Merry Christmas... and a minor update to AIF Toolkit

I hope everyone has had a wonderful Christmas. I have a teensy Christmas gift: AIF toolkit version 4.6. It includes some bug fixes and add a minor new feature. You can now force-strip characters so that their clothes go off-stage.

Anyways. Happy new year.

Download it here.

Where Have I Been?

So, it's been a bit of time since I posted here. It's what you might have expected it to be: life, work and sheer laziness. But there is another thing that's ultimately been slowing me down, something that I'll talk about here.

A year or so back I was a volunteer editor for Literotica. I had always been good at the minutiae of grammar and spelling, and I had previously worked professionally as an editor, so I thought: why not, I'll give it a go. I started editing stories and, to my shock, people were actually enthusiastic about my work.

So, after not having edited for a while, I've decided to try and edit professionally again, ideally for people who want to be self-published. To build my reputation, I've taken on a lot of authors, of all skill levels, and that's been eating my time like nothing else. I've stolen a moment here and there to work on my game, but progress has really slowed down.

One of the stipulations to my writers was that I could link to their work as samples of my editing, so I will be occasionally be posting them on this blog.

A few games have been released recently, and I will be posting some reviews soon.

An Update

It's been a while since I gave an update. Well, here's one.

Soccer Story a little less than 100,000 words long now. For some perspective, that's about as long as your standard novel. It's a bit hard to estimate since much of the writing has been moved over to a word document, but the important thing is that it isn't even close to feeling polished, done, or even at a working state. I've slowed down development on it to gather my thoughts about the project. I'm dissatisfied with the simulation aspect in a couple of ways. While it is sophisticated as far as a text project goes, it's feels quite *random*, and I'm really not sure what to do about it right now.

More recently, I have been working on a demo game for Simpler AIF. I won't be releasing much info about it, except that it is in a genre I have little experience in, so it's an experiment. I am, however, planning on doing my own hand-drawn art for it, contingent on whether I'm still able to produce anything worthwhile. There was actually a time I was an okay artist, but it was by intuition and practice rather than training, and it has suffered unused for a while. My skill at art has always been correlated with my boredom at the time and, since graduating from university and entering jobs that would fire me for doodling, I've hardly laid a pen to paper. That must change.

If I do manage to draw something that doesn't look like a graphite turd, I will post a teaser here.

Play Online!

Matrix Mole has kindly allowed Bad Sister to be hosted on AIFCommunity.org for web play. You'll notice on the right hand side a new "play online" feature. Clicking that will lead to a splash page where you can download the story file or play right from your browser. Unfortunately, because of the limitations of the javascript interpreter there are no images, therefore, several image-heavy descriptions have been revised.

Making AIF more accessible is, I feel, an important part of growing the community, so I encourage other authors to do the same. I know at least TADS and Inform 7 can compile to a web page, so it should be pretty easy. Myself, I found the entire process surprisingly easy to do.

Advanced Layered Clothing version 2

ALC version 2 fixes a minor bug related to stripping. It can be downloaded here.

Advanced Layered Clothing Released

Previously I had talked about Advanced Layered Clothing. I'm now unceremoniously kicking it out to the general public. All of my yammering self-promotion can be read in the post below.

You can download the zip file here.

Hanon Ondricek assisted with proof-reading and features and I want to thank him for his help and for putting up with me sending 3,000 versions of this.

Upcoming extension: Advanced Layered Clothing

For the past few weeks, I've been working on a new layered clothing for use with Simpler AIF, with very little spare time to actually work on any games. While Advanced Layered Clothing has been feature complete for a while, I keep thinking of things to add and change and, since then, it has become a major update to Simpler AIF as well. Overall, I'm pretty happy with Advanced Layered Clothing (or "ALC" as I affectionately call it), and, despite the name, ALC has proven very easy to use so far, as well as pretty easy to modify and customize so I'm pretty sure the community will like it too.

Over the past few days, I've been bug testing both ALC and Simpler AIF pretty extensively, catching quite a few bugs in the process. I'm pretty sure I've caught all the serious/embarrassing ones, still, ALC is quite large and complex and I'd bet there are a few I haven't caught even after release.

New Features of Simpler AIF

Simpler AIF (or SAIF) version 4 had a undocumented feature where you could customize the default library messages by using phrases. I never particularly liked this method and I've replaced it with an entirely new system. Now, all library messages are controlled by the "AIF message rules". Using rules rather than phrases gives the author a lot more flexibility. Such a rule might look a little like this:

AIF message for the can't lick your own pussy rule when the failer is Cersei: say "'Jaime, do I look like a contortionist to you?'"

SAIF now includes an index of customizable library messages that you can basically drop in the game and fill out as you desire, making it very easy to customize most of the extension's default messages.

Common body parts that were included as part of the "common body parts" plugin are incorporated in the core extension itself. By default, however, they aren't actually added to anyone in the game unless you paste in the relevant pieces of code, so they are still optional. What you get, however, is much better support for secondary body parts. For example, it was possible to lick your own tummy and legs in version 4, which has been fixed in version 5.

There are some more internal changes to Simpler AIF that might not be noticeable to most authors, notably a new action phase (the "redirect" phase) whose sole purpose is to redirect actions into different ones.

There are still some things I want to do with Simpler AIF before it is "complete". I would like to support tribadism and frotting, and I would like to generalize how body parts work (i.e. instead of a rule requiring "cock" it would require a "penile thing") to better support non-humans, but these features will be saved for a version 6.

Features in Advanced Layered Clothing

ALC has a clothing system that would be familiar to anyone who has played an AIF game. On the author's end, ALC is fairly simple to use but still has some advanced features.

ALC uses a body slot system (or "body areas") and works by comparing lists of covered areas with the associated areas of body parts. Neatly, ALC doesn't require the body parts to actually exist for you to test coverage (so you don't actually have to have a "feet" object to wear shoes, but you still test to see if the feet would be covered). It's pretty easy to add new garments and body parts. It is not so easy to add new body slots, but it is at least a labor-intensive rather than complex process.

ALC uses a variety of shorthand to make it easy to write prose about garments. For example, you can use the phrase "chest garment of A PERSON" to find the garment covering a person's chest. ALC also automatically sets an "obstructing garment" variable when it tests for accessibility, allowing you to write things like this:

...if Anna's breasts are not exposed, say "You rub Anna's breasts through [the obstructing garment]."

ALC includes three methods of opening a garment: unzipping, unbuttoning and shifting. There are two more I might add in future updates (tearing and unbuckling) but for right now these three are more than enough.

An updated version of SAIF's clothing set system as been adapted for ALC. This makes it easy to manage clothing, making it so characters don't make off with each other's clothes and making it easy to dress characters back up in their clothes.

Finally, and what I think is the coolest feature of ALC, are Automated Descriptions which handle character descriptions similar to how location descriptions are printed up.

Possible Future Extensions

Manageable AIF: Really more of a "lazy person's AIF" extension. Manageable AIF consolidates descriptions and the number of interactions down to as few as possible while still keeping scenes fully interactive, making writing a AIF scene much less work.

AIF Templates: Not really an extension but a collection of fully coded AIF scenes that could be dropped into a game and filled out pretty easily to make a fully fleshed-out interactive scene.

Sex Toys: Simpler AIF's handling of sex toys is poor and non-existent in ALC and it would make sense to move this to a new extension.

Arousal: I have a few ideas for an arousal system although they aren't fully fleshed out yet.

Positions: Again, I have a few ideas how to handle this although they aren't fully fleshed out yet.

So, do any of you have any ideas of what you'd like to see in an AIF extension?

EDIT: Update about Bad Sister

I wrote an imageless version of Bad Sister for play on browsers. It is ready to go except that it needs a host. If you have a server and wouldn't mind hosting it, please send me a line.

Inform 7 Headaches

I love inform 7. But sometimes I want to bash its head in.

I'm writing a demo game for my new layered clothing extension where there's a shirt and pants rack, and I want the player to appropriately put the right piece of clothing on the right rack by being able to type in "put X on rack" without typing "put X on the pants rack".

This appears to be a simple enough with a "does the player mean" rule...

DOES THE PLAYER MEAN PUTTING SOME PANTS ON THE PANT RACK: IT IS LIKELY.
DOES THE PLAYER MEAN PUTTING A SHIRT ON THE SHIRT RACK: IT IS LIKELY.

Normally, you'd think that would solve the problem, but oh no. No matter how much I manipulated the rules, the parser popping up with a disambiguation error, unable to know the appropriate place to put clothes. It took me about half an hour to figure out what was going on.

What I found out later was -- the putting it on action actually parses backwards, and in order to disambiguate the second noun, it couldn't refer to the first noun (which hasn't been clarified yet). So, it's literally impossible to make Inform understand PUT PANTS ON RACK if there are more than two racks in the room. However, you can make Inform understand PUT PANTS ON PANTS, which is nice but something I very much doubt my players will try.

So, I've tried many things to solve this issue... a supply a missing second noun activity, new understand rules, other, more obscure solutions, but it just seems to be impossible without deep knowledge of I6's parser, something which I don't have. The only real solution at this point is to consolidate my two racks into one.

It almost makes me wish I was using TADS 3. TADS 3 has an amazing parser that is extremely good at discerning the player's meaning through the verify routine. The verify routine checks if it is logical to do something, and discerns disambiguation by whatever the verify routine returns. This means that TADS 3 has essentially integrated its check and disambiguation systems together... its rather elegant and I am envious of it. Inform 7 would do well to borrow this concept from TADS just as TADS borrowed scenes from Inform 7.

Progress Report VIII

So, I took a bit of a break this week. And by "break", I mean I didn't fiddle around with the source code like I usually do, but I have still been writing. With the framework pretty much done, the remainder of the work is pretty much is just pounding out the story, events and content. That should take quite a while, so I'm thinking it might be another week before I do some actual coding.

I've been experimenting using Scrivener to plot out AIF. So far, I like it, but I'll blaze this trail a little further before I actually write about it.

No word count estimate this week (most of the writing is in an external document at this point.)

Another Wannabe's Laws of Using Character Descriptions

I. Pick three to four distinctive characteristics for each character. At least two of them must be something other than eye color and hair color.

These aren't the only physical characteristics of your character, but they will be the ones the reader will use to draw a rough picture in their mind of what the character looks like. Possibilities: a mole, some acne, stubble, square chin, long nose, weird ears, lanky arms, etc. Other parts of the body can be described but it is only these ones that "distinguish" this person from other people.

II. Repeatedly draw attention to these characteristics as the character does stuff, not just when writing an obligatory character description paragraph.

The player is likely to forget the distinctive features of characters. Therefore, you want to refer back them regularly. Have the character brush aside their black hair from their face, reach out with lanky arms, have their tits bounce as they jump, the sun reflect off their blue eyes, scratch a scar, and on and on. This is an efficient way to write, since it does multiple things a) makes characters a little more memorable b) bring attention to the NPC's mannerisms c) establishes a real physical presence for the NPC. Not only will this make your writing more interesting, but the reader will gradually get a strong idea of what they look like.

III. Drop the description when the player first meets the NPC.

Interactive Fiction has a unique advantage in that the reader can summon up a physical description when they examine the character. However, you still want to describe a new character, because it makes sense that you'd take an appraisal of someone as you meet them. It's annoying if the player is forced to examine a character just to find out what they look like.

IV. Don't use numbers in your description.

Exception: if the PC is the sort of person that would notice someone's measurements just by looking at them. Otherwise, it's weird if you list someone's bust or cup size when "large tits", "ample bosom", "narrow waist" etc would do the job just as well.

V. Efficient character descriptions are better than long and detailed ones.

Good writers are sentence multi-taskers and can do multiple things with fewer words. Take this example.

George is still youngish. He's still got cheeks plump with a bit of baby fat and a mop of unruly, brown hair. His face seems impressed with child-like wonder combined with newly-found adolescent cynicism. At least, he kinda does when he wears his glasses. He has blue eyes.

 Compare it with this:

George still has cheeks plump with baby fat and a mop of unruly, brown hair. His blue eyes carry, in equal measure, innocence and newly-found adolescent cynicism. At least he kinda does when he wears his glasses.

As you can see, the second paragraph deletes both what is implied (George's youth is implied by his cheeks with baby fat) and combines what is necessary (the sentence about his eyes into the paragraph about his expression).

VI. Go forth and write AIF.

Not technically a law of using character descriptions, but all the same. Write more AIF.

Progress Report VII

Here's a bit of a teaser for the interface. I think it's going to be a lot easier to see what's going on now.

Not much to say really. A few days into the beta and I think it's going very well. I've gotten a lot of useful feedback.

Summary

The slog of game mechanics continues, but the end is in sight. For a break, I wrote some more of the actual story. I'm not going to post the usual percentage because I just don't feel like it this week.


Total Word Count: 80379 (up 9295 this week from 71084)

Playtesters Needed

I'm going to having a closed beta of Soccer Story in a couple of days and I need playtesters. As there is little in the way of sex or story at this point, I ask that only people genuinely interested in the soccer and management aspects of the gameplay apply.

Please email me at AnotherWannabe93 at gmail dot com if you are interested.

Thoughts on Return to Pleasantville by Lamont Sanford

As of writing, I have not read ExLibris's review of Return to Pleasantville RTP, which I will be interested in doing. Before that, I thought I'd write down my own thoughts about the game.

Peril in Pleasantville was the worst game I ever loved. The writing sucks balls -- there's no better way of saying it. But it has tons of pictures and bucketloads of girls to sleep with to make up for it. Peril in Pleasantville, after all, was the game where you could go out on dates with two girls -- neither of which was your girlfriend, and sleep through a plentiful cast. It was awesome.

...And then there was the weird alien subplot I don't think anyone cared about.

But it was RtP that finally made me learn what PiP was trying to be. The awkward horror elements, wanton shamelessness and terrible writing makes RtP the AIF equivalent of an awesomely bad B-movie. For this reason, I was excited when the cult randomly appeared out of nowhere, thinking to myself "ah, this is where the game really starts!"

As it turns out, that's where RtP would end.

We were all well-warned that RtP was going to be smaller than PiP. Despite that, you can't help but wish sequels to be bigger and better than their predecessors, and so RtP's relatively compact size was a disappointment. I can't help but wish RtP was a different game. For instance, why even return to Pleasantville? Why not set the entire game in the cabin by the lake, bring more of PiP's old characters into it and make them a bit more central? I found myself wishing I could interact with some of the established characters a bit more, like Emily, Katie and Maggie, in different combinations, too. In particular Emily, who was my favorite character in PiP, shortly following Katie. (Lamont, there needs to be a Katie/Emily threesome, make it happen) As it is, the important girls get only fractionally more screentime as the numerous random girls you encounter throughout the game.The ending cult sequence could have been foreshadowed a bit more too.

Speaking of girls, there's a lot of them in RtP, and they range from super-hot (Becky and Ms. Weaver) to scary-looking (Ms. Johnson, crazy old lady). It was especially nice to get with Ms. Weaver, who for some reason has become ultra-sexy between games. If women had the same sex drive as men, they might be in a Pleasantville game. After nearly every sex scene the woman has had a reason to bolt out with nary a word about cuddling or even a second date. One girl even said "Thanks for the dick," as she kicked me out of her home post-coitus. Talk about a male fantasy. I found it all a bit funny, really.

RtP uses a peculiar "flirt" mechanic to seduce strangers. Every time you flirt with someone, you either succeed or fail. If you fail too many times in a row, you ruin your chances. If you succeed enough times, you unlock their sex scene. It's as simple as that, and it's the kind of system I might imagine someone writing an AIF parody would devise. Honestly, it's pretty lazy even for a Pleasantville game, and I think it would have bugged me if I could seduce a major character with it. As it was, I didn't mind it as much as I thought I would, knowing that the alternative probably wasn't going to be much more inspired.

Technically, RtP is more stable than PiP, which isn't saying much. The game doesn't bug out as much, and there are just some niggling errors that I just feel could have been fixed pretty easily.

I really feel that Return to Pleasantville would have been much, much better if it had just merged the first part of the game with the second part. The part where you're moping around town and the part where you're camping just don't fit together. Sure, it's pretty cool to be able to cruise around town picking up strangers, but I think I would have liked to have seen more variety with fewer characters. I would sort of love to see an expansion which fleshes out the second part of the game.

Progress Report VI

I feel a bit confused. The word count jumped up 10,000 words, and I'm not entirely sure where they all came from, especially since I've been mostly working on Simpler AIF this week. It's especially disturbing since I made a resolution to write only 7,000 words per week. Anyways, this is all probably a sign I should slow development down a bit and concentrate on other aspects of my life.

Luckily, I feel pretty close to finishing the framework of the management component. I put in popularity, merchandise and ticket sales, which, along with finances and training, makes up the core management functions. The more interesting and challenging aspect of management (attending to the needs of your players) is up ahead and is really the core part of the game. Hopefully, sometime next month I could actually write an AIF scene.

This means I am pretty close to needing playtesters. Any potential playtesters should be more interested in the management and soccer component of the game at this point, because there is very little in the way of actual AIF.

Summary

It's nice to be close to finishing the managing component. It feels just like a teensy bit more to go. No milestones this week.

Total Word Count: 71084 (up 10247 this week from 60837)

The Acts

Act 1
Design: 100%
Prose: 100%
Internal Polish 25%
External Playtesting 0%

Act 2
Design: 40%
Prose: 10%
Playtesting/Polish: 0%

Act 3
Design: 10%
Prose: 0%
Playtesting/Polish: 0%

Gameplay

Soccer Gameplay

Design 100% Programming 75% Playtesting/Balance 30%

Team Management

Design 100% Programming 65% Playtesting/Balance 0%

In-Game Documentation
Writing 75%

Characters

Recruitable Character 1: Prose 20%, Sex Scenes 0%, Romantic Sub-Plot 0%

Recruitable Character 2: Prose 10%, Sex Scenes 0%,

Recruitable Character 3: Prose 10%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 4: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 5: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 6: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 7: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 8: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 9: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 10: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 11: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 12: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Note: all the percentages are estimates.

Simpler AIF Version 4 Released

Version 4 of Simpler AIF is released. It contains critical bugfixes, some overlooked disambiguation rules and a feature I forgot to add. You can download it here.

Simpler AIF Version 3 Released

More than a year after Simpler AIF version 2, Simpler AIF version 3 is released. It is a MAJOR upgrade over Simpler AIF version 2.

Simpler AIF is an adult extension for Inform 7 (built off the ever-popular Dudeman's General AIF) and is geared towards beginners who want to write their first AIF game and experts who would like an AIF extension that is internally easier to customize. Version 3's documentation has been totally and extensively rewritten from scratch to reflect that. -->Games written with Simpler AIF version 2 will not be compatible with Simpler AIF version 3. <--

EDIT: Version 5 is the newest version, and is a major upgrade over version 4. You can download it here.

If you want to help me improve the extension, please provide bug reports and suggestions, either in the comments, AIF archive or the email provided in the extension.

FEATURES

• Much, much better documentation that walks you step-by-step on writing basic AIF scenes, adding new actions and body parts.
• All the basic body-parts and sex actions expected of AIF.
• A sex action tracking system that minimizes the need to keep track of fiddly truth states.
• Upgraded action memory system that counts how many times you successfully did something and also provides a phrase to treat unsuccessful actions as successes.
• A simplified layered clothing system, including an optional "clothing sets" plug-in that expands the functionality of the default clothing system.
• Plug-ins that provide features of convenience for AIF writers, that can either be dropped in from the documentation or commented out of the extension. Plug-ins include additional default body parts, the ability to rename the basic body parts, orgasm controls and more.

A special thanks to Hanon Ondricek for helping me test the extension and give suggestions, and to Dudeman who allowed me to use his extension as the framework.

Because I am using Simpler AIF to write Soccer Story, it will receive regular updates. So expect more.

Progress Report V

Don't be fooled by the massive jump in word count... because of technical reasons, I had to remove the AIF extension I was using and replace it with one of my own design (Actually, Simpler AIF, which can be downloaded from the AIF archive). The bad news is that I'm going to have to revise my word count estimate for Playoffs to be about 100,000 words. The ambivalent news is that there will essentially be only basic layered clothing, which means less complicated (but hopefully not less good) sex scenes with faster development times. The good news is that the game is running much smoother than it was before, since Simpler AIF has, I think, fewer moving parts and better suited for large, complicated projects like Soccer Story.

So, much of the work this week was devoted to getting my AIF extension up to snuff (I'm hoping to release relatively soon). I've rewritten the documentation and extension is much more robust in general. The remainder of the work this week has been devoted to the soccer game play, specifically in information feedback. I was not going to include announcer commentary, but I realized as I was actually playing the game that it was a) difficult to know what was going on b) seemed kind of random because I didn't have a sense of what the margin of success was. Specifically, I had a terrible shooter score against my amazing goalie, and that frustrated me. Now, the commentator will hint by what margin you managed to score or miss, and when I replayed it the game told me it was some crazy fluke I could not have anticipated. In addition, commentators will give an overview of the situation, perhaps hinting gently at what your next action should be, and, if nothing else, provide some color commentary on players and opposing teams.

Summary

(Edit) An important milestone this week -- Soccer Story is now longer than Bad Sister, which was 55,000 words long.

Because everything I did this week was stuff I had not anticipated working on, nothing is getting ticked up. That said, I'm still feeling pretty good about the project and things are still humming along nicely.

Total Word Count: 60837 (up 8932 this week from 51905)

The Acts

Act 1
Design: 100%
Prose: 100%
Internal Polish 20%
External Playtesting 0%

Act 2
Design: 40%
Prose: 10%
Playtesting/Polish: 0%

Act 3
Design: 10%
Prose: 0%
Playtesting/Polish: 0%

Gameplay

Soccer Gameplay

Design 100% Programming 75% Playtesting/Balance 30%

Team Management

Design 70% Programming 25% Playtesting/Balance 0%

Characters

Recruitable Character 1: Prose 20%, Sex Scenes 0%, Romantic Sub-Plot 0%

Recruitable Character 2: Prose 10%, Sex Scenes 0%,

Recruitable Character 3: Prose 10%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 4: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 5: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 6: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 7: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 8: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 9: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 10: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 11: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 12: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Note: all the percentages are estimates.

Progress Report IV

A Title, An Estimate, and Future Plans

I've finally decided on a title: Soccer Story. I know I've changed the name several times during development, but I think I'm settling on this because a) it hasn't been used by a more notable project that I know of, b) it fits in well with visual novel naming conventions, c) it's pretty descriptive of what you'll get in the game. At this point, the other alternative is "Football Story" if I decide to use the British nomenclature. I know it rubs at least one person the wrong way but for right now it makes sense (ironically, while researching for the game I found out that the name "Soccer" originally came from the British, so technically both are British terms).

Secondly, I think I've come to an estimate to how long the final source code will be, and that the final game's source code will be between 130,000~160,000 words long, if I don't cut major planned features. That puts me between 1/3 and 1/2 of the way done with the raw draft, which is quite exciting to think about. Unfortunately, I doubt I'll be able to keep the same pace I have been at for the past few weeks. Much of the word count has been inflated because I've needed to copy-paste the same code with minor variations, so who knows when the game will actually be finished. Not any time soon, likely.

What will be done sooner, however, is the demo, which shall be entitled Soccer Story: Playoffs and encompass the first half of the game. I believe that will be approximately 80,000~90,000 words long and will be relatively raw when released. Like the tech demo I released earlier this year it might not have much in the way of AIF, but it will have plenty of teasing. Since it's extremely unlikely I'll have fully interactive scenes with all 12 characters, I'll be using the feedback from the demo to decide which players get those sex scenes. Right now, I know of only 3 characters that absolutely will get interactive scenes, and I think I'll add two more. But don't worry, in the final game every female character will get at least a partially interactive scene.

Another thing, I'm not crazy about one of my characters and I'm considering replacing her, but I am truly tapped out of ideas. If you submit to me a character idea and I use it, in thanks you will not only be added to the credits but also your avatar will be added during one of the game's very elaborate hidden Easter eggs. Don't worry, it won't be embarrassing. It's just a little cameo. In particular, I'm looking for a girl who might be a good comic-relief character, someone perhaps a little out of touch with reality, but in a charming kind of way. If you have a suggestion, email me at AnotherWannabe93 a t gmail d o t com.

Summary

No notable milestones this week. Last week, I put in equipment and sponsorships. This week, I fully implemented it into the game. The other thing I implemented is training. Training turned out to be extremely complicated, in fact, the second most complicated thing except the AI, and that really took up the remainder of the work time. I began fleshing out the paths for one of the characters.

I added a framework for random and triggered events. In a minor miracle there wasn't any obvious bugs and it worked exactly as intended. So far, the only events you'll get are players quitting.

Total Word Count: 51905 (up 10607 this week from 41298)

The Acts

Act 1
Design: 100%
Prose: 100%
Internal Polish 20%
External Playtesting 0%

Act 2
Design: 40%
Prose: 10%
Playtesting/Polish: 0%

Act 3
Design: 10%
Prose: 0%
Playtesting/Polish: 0%

Gameplay

Soccer Gameplay

Design 100% Programming 75% Playtesting/Balance 30%

Team Management

Design 70% Programming 25% Playtesting/Balance 0%

Characters

Recruitable Character 1: Prose 20%, Sex Scenes 0%, Romantic Sub-Plot 0%

Recruitable Character 2: Prose 10%, Sex Scenes 0%,

Recruitable Character 3: Prose 10%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 4: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 5: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 6: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 7: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 8: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 9: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 10: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 11: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 12: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Note: all the percentages are estimates.

Meet Your Advisors

"Captain"

"Yes, you'd manage recruitment, training schedules, the finances and resources, and also provide support during our games... There's only one catch. You've got to make your decision right now, at this very spot. You can ask questions, of course, but you will not leave without giving me an answer."

The Latino girl only known as "Captain" is the legendary former manager of the Easton Egrets. No one knows where she came from. No one knows her real name. No one knows why she stepped down. Actually, no one really knows much of anything about her. Speculation abounds, and she deflects any questions with her trademark dry wit.

Captain is your assistant: she accompanies you as you recruit players, she manages the training schedules, she gives you advice on winning games and motivating your team. She's also one of your players, a skilled goalkeeper, and dedicated to boot. Captain is the only character that will never leave the team, although her exact reasons are known only to her.

Melvin

"It depends. Exactly how short are these 'shorts'?"

Melvin is very happy to be your advisor. He's the president of the Egrets Fan Club, you see, and is nothing except a shameless Super Fan: you couldn't catch him outside his green-and-white jersey. His constant interaction with other Egrets fans means he's got his pulse exactly on what people are thinking. And, you'd better listen to him, because without anyone to buy tickets, you're done for!

Melvin is an expert on merchandising, fan events, and stoking up a crowd. Through him, you can hire a cheerleading squad and mascot, set up interviews with the press, do signings, and other things.

Trevor

"The loving embrace of cold hard cash is all I want in life-- it just so happens that my soulless path to wealth and riches happens to coincide with the fate of the... charming Easton Egrets. That's how you can trust me. Let's tolerate each other, but I apologize in advance, 'barely' is really all I can muster."

Trevor is an import from Easton's business school and self-proclaimed "high-functioning" sociopath. Incidentally, he cares little about soccerpeople, but needs the experience and the grades to finally be able to plunder the retirement accounts he's always dreamed of. Trevor is the sort of man who can rub two coins together and make three... and then get a rebate from the IRS for a fourth.

Trevor will advise you on all things related to money. He also handles sponsorship deals, contracts, large purchases and tracks your income. He's constantly on the lookout for business deals and will often come to you with new opportunities.

Pervert Action Future: A Belated Review

I've been replaying a bit of Pervert Action: Future and I decided it never really got the sort of in-depth review it truly deserved. So I'll do a belated review of it. I won't be rating it at all because, really, it's a free game, and so you're not exactly sacrificing anything by checking it out. You can check out his website on the top right.

WARNING: Spoilers abound.

Story

First of all, bbben is a very clever writer. So, I couldn't tell if the story was convoluted just because it was very cleverly mimicking the sort of esoteric plotting often found in sci-fi anime or if it was just trying to build a connection between the original PAC game in a rather strange way, but I'm guessing the former. In any case, it gets away with it because of previously established tropes in the genre, but I couldn't help but scratch my head a little during the big reveal. I'm not sure, really, what to think except that the important parts were in the individual romantic sub-plots, which fortunately made a lot more sense.

All you need to know starting off is that Minami Tetsuya is a complete bitch, and in truth, it's Minami that really pushes the story forward. For this reason, I would have liked to see Tetsuya have a bigger role than she does. I'll get to that later.

Writing (ADDED: 10/07/2013)

The game uses a first person, script format to sort of emulate a visual novel instead of a traditional 2nd person narrative often found in AIF. It's appropriate for bbben's style in this case, especially when the air gets thick with one-liners. The important thing is PAF made me consistently laugh out loud, and it rarely felt like it was trying too hard to be funny.

For everything else, the narrator, Kenji, inserts much of his own color commentary as he describes what's going on around him. It makes normally utilitarian location descriptions a little more fun to read but I can imagine some people being annoyed by it.

Gameplay

Pervert Action Future very nicely combines the best of eroge dating sims with what we would call "traditional AIF". PAF's various component parts all feed into each other in different ways, the combat, exploration, dating and sex, so that none felt like an afterthought. Particularly nice was the combat system, which was very well balanced as well as being surprisingly deep and entertaining. My gripe with the combat system is that I was disappointed with the meager award for beating all the monsters, which is certainly not easy. It would've been nice to have a non-interactive scene or something.

The bulk of PAF's gameplay is choosing to either build stats or romance characters between your various fights. You have three stats, Hand, Mouth and Eye, which come into play both during fights and in sex scenes. You don't particularly need to have a balanced character, and in fact the game encourages you to load up on a single stat. Eye, I find, is not only the best for combat but also unlocks anal sex. Between Hand (which lets you rub pussy) and Mouth (which lets you lick pussy) the choice is pretty damn obvious. It might be a little much to ask for each of the stats to do a little more in bed, but it would be nice.

The sex scenes, for that matter, are all very well written, well voiced and well illustrated, but simple as far as AIF goes. I am not a tremendous fan of arousal systems and so I don't feel like I lost a whole lot not having to tap "G" to see the same message pop up until my virtual avatar busts a virtual nut, but it would have been nice to see something else brought to the table in place of it, maybe some sort of clothing system, especially since your in-game avatar can't orgasm at all except in some of the non-interactive scenes at the very end of the game. Again, having the stats come into play a little more would may have helped to add a little more interest here.

As far as the romancing goes, it's all an abstracted point system with some optional puzzles thrown in, with most of the plot being told through cut scenes. It isn't bad because the individual romantic sub-plots are quite good, but even some symbolic decisions would break up the feeling of non-interactivity.

The risk with this sort of game is what I would describe as the "symmetry" between all of the characters, which is both a good and bad thing. On the good side, you can romance any character with any stat. On the bad side, once you know the trick to seducing one girl, you know how to seduce all the girls. PAF isn't hard: you spend the first half of the game developing a single stat, then, in the second half you spam romance them with your uber complimenting, chatting and/or sparring, where at some point they'll fall into bed with you. It would have been nice to see some more dramatic differences -- for example, maybe you have to defeat Taka in a fight to get her to respect you, or maybe at some point Yuri goes missing and you have to find her. I would go as far as to say I would like it if some characters were flat out more difficult than others. I know the trend is to go puzzle-lite but here it all gets given away a bit too easily.

Characters

I played both PAC and PAF pretty close to each other, and the PAF characters definitely stick out in my mind much more easily, and I can't say it was just the superior pictures. For one thing, PAF's characters are just a lot more believable even while being larger-than-life, their exaggerated personalities given more context. I think part of the reason is that while  PAC seemed to purposefully mimic the sorts of archetypes typically found in eroge games, BBBen in PAF seemed to free himself a little more, having already established this strange Dating Sim/AIF hybrid and not really needing to rely on the player's familiarity with eroge games. But that's beside the point, since PAF's girls are just more likable than those in PAC.

In this regard, Chiemi really sticks out. At the best of times, she was charming and genuine, she made me laugh and be happy. At the worst, she made me sad and sympathize with her plight, being desperate and lonely as she is. Between that and the voice acting, which is just incredible and adds so much warmth to Chiemi, she stands out as the strongest character.  In the end, she hits a strange mark, because while some characters may have reminded me of some real life people, Chiemi was the only character where I felt like I knew people who were exactly like her. Don't get me wrong, of all the cast Chiemi would make the best real-life girlfriend, but as a romanceable character she hits an uncanny valley where, minus the cyborg parts, she's almost not fantastical enough. It's a difficult thing to explain... I just couldn't see her as an erotic character. I think that's why, even with Chiemi really being the best character in the game, she maybe isn't as popular as she deserves to be, not even with me, and that's a shame. Poor Chiemi. She always gets left out, doesn't she?

Taka, on the other hand, is damn fine. In my case, this isn't just because Taka's character model happens to be the least cartoonish and most vixen, but rather because I find Farscape's Aeryn Sun and Katee Sackhoff's portrayal of Starbuck to be just sex on wheels. It's probably the same reason I found Misato from PAC to be my favorite character from that game. I like tough, sexy girls, and Taka's not only badass, but her voice actress has a sexy, husky voice. It's just a personal kink of mine, and Taka just hits it square.

I'm not really sure what to think of Taka's relationship with Yuri. They are supposed to be almost like sisters, but I just can't buy it, considering how deeply troubled Yuri clearly is at least in the beginning of the game. Yuri struck me as the weakest character, I found her portrayal quite inconsistent, going from cold and enigmatic at the beginning to doing drunk karaoke with Taka somewhere in the middle, without much of a convincing transition in between. She's supposed to be deeply troubled, and considering her mother is Minami she would be, but her relationship with Taka is healthy enough to undercut this. It feels like both Taka and Yuri happened to be the odd characters out and needed a threesome ending. It's also not clear why Taka would trust Yuri and not Chiemi. I would have preferred, somehow, this sisterly relationship developing during the game with the player acting as a catalyst.

The final pair is Ayane the pop star and Ami the best friend, whose relationship made a lot more sense. I really liked Ayane because she was very believably "tsundere", and the story line with the player helping her come to grips with her exhibitionism was one of the best and hooked in well to her sex scenes. Ayane's voice acting was pretty good but it had the poorest audio quality, but studio-quality recording is probably a bit much to ask for. Ami's voice acting is second only to Chiemi's and, as a character, she could have very easily become boring or forgettable were it not for her generally pretty good writing and acting. Ami is the character which most obviously falls into a specific archetype, but fortunately it isn't noticeable because Ayane adds a little bit of interest.

A little should be said about Minami, who is very obviously the villainess of the game. Despite her being an awful person, I would have liked to see a little more of her, even if it's to mess up the PC's day a little more aggressively. She never really gets her own true interactive scene for one, and I didn't find her unsexy.

A final note: all of the actresses did a commendable job to breathe a bit of life into the characters, and for that reason none of them came off as Slutty Cheerleader #6. Plus, it's not easy to make dick-sucking sounds and not be self-conscious.

Overall

"Soccer Game", my own work in progress, is heavily influenced by the tone and game play of Pervert Action: Future. If there was any testament to how much I enjoyed this game, it's probably that. I just hope that BBBen wasn't planning on writing Pervert Action: Football.

I will, however, volunteer what his next game should be: Pervert Action: Sengoku. We've already been to the future, now's the time to go to the past. Finish Super PAC first, of course.

Progress Report III

Summary
Most of the work this week was focusing on the macro team management component. You can now buy equipment and choose a sponsor. A couple of milestones were reached. First, it is now possible to play through Act 1 into Act 2. Also, the word count is now higher than the standard rules but not quite as high as all of the extensions I've used. All of the Act 2 teams are implemented but not refined, and the skeleton of the tournament system has been implemented so you can technically get to the end of Act 2 although it's very bare-bones.

I've added a ton of admittedly lame humor. You've got to excuse me for that.

Total Word Count: 41298 (up 6338 from 34960)

The Acts

Act 1
Design: 100%
Prose: 100%
Internal Polish 0%
External Playtesting 0%

Act 2
Design: 35%
Prose: 5%
Playtesting/Polish: 0%

Act 3
Design: 10%
Prose: 0%
Playtesting/Polish: 0%

Gameplay

Soccer Gameplay

Design 95% Programming 75% Playtesting/Balance 25%

Team Management

Design 50% Programming 20% Playtesting/Balance 0%

Characters

Recruitable Character 1: Prose 20%, Sex Scenes 0%, Romantic Sub-Plot 0%

Recruitable Character 2: Prose 10%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 3: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 4: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 5: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 6: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 7: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 8: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 9: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 10: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 11: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 12: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Note: all the percentages are estimates.

Progress Report II

I'm a bit too drugged up on allergy medicine to work, too sick to go out and so forth, so now's a good time to release a progress report.

Summary
I'm still trying to make up for lost ground after the big delete, but I feel I'm much closer to being in the core of the game. Also, I hit my first real milestone yesterday: I broke Inform's default memory limits. Luckily, you can always allocate more, but ideally you don't want to do that too many times.

Total Word Count: 34960

The Acts

Act 1
Design: 100%
Prose: 85%
Playtesting/Polish: 0%

Act 2
Design: 25%
Prose: 2%
Playtesting/Polish: 0%

Act 3
Design: 10%
Prose: 0%
Playtesting/Polish: 0%

Gameplay

Soccer Gameplay

Design 95% Programming 75% Playtesting/Balance 25%

Team Management

Design 50% Programming 10% Playtesting/Balance 0%

Characters

Recruitable Character 1: Prose 20%, Sex Scenes 0%, Romantic Sub-Plot 0%

Recruitable Character 2: Prose 10%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 3: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 4: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 5: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 6: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 7: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 8: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 9: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 10: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 11: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 12: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Note: all the percentages are estimates.

Progress!

A lot of progress has been made, I've been working on the game pretty much every day. I can't explain it: in my view, there is very little in the world more purifying that deleting loads of your own work. It is like losing 20 pounds. So, I won't say that I am where I was when I restarted, purely in terms of word count I'm about 10,000 words behind, but I do feel like I'm much closer to being into the meat of the game.

The skeleton of day 1 is finished, which is the "set-up" of the game. Only the most basic level of team customization is in, in that you can rename your team now. There won't be a game effect but you will get funny reactions from people if you name your team something weird.

I'm working on the recruitment right now. There are going to be about 12 recruitable characters. I'm not sure how many of those will have romantic sub-plots and interactive scenes... ideally all, but I don't think I'm going to have the time to do all that. In any case, to recruit a character you have to complete a mini-CYOA sequence, and how to get those CYOA sequences to follow properly after the other is the challenge for the moment.

Anyways, that's all for now. It's churning along now, and hopefully I won't be deleting tens of thousands of words again.

Images Required?

Some people seem to think that images are quickly becoming a requirement, but an interesting thing happened. Mr. Flibble, author of Magician's Nephew, announced he was going for a second round of beta tests. There was a showering of requests. As far as I know, Magician's Nephew contains no images.

It's obvious why. Magician's Nephew is a really good game, with a cool premise and interesting choices. It also created a bit of a splash in the Shark's Lagoon (honestly, no pun intended) which generally is a more image-focused community anyway.

My personal feeling is that there is plenty of room for text-only games. What I think is true is that games with images don't need to be as good to get noticed. Now, whether we've set the bar for quality too high is a debate worth having, but I think it's evident the death of text is greatly exaggerated.

I'm eager to get my hands on the final version of Magician's Nephew. But I've got some work to do on my own game, first.

(Almost) Starting From Scratch

This weekend, I reloaded a much earlier back-up of the project and began reorganizing the contents for expansion. I also began to make some new rooms and populate it with furniture and so forth. These are all pretty safe things to do while I'm brainstorming all the new characters, new sub-plots, new game mechanics and so forth that I'll need.

I received a good number of comments, the vast majority of which were varying levels of "make what you want to make." A sentiment I respect. I'd be lying, however, if I said that hypothetical future popularity didn't figure into it at. I find it very gratifying when people like the stuff I make. But throwing out the TF was not one of those decisions. If I felt like I could pull off a soccer simulator with TF elements, I would have, and people would play it because there's not much AIF coming out these days. But I realized that the TF and the soccer sim stuff were two contradictory experiences that was getting harder and harder to rectify.

Why go TF in the first place? It's very simple: I like to mix things up. I don't have a desperate need to write TF, or at least it's no more desperate than my need to write quality things and have people enjoy my work.

But, one thing will ALWAYS be true, and that's that I'll ALWAYS write about things I want to write about, for a very simple reason: if I didn't want to write about them, they'd NEVER get done. Believe me, if I was going to write a story purely for eyeballs, I'd write a game where Hermione Granger and Harry Potter have an incestuous relationship and are also vampires.

Wait, no one steal that idea! No one steal that idea!

Should I Throw Away the Transformation Elements?

I've been thinking very hard about my game for the past few days. There's something I'd appreciate a bit of input on.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist. If something doesn't fulfill my internal quality-control, it's not likely it's going to get done. I get a nagging feeling in my chest, something that tells me that something is wrong. I get that feeling when I work on this game. I think I understand now what is bothering me.

#1: There are people who are more interested in the soccer elements and not at all interested in the TF elements. Others are more interested in the TF elements and not at all interested in the soccer elements. It appears that the latter group is in the minority. It is bad game design to have one half of the game barely tolerable by half the players. There's just very little demand for soccer sims with TF. People just seem much more excited about the soccer and very "meh" about the TF.

#2: There is a debate in AIF as to how much the PC should be a reflection of the player and how much they should be a character in their own right. The former camp says that the protagonist should be basically a nameless shell to allow the player to reflect them as accurately as possible. The latter camp argues that nameless PCs are never practically going to provide a satisfactory level of freedom to players, so you might as well make them interesting characters in their own right. I am in the latter group, but this game would have plowed brave new ground into my side. Ultimately, I was getting uncomfortable with the amount of kinks, neuroses and so forth I was imposing on the player, and that was required to move the story forward.

#3: The scope of the game was too large and varied to accomplish in any sort of timely or quality fashion. There needs to be no contradiction between quality and quantity if one is willing to sacrifice their lives to work on something. I'm not that sort of person. Me wanna haf fun.

What needs to be understood is that I started this game out as a TF game with a soccer mini-game thrown in to add a little interest. Now, the main draw appears to be the soccer mini-game. A soccer management game with sex thrown in hasn't really been done before, and I think that sounds like a lot of fun. And, I might as well add the soccer mini-game is pretty technically sophisticated. It took about a month of (intensive) development to create. You can download it off the AIF Archive.

So, if you haven't guessed already, I'm considering tossing out the TF elements and focusing purely on expanding the soccer management elements. You're a male, from start of game to end of game. I haven't decided if that male character will be named or unnamed; Erin, formerly the PC, will become an NPC. You manage a girl's soccer team. The characters will be the same. You train the girls, you can romance them, you resolve their differences to make them a better team.

So here is the new premise I'm considering:

Erin, star player for the Easton Egrets, has disappeared, leaving her old team in a state of chaos. Interpersonal rivalries have reached a breaking point, and everyone's been neglecting their training. An outsider needs to come in to reform and restore the Easton Egrets to being the greatest soccer team New Suffolk has ever seen.

If I choose to do this, I won't exactly be starting from scratch but I will be basically throwing away months of work. I'm fine with throwing away months of work. God knows I've done it before (...though... I do have plans for saving some of the sex scenes I've already written... B-D ). This will also mean I'm returning to the working title of "Soccer Game", although hopefully I'll come up with something a little more creative soon.

So, if you have any suggestions about what I should do, now is the time to let me know.

What Happens With Poor Planning

Planning is important. It's also not something I'm particularly good at.

Looking at the source code for Erin's Big Game today, I realized to myself: "Damn, what a mess." There's interlocking pieces everywhere. Well, there are pieces everywhere. They aren't particularly interlocking with anything. Rather, they're jammed together like a plastic bag of gears and bolts.

For example: How in the Hell did I think two conversation systems was a good idea when I have, literally, dozens of characters? Why didn't I program a time system to begin with rather than try and fit it into an already partially written game? I thought I was so clever to start writing the critical scenes first, beginning, middle and end. Never did it occur to me how difficult it would be to, you know, insert the things between those points.

There's only one solution at this point and, that's to rethink how I'm going to do things entirely. I'm going to save what I can and put it into some fresh source code. That's going to take time. In the meantime, I'm going to spend some time doing some AIF related side-projects in ADRIFT. I might talk about that in the future.

Now enjoy this artist's representation of me at work.

Progress has been Slow

So work on what I'm tentatively going to refer to as "Erin's Big Game" has been slow. This is partially due to real life issue such as moving homes, partially because I still have work I promised to do for other people and that's eating away at me, and finally because Game of Thrones and derived products have been sucking out all of my time. Generally, I find returning after not having worked on something for over two weeks or more difficult, because the code has gotten long and I'm not always sure where to start. Suffice to say, I haven't even been checking the AIF Archive recently, which is usually something I do every day.

Sometimes inspiration directs me elsewhere. I've got to say to myself: "No [MY RL NAME HERE]! Existing projects please!" As someone with a lot of ideas and little discipline creating large projects can be a struggle. In these cases it may be a good idea not to force it. Or to force it. I haven't decided yet.

Anyways, doing a little bit each day will help me get back on track.

Character Profile: Amy

Introducing our first major character...

Amy Ruthers

Height: 5'6"
Weight: 136 lbs.
Skin Tone: Light
Eyes: Green
Hair: Natural blonde, tied back
Birthplace: Richmond, Virginia
Sexuality: Straight
Likes: Animals, cute things, romantic comedies
Dislikes: Crudeness, meanness, scary movies

Hardly anyone could hate Amy, having the reputation of being the sweetest, most innocent person in the entire league. After all, she blushes whenever the subject of sex comes up. Everyone believes she's a virgin but no one has really had the courage to ask, since she tends to make everyone into an older brother or sister, and everyone feels the need to protect Amy... except Captain, who regards Amy as a weak link in an otherwise very strong team.

Out of Amy's many admirers, her most ardent is Erin, who is reduced to a sort of puppy-love every time she sees her. As a result, Erin is often passing the ball to Amy during games and giving Amy credit for wins wherever possible. This has given Amy a reputation of being a better player than she actually is. And something that irritates Captain to no end.

A Name Change

I'm feeling pretty dissatisfied with the title. Erin's Letter just sound way too much like a Lifetime made-for-TV movie. My other choice was Erin's Wish or Erin's Dream but they sounded like a cancer foundation. Maybe something simple and fun like "The Big Game". Anyways, I'm open for suggestions.

Character Profile: Erin

Introducing our protagonist...

Erin Reilly

Height: 5'9"
Weight: 166 lbs.
Skin Tone: Light
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Shoulder-length brown hair
Birthplace: Easton, New Suffolk
Sexuality: Lesbian
Education: Biology Major
Likes: soccer, girls, comic books
Dislikes: Ricky (captain of Easton University's men's soccer team), studying

Erin has made quite a name for herself recently. She's the champion of the Easton Egrets, having scored the winning goal over their rivals, the Vanderville Valkyries, last season. She's brought an obscure, under-performing team to the pinnacle of college soccer fame. They say Erin is destined for great things in the world of professional woman's soccer. There's just one problem. Erin doesn't want to be a woman. At all.

Erin is sure that his being born into a woman's body is some terrible cosmic mistake. But she's always been too afraid of surgery and hormones, so she accepts it, for now. But things change, and new opportunities arise. When her life as a woman becomes unbearable, she soon receives an offer from an unexpected direction...

Erin's Letter: Progress Update I

ACT STATUS

ACT I: 100% design, 90% written, 0% play-tested.

ACT II: 75% design, 25% written, 0% play-tested.

ACT III: 10% design, 0% written, 0% play-tested.

ACT IV: 10% design, 0% written, 0% play-tested.

CHARACTER STATUS

Major Character I: Path 10%, Sex Scenes 50%

Major Character II: Path 5%, Sex Scenes 0%

Major Character III: Path 5%, Sex Scenes 0%

Minor Character I: Path 75%, Sex Scenes 10%

SEX SCENES

Fully Interactive as Female
Completed: 1 Partial: 0

Partially Interactive as Female
Completed: 0 Partial: 1

Fully Interactive as Male:
Completed: 0 Partial: 2

Partially Interactive as Male
Completed: 0 Partial: 0

SOCCER GAMEPLAY

Tutorial: 90% Complete

Play-offs: 0% Complete

Tournament: 0% Complete

Bad Sister: A Retrospective

So, this is the thing I've been meaning to write for a while, since I finished and published Bad Sister, in fact. I'm equal parts extremely happy about it and a little embarrassed. Writing Bad Sister and publishing it to (relative) popularity is very gratifying and certainly an achievement not worth sneezing at. At the same time, it's a dirty, dirty sex game. It's not exactly something I can hold aloft as a real achievement in real life and put on the resume. Not unless I want a career in writing porn games, and that's unfortunately a niche market right now.

Bad Sister was an experiment. A personal experiment, it's not an experimental game. God no. I just wanted to see if I could write a sex game. I actually had no experience writing erotica, my genre being closer to fantasy and science fiction. I started playing and writing normal IF but then began AIF as a guilty pleasure. I played Moist out of curiosity. Then I made my way through the Goblinboy library and the BBBen library and before long, I had actually run out of AIF games worth playing. Anyone who knows me in real life knows that at that point I'd just start making my own shit.

So, I must have started like four games before I actually started working on Bad Sister. First was a game called 3 A.M at the Gas Station, where you play as a musician who invites a strange girl to have a foursome with you, your girlfriend and your (female) manager in the back of a van. This was supposed to be a small game but I quickly realized that programming an AIF extension was going to be hard as shit and foursomes are very labor intensive.

The next game was going to be entitled The Alt Girls, which was a sex-romp through a town where you slept with a lot of girls who were into various alternative cultures. There was an punk cashier girl, a hippie girl with a broken down ride and a fiery communist girl (modeled after Damsel from Vampire: Bloodlines) planned for, but I got really bored because there was no storyline to speak of.

There was Queen of Metal, which was based on my love of the thrashing, smashing, headbanging music. It was going to be a silly RPG where you played a metal head who fought with (and, of course, fucked) the four Muses of Heavy Metal against the... well, I won't say it because I'd still like to write the Queen of Metal. But the four muses would be based on four tendencies in metal that I liked. They are/were going to be: Druya, the tiny Russian girl who represents folk metal; Clare, a Christian with a Joan of Arc themed band who represents fantasy and power metal; Nalia, the Celtic sensation who would represent progressive and operatic metal; finally, a witch (whose name I forget) who would represent black and death metal. Of course, writing an RPG is actually a lot of work and I hadn't exactly anticipated that.

That leads up to Bad Sister. When I started, I promised myself this is going to be a game I'll actually finish. I sort of half-expected I wouldn't be able to do it. So I just started with a basic premise of a person going on a date with a girlfriend. From there, it expanded. I added a "Bad Sister". I thought that Taylor was unrealistically antagonistic, so I added the back story. I threw in some lesbian scenes because yes.

The point is I didn't exactly come into it with a plan. I didn't realize, for example, that I'd switch to CYOA. At that point, it wasn't because I was incapable of making a text adventure, but that I'd never finish it if it wasn't CYOA. But I really wanted to have AIF-style sex scenes so I wrote a very convoluted method to use sex commands.

It was a lot of fun and a lot of work. Even though people still call it a small project, it didn't feel that way. It felt huge. The total amount of text contained in Bad Sister (including the programming) was about half a novel. Unlike a novelist, a game not only needs to be proofread but also debugged and playtested. As a result, it takes a long, long time to produce one simple game.

I was extremely fortunate to receive the services of Goblinboy for making the game images. He is a very swell guy and even helped to test the game. I sort of doubt that many people would have played if it weren't for him. A. Bromire made really extensive notes and playtesting. It's because of him the game was mostly bug-free, because believe me there was some really honking bad bugs to begin with.

While I guess I could have refined the thing forever, but eventually you need to kick it out the door. Towards the end the game was totally draining me and working on it was taking all of my patience. I finally pushed it out into the world in February. I was elated to see it made something of a splash and it made me really want to continue writing. In addition, I feel a bit like now I have membership in the elite group of "game makers", a feeling which is probably not warranted but nevertheless.

Still, there are things I would have wanted to change. There are corners I cut. Ending #6 really was pretty convoluted and was basically an exercise in me trying to jam through an ending that really didn't make any sense. I was actually pretty happy I got to use Jenny (it was my suggestion) but I guess it probably did invite a comparison with Meteor (which was a far, far better game, to be honest).

Another thing is that, while erotica is everywhere, it is actually really difficult to write. This may be why most erotica is pretty bad. I feel like I've got to lot to learn. Luckily, in this regard, I stand on the shoulders of giants. Even new authors give me something to learn. Brad's Erotic Week helped me realize that good porn is actually very similar to good horror, lots of buildup and tension and hinting only to be released in crazy and unexpected ways. Palmer is just an enviably good writer. Leagues better than so-called "professionals".

Many months later, it's strange. What I find the most gratifying is not the nicer things people have said about it but some of the more critical things. It's nice to hear people say good stuff of course, but to hear people say something fair but critical is, I think, an indication that they took your work seriously.

Sorry for the wall of text. It'll probably happen again. :)

Announcement: Erin's Big Game (Tentative Title)

An AIF Game by Another Wannabe

She's not what you'd call a typical college girl, Erin. She's a champion soccer player, a parentless orphan, and has always, always desperately wished to be a boy. Now, a strange experiment has made Erin's most impossible fantasy finally come true. She, rather, he, returns to her old school under a new identity, Eric, with a second chance to pursue the romance that was out of her reach. And she's got to keep her former friends from realizing her true identity.

It seems like Erin is getting everything she had ever wanted. But as Erin soon finds out, it's not as easy being a boy as she thought, and it's far more difficult keeping things a secret as she imagined...

FEATURES

• Lead the Easton Egrets to victory as their manager in a challenging soccer management game, eventually challenging their greatest rivals, the Vanderville Valkyries.
• Entangle yourself with three major romantic interests, each of whom have complex stories that are connected in some way to the other, or one of many minor ones.
• Not a faceless, nameless player character: make major decisions with a PC that actually has their own thoughts and feelings. 
• Lots of endings, good and bad, easy and hard.
• Sex-positive, lighter tone inspired by more grounded Anime romantic comedies.
• Features many fully interactive sex scenes, both as Erin and Eric, as well as many non-interactive ones.
• Might have images, if someone volunteers to make them.

RELEASE: PC release maybe late next year at the earliest. No word from Steam or XBox Arcade.

PRICE: Zilch dollars and no cents.

EDIT 9/10/2013: Changed title from "Erin's Letter" to "Erin's Big Game".

Under Construction?

Apparently, this blog is searchable (a search of "Another Wannabe aif" on Google came up with this as a first result). I've been working on this blog for a few months and I hadn't intended to release it yet. Anyway, I should probably make a post explaining myself. Hello, I'm Another Wannabe. I write sex games.