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. :)