See how this goes

Day 1 is almost completely planned out with days 2 and 3 outlined so I've decided to have a stab at writing some dialogue. I'm still testing the waters with this project so I need to make a reasonable amount of progress tonight to feel confident about being able to see the whole thing through. I'll report back in an hour with my progress.

Update: Managed to write half a page across 2 hours of very on/off writing. It was mostly legitimate distractions but still a little disappointing. I'll hopefully do better the next time I sit down to try this.

My other hobby

 A bit of a treat for anyone who discovers this new blog. This is a manip I did a while ago but haven't uploaded to my account at the Hypnopics Collective. Enjoy!

If you stumbled on this blog by accident and have no idea what this is about I'll explain. I started doing manips about women being turned into sluts by various nefarious means a couple of years ago over at the Hypnopics Collective. I was originally inspired by the works of Callidus but when I joined the Collective I found a great deal many more artists to admire and even discovered a wonderful collection of games made in the RAGS engine on their forum. After a while I decided to make my own attempt at making a RAGS game, but after releasing the demo I found myself struggling to progress the game without a proper design and went back to manipping.

My inspiration for manips has left me lately, and I find everything new that I try to make just has the same feel to all of my previous work. I took a break, looked back over my old RAGS project and started working on it again. Hopefully this time I can finish the project!

There can be only one

I've made a significant decision today. There will no longer be a choice of characters for the player at the start of the game. The game is going to focus on Ginger (Shuya) who already has multiple story branches plotted out. This significantly simplifies the workload, in particular the various dialogue alts that would have been required to include Malisha as a playable character.

I still intend to have additional player characters (in particular Malisha), just no longer as a part of the initial release of Slut Royale. If the making of Slut Royale goes well and the reception of the final release is good then I will embark on making an expansion pack. Since this is a part of the plan I can design the variables and timers within RAGS to accomodate the possibility of future expansions without delving into the complexities of the storytelling now.

Edit: Damn I'm glad of this decision. I'm working through the timeline for Ginger and there are so many alts because of my decision to make a few of the NPCs move around. Still, the design is coming together now and that makes me happy.

Books of Knowledge

I received a couple of books about game design and writing for Christmas and I've been steadily reading those to get a better understanding of what I'm trying to do with my own game. Hence the reason for no measurable progress in the past couple of weeks. I doubt there will be much for a few more weeks as I'm quite a slow reader.

I noticed a dialogue test screen by a person called kivik on the Hypnopics Collective for his/her Rags game and it reminded me of the Ultima 7 interface for talking to NPCs, which I rather liked. A big part of the re-design for Slut Royale includes the use of overlays, so I will probably use the idea for head shots myself. Thanks kivik!