Friday, July 25, 2014

Fencing Academy... published?

Some pretty heady news today. The stories I've been working on and submitting to Literotica are getting published... in an actual (e) book!

A few days ago, I signed a contract with Uruk Press, giving them the digital publishing rights to the Fencing Academy stories. They are a new and small publisher specializing in erotic fantasy, definitely worth checking out. Needless to say, this is pretty awesome. I've been working my entire life to write professionally and now the time has finally come.

This is really the chance to do something truly special. Publishing like this is going to give me a lot of flexibility and support to write the best story I can. I'm hoping to write several Fencing Academy books, though the details are all up in the air for right now.

Anyways, as new stuff comes out I'll let you guys know.

You can read the first four chapters on my literotica page.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Thoughts on 2014 Minicomp

Well, I've just made my rounds of all the minicomp games and this is, briefly, my thoughts on each. Overall, I was impressed by the general quantity and quality of the offerings. It certainly says something hopeful about AIF in general. In alphabetical order:

Amy the Slut
This is one of the three games I failed to finish in this year's minicomp. It's technically impressive in that it's basically a dating sim using Twine, but I just felt no motivation to help Lance get with Amy. The prose is rather spare and to-the-point, as well, leaving very little meat. In the end, I wasn't curious about their relationship and there wasn't enough going on to keep my interest.

Dinner Plans
Wow... where do I start? I loved Dinner Plans. It may be, actually, the best minicomp game I've ever played. The snappy dialogue, excellent writing, interesting concept and well-realized characters all combined for something pretty fucking memorable. The pacing was just excellent, and the transition to the final sex scene in the end was very smooth. That made the game exceptionally hot. AOneHitWonder, I hope not.

Friday Afternoon
This was clearly the best of the various Twine offerings this year. The writing in Friday Afternoon was great, with elegant readable prose, unfortunately marred by a few spelling errors ("cocktails", not "coctails"). What particularly stood out for me were the descriptions, which were very well illustrated. Where it suffered, perhaps was in structure and pacing. I felt a little like I had been dropped among a bunch of different characters I really hadn't been introduced to. I'm told my character is chasing after a girl, but I don't really get a chance to know her before Sex Scene happens. Being a snippet of a larger game, I suppose this can't be helped.

Fucking Monster Bash
Full disclosure, I helped beta test Fucking Monster Bash... and then I ruined it by updating Simpler AIF 1,000,000 times. The best part of the game was the documentation, which called me a genius, something that was sorely lacking in the other offerings this year.

...Ok, on a serious note, I'm not quite a coding genius, since I7 is the only programming language I'm any good at, but it is flattering all the same.

Hanon Ondricek's writing is hilarious. I really thought Briar deserved to win last year's minicomp. Admittedly, I can't say FMB quite deserves that distinction, though I think Hanon has it in him to make an excellent game. I still question the use of Threaded Conversations. I'm not a big fan of the extension myself. As a player, it's very weird and it's effectively a menu-based system without the convenience.

Lark Rise
Unfortunately, I couldn't make it through this game either. The number of errors and run-on paragraphs made it very difficult for me to read through. There is one section where you find some papers, and out pops a massive block of text I immediately glazed over. Eventually, I got stuck after calling Evie to dinner and that was that. Which is unfortunate, because clearly the author is trying to tell some kind of story, but it ends up just getting lost. There could be a good game in here, but it is in such desperate need of proofreading.

One Last Pay Day
Wow. Another mind-blower. This time we're put on an alien planet with a firebrand warrior merc babe, and we need to do exciting shit like pop alien heads. The writing was awesome, dialogue snappy and characters bursting with personality. Some puzzles are a bit easy, by the end of the game you end up making some very headscratchy decisions and serious moral quandaries. The amount of polish approaches absurd. It plays great. Period.

*minor spoilers* Another curious thing about this game is that this is the first game I've played where the main female interest is pretty damn evil. It's definitely a different take. By the end of the game, I really didn't like her very much, which spoiled an otherwise excellent ending sex scene. That's the only bad thing I can say about this game, and it's most a personal taste thing.

Slim Spady Detective
An interesting concept that, unfortunately, just wasn't executed well. The author was clearly going for a traditional IF feel while sticking with Twine. I think the author would have been better served learning how to use one of the traditional AIF authoring systems (TADS, ADRIFT, or my favorite, I7). The rather strange inventory system put me through a loop. Eventually, I kinda just stopped playing.

Snowstorm
An AIF game set during a snowstorm is an excellent concept. But this is more a truth-or-dare game, and the challenge here is to get your partner comfortable enough to have sex with you. The descriptive prose is unfortunately very sparse, but the dialogue is better.

Unfortunately, Emily is a bit odd. She takes it very personally when asked to twerk, for example, and I kinda of felt dealing with her was a bit like navigating a minefield. When the sex does come, the descriptions are very spare. Had they been a bit more padded I think the game would have been more compelling.

Personal Rankings

(NOTE: This is NOT the official results. These are just the games that I think are the best.)

3rd: Friday Afternoon by Shannon O'Donnelly
The writing was excellent and the concept hot. I can't wait to see it expanded. Unfortunately, it didn't have the same sort of depth of interaction as those that were higher.

2nd: One Last Pay Day by Louys Bilitis
Between the excellent writing and the stunning amount of polish, this game could have very easily taken 1st place for me. Unfortunately, it didn't quite have the level of eroticism as the first place game.

1st: Dinner Plans by AOneHitWonder
It's a bit formulaic, but the great characters, quality of the sex scenes, and outstanding pacing and writing made Dinner Plans the best game this year. I loved it and I can't wait to see if there will be more.

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Thoughts on Emily: Sister Attraction REDUX

So, I was embarrassed by my prior review of E:SA. I think my initial feelings about it were highly colored by my irritation about the age thing, which is definitely not fair on the author especially since he put up the splash screen stating explicitly that people who were offended by E:SA's themes shouldn't play. I still kind of feel that the explicit ages could have been removed without really detracting from the project, but that is the last time I will mention that in this new write up. E:SA is a game with a lot of strengths, while my old review highlighted things that bothered me and breezed past the things I liked. Sure, there are rough edges, but yeah, the game is pretty damn good and definitely pushes AIF in a new, positive direction in terms of storytelling.

Gameplay

E:SA is a love story about two teenagers who happen to be siblings. While the story is pretty linear and, as far as I know, pretty much ends the same way each time (unless you fuck up royally), the player can, by solving puzzles and through interaction with Emily (the titular sister) can effect how the relationship evolves in both a sexual and romantic way. The game keeps track of two scores: Intimacy and Daringness. Intimacy is usually increased by talking with Emily, and daringness is increased by taking bold actions, including, evidently, culling poor insects. Increasing your score, again, won't change the ending as far as I know but is critical for unlocking the MAX SEX CONTENT.

The puzzles range between pretty easy, relatively difficult and irritating. My favorite puzzle involved hunting a bee through your house, and waiting for it to land on something durable so you can smack it. It shows a good bit of technical finesse on the part of the author, though perhaps only AIF veterans would be able to find the newspaper to crush it with. Sneaking around your sister's room and reading her diary is fun, and it's a nice touch that you can't read the entire thing in one playthrough.

The intimacy puzzles more involve a close reading of Emily's dialogue, of which there is a lot. The key here is being able to read Emily's needs and wants, or getting her to open up about her feelings. Some things are pretty obvious, others are really less so.

There must be some real headscratchers in E:SA because in my several playthroughs I couldn't get all the points. Thankfully, for morons like me there is a cheat to give you bonus score, which allows me to pretty much experience the entire game. Overall, the score provides a pretty compelling incentive to explore and try a lot of things. The scenes you are awarded with are well worth it.

Sex

Sex scenes in E:SA sometimes miss, sometimes hit home runs. Palmer's writing is pretty good, but as a scene progresses past foreplay the writing tends to collapse a bit. In the harder actions the prose is kind of impenetrable, and it just seems like "rub tits" and "fuck pussy" have really the same amount of effort put into them. The originality and imagination Palmer shows during the foreplay scenes just isn't present in the full-on sex scenes. The arousal system feels like kind of an afterthought, with the messages just sort of tacked onto the ends of the prose. It's not that I hate arousal systems, done well it can make sex scenes extremely immersive, but if the arousal system isn't properly implemented it's just better to have longer chunks of quality text. Emily's sexual dialogue doesn't feel as inspired as her non-sexual dialogue, and it can get irritating when she hints or asks for something in one line and refuses to do it in another.

The general quality of the first few scenes really made this stand out. The bedroom scene with Emily was excellent, as was the mutual masturbation scene. There is even a scene where Emily starts issuing orders to you, the player, which was pretty imaginative and something I hope we see more of in AIF. That made the later sequences far more disappointing. The dream sequence with that black-haired girl whose name I can't recall was entirely forgettable, and Emily's final sex scene just feels very anticlimactic.

E:SA includes plenty of pictures. They didn't do much for me, but this definitely a personal taste thing. This is partly because (please don't lynch me!) I don't find Emily's model particularly sexy, and partly because I'm slowly finding text and audio more erotic than pictures. I'm beginning to understand how people can feel how images are a distraction, ultimately, I feel like I would have enjoyed E:SA more without them.

Story and Characters

Emily and her brother's relationship is set in the context of what is basically a broken home. Their parents are distant and the siblings have essentially come to rely on each other for emotional support. This is a pretty serious backdrop for what is, basically, a feelgood, lighthearted game. The game's plot is propelled forward by a photo contest, which the PC uses as a pretext to get closer to his sister.

In my prior review, I was pretty fixated on the photoshoot, and I thought it implied a lack of love on the part of the PC. I'm going to backtrack from that quite a bit. I think the photoshoot sub-plot implies stupidity on the part of the PC, but I don't think he doesn't care about his sister because he wants to take pictures of her.

That said, the choice of a photoshoot is not quite a seamless fit with the plot. It feels weird to me that my PC is basically submitting naked pictures of his sister for the world to see. It would fit well in a game where the characters were not so well-realized, perhaps in a sex rompy game like a Pleasantville, but it is an odd juxtaposition with the carefully tended emotional backstory Palmer is trying to develop. A little change would have gone a long way. Instead of a photo contest, why doesn't the PC have a simple passion for photography?

Other than the photoshoot thing, Emily and the PC's relationship is tended to with great care. The dialogue is generally outstanding, and the joking and banter that goes on between them feels very realistic. I could really see people saying what they say. They do get touchy-feely, but teenagers I think tend to be that way so that wasn't a problem for me. Dialogue was only occasionally awkward. The game is narrated in the PC's voice, who is supposed to be telling the story as he remembers it to an interviewer. This is something I haven't seen before in AIF, but I'm not sure how successful it is. I felt like I was being ripped from the action too much and that I was being reminded that the PC is not in the "here and now" as it were. It felt too much like I was reading something rather than being put into the PC's shoes.

Overall, Emily and th PC's relationship develops sensibly. You know they like each other, but breaking down the barriers to consummation is really where the meat of character development lies. Considering the "broken family" backstory of Emily and the PC their burgeoning romantic relationship makes a lot of sense. There is a natural escalation, both sexually and emotionally, which is E:SA's greatest strength and so far something pretty much unique to this game. The execution is good in spite of the rather silly photoshoot subplot.

Conclusion

So, I think this review really more accurately reflects my opinion of E:SA. There is a line between providing constructive criticism and being a dick, and I feel like I was using the guise of giving constructive criticism to essentially be a dick. E:SA is a good game, and you should definitely play it if you're not offended by the game's themes. If you're going to throw a fit like I did, than you should perhaps skip it.

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Pervert Action: Legacy Announcement

In case you guys didn't know, BBBen announced his new Pervert Action: Legacy game a few days ago. I've actually actively been contributing to the project, so that's pretty cool. So far, it's really shaping up awesome, and I'm pretty happy to be a part of it. Phinn is also contributing art, and I'm routinely astounded by the quality of his renders.

Here's the "press release" for lack of a better term that BBBen put on his site.


too long; didn't read: New Pervert Action game in development featuring hot maids.
Synopsis: The third game in the Pervert Action series. As master of a mansion in a remote valley, it is Kenji's job to train up his "battle maids" in housework, combat and the arts of love...
I don't want to release too much information on projects that are currently far from getting a release, but it also seems worthwhile to mention this one since it's now occupying my AIF time. I have started writing it, done a lot of design work and a fair bit of multimedia work, but it's still a long way from being ready. Nonetheless, there's a good chance that if I'm not posting anything it may be because I'm working on this.
I will say that I'm trying to mix up the formula a little bit so that the gameplay feels fresh while still keeping what worked about the previous titles. The combat system in PAF will be developed and expanded, while relationship gameplay will be a little bit more diverse. The sex scenes will likely be a little shorter, but also more fluid and more numerous. I'm consistently trying to improve the standard of the graphics in the series, and additionally this one will have larger images than in past.
Release date: Not close. Stay tuned and I may release the occasional character poster to whet your appetite.
Collaboration: Super Pervert Action: Crisis is the most collaborative project ever in the history of AIF, and Pervert Action: Future is pretty high on the list too. Therefore it's only natural that there would be other people contributing to this new project. I've spoken to a couple of voice actors who will hopefully be returning to lend their talents to this game; Phinn, who worked on the images of Super PAC, has got involved to work on images for PAL; and Another Wannabe, writer of Bad Sister, has volunteered to contribute text.
Voice acting: That's absolutely the plan! I intend to get in voice actors I've worked with before, although because some won't be available there will likely be some new people too.
Graphics: Phinn and I have already started work on them. More info on that topic will be coming eventually, but one small detail is that we'll be using larger images this time, for a bigger on-screen impact. Where the old images only take up a corner of most screens, these will take up more like half the screen (that's the plan, anyway).





...OK, so, while BBBen isn't listening, here are some major spoilers... Dumbledore's gay. Jaime and Cersei? Banging. Soylent Green is made of people. Turns out, I was the cat, all along.