An update on how things are going

Been a while since I posted here. I intended to post about this like half a month ago and then just...didn't. Anyway, I've made a discord so I can shitpost at people while I'm working on Shield High and give everyone live updates on how it's going. The hope is that if I have a few active people in there telling me to work harder, I might actually do it. You can get onto that discord right here: https://discord.gg/zBhqsHt

It's got some Patreon integration with rooms for patrons, but obviously that's not going to be a necessity unless you really want my private attention if the main channels pick up a bit.

Next bit of news, I've moved on from tweaking old stuff and am actually writing some new content. I'm hoping to build a habit of writing new event chains several times a week, and with luck there should be an update coming sometime in the next month or so. It's gonna be a bit wonky, in terms of some characters being updated to the new style, moddable style, while others are stuck with the old hard-coded style, and like, one will have combat text while the rest don't, but I've decided to abandon any delusion about my work flow and accept I work best doing a little bit of something and then moving on, and just rotating through the chores that need doing until they're all done.

Not a lot else to report, hope some of you can come jump onto the discord and I can relive the glory days of when I made an IRC for all of three months.

Pudding Earl

A little testing

Hey guys!

So I'm back at work on Shield High, trying to address some things that have been problems for far too long. The first one being that combat isn't as fun or challenging as it should be. As such, I've put up a couple of tests on my Patreon, which I'm now posting about here to get some more eyes on and hopefully a bit more feedback on.

Fatigue has been re-balanced a bit, the ability to take your own clothes off has been added, and the AI has been updated to be a hell of a lot smarter. All in all, I think it's a nice upgrade, but I obviously want the opinions of the people who actually play the game, so I'm throwing it up here too.

You can find the second, most recent test here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/more-testing-20228207

A couple of the scenes are broken, but you can still access combat as normal. I've been updating the actors to sit in their own separate files instead of being in the code, which has necessitated a few changes to event structures, and I'm only just getting started on updating this all.

That's all for the moment, suggestions for what can make combat more interesting are welcome. I've got some actual descriptions for the fights, like in the old version penciled in, but that's about it for the time being.

Pudding Earl

My procrastination cycle (Or why I go absent for ages at a time)

As I'm sure none of you are surprised to hear, I have a big problem with procrastination. It's not just a problem of not getting things done. I could overcome that with determination. Rather, it's a problem where I put pressure on myself to get things done. And when they don't get done, I don't just say "Okay, I'll do them soon." Instead I say "Okay I'll do them soon and then do even more to make up for it." You can see how this might lead to some problems. Because when the time comes to do them again, now there's even more work to do, and so I extra don't want to try and deal with it. So I don't, and then I tell myself I have to make up for it EVEN MORE.

That's why a single missed update will usually start to snowball out of control. Because I want what I give to be worth the wait, but that's almost impossible to deliver. And the longer I put it off, the harder it becomes to deliver. So the longer I put it off because of the self-imposed pressure. This current absence isn't actually caused by that. But it's being made worse by it. Since moving, I've not been legally able to work. That includes self-employed work like Patreon. I could get Patreon money, but it'd have to be taxed in Australia, which is just...an ungodly hassle to work out. So the plan was simply to not update until I could work.

Good plan so far right? Except I told myself I'd put in work during that absence. And I have! Just...not nearly as much as I'd like. I've even scaled back my expectations and I'm still not working towards them. So now that I'm less than a month away from getting the work authorization, I don't have anything remotely resembling an update, let alone one worthy of the time I made everyone wait for it. And because of that...I continue to not update it because not updating means not having to deal with the problem right now. It's a rather vicious cycle all things considered. One that I would like to get better about.

That having been said, there was a comment on the last blog post I made saying they wanted to see my work resumed. I'm going to assume that's referring to Shield High specifically, however in case it doesn't, I am...actually working on other things. I've posted about them before, but there was no engagement and no sign of interest at the time, so I haven't really bothered giving updates on that. If I'm wrong there, and people are just interested in my work broadly rather than Shield High specifically, let me know, and I'll start posting updates on anything else I'm doing.

Anyway, that's just where the situation is at right now. I'm gonna try and pull myself out of this slump and get something going, but I'm not offering any promises. I've made that mistake enough times as it is.

Pudding Earl.

P.S. On a quick side tangent I do think about Shield High quite often. It's not like it's been forgotten, just neglected.

Earl's Musings: Action Engagement

Sorry I haven't posted sooner! I legitimately just have not had thoughts to share. It was getting so bad I was thinking about just writing about a mechanic I'm trying to add in to Shield High. But then I was lying there and a thought came to me. Or rather, I studied, played Scarlet Moon a bit, and noticed a common theme between the two. Somewhere in the middle of both I found myself looking ahead to see how much further I had to go. And that got me thinking about when I usually get bored during text-based porn games.

I usually get bored when I have to scroll. A tiny scroll bar is fine, I can forgive that for the texts that end up getting a little long, but not so long they justify being split in two. A massive one however is just...kind of boring. I've spent so long having to perform a task that I start getting anxious to perform the next one. I just want a button press or something to break the flow of reading, to make it feel like a more manageable amount of story, even if it's not.

Ironically, I don't have this issue so much in Shield High entirely due to my own failings as a programmer. Making a scroll bar was too much work when I first started, so I instead opted to carefully curate my content to avoid going over the limits of what the screen can hold. This has created the useful side effect of meaning that even the longest scene still has a regular point where you need to click the button. This has an added bonus of making skimming less tempting overall. The information is going to vanish if you do press the button, so you're more likely to take a moment and read it more carefully. At least the first time or two it comes up.

I suspect this fact is also a contributing factor to the popularity of VNs. I've always felt like the requirement for you to click readily has weakened the overall strength of the writing (especially in sex scenes) however it also serves to compel you forward, and keep you somewhat interested in the story. One could even argue that it's some sort of skinner's box sort of thing. The fact that games typically start off with some reasonably frequent, petty choices, and then space them out after the introduction really just serves to further this idea, since choices would serve as the "reward" for which you keep clicking and reading for. (I realize I am an outlier as someone who reads most of the VN text even if I've seen it before. I've seen how others play them.)

Obviously I don't think VNs make for very good porn games. I don't know if I've openly stated as such before but I'll do it now. The format leads to substandard writing as you're forced to cram text into a relatively small box, and the art rarely makes up for the quality of the writing. They work best as...experiences? I suppose, that run for a couple hours max and culminate in a sex scene. Negligee would be a good example of one I think does it overall well.

But yes, just some broad thoughts as usual, nothing particularly insightful I'm sure, but it's not something I've ever properly thought about before, and since it has come to mind I'm going to write it here for you to consider, and for me to remember in the future. Much like how I had the phrase "Flying Cat Knights. Cats, that are knights, that can fly" sent to me on facebook so I would remember it in the morning. It's still as awesome an idea in my head now as it was a little after midnight.

Pudding Earl

Earl's Musings: Art vs Writing

Oh wow, exactly one week since the last post. I was really worried thinking about this before that I'd have been gone too long, but hey, here I am, back on time. This is a topic I've been sitting on since around Christmas, but now I can finally actually talk about it.

So, porn games are really weird in the way they exist as a thing to market around. With a normal video game I can just show you some screenshots, maybe a video of gameplay, and you either know if you're interested or not. With porn games however the gameplay isn't the focus. I mean, it kind of is, it needs to be fun, but no one looks at a porn game and says "Oh damn, that looks *fun*." No, everyone who looks at a porn game is trying to decide if they think it looks hot or not. Will they get off on playing this game?

And that, is where a really big issue crops up. Cause people are inherently visual, so if I show you some images that are really sexy and up your alley, you know that you're going to enjoy the sex content. Except, you don't need to play the game to see still images. In marketing to you the game, I'm giving away some of the content, and diluting the overall experience that you're gonna get playing it. And art, by it's nature, is still, once you've seen it, you've seen it. To be fair, this same restriction applies to writing, but writing is, overall, quicker to produce, as such you're not stuck in one position within the writing for an extended period of time, like you are in art. The result of this is that games with heavy art feel like they're really easy to get someone to play, but then struggle to hold up over time. Especially on replay value.

Writing on the other hand is the exact opposite. How the fuck do you market something that has no pretty art to show off? That's a somewhat serious question, if anyone has any ideas, please for the love of god tell me it might make working on Shield High easier. But it's just as much a rhetoric one for the sake of the discussion. Just screenshots are harder sells when the screenshot is comprised largely of text. However, once you've gotten someone in, keeping someone in with text is easier. There can simply be more of it, and you can keep a scene flowing and more interesting than with art, since there's nothing that your dialogue and descriptions can be conflicting with in front of the viewer. The big downside of this, is that since art takes more time to make a single piece of, it's generally viewed as being a more valuable skill set than writing. Hell, I make this mistake sometimes, and I am writing a porn game and know exactly how hard and painful it can be. But since I can do it, it feels like anyone can, until I read some other writing and realize just how wrong I am.

A QUICK SIDE NOTE: I am in no way claiming to be a great writer. Just good enough that some of you, my adoring fans, have told me that I'm the best in my particular genre. I would never claim such a thing, however if someone else were to do so, which they have, I would be being dishonest not to repeat them.

Like most musings, I feel as though this has been a directionless ramble, so I'll give a brief summary of what I think, and then wrap it up because I really want to finish this burger in front of me. Games that use predominantly art as their source of porn are really easy to get random people interested in, but are difficult, if not impossible, to make truly great products. Games that rely on their writing meanwhile, is where some of the best products can lie, but also some of the very worst products end up, and are generally pretty difficult to market. That having been said, going forward I think I'm just gonna put out screenshots, since in writing this I do recall looking at CK2 mods, which often were just screenshots of events being started that turned out a good way to hook people, so maybe I'm just being over dramatic.

And as a quick aside, Animation-driven stuff is a whole other ballpark of quality that I'm not even going to consider touching here, but probably is just the best of both worlds.

Pudding Earl

Earl's Musings: Player Motivation and Initiative (Or, The Earl rants a while longer about why sandboxes are bad)

I know, I know, what am I doing back so soon? Well, it's part of a new initiative that I've just come up with. Right now, I'm achieving fucking nothing. Shield High is stalled, my other game is stalled, my book re-writing thing is stalled. The only work I do is on the roleplaying games I'm running and that doesn't really count. So I'm going to try and make an effort to post more musings about literally any thoughts I have about porn games. With luck this torrent of thought will motivate me to begin working again on actual projects.

So anyway, on to the point. Porn games have, in my opinion, a porn problem. This problem is that porn feels like a band-aid for deficiency in the game. And, to an extent, that's okay. If your gameplay is just mediocre, if it functions just fine, but has some weird imbalances, then, whatever, your porn probably can carry that through. What if your gameplay is solid, but your story is a bit lacking? Well, again, porn can make up for it. But there is something porn can't make up for, which is motivation. Why am I playing this game? What am I supposed to do? What goal can I work towards? None of these questions a player asks can really be answered with just "Porn". Because porn, obviously, is super freely available, no one is going to work on things for *just* porn.

This isn't just a porn game problem obviously, and I'm not saying all games have this problem. The thing that got me thinking about this is how utterly directionless I feel playing Skyrim or Oblivion with porn mods on. Obviously I want to engage in the porn content but it's hard to do so while also advancing a grander story. I had to think about it for a moment after getting this far however to be sure that I've played porn games with this problem, but I know I have. I forget the name of the game, but I remember playing a demo for a paid game and finding myself thoroughly underwhelmed by the whole thing.

The root of the issue, in my opinion, is that porn, while in the name of the genre(depending on what you call it), can't actually be the main draw of the game. There needs to be some other form of engagement to motivate a player to actually be a player, and not just wander off to go and do something else. And it can be something pretty simple. In TiTS for instance, I played through that game with the motivation of beating the shit out of my cousin and taking them as a prize. Will you actually be able to do that? I don't know. I fucking hope so, cause if not that's the biggest tease ever. But it's my motivation for playing on.

The other point besides motivation, as the title suggests, is player initiative. This one is a lot more circumstantial, as there's a lot of genres where you just...don't need it. If your game is linear, or spoon feeds content to the player, initiative isn't necessary. However, again, playing the games I do, it comes up a bit and I want to mention why I think it's a thing worth considering. Player initiative is a strange thing in video games. The rigid nature of video games means that pursuing a goal is a very limited thing. I can't set out in Skyrim to be king. Not unless I have a bunch of mods, at least. Nor can I set out to be a Jarl, or really any figure of authority. Except for all the guild leaders. But that doesn't entail pursuing any real goal, it's just a quest chain. There's no initiative behind it. One time in Oblivion I set out with a goal to build a harem. That actually worked out nicely, I had something to work towards, I had to build up the power to achieve it. In the end I did it. And then promptly stopped playing because it wasn't a very fun outcome. It was the most motivated I've felt playing one of these games, cause I had a clear goal to build towards. The problem wasn't that achieving it was boring. The problem, at the end of the day, was how easy it was. Once I had access to the right spells combat became a joke, and without any threats, and without the game being able to pose a challenge to my success, I didn't feel any need to continue.

I was going to include a bit about Shield High here, but on reflection it's wiser to just stop talking and hopefully I can just...show you how I think things could work better.

Pudding Earl

Earl's Musings: Why I think sandboxes kinda suck

Well gee, I just went ahead and ruined the plot of this musing. You can basically tell what my thoughts are from the title. Great job me. And it doesn't even imply there's anything sexy going on. There might be though, I haven't gotten into it yet and I'm sure I can weave it in somewhere.

So, I've started playing two games recently. I've picked up Oblivion again, and I've been playing Gravity Rush (also Gravity Rush 2 but they're almost the same game). Playing a purely open world game like Oblivion alongside a somewhat open world but mostly linear game like Gravity Rush has kinda made me realize that for all my claims of wanting an open world game, in a lot of ways I really don't. I mean, even looking at the porn games I play, Princess of the Ring remains my favorite, and that's basically an arcade game. It's a shame, because the promise of an open world game is huge. And it's that exact promise that kinda makes them suck.

The big problem I have with an open world is how...inorganic a lot of it can be. I've made at least a hundred characters for Oblivion over the years. Only one ever made it to level 10. My current character is level 4. That having been said, the one who got over level 10(I think they ended up being level 15 or something) was on the Xbox, and so the lack of mods meant all the content was appropriate for my level and I could just walk everywhere I wanted without any fear. So there's still hope for my PC characters one day getting that high. The main reason I don't gain all that many levels is because, in order to gain levels, you basically need to be aimless. The best way to level up is to pick a direction and walk. Any time you see a cave, or a ruin, you walk inside, kill everything, loot some stuff that's good, and then leave to keep going.

The problem with that is that it's the opposite of how the game presents the way of leveling up. Which is completing quests and going on focused adventures. So if you're trying to do the things the game suggests you should, you end up being pretty weak and never growing, and if you level up you find yourself feeling no sense of achievement other than getting stronger. Furthermore, getting quests is...strange. You just sort of, ask around town until you stumble onto something most of the time. Or decide to look things up. And the limited number and scope of the quests means that you can't really have a home in these games. Eventually the content in an area will dry up and you'll have to move on. That isn't inherently bad, but it does limit your options for what to really do in such games.

Even more conventional sandbox games suffer from this sort of hub-based, activity-based approach that prevents you from really *making* a story, instead of simply playing one out. Personally, I think the solution lies in creating a framework by which a player can create and pursue an ambition. To use Oblivion as an example, making it possible to overthrow a count, and become count yourself could be a rather interesting ambition. It doesn't even need that many new mechanics added in, base it off fame and disposition to local NPCs, as well as some authority figure somewhere. Or add in an ability to make a faction. The DLCs allow you to build up a base, simply adding on a few more mechanics to that, territory control and an abstract measure of power would be sufficient to give a sense of achieving something.

And now we get to the sex element. Cause even sex is negatively impacted by this in some ways. Well, it isn't, but it could be better with them. Defeating enemies and taking them as slaves is fun. I've played at least one playthrough of Oblivion along that general premise. Being defeated and taken as a slave is also fun. However these interactions are, ultimately, random and meaningless. I might be enslaved and swear revenge on my captor but most of the time, he's just a random bandit. I might defeat my enemy and capture them but this is our first encounter, there's no history to make it more interesting than just what it is. With ambition systems and the like however, it could be possible to have rivalries that have meaning to them. You could be enslaved by someone you can't just kill when you get out, who you have to work for your revenge on. Enslaving rival leaders would be equally exciting, because you've known them for some time before finally winning out over them.

Thinking about it, what I'm describing is a lot like the Nemesis system. That was a cool thing, I've heard lots of nice stuff about it. Personally I couldn't really enjoy Shadow of Mordor however, so I can't say for sure if it was actually as good as people say. Either way, I realize what I'm talking about is a pretty massive stretch, so I don't actually expect to ever see it happen.

Hope you all enjoyed the ramblings, if there's something that does what I'm dreaming of please do let me know, it'd be lovely to find out about.

Pudding Earl