Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
Sorry I’m so late in posting. Been kinda ignoring Scarlet Moon lately and obsessively playing roguelikes (Angband and Tales of Maj’Eyal FOREVER!). I needed a break from all the spanking, so decided to explore other avenues to satisfy my masochistic needs. But I’m back at it. I’ve got the next episode planned and I’ve started working on it. So, yay for progress!
But that’s not the true purpose of this post. After a lot of consideration, I’ve decided to make Robin Pearce’s book Master of the Manor available. I have very strong misgivings about distributing someone else’s work like this, but Pearce has unfortunately gone dark, and they’d already had Master of the Manor available for free on their website before they went dark. So I’m mostly restoring the status quo.
Besides, Master of the Manor is an incredible game. For as long as I’ve been able to write an “Hello World” program, I’ve thought about creating a spanking video game. I tried several times over the years, never really getting very far. I never really had a good sense of what a good spanking game would like. What kind of format would keep the game reasonably scoped for a personal project, but still be rich enough to be properly considered a game?
Then I found Master of the Manor. A CYOA adventure with statistics, special abilities and a keyword system for remembering past actions. An incredibly rich, immersive and *interactive* game that would be dead simple to implement in a program. Almost from the day I finished my first play through of Master of the Manor I started working on what would eventually become Potion Wars, where I learned a lot of lessons that led to Scarlet Moon. This game inspired me, and one of the greatest tragedies of Pearce going dark is that people no longer have access to it.
So I’m making the game available in two formats. One, is the classic Epub format, that should be readable on any EBook or EBook program:
Master of the Manor – EPUB
.
The other is in plain text: Master of the Manor – Txt
I’m a plain text junkie. It lets me read the game in my terminal, and it’s very easy to search, take in-line notes if necessary, etc. Besides, Master of the Manor doesn’t do any anything fancy. So you don’t lose anything by reading it in plaintext vs. epub, except perhaps it’s not as easy to put on an EBook Reader (I wouldn’t know, I don’t own one).
One problem with the version that Pearce released as an Ebook was that it didn’t include any links. So you’ve got to do a lot of page flipping. I’ve included a special tags file with the text version that’s been generated by ctags. If you know what ctags is and how to use it, cool. Don’t read any further. Just download the text version, open it up in your favorite editor and take advantage of all that tags goodness to jump directly to page numbers.
If you don’t know what ctags is well then read on. Ctags is an old, venerable program that lets you build an index of one or more files containing plain text. It was originally built to make it easier to jump through software code, but it can be used for any plain text (I use it to navigate Scarlet Moon’s story content for example). I’ve generated an index of all the page numbers, so with the right editor if you put your cursor on/in front of a page number, like this: Turn to page |34, then with a simple keystroke you can jump immediately to page 34. No manual page flipping!
If you want to do that, follow these direcctions:
1. Download and install the Atom Text Editor (as an aside: I think Atom’s a bloated POS, but it’s the only text editor on Windows that isn’t Vim or Emacs *and* can natively read tags from an externally generated tags file).
2. Download and unzip the plain text version of Master of the Manor.
3. Open `master.txt` with Atom.
4. Read the book with your hand down your pants/skirt (VERY important).
5. When you reach a directive like `Turn to page 34`, place the cursor just before `34`.
6. Press Ctrl+Shift+r (I *think* it’s Cmd+Shift+r on a Mac).
7. Type 34 in the popup that appears.
8. Select the result that has just 34 on a line by itself.
Voila, you’ve now jumped to page (really section) 34.
If this is too many steps (it kinda is, really), then just read the plain text file and use your editor/Word’s search capability. Or download the epub and flip manually/use your epub reader’s search capability. Whatever makes it easiest for you to enjoy the spanky goodness.
As a final note, I will *not* distribute Dianne’s Promotion in the same way, so don’t ask. Pearce made a few noises about eventually releasing Dianne’s Promotion on the website like Master of the Manor was, but they hadn’t done so when the site went dark, and I’m not about to do it for them. If you want Dianne’s Promotion (I heartily recommend it, it’s almost exclusively spankings whereas Master of the Manor is spanking-heavy BDSM), then buy it on Amazon or Goodreads, and throw a few bucks at Pearce.
Oh, and I have a new e-mail: aka@spankingrpgs.com. I’ll probably keep the gmail around for a while longer, but I’d encourage you to e-mail me at my new address instead. Google’s been creeping me out lately, and I want to get away from them as much as possible.
AKA
Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
I’ve updated the download page with the newest version: Scarlet Moon 1.0.8.
Alas, there isn’t any new content. What there has been is a massive rework of combat to better support interesting powers (i.e. powers that aren’t just “do damage” or “inflict status”). Most of the changes are a straight up refactor, which means that a lot of the code has been rewritten, but it still does the same thing. There are however a few changes:
- Grappling now moves both the grapplers into the grappling range, but doesn’t force them to remain in a grapple.
- Spanking is now a single turn action that inflicts the “Humiliated” status and has some sexy text. It no longer spans multiple turns.
- All ally actions are executed before enemy actions. When you have allies (which won’t be for several more episodes), you’ll also be able to control the order in which those actions execute.
- Chain Pull (a power that Buzzsaw has at the end of episode 1) now both pulls its target into a grapple, and inflicts the “Frozen” status on the target. A character with the “Frozen” status can’t move, though they can do everything else (attack, spank, use powers).
- Scarlet Slap is now Scarlet Punch, and can be used both at armslength and in a grapple.
These changes were made for a variety of reasons, but the big one is because I’ve got a much clearer idea of how I want combat to work:
First, there are only a small number of “atomic” actions that define all of combat. Each action resolves into one or more of these actions. The basic actions are:
- Damage (negative damage heals).
- Inflict a status for a given duration (negative duration reduces the status’ duration, or heals the status if the duration is dropped to zero).
- Move
- Grapple
Technically, grapple could be defined as two Moves, but that proved to be hard to keep consistent (i.e. there was a high risk of one of the grapplers entering a grapple, but not the other, which makes no sense).
Each basic (non-power) action is resolved into a single one of these actions. Attack is a single Damage, move is a single Move, spanking is a single Inflict, etc. Powers on the other hand can do one of two things: they could resolve into one or more of these basic actions (like Scarlet Beam), or they could react to basic actions in combat. For example, you could have a power that redirects the first 2 non-negative damages that target a character. Or you could have a power that allows a character to automatically attack the first 2 enemies that are inflicted with a status.
This gives you a cheap way of activating any power that reacts to other actions. You have a power “Kick ‘Em While They’re Down” that automatically attacks enemies inflicted with a status? Cool, activate the power, then spend the next few turns giving your opponent a spanking. Not only will you weaken them, but you’ll do a bit of damage to boot.
Supervillains will tend to be more powerful than your heroes, and their actions will tend to be more direct. You could already see this in Buzzsaw: all of her powers involve getting you into a grapple, and hitting you _hard_. However, heroes will tend to have more reactive powers, and the challenge in the game will be finding the right combination of powers that amplify your attacks, while mitigating your enemies’, and getting all that set up before your enemy gives a you figurative and literal spanking.
So, the first two changes above simplify your basic actions to make it easier to use them to set up chaining. The third change makes it easier for the player to set up their chains. They also make combat more deterministic which is a plus in my mind. The goal here is to find a good strategy and execute it, not pray to the RNG god. The hope is that with the wrong strategy, you’ll almost always lose, but with the right strategy you’ll almost always win. The last two changes are just balance tweaks. Chain Pull’s change allows Buzzsaw to nullify the “keep your distance and shoot her strategy” in the second fight that can now be used to _great_ effect in the first fight since your move action will always execute before any of her actions. The change to Scarlet Punch means you can focus on building up your strength without forcing you to go into a grapple to make full use of it.
I would appreciate it if people could take the new version and try it out. Let me know what you think of the changes to combat, and if there are any bugs. I was able to play through the full episode a couple of times without any problems, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any of course. Even a combat system as deterministic as this one has quite a bit of randomness.
A few bugs have also been fixed. The character screen now allows you to make changes to your character _without_ resetting all of her stats. Furthermore, I fixed two places where your willpower _should_ be increasing, but wasn’t. You can now take the Willpower options and still be strong enough to fight Buzzsaw!
AKA
Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
Sorry about missing the November update. I was preoccupied.
Anyway, it turns out that when you do a massive rewrite of your system, you end up with a fair number of bugs. So my beta testers have spent the past month dutifully documenting the many, many, _many_ bugs they’ve found in the latest update, and I’ve been squashing them.
It’s been like 5 whole days since I sent my beta testers the latest version, and they haven’t sent back any bugs (which is a record I think). So hopefully we’ll have the full first episode ready for your avid consumption. I’m honestly a little bit disappointed with it. I think I spend too much time catering to my thong-bikini-beach-spanking fetish and not enough to my thong-superheroine-spanking-fetish. So the superheroing part is a little bit more railroaded than I would have liked.
But I’m kind of sick of this episode, and ready to get the hell on with it, so whatever.
Anyway, now I’m going to talk about my plans for the rest of the game. Here were my original plans:
The first episode would be a little bit unique in that it would be a CYOA tree of choices in which we introduce the majority of the main cast and try to tell a superhero origin story that has less “normal person is normal” and more “superhero-just-punched-that-guy-through-a-wall-holy-fuck-this-is-awesome.”
All subsequent episodes would be in a style similar to the Spanking Adventures by Robin Pierce: a loosely connected set of CYOA-style vinettes, with a hub screen where you choose which to do when. The idea was that each day would have the following choices: study, patrol, sleep, work, and go out.
To add a bit of gameplay to these events, there would be three additional statistics: stress, fatigue, and GPA. The various vignettes would have different choices that could increase or decreaes these three stats. Furthermore, for every 5 points of stress you would receive a 1 point penalty to your primary stats. Meanwhile, every point of fatigue would subtract a point from your maximum energy. Meanwhile, GPA would serve as a multiplier on your stress: the higher your GPA the slower your stress increases.
Furthermore, there wouldn’t be enough hours in the day to do all the events, so you’d have to make decisions: should I study, or take a nap? Go to work or go and party? The idea was to add some tension to the game, because you’d have to carefully balance your priorities to make sure you have high enough stats and energy to defeat the villain of the episode, but also leave you in a good place for the next episode.
However, I think I’m going to do away with this approach, and make every episode more like the first, for a couple of reasons both story and gameplay related.
Gameplay:
My biggest problem with the gameplay is that you have no idea how powerful you need to be to defeat the villain. As a result, you don’t have enough information to make good choices when deciding which events you want to do for a given day. You could very easily find yourself in an unwinnable situation because you made sub-optimal choices three in-game days ago. I’ve played games that pull this, and it always frustrates me to no end. Keep in mind that I do want the game to have some challenge, but this feels too much like fake difficulty.
One thing I’ve learned from the playing through the first episode is that energy is _precious_. It’s even more precious than I expected it to be. It is a non-renewable resource that leaks away with every round of combat. Every power you use brings you a little bit closer to defeat, and you’re hoping that the advantage you get from the power offsets that. This introduces more than enough tension. Trying to stack on any more will turn tense gameplay into frustrating gameplay.
Story:
The problems with the gameplay could be solved easily enough by simply doing away with stress, fatigue, and GPA. However, I also think that this format would make it harder to tell a good story. The original plan had been that each choice would star a particular supporting character. For example, the patrol choice would feature Juliana in a starring role. This makes sense because it makes it easier to manage a large cast: by having subplots that focus on one character at a time, the player has time to learn about each character without being overwhelmed.
However, the player has a choice of which events to partake in each day. As a result, you can’t really build on previous events (the complexity would rapidly spin out of control). Furthermore, we can’t really incorporate key character development into these events because we have no idea if the player will see them or not. As a result, each subplot has to be a standalone vignette that doesn’t really contribute anything significant to the story, and doesn’t significantly develop the character. It would also be very difficult to weave these vignettes into the main plot.
In other words, it’d be filler. I don’t want any filler. One of my main goals is to make every scene contribute in some way to the story, either by advancing the plot or shedding some light on a character, or world-building.
Instead, I think we would get more mileage if we structure our episodes a lot like in X-Men: Evolution. In X-Men: Evolution you often had a main plot that focused on a handful of the cast (two to three characters typically), and a more light-hearted subplot that focused on other members of the cast. The subplot allowed them to inject some comic relief into the episodes, as well as give screen time to more characters without affecting the pacing of the main story. So my current plan is to have a main plot that will focus on Juliana, the player and the villain-of-the-week’s shenanigans. Meanwhile, we’ll have a subplot that stars one of the support cast. Essentially, these subplots will be the vignettes that we had originally planned to be separate events. Except we’ll be able to weave them into the main plot, and we can guarantee that the player will see some form of them (of course, we intend to give the player choices that effect how each plot plays out).
This also means that I don’t have to add any new features to the codebase (like I would if I wanted to do the original plan), which will be a huge timesavings. There is still a fair amount of coding that I want to do for the next episode (I need to refactor combat to better support some of the more interesting powers that I have in mind). So I’m not done with major development just yet.
Those of you who have kindly volunteered to help me write will be primarily helping me with the subplots, and possibly enriching the main plot with additional choices.
AKA
Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
Today, I am proud to release the first day of the first episode of The Scandalous Scarlet Moon.
You take on the role of a Silver Age style superhero(ine) Scarlet Moon. Aided by your best friend Juliana, you must protect the City of Generica from a host of villains, from brutish thugs to sensual seducers, grinning giants to evil masterminds, honorable hunters to cheating thieves. But don’t spend too much time superheroing! After all, you’ve got a job to keep down, studies to keep up on, precious precious beauty sleep, and you might even want to have fun every now and then! Neglect them at your peril (to your bottom). But don’t spend too much time focusing on your regular life either! After all, every one of those villains will happily put you over their knees and give you the kind of a spanking a meddling superhero deserves if you let your guard down for even a single second!
So join me as we embark upon an epic quest across, over, and under Generica City!
In this release experience the epic, action-packed origins of Scarlet Moon! Fight your way through an abandoned business park crawling with the Evul gang, the Whistlers, learning skills as you go that will be absolutely essential to getting out of there with an unmarked bottom. Come face to face with your very first supervillain: the boisterous Buzzsaw and learn up close how they earned their menacing name!
This release contains the following:
- Customize your character however you want! Pick their gender, name, appearance, and clothing.
- Pick the genders of most other characters! Most NPCs are broken into one of three roles: spanker, spankee, and switch. Pick their genders universally at the beginning of the game, or select the gender of each character as you meet them.
- Experience a rather generic superhero story, where you get to make some choices that dictate how your character reacts to the situations! This episode is alas, rather linear, and your choices don’t impact gameplay much. But that will come in subsequent episodes.
- Engage in turn-based tactical combat. Most of your enemies don’t pose much of a threat, but be careful! Your health and mana are combined into a single stat, energy, you have no way of restoring energy, and you lose energy each round (this can be turned off). You’ll have to make intelligent and efficient use of every skill in your ever-growing arsenal if you hope to survive!
- Get annoyed when you discover that you gain nothing from combat!
- Experience in-combat spankings! Be mildly annoyed at how utterly impractical they are at this point in the game, and hope they become more useful as the game progresses!
- Experience lovingly crafted in-story spanking scenes that eschew sound effects in favor of purple prose, and clunky back and forth between the spanker and spankee! How many different ways can we describe getting slapped on the ass? Play and find out!
- Prefer to play a Domly Dom of Domliness and don’t relish the idea of your character getting their fanny whacked? Every spanking scene is avoidable! Turn off in-combat spankings (which also turns off losing-to-the-supervillain-spankings)! Naughtiness is inevitable, but spankings are not!
- All sorts of bugs and crashes that have slipped past myself and my beta testers, because let’s be honest, I’m a hack whose too busy jerking it to use proper design, write enough unit tests, and don’t even talk to me about integration tests! (If you happen to discover one of these, please let me know, and maybe we can trick a few people into believing I know what I’m doing).
The next major release will contain the following:
- Beach scene! Because who doesn’t love the idea of buxom women in thong bikinis getting spanked in public at the beach?
- The kidnapping of a character you’ve only just met, and probably don’t like very much, but are expected to save anyway!
- The unveiling of Scarlet Moon’s costume! Will she have a modest, practical outfit, or the type of sexy skanky skimpy spandex slip you secretly enjoy but publicly denounce because there’s something terribly wrong, yet dirtily sexy, about a genre where the mainstream works have already done the work of designing the outfits for the inevitable porn parodies!
- Stat gain through roleplaying! Rather than getting stronger in combat, some of the choices you make during the story will give you stat bonuses, and let you learn new skills! Will you be a character with high Strength, who punches her way through problems, or a fast-talking charmer with high WIllpower who talks her way out of scrapes? The choice is up to you!
- Balance short-term gains with long-term benefits! Do you eavesdrop on your opponent, and try to learn her motivations, or do you ambush her now, and gain the upper hand in what is sure to be an intense battle that could go either way?
The game is written in Java, so you need to make sure you download and install Java 8 if you don’t already have it installed. Be warned, Oracle apparently has a shady deal with Yahoo! where they try to trick you into making Yahoo! your default search engine, so keep an eye out when installing Java.
The game’s code is licensed under the GNU GPL-v3, while the content of the game (events, characters, etc) is released under the CC-BY-SA. What this means is that you are free to take my work and do whatever you want with it (release a slightly modified version of my game, write stories featuring my characters, etc.) and release them so long as you:
- Give me proper credit
- Release your work under the same or a compatible license
Edited
I’ve uploaded a new release that fixes an issue that may have caused the game to crash when attempting to save.
I’ve uploaded a new release that fixes an issue where the player will not learn the skills they are supposed to if you change the font size on the character creation screen.
I’ve uploaded a new release that fixes several issues: Character skills are now properly loaded when loading a game, so skills don’t bleed over from one game to another. The player can now defend at the distant range. The option where you defeat Buzzsaw and spare them a spanking now transitions to the correct event. Struggling during a grapple no longer automatically breaks you out of it. It now reduces the duration based on your grapple skill. Buzzsaw now knows the skill Soaring Leap, where she jumps at you, which puts both you them at armslength. So you can’t just move to distant and spam Scarlet Beam until she falls over. Well, you can but she now has a way of getting close to you.
Spankers, Spankees and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
**Insert obligatory crappy April Fool’s joke here**
Now that that’s out of the way, I’m getting very close to having a playable beta. I have everything implemented that I need for the first episode except for the combat code, which I’m working on now. As far as combat goes, I need to implement the following:
- Functionality for selecting skills.
- The logic to actually execute a round of combat.
That’s pretty much it. I already have the AI implemented, as well as the code that actually executes each action. I just need to glue all that together, and I’ll be good to go.
So I’m expecting to have all that done by the end of the month at the latest. What’s the next step after that? The next step is to pass the game along to my beta testers. I’ll consider it ready for release when I’ve gotten four approvals from my beta testers (or it’s early June, and I haven’t heard anything at all from my testers, depends on how responsive my testers are).
So we’re on track for a release in early June. My view and controller code still isn’t particularly pretty, but at least it works (far as I can tell anyway), and I have some understanding of how it works (though not complete. JavaFX has some infuriating and unintuitive bits around event processing that I haven’t fully grokked just yet).
So, to taunt you all, here are a few screenshots!
First, we have a screenshot of character creation
Character creation provides just as many options as Potion Wars, only thanks to the magic of libraries (instead of rolling it my own stupid self), it’s arranged very pretty in something approximating a real UI. Character options will include:
- gender: male, female
- bodytype: slim, average, voluptuous, heavyset
- eyecolor: blue, brown, green, hazel, grey
- haircolor: blonde, brown, red, black, rainbow
- hairstyle: down, pig tails, ponytail, single braid (something like this), buns, mohawk
- height: short (5′ – 5’3″), average(5’4″ – 5′ 7″), tall (5′ 8″ – 5′ 11″, gargantuan (6′ and up)
- musculature: soft, fit, muscular
- skincolor: ivory, peach, tanned, brown, caramel, black
- clothing: There are a ton of clothing options (mostly female-oriented, I’m kind of biased, alas) and all are available from the beginning, so that you have a high degree of control over the civilian appearance of your character. More clothing options may be added over time as people request them (clothing is very easy to add).
Next we have the options.
Crimson Glow provides the same and more options as Potion Wars:
- You can control whether or not your player can be spanked in battle. This will also affect supervillain story spankings. If the player is not allowed to be spanked in battle, then neither will the player be spanked after losing to a supervillain. Other in-story spanking scenes are possible, but since all of those will be avoidable by selecting the right dialogue option, rather than winning a challenging battle, those are not disabled.
- Artificial Intelligence controls how smart enemies are. Dumb enemies pick targets and actions at random. Average enemies pick their skills based on what they’re good at, but pick targets at random. Smart enemies pick their skills based on what they’re good at, and are more likely to pick targets who will be weakest against those skills.
- This game takes full advantage of the fact that both genders have an ass, and disciplinary spankings (which make up 99+% of the game’s spankings) focus exclusively on the bottom and thighs. “Spanker Gender” sets the gender of all characters who are tops (almost always administering rather than receiving). If the gender is UNKNOWN, then you will be given the opportunity to pick the gender of each top individually when you first meet them. The same for the spankee gender. All supervillains are considered spankees. If the genders for both top and bottom are the same, then all generic enemies will also have the selected gender.
- Energy Lost Per Round of Combat controls how much energy all characters lose at the end of battle (note: You cannot go below 1 energy through attrition). NONE means allies don’t lose any energy, and enemies lose a lot. MODERATE means enemies and allies lose at the same rate. SEVERE means allies lose a lot of energy, but enemies don’t lose very much (though they do lose some).
Next, an event screen.
This is the first event of the game. There is one, very important improvement over Potion Wars: Even text is now displayed with a scrolling bar. So no more multiple pages. The text of an event is now displayed all at once on the screen, and allows players to scroll through it (though moving on to the next event clears the view).
Finally, combat!
The first thing that should be obvious is that I’ve expanded significantly on the positioning system. Rather than having spanking/grappling/armslength, we now have spanking/grappling/armslength/distant. Different characters will be able to attack at different ranges, and will have different skills that work at different ranges. Positions are also displayed in a simple visual view. The top rows are enemies, the bottom rows are allies. The combat log is also a scrollbar, like events, and will display all feedback on user commands. The —-Character Name— tells you which character you’re selecting commands for, and will be displayed after the feedback of every command.
This view relies a bit too heavily on the combat log for feedback, but this damn thing is being complex enough to program. I may improve it in the future, but this should be enough to make the game playable.
One very important differences from Potion Wars:
There are no longer dungeons with mazes. It was decided that those really weren’t worth the effort of designing, and implementing. Furthermore, I don’t think they always work well for superheroes (which tend to focus on small-scale battles between heroes and villains). Not all villains have a billions minions at their beck and call, after all. Instead “dungeons” will be a sequence of events, like CYOA. In these events, the player will be able to make choices, many of which may involve using skills to get by obstacles, or gain the upper hand in battle. Furthermore, the player _does not_ get better through combat. Instead, in most dungeon events, the player will have a range of choices. Each choice will increment at least one skill by one point. For example, you may be faced with a thick fence. You could choose to ram through it (which improves strength), jump over it (improve speed), or find the guardhouse and convince the guard to let you through the gate (improve willpower). Of course, you might fail (bounce off the fence, land on the fence, get spanked by the guard) if your stat isn’t high enough, but you’ll still get the stat gain.
In short, unlike Potion Wars, battles are very painful (even easy ones will drain precious energy), and should be avoided when necessary. Of course, that doesn’t mean you might not get bonuses for charging into some battles, especially if it involves saving people.
This might seem like an odd decision, but there are a few reasons for it:
- This allows us to do much more interesting things. For example, the “dungeon” could consist of playing cat and mouse with a single villain, in which you try to find them, or manipulate the environment in a way to give you an advantage, occasionally having skirmishes with the villain if you fail an event, or get the upper hand.
- It provides more opportunity to roleplay. The time I would have previously spent designing dungeons, and getting them to display can now be spent writing up events.
- It removes a rather frustrating balancing act. If combat made you stronger, then on the one hand you’d want to get involved in combat as much as possible to become stronger, but on the other save your precious energy for the boss. While in theory this might be fun, I think it would mostly be frustrating, because you don’t know how strong you need to be later in the game, or how much energy you’ll need to fight the boss. So I think removing the built-in incentive structure from combat will make for a much more interesting gameplay experience. It will now be about “How do I efficiently get to the supervillain and defeat them?” rather than “RAAGH HULK SMASH!”
As an added note: One of my writers has written up a few short scenes to get a handle on some of the characters. He’s given me permission to post them, so you’ll see a few short snippets coming up in the next few days. Think of them as sneak peeks (though they take place around the midway point of the game, so they’re a little bit spoilery, but the only thing they really spoil are the superhero names of some of Crimson Glow’s allies).
Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
So I’ve made _excellent_ progress. I’ve managed to finish the first round of the game engine, something I wasn’t expecting to finish until the end of February at the earliest. Right now I’m working on the startup code. By the end of the week (at the latest) I should have all the code written to run the game for the first time.
However, that does _not_ mean that a release is right around the corner. Here’s a list of things I still need to do:
- Write JSON files describing the random enemies of the first dungeon, and the boss of the first dungeon (won’t be too hard. Maybe four files tops?) This includes writing the in-combat spanking text, but I’ll be lifting and modifying the combat text from the first enemies of Potion Wars, so that shouldn’t take too long.
- Write JSON files describing the clothing options for the player (lots of files here, but items are much simpler in this game than in Potion Wars, so again it shouldn’t be too difficult)
- Translate the transcript of the first day of the first episode into a JSON-like format (it’s not quite JSON because the events have line breaks, which I don’t believe JSON supports), and do any editing I decide to do.
- Debug the game. This one will probably take a while. I’ve been reasonably good about writing tests I think, however I don’t really have tests for the view or controller. The view because GUI code is rather hard to test automatically. The Controller is also woefully lacking in tests. Now, most of the Controllers are simple enough that that probably won’t be a problem (query model, invoke method on appropriate game screen). However the Combat Controller is rather complicated. I really should refactor that one out into smaller, more testable pieces. But I’m lazy.
- Balance the first dungeon.
Once those five steps are complete enough, I’ll pass it off to my beta testers to break.
So we may see a release by May, but officially, I’m going to keep it at June. I’ll admit that I have cut a few corners, and I’m not sure how badly that cutting is going to hurt me just yet.
One nice thing: I feel like I have a _much_ better handle on this codebase than I did on the Python codebase for Potion Wars. So that at least is a success!
Spankers, Spankees and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
First weekend of the month, so monthly update. I’ve finished the first draft of the first day of content, as well as most of the tweaks to the engine and to the first dungeon that I want to make at this point. The next step is to update the customization choices at the beginning of the game, then spend about a week ripping my hair out and swearing as the game crashes like a racetrack full of drunk drivers driving monster trucks. Once the game starts crashing like a racetrack with a single drunk driver in a monster truck, I’ll toss it off to my beta testers, and then we’ll get the first day posted.
I was planning on posting the content I had for episode 2 of Potion Wars, but apparently compiling LaTeX into PDF is more complicated than it should be on a Mac. Useability my ass. Anyway, I’ll see if I can get it compiled and posted tomorrow.
For the rest of the post, I’m going to talk some about the structure I have envisioned for this game, particularly the dungeon crawling part. In Potion Wars, I was trying to make each fight fairly challenging (at least until you gained a few stats, and some more health/mana). Basically, at first you needed to run back to the healer after each battle. However, in Crimson Glow health and mana have been merged into a single stat, energy. Furthermore, there aren’t really going to be healers (or potions).As a result, energy is going to become a very limited and precious resource. Finally, the emphasis is going to be on battles with supervillains rather on generic fights, and you should feel like a superhero when fighting generic enemies. So you should be able to mow through lots of generic baddies.
To capture this, dungeons are going to be much more about energy conservation. Generic battles won’t be particularly challenging, but they will wear on the player, and a big part of the strategy will be determining the most energy-efficient means of completing the dungeon, so that you have the energy to defeat the supervillains. Furthermore, generic enemies will be very fragile (i.e. non-super enemies will have 1 energy, with the possible exceptions of the first boss), and they won’t really have any special skills. So you should be able to one-shot them easily. However, there will be a lot of them, and they’ll be strong enough that you can’t just hold down the attack button and blindly mow through them. On top of that, there will be energy attrition. Basically, each round your character will lose some energy (because it takes energy to keep your powers going). The amount you lose depends on the difficulty level:
Hand: You lose no energy each round, and supervillains lose lots of energy each round. Resting also takes no time. This is the difficulty for people who want to breeze through the game and experience the story and spankings without too much challenge.
Strap: You and supervillains lose a roughly equal amount of energy (villains may lose a little bit more, because they didn’t have to slog through a dungeon) each round. Returning to your room and resting takes some time, but you should be able to have enough time to rest once or twice without ignoring too many other responsibilities. This should be a good, reasonable difficulty for people who enjoy RPGs.
Cane: You lose quite a bit of energy each round, and supervillains don’t lose as much. Resting takes a significant amount of time (several hours). This is the difficulty I will be balancing on (mostly because if I’m not careful, this difficulty could be unwinnable), and will (hopefully) require a careful use of skills.
Speaking of skills, this is another difference from Potion Wars. In Potion Wars, there were a fair number of stats (six, I believe) and everyone learned the same set of skills, In Crimson Glow, there will be far less emphasis on stats, and far more on skills. There will only be three stats: Strength, Speed, and Willpower. Strength controls how good you are at grappling, Speed controls your regular attack, and Willpower will generally influence how much energy you have, and how strong your skills are (though Strength and Speed will also play a role depending on each skill). However, I plan on there being a lot of skills, and each skill will have multiple levels. Not only will there be skills that are general-purpose (like Crimson Punch), but there will also be skills that are very situational. For example, there might be a supervillain who is a flyer, and really fast, but not very strong. So you can learn a skill that allows you to anchor your opponent to a building, drastically reducing her effectiveness. Of course, anchoring may not be effective against other opponents who are on the ground or something.
Basically, my plan for each supervillain is that you will have two avenues open to defeating them:
- Patrol a lot and get high enough stats that you can beat them using just the general-purpose skills. This will be the more challenging route, but it will be necessary if you want to be able to beat supervillains the first time you meet them.
- Get your butt spanked the first time (most likely), and then develop a special-purpose skill that neutralizes the supervillain’s strength, or inflates a weakness.
In particular, I want each villain to have their own combat style (as much as they can given the relatively simplistic combat system) with their own unique and powerful skills, and I want the player to be able to develop counters to those skills. It always bugs me when enemies have super-powerful skills, and you have no way of countering them (I’m looking at you Avernum: Escape from the Pit and your stupid acid raining bosses, and utter lack of silence spells, or elemental protection spells or cure-all spells for the entire early game). I just love being able to take an enemy’s strength and turning it into a weakness.
A little sample of some of the skills you’ll be learning:
Crimson Slap: This game’s version of firebolt. Standard single-enemy damage skill. Higher levels make it more powerful, but also cost more.
Crimson Armor/Boots/Eyes: Increase strength/speed/willpower at the expense of the other two.
Crimson Cord: Pull an enemy into a grapple.
Crimson Flare: Blind every enemy in the battle, giving them a significant penalty to speed.
Crimson Bind: Wrap the Crimson Cord around an enemy and essentially paralyze them for a few turns.
Furthermore, different skills will be unlocked based on levels gained in other skills. For example, to unlock Crimson Bind, you need to get three levels in Crimson Cord, and to unlock Crimson Spanking you need to know Crimson Bind and Crimson Slap.
Basically, I want a lot of the depth in the game to come from skills. Which skills should you train? Which ones should you use in this situation or that situation? What kind of character do you want to play?
Edited to Add: Furthermore, the nature of this game means it is much more conducive to having help from outside writers. In particular, I’m looking for writers who’d be willing to adopt one of the player’s roommates (there are five. Three have been adopted already). Basically each roommate will be associated with one of the basic choices you can make each day:
- Patrol – Taken (by me!)
- Work – Taken
- Study
- Party
- Train – Taken
And the events of each activity will further develop that character. For example, one of your roommates will be a colleague at your work, and the work events will feature him/her heavily. My dream is to have someone else working on each of the other activities. That way, I can focus just on writing the Patrol events, on improving the game engine, and merging everything into a coherent episode. If you’re interested, send an e-mail to my google account sprpgs, or contact me on animeotk (my handle is “aka”) and we’ll talk.
Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),
So I have some bad news. I’ve decided to put Potion Wars in a coma. I’ve been having a lot of trouble writing the second episode, mostly because of massive tone clash. The premise just demands a very dramatic, down to earth tone. Dramatic, down to earth tones really do not mix well with spanking porn. Rape, torture, and incest porn? Sure. Just look at the success of Game of Thrones. But spanking has just too much whimsy to really work well with a story about a drug war being fought along racial lines.
Some of you are probably slapping your forehead and saying “No duh, dumbass!” In my defense, the story kind of got a little bit out of my control. Stories do that sometimes. Note that I’m not doing this lightly, and it’s absolutely not because I got bored and found a new, shiny idea. I love Potion Wars, I love the story that’s taking shape, and I very much want to tell it. This just isn’t the right place.
So the next question is, what now? One option would be to take Potion Wars, rip out all the porn, and release it somewhere as a vanilla game. However, this website is called “spankingrpgs.” Not “baitandswitchrpgs.” I’m going to write a full-fledged spanking RPG if it kills me. I just need to be careful to select a premise and tone that are conducive to spankings. So here are my constraints:
- The game needs to be an adventure tale that is ostensibly dramatic. It does not have to be serious and angsty, but I’m not a comedic writer. The content should be dramatic, even if the tone is not.
- The game should have an element of whimsy, silliness and absurdity. Spankings are absurd, and they will fit much better if there are other elements of absurdity already.
- There needs to be plenty of natural opportunities for spankings, both top and bottom. Ideally without making the spanker look like a total douchebag (unless the spanker is villainous and they’re supposed to be total douchebags).
After considering these constraints for a while, I decided that one of the genres that best fits is the superhero genre. Particularly, Silver Age superheroes. Silver Age superhero comics were more than a little absurd, but the characters took them more or less seriously (so we get a rather absurd tone, but also some drama). Furthermore, a Spider-Man style superhero (i.e. a part-time superhero whose trying to balance work, life, and superheroing) provides a ton of natural spanking opportunities. First, we get the obvious superhero-supervillain showdowns. You can spank supervillains for trying to take over the world for the umpteenth time, and supervillains can spank you for trying to foil their plans for the umpteenth time. Plus, Silver Age supervillains tended to be ridiculously over the top, and I could totally see a Silver Age style supervillain giving a Silver Age style superhero a sound spanking, and vice versa. Furthermore, there are plenty of opportunities for spankings as the player tries to live a normal life. You stood your boyfriend up, because you were fighting across a bunch of rooftops? That’s a paddling. You slept through class because you were up all night trying to find the villain’s hideout? That’s a paddling. Forgot your mother’s birthday? Paddling.
My basic thoughts are the following, at least for the first season:
Each episode of the first season will have a new villain. You’ll have an initial encounter with the villain, that will be fought either to a draw, or the villain will win. Then, over the course of the episode you’ll need to prepare for the next showdown with the villain. This could be done a variety of ways:
- You could patrol a lot. Basically, beat up a bunch of generic criminals to get stronger, and interrogate the underworld about this villain (note that patrols will have some unique content for each day, just like other events. You won’t just be grinding against generic enemies).
- Do some research. Maybe the villain is reminiscient of an animal of some kind. So the animal’s weaknesses may be analagous to the villain’s. Or maybe you study news footage of your last battle to better determine what their strengths are, and then develop a new skill to counter them.
- Try to learn more about the villain’s personal life. See if maybe you could use a bit of psychological warfare to manipulate them, or lure them into a location where they won’t be as effective (i.e. lure a flying enemy into the sewers).
- Some combination of the above three.
Furthermore, you’ll have obligations you need to meet outside of superheroing as well, like homework, family get togethers, a job, etc.
Each episode will be broken into days, and I’ll release content a day at a time. Each day will be a fairly small update, so that we don’t have massive droughts like with Potion Wars. Each episode will have a list of tasks you’ll want to accomplish, perhaps broken into subtasks (i.e. you have a midterm at the end of the week, so each day will have a subtask to study three hours. If you study three hours every day of the episode, you’ll get an A+ on the test). However, you will not have enough time to do all of them. You could do all of them so-so, or a few of them well, but you can’t do all of them completely. Furthermore, you’ll absolutely have to spend a lot of your time preparing for the final fight with the supervillain, because at the climax of the episode you’ll have to defeat them. So if you spend too much time doing personal life stuff, you may find yourself in an unwinnable situation.
Of course, you need to do moderately well at the day-to-day tasks as well. Perhaps if your grades get too low, you’ll have to move back in with your parent (you’re in college, FYI), which will make it harder to patrol and research villains. If you do too poorly at your job, you’ll be forced to spend extra time at work, giving you less time to patrol and research villains.
The supervillain combats will probably be a bit more elaborate than the battles in Potion Wars. Not a whole lot more elaborate (I’ll be using the same game engine, just with a few minor tweaks). But many of the combats will probably be multi-phase. You’ll fight for a while, then there’ll be a cut-scene, and you’ll get options (which options will depend on the choices you made over the course of the episode). The outcome of the options will determine who gets a bonus in the next phase of battle, you or the villain. Obviously there will be a lot of save-games to minimize repetition. There will probably be an auto-save at the end of each phase of battle, and an autosave at the beginning of each day.
Finally, I’ll probably introduce more customizations. In particular, I’ll give players the ability to control the gender of other characters. You’ll have the options of:
- Specifying the genders you prefer to see for spankees. This will generally influence the genders of supervillains (since you are required to defeat them at the end of every episode), and perhaps a side-kick if you get one (no promises!). If you turn off the ability for enemies to spank you, then all generic enemies will be this gender.
- Specifying the gender you prefer to see for spankers. This will generally influence the gender of authority figures (your boss, your parent, etc). If enemies are allowed to spank you, and both the spankee and spanker gender are the same, then all generic enemies will be the selected gender. Otherwise, the gender of generic enemies will be chosen at random.
- Let the game choose at random (or let characters use their preferred genders if they have one).
- Pick and choose on a case-by-case basis. This has the downside of interrupting the flow of the story a bit, but gives you more fine-grained control.
Note that this isn’t guaranteed to affect all characters. For example, I plan on pulling Carrie into this game as your best friend, because I just love writing her. She’s going to be female either way, because she will forever be a woman in my head.
The downside to giving players control over the gender of other characters is that there probably won’t be as many sex scenes as I’d planned in Potion Wars (i.e. few to none), because there’d be so many damn combinations to write (male-female, female-male, female-female, male-male).
Furthermore, dialog choices probably won’t have as much of an effect as it did in Potion Wars. This is because I want the various tasks you can choose each day to have significantly different content each day, and I do want to release content at a reasonable pace. I do still want to give you opportunities to influence conversations, and I want characters to remember them, but you probably won’t get as many dialogue choices, and your choices probably won’t have as many and as long-lasting effects as I’d planned for Potion Wars. For example, in most conversations, you’ll probably get one choice at the beginning, in which you’ll have two to three options of various personalities (cooperative, aggressive, bratty perhaps). Then, the rest of the conversation, I’ll put words in your character’s mouth, based on the personality you chose. So if you chose the bratty option, then I’ll give your character bratty dialogue in that scene.
That being said, I do want some activities in earlier episodes to influence later episodes, so I’ll try not to railroad you too hard. As always, it’s a careful balancing act.
Thoughts? In particular, feel free to make costume or supervillain/hero suggestions. Also, if there’s a particular personality you’d like the opportunity to roleplay (an angsty loner hero? A pompous bastard? A cowardly lion?) let me know in the comments. I’m always looking for personality suggestions, and if I’m going to spend time writing dialogue for a particular personality, I want to make sure there’s at least one person that wants to play it!
Spankers and Spankees,
First, I’ll be spending next week visiting family, so I won’t be on until the last week of May (a little over a week from now).
Second, I spent a few hours last night playing Dark Eye: Blackguards. Haven’t played it much, so I don’t have much of an opinion about it, though it looks like it has potential. There are a few things I don’t like (the heavy emphasis on randomness in combat, especially the high failure rate of spells), but there are also some things I do like (the combat grid is well done, the combat itself is fun despite the heavy random element, and the story has me intrigued, though I’m 99.99999% certain it’s going to fall into the painfully cliche “My old friends are members of an Evil Cult Planning to Unleash the Supreme Evil/Take Over the World/Steal Grandma’s Pacemaker” plot). Actually, that last one sounds like it’d be kind of fun…
One thing that I really really like is the stat gain system: after each fight, your characters gain experience (groundbreaking!). This experience goes into a pool of points that you can then use to level up your skills. So far at least, after every fight I’ve gained enough experience to level up at least one skill, and often more than one. I like this because it gives a sense of gradual improvement. After every fight my characters are slightly better than they were before. I like that. And when I like something, I start thinking about how I could build a similar mechanic…
So here are my thoughts. Currently, every action gives you 3 stat points. Where those points are allocated depends on the action performed. For example, attacking allocates 2 stat points to Dexterity, and 1 stat point to Strength. Every time enemies attack, you gain one stat point, depending on where you got attacked. While I like how organic this approach is, there are a few problems. For one thing, your defense also relies heavily on these stats. Therefore, in order to keep yourself from being one-shotted by a physical attack, your squishy mage will have to waste turns smacking baddies with his staff while your enemies laugh. Similarly, with physical attackers (assuming those attackers even know any spells. If they don’t know any spells, they can only gain those stat points by being zapped by spells). Second, if you decide during the game that you need to pivot (i.e. focus more on magic and less on physical attacks, or vice versa), then you need to waste precious rounds doing something your character sucks at. This will almost certainly be frustrating, especially if I can balance the combats well enough that they’re close. So this is actually a very rigid approach to character improvement, and that’s not good. I don’t like rigid character development, because it punishes experimentation.
So, the first thought is that all stat points go into a pool, which the player is then free to spend to improve stats, health, mana, and learn spells. This makes character development much more flexible. Are you getting roasted by spellcasters? Spend some points on Talent. Getting one-shotted? Dump a bunch of points into health. This also has a benefit when characters join your party: Rather than giving them pre-allocated stats which may or may not work with your build for for the rest of the party, I can just have the character start with a pool of stat points that you are free to use however you wish. I could do a similar thing at the beginning of the game, allowing you some control over the starting stats of your character, which spells they know, etc.
Now, here’s the next thought, and the one that gets me really excited: You need to spend a certain number of points in order to improve a stat, and the number of points you need to spend increases as the stat gets higher. So far so standard. However, let’s throw in a little bit of randomness. Just a touch. Imagine if you have a percent chance of gaining the bonus from the next higher stat, depending on how close you are to increasing your stat. So suppose you have 10 Dexterity, it takes 100 points to get 11 Dexterity, and you’ve already spent 90. So you’re 90% of the way there. Imagine if in battle, you have a 90% chance of attacking with 6 Dexterity rather than 5. So maybe there’s a 90% chance that instead of doing say 10 + .4 * 10 = 14 damage (against an enemy with 3 Dexterity), you do 12 + .5 * 12 + 1 = 19 damage. Meanwhile, if you’ve only spent 50 points on Dexterity, you “only” have a 50% chance of gaining this bonus.
Second, suppose that you don’t gain a fixed number of points every time you attack. Instead, the number of points you get depends on how effective your action is. The less effective your action, the more points you get. So imagine you have 5 Dexterity (so 10 warfare), and your enemy has 5 Dexterity (so 10 warfare). Then, you’ll do 10 damage. Meanwhile, if you have 10 Dexterity (so 20 warfare), and your enemy has 5 Dexterity, you’ll do 20 + .5 * 20 + 15 = 45 damage. So you’ll get significantly fewer action points than if you only have 5 Dexterity. Now obviously, you need to have some caps, so that a tank with 5 Talent doesn’t get 5000 action points for casting Firebolt on an enemy with 95 Talent. Similarly, a character with 95 Talent zapping an enemy with 5 Talent should get at least some action points. The points you’d get would probably be something like max(MIN_POINTS, MAX_POINTS – effectiveness), where “effectiveness” could be something like the damage you do, or the number of turns you start grappling, or the number of turns an enemy is inflicted with a status spell.
These two things provide a whole lot of opportunities for different play styles. Do you spend your action points now, and make the upcoming battles easier, or do you hold off to get as many points as possible but make the upcoming battles much harder? Or do you do something in between? How in between? Only spend enough points to get 10% of the way to the next point? 50%? 90%?
Furthermore, a jack of all trades character has an interesting new twist vs. a specialized character. First, you can have partially developed stats, and still gain some benefit from them. The points put into a partially developed stat start working for you from the beginning. This can make it less painful to spread points around. Also, Jacks tend to have lower stats across the board, but not so low that they can’t be effective in battle. Therefore, regardless of their actions in battle, you can expect them to gain more points, which can again ease the large point burden. I like this. I like this a lot. Specialized characters are valuable because they are very effective in battle against specific classes of enemies, but at the cost of perhaps a small dint in action points. Jacks meanwhile aren’t as effective against any one enemy, but can hold their own against anyone, and tend to gain more action points.
What do you spend points on? Well, you can spend points on any of the stats (Dexterity, Strength ,Willpower, Talent, Alertness). You can also spend points on health and mana (one point corresponds to one point of either), and you can spend points to learn spells.
This again, opens up a huge range of character building options, especially since mana, Talent, Willpower, and spell learning are all decoupled. For example, maybe you want a character who is mostly an armslength fighter, but perhaps has a few of the simpler buff spells, to provide some support. Then you don’t bother putting points into learning new spells, but instead pump Talent, and Dexterity. Maybe you want to build a Grapple-tank, someone who can grapple a spellcaster and shut them down, but you don’t care about necessarily learning spells. Then you can pump Dexterity and Talent (with perhaps some Willpower). Maybe you want a character who knows a wide variety of spells. Then you pump Talent, Willpower, and spells, with some points also thrown into mana. Maybe you want a character whose spells aren’t particularly effective, but he/she can cast a lot of them. Then you pump spells and mana. Similarly, maybe you want a wall, a character whose job is to defend the squishier characters, but not much else. Then maybe you pump their health to absurd levels.
Of course, the tricky part is to balance them all. 😉
Another tricky point is that if I’m not careful it could be very easy to exploit. Just cast one Firebolt at 5 Talent against an enemy with 95 Talent to get the MAX_POINTS, then spend the rest of the combat attacking and pump the points into your Dexterity. Perhaps a character doesn’t gain any points if the stat difference is too large, or takes severe penalties to the number of stat points they get? I don’t know, I’ll have to think about it.
Any thoughts? I might spend the next week thinking about it, and potential formulas for generating points, how fast point costs increase, etc. If I do implement this (I may not, this is still very much in the brainstorming phase), it won’t be until after I’ve overhauled the GUI. Allocating points will require significant (and non-trivial) extensions of the GUI, so I don’t want to do anything with that until I’ve built a GUI that can actually be extended with non-trivial things.
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.