Has it really been 3 months???

Wow.  So I sat down today to work on the game a bit.  And as I was getting moving, it occurred to me I hadn't posted this month.  Apparently I also didn't post in November nor in October.  Wow, I suck at keeping y'all updated.

On the other hand, there hasn't been much to update either.  When I get free, I mainly doodle & try to plan out events.  When I have more than an hour (like today), then I get to actually do a bit of drawing in the game.  Right now I'm working on some background characters.  There was a push to have more interaction with them (sex).  I think that's cool, it does make the game much more interesting.  It just takes a lot longer to draw them well enough to fap to, and then animate them on top of that.  For example the shopkeeper inside the dunecrawler was originally a mole-man.  Turns out that's just not very sexy, so now he's more like a Gnome.  Which isn't super sexy either, but I'm willing to settle for "better" at this point.  haah.  (If you have a mole-man fetish, my apologies.)

So nothing earthshattering is going on, but stuff is going on.  Slowly.

While I'm filling white space, let me babble on about something that has been a problem for a while, and is only continuing to get worse.  Right now the game comes out at just under 10 MB.  That's perhaps a bit large for a Flash game, but I haven't seen it cause any real issues with the gameplay.  What I am seeing however is incredible delays when I'm working with the source file.  That file is 150 MB and growing.  I don't think Flash was meant to work on files that large.  Just pressing the save button can take in excess of half an hour, and you can forget about doing a "Find & Replace" operation.

Fortunately, most of the work I need to do now is just drawing.  I can do that in a separate file, and then move the art over once it's done.  So this isn't the show-stopper that it could be.  It does make me wonder if I'm doing something very wrong however.  Like instead of one big source file, was I supposed to have 10 little ones & then combine them together at the very end?  I don't know, and I don't see any obvious path to make such a trick work in Flash.  I can't help but wonder if this is one of those things they teach in programming school that separates the hobbyists from the pros.


Around the Interwebs:

I'm not exactly sure when Parasite in the City was released, but it's available now.  I'm not huge on zombie porn, but the game itself is pretty good.  Good enough that I finished it anyway.  The controls are sluggish & the porn didn't really click with me, but despite all that there was still a whole lot of neat details that really made the game stand out.  For example, in the screen shot above two of the enemies have grappled each other for sex, rather than chasing down the hero.  That's pretty cool imo.

Oddly, that's the only game I can think of in the last couple of months to catch my eye.  I suppose it is possible that there's been a shortage these last couple of months.  I haven't been surfing nearly as hard as I used to, so I'm more likely to believe that it's out there & I just haven't seen it.  Or I've become very picky.  hahah.  Regardless, if you found an awesome porn game over the last few months, feel free to mention it in the comments.

Til Next Time
DirtyC101

September update

My game update: As you might have guessed, I'm fed up with being busy all the time. So today I slacked off & worked on my game. Feels like it's been eons since I've touched it. Most of the time was spent going "how did I do this last time?". I even had to do the "where did I put my notes? I put them somewhere safe so I wouldn't have to search for them" - yeah, that search. Naturally they were right in front of me, just under a pile of other stuff. haha

So, very slow today, but it's nice to at least say the game isn't totally sitting still anymore. Hopefully I'll be able to build some time in each week & get this project moving again. It sucks to have projects to do that are both fun & rewarding, but not be able to get to them.


Around the Interwebs:

K, since my game is slow, let's talk about other games. The first one was a total surprise to me. I found it in my inbox. Game is called Pendulum, developer is cheshireCat, and you can find links to the game on his blog.

Now, let me say, one of my side-dreams for this blog was to review porn games. I'm unaware of anyone else who does so well. So getting a porn game in the mail for free was like hitting the goddamn lottery. Super-psyched. Too bad he sent me the link a month ago. Like I said, busy here. hahah

Anyway, the game is both cool & flawed. It's a platform game where you race upwards to avoid being burned by lava. The enemies will grab you & rape you, which doesn't necessarily end you, but it does waste lots of precious time.

In further coolness, the levels seem to be randomly generated on the fly - monsters & platforms are never in the same place twice. There is also a GLADOS-like voice taunting you during the levels, which I found to be very cool until it started repeating itself. So, some really cool concepts going on here.

The flaws come in the pixel porn itself. There's a cut-off for me where the pixels are so coarse that the porn just stops being interesting. This game is well over that line. The sprites are so low-rez that they might as well be censored. Hell, maybe they are, I can't tell. hahah. Some folks like that level of detail, as it leaves a lot to the imagination. Sadly, that's not my thing. Even so, glad to give a fellow artist a bump. Good luck man!

Next up was another surprise. Hounds of the Blade had an update. This was a game I had written off as being dead. I don't think the author had updated in over a year. Seeing this one come back was, well, a bit inspiring really. Having my own game sit, and seeing a (better) porn game do the same & come back, well, yeah, just cool all around.

You can find he game on the author's blog, but you will probably have more luck using ULMF instead. Not only can you find an english translation patch, but you will sometimes find torrents or just good links directly in the forums. At the minimum, you can usually find someone who speaks enough Japanese to point ya to the correct download link on the author's site.

And lastly, I wanted to also add a link to Ellowas. This one isn't a game link, but rather some impressive 3D movieclips. I had been following him (her?) a while ago for some of his warcraft porn, but hadn't visited in a while. Sometime since then he's started adding sound to his little movie clips, and wow, they went from good to amazing. So I thought this deserved a bump, if for nothing else other than I really dig the clips he did with Elizabeth. Who I think is from Bioshock Infinite, which is a game, so the link totally counts. haha

Til next time
DirtyC101

August Non-update

Y'know how a month or so ago I joked about being too busy in real life?  Yeah, I should know better than to say stuff like that.  I've had a shitstorm of work fall upon me, and I really haven't had time to do anything with the game.  Mostly my own fault - I took a good look at where I'm at now & realized I could be happier, so I tried to change it.  I took a couple of risks simultaneously, and if any of them had paid off I'd have more spare time for fun stuff (like this).  Naturally none of it came together thou, so now I'm just buried in work.

Don't worry, I'm not dead, nor am I starving or hurt or anything like that.  However, my plans to have more time to work on the game have backfired spectacularly.  It would make a great story, if I had time to tell it.  hahahahah  Well, okay, maybe not great, but better than most reality TV anyway.  =D

So that's where I'm at.  Thank you for all the well-wishes I've been seeing in the comments.  Rest assured, game is NOT dead, just on a long, long detour.  Continue to expect delays, and I'll continue to keep y'all updated as I can.

Thanks!
DirtyC101

End of an era?

So, not sure what to say about that.  On one hand, I don't link adverts, so I should be 'safe'.  Although a first glance might mistake the previous post for adverts I reckon - scary thought!

In reality, looks like Blogger is ramping up a quest to remove porn from their servers.  I'd be less scared if they had given a larger window, but since I didn't receive it until after the cuttoff date, I can't help but read between the lines.  For that matter, it's about to be a big holiday week here in the USA, so many won't be checking their e-mails at all.  The timing is far too sketchy.  It'd be like announcing layoffs on December 26th.

So, based on their e-mail I should still be around for the near future.  But I can't help but wonder how long it will be until they decide I'm on the chopping block.  For what it's worth, should they shut me down I'll start posting a bit more on the legend of krystal forums and on ULMF

That's all.  Haven't put together an official July post. Wanted to get this out ASAP, just in case I can't post tomorrow.  =(

DirtyC101

June update: Break time!

This post will no doubt disappoint.  I have not worked on LotTO this month.  I've been busy with a combination of real life stuff and work.  Okay, that's a lie.  I'm busy playing Wartune.  It's not a great game, but it is surprisingly good for free.  I enjoy it, reminds me a great deal of the old Final Fantasy games I grew up with.

Not sure I trust the folks behind it terribly much though, as they seem to pull some really underhanded shit.   Since this is a porn blog, and blogs must have pictures, here's some examples.  Keep in mind that Wartune has NO PORN in it at all:

Yeah, would you guess it was an average flash game with a little cheesecake?  If you've been 'round ye old Interwebs, then yeah, you probably could have figured that out.  I like the idea of a free to play porn game as much as the next guy, but I know bullshit when I see it.  Which is a shame, cuz the base game isn't bad really.  Ah well, think of it as a good indicator as to the team behind the game.  I would have considered giving them some cash right up until they pulled this shit.  Oh, here's a link to the Escapist with some more details about the advertisements if you are curious.


In other news, although I have not been working on LotTO, I have been dinking around with making porn games.  As we've covered before, my game-making pace leaves something to be desired.  The big culprit (imo) is that I'm not motivated to draw.  So, I've been working on that behind the scenes.  No, I haven't learned to love drawing.  I've been searching for an artist.  And I've found a few in fact.  Sadly, nothing has really panned out yet.  Many of the folks are missing some combination of  talent,  tools, or time  (Oh, all T's - I wins!).  I've helped code a few minor bits here & there, but much of it never gets past the "ideas" phase.  Actually, that's a slight lie, I have one that's maybe 30% towards being a playable demo - I would love to get that one to a showable state, even if it ends up never going anywhere.

So anyway, that's my month in a nutshell.  I'm pretty deep in Wartune's claws atm, so don't expect anything from me soon.  Hell, I haven't even been surfing my usual porn sites, so I can't even give y'all a linkdump this month.  No fear, things will get better.  They always do.  :)

Til next time
DirtyC101

May Update: Snake. SNAAAAAAAAKE!!!!

Is it bad that the dude screaming "SNAAAAKE" at the game over screen is the only thing I can recall about the Metal Gear franchise?  Well, that, and running around under a cardboard box.  


My Game: 

Next release date: Too far out to even guess yet.

That said, I have (almost) finished the background for the first of the two zones in Act 3.  That's a big milestones to me.  The game becomes more than just a pile of parts, & I can actually walk around & explore.  It also means it now takes longer for me to run around & debug, but that's a problem I'm glad to have.  haha.

I should probably water down the above statement a bit.  Yeah, the backgrounds for the beach level are done, but only the backgrounds.  There's nothing to interact with yet, so it's really quite boring at the moment.  Hell, there's even a few places in the background where I have placeholders because I'm too lazy to draw the details.  hahaha.  But even so, I've passed that marker when the game world starts to feel like a game world.  That's cool.

I've seen a lot of requests for more NPC sex, and there's even places where it would fit on the beach level, so I'm going to try & include some.  We'll see if we like the results.  I'm honestly a bit torn, as it takes just as much effort to add NPC sex as it does to add monsters. The monsters add more gameplay though, so they're a better use of my time.  Then again, hey, sex game.  Any sex I add is a good use of my time.  hahahah.

Speaking of, here's the first actual monster from the new level.  As always, drawing is not my strong point.  Please feel free to help me deconstruct or to offer any pointers on how to touch him up.  (Is it wierd that I kinda like posting my own art, because I suddenly see all manner of terrible flaws once I press that publish button?  hah)

I purposely made the fingers extra long because I thought it would give a neat, almost sinister look.  It kinda works at a quick glance, but if you look twice you see the proportions are out of whack.  I think the palms need to be wider, which might allow me to extend the fingers too?  Anyway, I may take another swing at it, but fuck, I hate drawing hands so much it may just have to float as is.  hahah

Also not quite happy with the head.  It's serpentine alright, but as a whole it just doesn't click.  I think I may have the whole head too tall, possible the eye is too far back as well.  Or perhaps the back of the eye needs to be rounder?  Anyway, more things to tinker with.

This also brings us to one of the more entertaining parts of my blog.  I haven't planned out any sex poses for this guy yet.  If you are feeling creative, here's a good place to offer suggestions.  It'd be cool to involve the tail in some manner, but not necessary.  

Don't forget the rules from last time - he gets four poses in total.  At one end the hero should be dominating the grapple, while at the other he should be dominating, and there's two more positions in between.  The four poses should all be related, and only the very last pose should involve penetration below the waistline.

Around the interwebs:
No new games really caught my eye this month.  The only big news I saw was on Offbeatr, where Fenoxo proposed a new game idea and generated more than $100,000 in pledges.  That's some serious dough!  I suspect all the amateur game makers are going to come out of the woodwork shortly.  With luck, there could be a flood of new porn games posted by late this year.  Looking forward to that.

Til next time
DirtyC101


Update: Right after I posted this I found out that Kyrieru posed his new game Eroico.  I haven't played it yet, but I loved the last one.  By the time next month rolls around though this will be really old news, so thought I'd drop a quick bump here.  If you're a fan of pixel porn, go check it out.  Demo is free, and the whole game is only $5.

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

March Update - Ho ho ho, Green Giant!

Don't sweat it if you don't get the title, just means you didn't watch enough American commercials in the 90's. 

My Game:
There's 3 stages of poison severity in my game.  You'd have to try really hard to get past the first stage in the current release, but most of the basic mechanics for all three are there.  There's a section in Act 3 where the 2nd & 3rd poison levels are much more likely to occur.  I wanted a more visual cue to help distinguish between the three.  So I've been playing with adding a green tint to the hero's skin.  As you might imagine, this had some comical results until I got it right:

Supposed to be poisoned, instead she came out kinda hot.  Well, if you're into green chics anyway.  haha.  Anyway, after an afternoon of mucking around, I realized two very important things.  Crankin the green up gives ya bright green skin (like above).  If you want a darker/sickly green color, you really want a green in the middle of the spectrum. 

The other thing is that you don't so much want to amp the green.  What you want is to mute the other colors.  Muting blue seems to be more important than muting red BTW, although I'm not quite clear why.  I'm still using my preschool knowledge, which says blue + yellow should get me green, but here I already have green.... bah, whatever.  Anyway, tone down red a little & tone down blue a lot & you get some really nice dark greens.  Probably obvious to anyone who's looked at a RGB color palate, but the obvious isn't always so obvious when you're working.  heh.


When I left off last month I said I'd be working on drawing backgrounds.  All true, and making progress there too.  Backgrounds aren't terribly exciting imo, but here's a sample of one of them:

I've got most of the trees & grass built, so from this point making the backgrounds should just be a matter of plopping down vegetation until I'm happy.  The water's not so great though.  Probably needs more than just a single solid color.  Simple gradients aren't cutting it though, and I don't want to add much more detail.  I want to keep the backgrounds simple - especially for something that you can barely see.  So I dunno, something for me to play with some more.


Around the Interwebs:
Okay, there really wan't much to catch my attention last month, so going to talk about something slightly different.  One of my fantasies is quitting my day job to do this full time.  Don't get too excited about that, it really is just a fantasy to me.  I actually kinda like my day job.  Anyway, a more realistic dream might be to get good enough at making games to make it a second source of income.  Might even motivate me to work on my games on a regular basis.  ha!

I'm not much on setting up stores, begging for sales, and I downright detest DRM.  So the idea of selling finished games has always been a no-go for me.  But recently there's been this new push from sites like Kickstarter.  If for some reason you haven't heard of Kickstarter, the idea is you pitch your games when they're still ideas or demos.  If folks like it, they donate a few bucks.  Mutiply this by every bored person on the web, and you have the potential for a fully funded game.  I think it's a fascinating idea, although not without it's own set of flaws mind you.

In my case, the biggest flaw is that Kickstarter prohibits adult content.  Naturally, there's another site out there to specifically fill that gap.  That one's named Offbeatr, and seems to offer what any aspiring adult game maker would need.  So I started browsing though the details.  I have to say it looks really sketchy from the artist side.  Because it's adult content, many companies won't touch them.  So they're having to do a lot of work-arounds to make payments happen.  And they're passing that charge on to the artist.  They get a 25% cut (vs. 5% for Kickstarter), and all the payments get processed through some 3rd party Paypal knockoff I'd never heard of.  I supsect it's all above board, but man, it sure raises a bunch of warning flags.

Anyway, not looking to make that plunge anytime soon.  Don't worry, I'm not going to suddenly put LotTO up on a donation site & beg for funding.  I might cite it as an example of what I can do however, which means I need to get back to work.  hah!

DirtyC101

February update. Cuz one can never talk enough about chainmail.

My game:
Skyrim is still my main goto when I flop down after work, but that hasn't stopped me from fiddling with my game this month.  When I'm motivated enough to draw, I'm still working on better chainmail.  After a few more attempts, I started searching around for tutorials.  Found a pretty good one here which walked me through the basics.  I had to start over from scratch, but I think the result is better.  May need to play with the line weight for the links, or possibly try to add some gradients or highlights.  But I think I'm on the right track now anyway.

One more thing I find funny/interesting about this.  It looks pretty good when zoomed out to the normal game size.  As I zoom in, it gets progressively worse.  When I'm zoomed in close to draw, it looks downright terrible.  The picture above is somewhere between the two zoom levels.  Meh, art.  =P


When I'm not motivated enough to draw, I've been fiddling with some of the code.  Did y'all notice how once a grapple starts, all the other monsters will quickly surround you?  Way back when, I tried to slow down this process by having the monsters continue to attack.  That worked for the zombies & pirates, but many of the new monsters in Act 2 actually move faster when they attack (we're looking at you mister elf).  So recently I went back in & tried reducing the movement speed of the non-grappling enemies.  I think there's a balance here that would work - don't want to make it too slow or we'll never see double teams.  I've got their speed reduced by about 50% right now, and I think that's about right.  May need some play-testing to verify.  Walking animations look wrong now because the speed is off, but that's something I can fix once I settle on a speed.


Around the Internets:

Found two games this month that caught my eye.  The first one is called Seduce Me.  The porn in this one is actually kinda bad.  The art is quite good, but the porn events are nothing but a single image, which gets cropped & copy/pasted to make it appear like a full page from a comic book.  I'm no stranger to copy/pasting myself, but this struck me as being too lazy.

The game redeems itself with the gameplay.  Instead of a chat menu & dialogue tree, you play a series of card games to represent how well you sweet talk the ladies.  It's a bit of a stretch, but the games were really fun.  So much so that I found myself replaying the game several times & skipping the porn scenes.  This may simply be because other porn-card games are always either poker or blackjack.  Neither of those games makes an appearance here, so this seemed fresh & novel by comparison.

I'll note that the game was pretty damn buggy.  Had an annoying habit of locking up my whole PC and refusing to let go.  I found that closing the game & restarting after every couple of scenes seems to help tremendously.  FYI.

The second game is still just in demo form at the moment.  Using my amazing translation powers (AKA, reading the English text on title screen), the name translates to "Fleeing".  You're playing a male trying to escape from a lair of succubi, so I guess you could call this reverse run & rape?  You can have sex with the girls, but you have to be careful.  Run out of stamina & it's game over.  If you clear the zone you can level up a bit, at which point you can maybe have a little more sex if you dare.... Anyway, it's a really neat idea, I hope it makes it past the demo stage.

Personal side note - the bad girl in this demo is totally hot (imo).  The artist can clearly draw.  So why does the dude look like a scrawny girl?  Is that the only style the artist knows, or is it intentional?  Would a brawny hero make the game unbelievable?


Anyway, that's all for now.  Working on the floorplan for the new levels at the moment, so expect lots of "I hate drawing sand" from me next month.  haha
DirtyC101

Janurary Update: Skyrim Ahead, Expect Delays

So I'm all in the habit now of posting once a month.  And I realized today was the 14th, so half of January is already gone.  Figured I better post something, or y'all will start thinking I'm dead or worse, my game is dead.  Neither is the case.  I did however receive Skyrim as an early Christmas present, and I'm been... obsessed with it ever since.  Smithing, enchanting, brewing, back to smithing...  I'm told there's dragons somewhere as well, but that seems like an odd addition to a crafting game.  =D

So yeah, not the news y'all wanted to hear I'm sure.  Take heart, Skyrim is already starting to bore me in places.  I doubt it'll hold my complete interest for much longer (although I bet I'll still fire it up occasionally for several more months).


As filler this month, I'm going to cheat & pull a question from last month's comments. 

Brian Rogers wrote:

Have you ever considered implementing a Whore/Virgin system?

I have.   The problem I end up with why would you ever play the virgin side?  I'd love to think my games are good enough to stand without porn content, but let's face it, I'm a far cry away from there. 

This kinda gets back to my post a few months ago.  The player is here to see some smut.  Having a slutty option would be nice because it encourages sexy behavior without making the character lose.  But how does having a virgin path help here?  I can't imagine anyone playing the virgin path, except perhaps once through to see the dialogue changes (and even that's a stretch). 

Oddly, this could go a totally different direction.  Instead of whore/virgin, what if you started at 100% pure virgin and the objective of the game was to become as slutty as possible?  Could even have a 'scoring' system.  Not sure I'd really enjoy that kind of game though.  For some reason, I'm imagining something where you're rushing from one BJ to the next.  Could be hot to some, but not my thing. 

Now that I say that, it occurs to me this is basically what the original LoK game was.  Walk around, have sex, and as you leveled up your slutty meter you unlocked new monsters.  So maybe there's some merit to this.  I think you'd need to tweak the system in some manner though.  To be blunt, the original LoK game got boring really fast, which I'm sure is why there was a cheat button built right into it.

Anyway, feel free to discuss below.  I promise I'll try to be more responsive to comments this month.  Right after I finish crafting this suit of armor.... =)

DirtyC101