crash reported by Wildfire on the route you take if you lose the first battle.
New version with some small bug fixes pointed out by Wildfire. No crashes, just a couple of typos, and one inconsistency.
Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages,
Just posted a new version with a fix for an old, but relatively obscure bug. Basically, saving was broken for the first day of episode 1. My saving logic relies on the event names following a specific format, and the first day of episode 1 followed a different format (because it was the very first content I wrote, and I didn’t know what I was doing).
I didn’t want to change the event names, because I didn’t want to break people’s saves (save compatibility is a big deal for me). I thought I’d added logic to account for it, but I guess it doesn’t work. Since saving on the first day of episode 1 apparently doesn’t work anyway, I figured save compatibility wasn’t a problem, so I went and fixed episode 1 day 1 to line up with the rest of the game.
I loaded some saves from later in the game, and they all seemed to work fine, so it shouldn’t have any impact on saves past episode 1.