April Update: How not to draw skirts

My game:
Next Release: Don't know yet.

So been drawing new armors for the game.  It's going well enough, although I find that I can spend a whole week & still not finish a single one.  In particular, I couldn't get the balance between sexy & armor right for the new wizard robes.  I've redone the whole thing at least 4 or 5 times now, and still not sure I'm going to keep what I have.  Which brings me to today's topic.  It really bothers me how I still can't get dresses or skirts to look right.  You might notice they're always the first thing to get torn off.  It's because they always look wrong to me in at least one of the possible poses.  So I make a point of removing them first.

For whatever reason, it finally dawned on me today that the reason they look wrong is because they aren't hanging like they should.  I don't have a separate clip for the lower half of the armor.  It's either tied to the torso or tied to the legs.  So when the hero crawls or lands on her back, the skirt still points straight back rather than following gravity.  In the past I've worked around this by deleting certain tracelines & smearing colors.  It works most of the time, but if you catch certain frames you'll see it looks really wrong. For example:

The picture on the left isn't so bad.  The skirt height in the rear doesn't quite cover the rear leg though.  If you're looking, you see it.  The problem is the same skirt height looks really stupid when she's crawling.  See the picture on the right.  What's that triangle doing sticking of her butt?  Hhaha.

Okay, maybe this is a silly thing to bitch about, but it's one of those things I've been trying to work around for a while now.  For each outfit with this problem, I've tried a slightly different approach.  And each time it's had some problems.  So I think this is really just a reminder to myself - Next game, I need to include a separate sprite just for the lower armor.



I'm still slowly making the backgrounds.  It's a nice way to waste time when I have like 20 minutes to kill & don't feel like doing anything ambitious.  I have run into a strange problem though.  There's a few spots where the 'path' on the ground isn't nice & straight.  For example, here's one where it opens up into a little clearing.  It's supposed to blur the dirt lines into the grass, and it appears to do so in the editor.  But when I actually play the game, the blur doesn't show up:

No idea what's causing that.  I'm sure it's something stupid I should know, but for the life of me I can't remember what. 

Oh, and you can see the red lingerie set from the elvin ladies in that last picture too.  Someone requested I make it.  It wasn't planned, but I already had the boots drawn, and I needed stockings & gloves for the new wizard armor.  At that point making this set was just applying some color swaps, so I figured I'd go ahead & knock it out.  (See, I totally listen to fan requests.  When they're easy.  hah!)


Around the Interwebs:

Toffi released Melly 2 last month.  After several complaints, he released an easy version.  This really strikes home to me.  How do you balance the difficulty in a game where you lose to see the reward? Should the difficulty be really high, so that the players get to see all the sex scenes?  Or should it be really easy to beat, in which case the players have to replay & lose on purpose to see the fun stuff.  That's backwards from where a game of skill ought to be.  Perhaps sex games aren't meant to be games of skill?  (Or it's the skill of playing 1 handed - lol!)

I personally liked the way he handled this problem.  There's was a cheat mode already built into the game.  It gives you infinite lives and it lets you skip levels.  In my mind this is even better than a gallery mode, as you still get to see the animations you want, but you get to play the game too.  Anyway, folks still complained that this was too hard, so he released an easier version.  In fairness, the original difficulty is hard by being downright cheap sometimes.  I'd often see a fast monster run up behind a slow one & get me before I could fire twice.  I assume that's in there to force the occasional sex scene?  Glad to see the sex, but not when I feel the game is cheating.

Anyway, one of those things that we have to keep balancing.  Glad to see I'm not the only one who's thinking about it.

-DirtyC101