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):