February Update

Next Release: Summer-ish

Hey all,

Sorry for the sparse posts.  I haven't been working on the game much this last month.  My other hobbies have suddenly become more interesting than porn. (Seriously, how often does that happen?)  Don't fret, I expect to be getting back to coding again shortly, but in the meanwhile I'm happy to ride out my other interests for a bit.

Although I haven't done much with the game, I'm pretty excited about what little I have done.  Almost all the comments/problems from the last few months have been addressed to some degree.  I'm not promising y'all will agree with my changes, but I think in every case the result is better than before.  So, that's pretty cool.  Crawling has in fact been greatly reduced, the bunny village is little less annoying to travel around, and there's even a few bonus goodies hidden away now (be sure to go back & visit old levels in the next release).

I'm starting to work on the double team animations now.  I'm not 100% sure I'm happy with them though.  One of the things I really wanted was for the original single monster grab to influence the double team position.  So for example, a single human male grab would combine with another human male/female like so:

This sounds okay & all, but it also means that the animations are a bit repetitive.  In this case, the original male's animation barely changes at all, and the actual difference between the 2nd male/female isn't really all that big either.  Of course, I'm showing one of the worst examples so far, and I'm cherry picking from the four grapple positions...  Still, not sure this is going to give me the variety I want.

On the other hand, this is also much faster to animate, as I don't have to change the animations nearly so much either.... So not entirely a bad thing.   hahah!

Anyway, that's where I've been for the month.  Hopefully I'll have more to post soon!
DirtyC101

Where'd I go?

Just a quick note to everyone.  Yes, the site was down.  No, I don't know why.  Google sent me an e-mail demanding a cell phone number.  Once I entered it, the site returned.  Sadly, that's all the information I have.  I don't know if there was a complaint against the site, or if I triggered some sort of alarm on their end, or if this is some sort of preliminary SOPA/PIPA defense they're rolling out.  (Maybe one of the admins there is just such a huge fan that they wanted my phone number?  lol).

Whatever it is, site's back up.  I'm grateful that the fix was so easy, but damn it'd be nice to know WHY it was gone in the first place.  Something I'd like to avoid in the future.

DirtyC101

Save Me!

I suspect most of you recognize the two scenes above.  From a play standpoint, they're almost identical.  They're both 'run up & save them' mini-quests.  And perhaps you were wondering why I'd put the exact same content in twice?  Anyone?  No?  Okay, well, let's pretend you said yes anyway, cuz this post gets really boring otherwise.  ;P

Fair warning, this isn't directly about code, but it is definitely about the magic behind the curtain.  If that's not your thing, ya might wanna stop now.

The main code allows for two different things that can interact with the character - monsters & items.  Monsters are fairly straightforward, they're the things attacking you.  Items represent almost everything else.  If you hit spacebar to interact with it, it's an item.  So that means most doors, cabinets, quest NPCs, weapons or clothing on the ground, etc.

There's some rules (okay a lot of rules) in the code to handle each.  And between the two, I can usually make everything happen that I need.

The time when I have trouble is when I need both monsters & items at the same time, and they interact conditionally with each other.  Take the rescue events above.  There's a monster (or monsters) and an item (the girl), and you need to be able to interact with her after she's saved, but until then she needs to stay unselectable.

When I originally set up the LeiLei rescue, I had the item (LeiLei) drive the event.  Once you get within a certain range, the monster is 'released' so to speak.  At first I was really happy with this.  But on later playthroughs, I noticed that it was possible to get just outside the trigger range, and swing a reach weapon right through the monster's sprite.  The monster should be hit by this & react, but because it's all slaved to the item, instead he just stands there & the attack passes through him harmlessly.

That's the kind of bug I'd like to avoid.  Operative word however is like.  It's not game breaking, it doesn't lock the game or force you to start over.  It just doesn't work 'right'.  We see the weapon pass right through him, and whatever immersion we had in the game is broken.

So to answer my earlier question, the reason I did the exact same event again with K. Fox is because I wanted to see if I could do better.  This time around, the monster closest to the PC is driving the event.  Again, if you get too close he'll turn around & attack.  But now you can also hit him from range & surprise him.  This also caused all manner of problems if you can imagine.  The code wants to walk monsters towards the player, so I had to find a way to turn that off, but just for these two.  Then it wants to throw attacks at the player, had to disable that too.  Then it wants to grab the player if you get too close, but I have to tell it to release the animation with K first.  Oh, and if you jump him, then I have to release not just him but also his buddy & K Fox, so that combat works as it should.  Oh, and then K has to know if the monsters are dead or alive, so that you aren't accidentally talking to her while fighting.  I was re-re-re-writing the code for this right up until the game was posted.  I kept finding bugs I never thought of (like if you one shot them with the meteor, or if you run up & try to join the grapple).

This is the one area where I was sure I'd get a bug complaint.  There's just too many variables at play.  Although everything seemed ok, I was sure there was going to be some combination of distance-attack-player that I wasn't considering which would break the game.  I haven't heard any though, so perhaps I got them all after all?  That's sort of comforting of course, but not what I was expecting either.  hah.

Anyway, this event was a large part of the reason why I released the 0.50 beta.  There's other reasons too of course, but this is one of the prime examples where there were just too many permutations for me to test them all.  And now that it's working, I'll probably never use it again (hahah).  Okay, not entirely true.  There won't shouldn't be another 'rescue' event, but the same code tricks can be used in other areas as well.

And yes, Farah will make an appearance in Act 3.  Just not in a 'help, save me' quick event.  =D

DirtyC101

Weapons

I've wanted to write this post for a while, but I held off because I didn't think it would make much sense.  There's five major groups of weapons in LotTO.  They are:

Two handed weapons (fire-axe & maul)
One handed weapons (longsword, wooden sword, torch)
Martial Arts (unarmed, weighted gloves)
Wands (starter wand, fire wand)
Staves (staff of water, staff of earth)

Before you read any further, take a second & rank those five groups in your head.  Is there one group that's your favorite?  Why?  How about is there one you always ignore?  Although it may not be obvious, I'm trying fairly had to balance all five against each other.  Now that I've played with them a bit, there's going to be some buffs coming.

So, here's my opinion on the 5 groups.  If you're feeling chatty, now's a great time to disagree.  =D

1. One handed weapons.  Grade: A+   Not too long ago I re-tuned this special attack so that monsters wouldn't be knocked clear on the first hit.  That really put these weapons over the top, as now you have a very safe attack that does fantastic damage.  These weapons were supposed to have problems with ranged casters & with monsters creeping up behind them.  To a minor extent that's true, but it's not nearly the downside I was expecting.  Changes: None planned.  They're powerful, but I'm okay with that (and I hate nerfs).  New one handed weapons may suffer slightly though, as I will likely only apply very minor bonuses.  If they still feel too powerful after a round of changes, I may slightly reduce their reach, but I'd rather not go that route yet.

I'll also note that I think this is a large part of why folks say Farah is too powerful.  Her default weapon is simply better than anything else out there.

2. Martial Arts.  Grade: B+  Martial arts combines good damage with a fair bit of movement.  In most cases that movement is a good thing, as it keeps any monsters from creeping up behind you.  It also has the best special in the game (arguable perhaps, but it does have the longest invincibility).  The downside of martial arts is that it can be downright terrible if the monster is immune to knockback (tentacles) or merely highly resistant (slime boss).  More so than any other weapon group, I think this one requires a backup weapon.  Other than that drawback though, I think martial arts are quite solid.  Changes: None planned, although later weapons will probably get some reach on them.

3. Wands.  Grade: B-   I hear that wands are terrible.  I'll grant that they're not awesome, but I think they're really solid.    Wands have the ability to keep mobs offscreen, making them the safest weapon of the bunch.  They do very good damage and they bypass damage reduction.  Their special attack has the highest DPS of any weapon class out there, making them my boss killer of choice.  Their only real drawback is they aren't good when you're surrounded by multiple monsters.  The basic attack has a slow fire rate, and the special attack grants almost no invulnerability.  I think it's the last part that makes folks dislike wands.  If you're about to break a grapple & you're surrounded by multiple monsters, the wand is probably the worst choice for making some space.  Changes:  I have been playing with how projectiles work.  You can now cancel enemy projectile attacks with your own (assuming they touch).  That wasn't meant to be a buff honestly, just something I wanted to include.  But I'm noticing that it makes wands a tad stronger.  The actual planned buff here is that I'm going to extend the minimum range a bit.  It's supposed to be the ranged weapon, but for a low spirit character I think the normal sword has a longer reach.  I'm also hoping to include some better wands earlier in the game.

4. Two handed weapons.  Grade: C   Let me back up here.  Every weapon has a 'difficulty' assigned to them.  So for example, many of you noticed that when K. Fox first equips the weighted gloves, she loses her fifth attack.  For the gloves, that last attack requires a body score of 7 for her, and typically she'll have a 5 or a 6 when she first finds them.  Similarly, the wooden sword & the longsword both have the same attack chain, but getting the entire attack chain with the longsword requires a much higher body score.

I'm pointing that out because so far I've only introduced two extremely heavy, off-balance two handed weapons.  They both have an extremely high difficulty rating.  I don't think it's even possible to see the final attack in the chain yet.  I'm of the opinion that these weapons are actually great.  As soon as y'all see the fourth attack in the animation, I think that this class of weapons will jump up there with the 1 handed weapons.  Maybe not quite as good, but definitely viable (Grade A or A-).  Changes: None, other than adding some better weapons in this group.

5. Staves.  Grade: F   Staves are in a rather distant last place right now.   Which I find funny, as the special attacks are crazy powerful (imo).  I'm pretty sure a fully powered meteor would one-shot the slime boss, just to give you some idea.  But their basic attacks are terrible, and the special move has no invulnerability.  So, it's really tough to justify using them (other than as a backup weapon for their special). Changes: I'm playing with having the projectile continue after it hits.  It makes it sort of a baby AoE attack, as it can hit & push back multiple monsters.  What I'm seeing right now may actually be too powerful, but I think I can balance it out.  I don't think it will make Farah players jealous, but it will definitely makes casters pause & think which weapon class they want.


So that's my mindset at the moment.  Although I don't think it's possible to get them all perfectly balanced, I'd like to be able to grade all five of them as either an A or at least a high B.  I'm not there right now, but I think I'm on my way.  For whatever reason, this is one of the most enjoyable parts of making the game for me, so don't be shocked if this part comes up again.  =)

DirtyC101

Too Soon for Nostalgia?

I've always been really proud of my first game - Kay Fox & the Magic Sword.  I had no knowledge of Flash when I started, but I had a one month free trial and a full pile of sprites I could rip from Playshapes' game.  And sure enough, I manged to make something playable before the trial ran out.  I constantly think back to that & wonder why I can't crank out a new game every single month.

Well, during my downtime I went back & played it.  Or tried to anyway.  The animations were so bad I quit before I got to the bar.  I don't mean Playshapes' artwork, that's outstanding as always.  I mean everywhere I animated it.  It was just hard to watch.  The punch & kick animation are both glitchy, like they're missing half their frames.  And for whatever reason I have Kay's head on funny as well - it doesn't sit on her neck correctly.  It's bad enough to make me want to go back & re-make the game.

I'm not going to do that of course, I've got my current game to finish.  Plus I think it's cool to leave a trail behind & show where I've been.  I just think it's amazing how much I've improved in only 2 years.  Now if only I could also release a game every month, then I'd really be somewhere... haha.

(This is the middle frame of animation from the punch.  It's supposed to be an elbow smash IIRC, but instead it looks like her arm is cut off)

Anyway, I am in fact working on LotTO again.  The color options are done, but buggy.  In certain grapples, some body parts revert back to their original color, and I have no idea why.  I'll battle it again later, for now I'm simply noting where it happens.  Seems to always be hands & feet, which are also the sprites that often change layers & have the most variety.  So I have to believe it has something to do with one of those.  But everything I've checked so far says that's not the case.  I'll keep looking, I'm sure it'll turn out to be something stupid.  Not that that's ever happened before...    ;P

(New fetish time! Ladies with multi-colored legs!)

Update - Turns out the problem was in fact something pretty dumb, and had very little to do with how I'm setting the color.  The other thing hands & feet have in common is that they are both used in the unarmed attack.  In order to for the code to check if you're hitting something, I had to name both of them in the property menu.  Looks like I was sloppy with some copy/paste, as there were multiple body parts with the same name in any given frame of animation.  For example, in the picture above both of LeiLei's feet were named 'foothitbox'.  Kinda funny that this is the first time it cropped up as a problem, seems like it would have caused other errors before this.  Anyway, problem found & fixed, moving on.  =)

And lastly, while I was on break there was one more game I played that really deserves your attention.  The Legend of Queen Opala II.  Much like my game, what's posted is only the first half of the game, but what's there is really good if you like old school RPG's.  Fair warning, if you don't like HUGE tits or beastiality, then the porn isn't going to appeal to you.  Also, it's heavy on 'game' & light on 'porn' imo.  Still, I played through what's there twice, something on the order of 40 hours, so clearly I liked it.

Looking forward to 2012  :)
DirtyC101

December Update

Monthly status update:  I have no idea when the next release will be ready.  I'm guesstimating spring or summer at the moment.

K, that's out of the way.  I haven't worked on the game much at all this month.  I've mainly just been enjoying my break, re-reading comments, daydreaming about the game, oh, and actually PLAYING some other porn games.  I've found a few I really like too.  I'll puts some links at the bottom of this post if you're curious.

On the upside, the new computer is up & running.  On paper, it's much faster than the old machine, and in many places it really shines.  However, when it comes time to save my work, it takes forever.  At this point I have to assume there's a bug somewhere that's causing Adobe to hang, or perhaps the virus scanner is going crazy & scanning every block before it allows a write.  Whatever it is, I can see that one processor (or core) is running flat out for minutes at a time, while the rest of the machine sits idle.  I guess Adobe needs to multi-thread the save function?  Frustrating, because I can literally copy the entire .fla file in 5 seconds, but Adobe takes upwards of 5 minutes to save the thing.  What's it doing?

I have been tinkering with something however.  Let me attach a picture below.  See if you can figure it out.  ;P

It's not done yet, but yeah, I'm working on alternate color schemes for each of the characters.  Eventually I hope to have a slider bar so you can make your own color combos as well.  Learning to code this has been both fun & incredibly frustrating.  I'll probably rant about it later.  I like the results, but let's just say that Actionscript2 does not handle setting colors well (imo).

This has also served as a nice time to go back & clean up my lines & such.  The hero sprites were some of the first things I drew for the game, which means there was a lot of draw-erase-draw-erase going on.  It's amazing to me how overly complex some of the curves are because of this.  I'll see what looks like a simple curve, but upon close inspection I'll discover it's being defined by 50 points (should be like 3 or 4).  So, I've been fixing that too.  There's a (small) chance that this will result in a faster game for those of you on older PC's, but mainly this is just about me optimizing where I can.  Damn you OCD!!!

OCD: "You know, you should really set her eyebrow color too"

Me: "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU"


So, what have I been playing you ask?  Let me start with Dusty's Castle.  As far as I know, it's the first game that's ever been finished on the LoK forums, so a big congrats to Gorepete.  Gorepete also added a color slider just before the game was done, which pretty much inspired me to try & do my own.  So I reckon that's a double thanks I owe him.

The next game I'm playing is all Japanese.  The only text I can read says Hikaru Senki, which seems to be what folks are calling it.  I call it 'train your Pokemon to be a rapist', which doesn't quite flow off the tongue so well, but leaves little doubt about the gameplay.  Anyway, I was shocked at how much fun it was.  Game boils down to collecting shit & sexing up enemies.  If you're interested, follow this link.  Be sure to scroll down & read all the menu translations, as you'll need to know how to equip & swap weapons & such.

And the last link I'm going to post is a game called pretty warrior may cry.  Other than the 3D, this is almost exactly what I wanted to do for my next game.  So needless to say, playing this was a surreal experience.  It was like playing a game plucked from my dreams, described to someone over the phone, who doesn't actually speak English.  So yeah, I loved it.  No promises you get the same experience.  ;)

Til next time
DirtyC101

Feedback Loop - Part 2

Ok, I said I'd try to sit down & put the rest of my responses together in some coherent manner.  Well of course that didn't happen, so here's another splatter of responses in no particular order.  ;)


Invincible Escapes:  I'm hearing folks ask for some invincibility when escaping from grapples.  I'm slightly against this, mainly because some of the weapons already grant invincibility with their S attack.  The weapons are balanced around this.  So for example the large 2H weapons are kind of slow in their normal attack & have long recoveries, but they also do excellent damage & have fantastic invulnerability with their super move.  I even tried to set it up so that there's (usually) time to swap weapons after an escape.

So if you're the type who likes to jump into large groups, I assume you're going to pick a weapon with a good super for escaping from being surrounded.  This may be a poor assumption on my part, but I can't quite tell from the comments.  I personally think that if you get surrounded by a large group, then you really should be in trouble, so I'm pretty happy with how the mechanics here are working.  About the only change I'm considering here is granting more space if you die & use a continue.

Game Speed:  On my original computer, the game played at about the right speed when I set it to 20 FPS (frames per second).  What I didn't realize was that the game was actually running at ~14 FPS even in empty rooms, because my computer was really slow.  When I moved to my gaming PC, suddenly everything was way too fast, as the game was actually running at 20 FPS.

So sometime between the last two releases, I reset the game speed down to 15 FPS, which should put the game at about the right speed on everyone's PC.  The problem is a few of you already had nice PCs, and got used to the faster game speed.  So now the latest release seems like it's running in slow motion.  I think the solution here is I need to find the FPS command & just make a slider to keep everyone happy.  In the meanwhile, here's the 0.50 release at both 15 FPS (current speed) & 20 FPS (fast speed):

Current Speed
Fast Speed

If you think the game needs to be even faster (or slower), let me know.  Ideally I'll build a slider into the game to let you pick (assuming Flash lets me change this on the fly).

Arrow Respawn Rate:  Okay, let's rewind back to the previous release.  Originally, your body score moved the grapple bar indicator, and spirit controlled how much damage you did.  Although that sounded good on paper, it turned out I didn't like this system for two reasons.  The first was that Lei Lei's sex scenes ended way too fast, and the other was that you couldn't watch the animations because you were constantly staring at the arrows.

So I re-tuned the system quite a bit, with the intent of fixing both these problems.  Now both body & spirit move the bar, but in different ways.   Body still works very similarly, and moves the bar in your favor if your score is higher than your opponent(s).  Spirit moves the indicator by controlling how often the arrows appear.   So if you want to see the arrows appear quickly, you need to raise your spirit score.

That solved the first problem just fine, but it meant that anyone with a high spirit was still playing the 'watch the arrow' game.  So I re-tuned the arrow game a bit as well.  Now the time between arrow respawns is longer for everyone, but the jump on the grapple indicator is also much higher when you complete a series.  It should play almost exactly the same, the difference is you now have more time to watch the animation.  The message I'm hearing is that folks don't like having time to watch the animations.  I find that really hard to believe, although perhaps what they mean is that they want to constantly be doing something.  I'm more inclined to believe that everyone who is complaining is playing Farah, and don't grasp that the penalty for having a low spirit is long delays between arrow respawns.  I can't prove that though, so I'd love to hear some more detailed responses here.

Character balance:  Folks think Farah is more powerful than the other two.  At this exact second, I'm inclined to agree, although not to the extent I'm hearing.  I'd like to balance this back a bit, without nerfing Farah.  I may further buff spirit in sex grapples, or I may buff the regeneration rate from spirit.  There haven't been a lot of spirit puzzles yet either, which is something I'd like to add.  The key here is I don't want to completely lock Farah out of a section of the game.

Leveling system:  I'm seeing requests for more RPG elements, mainly a leveling system of some sort.  Wasn't planned, but I like the idea a lot.  I'll see if I can crowbar something in here, so that there's yet another advantage to defeating monsters.  In fairness though, there's very few monsters that can be avoided, it's not like you can run around them if they're in your way.  So whatever I do here will be minimal.  I absolutely do not want folks to feel like they have to farm monsters for XP before they can progress.

Damn, that's a long post.  But I think I hit all the big buttons.  If there's something else on your mind, let me know.  I promise I read every comment, even if I don't respond to it directly.

DirtyC101