Another villain

This particular one helps fill our catgirl quota.  She's an obvious Felicia rip-off, I know, but it's kind of hard to find cat girls that aren't just an extra pair of ears, and a werecougar enemy should look a little bestial.

Like the succubus, she can turn defeated player characters into enemies... that'll take a little coding, but it shouldn't be anything prohibitive.  In this enemies' case, she turns each race into some different were-variety: a wererat for the gnome, a werefox for the elf, and a werebear for the half-troll.

You don't stay playable after that... I considered it, but the feature/art creep would just be too much.  It's just another way I'm trying to add a little persistence to the world, and if that can take the way of extra hentai content, all the better.

Updates will probably be a little irregular through the holidays.

Art Time

Not a lot to report because I'm doing more game art.  Not being a particularly good artist, this takes me a fair amount of time.  Most recent work included some more boss art, including a Succubus boss (I think they're pretty much required by law for GOR games, right?) see below and some various other females.  Also in the works are bath house scenes for the characters where they talk with various NPCs, etc.

Rescue!

Well, now there's some of Marigold's doomed party in the game for you to rescue.  The first and easiest in the alchemist... you find her on the first level, and she can make it out by herself, or you can give her the scroll.

First, when you start the game, you get this trying to go to her place:

In the dungeon, you find her in one of the rooms:

Just give her the town portal scroll and she'll make her own escape (You can follow via the portal if you wish):

...and back on the surface, you'll have access to her shop:

...most of the other members of Marigold's party... didn't fare so well.

In any case, moving on from here to any number of issues, from finishing up town events to adding NPCs.

Downsides of Fame

Earlier, I'd mentioned how I was going to do a Fame system, so that if you lose a character you get a new one leveled based on your fame, from killing bosses, etc.  However, as time went on, I realized this was kind of needlessly complex and would better be replaced by a difficulty system:

Easy - 999 Lives (New characters) your new character has all the XP of the last one.
Medium - 8 Lives, your new character drops down to base XP for the last level. (I.e. you lose excess XP)
Hard - 3 Lives, your new character has half your previous XP.
Rogue - Permadeath, all XP lost when you die.

Although all the GOR CG will be in for all difficulty levels, I may make some particular scenes only for the harder difficulties.

Other than implementing that, did some support work to make monster distribution on levels and such easier to adjust.

More Monsters, more scenes

So, besides being somewhat sidetracked by Succubus Nests, recent progress has been around "bonus" h-content in the Inn, and adding more monsters.

The monsters are all rogue staples, and will just result in a player death (no h-content) if they kill you.  As such, I've added them relatively sparingly, since we don't want too much risk of losing characters in non-hentai ways.

Here we have a giant bat, along with the usual Icky Thing.  Also worth noting is I buffed everyone's HP and damage, to help even out spikes that resulted from the RND (Nothing like randomly having your face crit off...)

Giant rats are, of course, required by law.

Currently, it just goes into a scene in the inn, but in the future I'll have the extra scenes triggered by certain plot events.  I went ahead and wrote three different fantasies per race, which was probably overkill, although I didn't do extra graphics for each one.

Later on, there'll be a peeping scene at the inn as well, along with some nightmares so that you can see the GOR for enemies you defeated without losing your player.

A little bit of plot

I'm not precisely making a Hentai Hamlet here, and Roguelikes generally feature a relatively simple plot, so I've made an effort to keep things focused (Defeat the bad girl, rescue downed NPCs on the way for extra pics/scenes) and avoid lots of text.

Here's where you spawn, starting the game:

A quick look at the poster introduces the villain:

...and chatting with the lead guard gives you some background and starts the quest to go kill her (and leads to the quest with Marigold):

I've coded in some of the town/inn events that provide some of the non-GOR hentai, but the scripting isn't done yet, so no screenshots of that.  Although it's a relatively minor feature, I've altered the heroines so they emote when they lose clothing, based on their randomly-generated personality:

Also changed, monsters have distances at which they can see you.  I've changed the aggro system so they can "Alert" other ways than seeing you, expect intelligent monsters to raise the alarm, and possible events like screaming when you lose clothing or the crash from bashing open a door to alert nearby monsters.

Bugs Squashed, Kobolds Spared?

So, many hours of irritating bug fixes later, just about all the ones mentioned in my previous post (and plenty that weren't) are gone.  The only lingering one involves some monsters not realizing they should path to the heroine.

That being said, some progress with the female "boss" monsters, in that they now all leave "corpses" after you defeat them, and, at least in the case of the kobold girls, you can spare them and just turn in their underwear as a reward.  Later on, I'll add some consequence for saving them... as I have it now, female magic users (everyone but the half-troll girl) have to rape other magic-using females to gain maximum MP points.

Our heroine has Mitzi at her mercy:

 She has mercy on her, much to the surprise of the kobold (who certainly won't show the PC any):

There's the kobold girl's panties:

Currently, you just remark when walking over them, later on you'll be able to collect them to turn in as a quest reward, as well as panties of fallen heroines and other allied NPCs:

Squashing Bugs

So, after finishing and importing a whole bunch of artwork (the use of which will be my next update) I decided to go ahead and leave town and head back into the dungeon.  There, I came face to face with a whole load of new bugs:

Well, that's certainly not right... it ended up being a case of reusing a variable I shouldn't have.  Pretty much a symptom of not naming even trash variables clearly.  That wasn't terribly hard to deal with, although the following bug took much longer:

This one looked like a transparency bug (the wrong color is transparent) but messing around with that code didn't fix anything.  Not surprising, considering transparency seemed to work fine elsewhere...

...and this is a monster meleeing our heroine from across the room.  Still haven't solved this one yet, although I'm pretty sure it's due to the new pathfinding.  Kind of important to fix, as it renders the game more or less unplayable.

I took out the dynamic coloration for this run, and the blending appears to work correctly, which got me on the right track, that it was a corrupted resource.  Reloading all the coloring and graphical info finally fixed it, as seen below:

...and there were a whole bunch of minor bugs (like regenerating more than max life, and getting "killed" over and over again due to the half-trolls new life regen) that didn't merit screenshots.  Anyway, progress continues...

Throne Rooms

Marigold is finally in as one of the main quest givers... she's kind of the plot engine and narrator, as she remains a constant even if you lose an individual PC.

Here the player is approaching her for the first time.  Below, she's talking to her:

The fallen members of her former raid party against the Siren appear, mostly as HCG, but not all of them are dead or defeated.  You can use town portal scrolls yourself, or give them to fallen NPCs or PCs so they can make it back to town.

I probably need to give some contrast to the inventory screen, as well as make it pop up when you try to use items in combat.

Noxico

So, there aren't a lot of adult roguelikes, but Noxico is trying to fix that:

http://helmet.kafuka.org/noxico/

It's still pretty early in development, but it looks like it's going to be an interesting game, and more "rogue-like" than my current project.  Kind of like Corruption of Champions as more of an RPG.

As for Dungeon of Lost Maidens, I'm still progressing (slowly) which is about as a good as it's going to get through August.  More town work done, installed the key vendor and the temple.

A better shop interface

Ok, well, at least got rid of the previous dialog-based shop interface for something that made a little more sense.

Town and Scheduling

So the reason there haven't been any updates is I've barely found any time to work on the game.  That's... frustrating, as I was hoping to finish this summer, but it'll probably slip to this fall or the end of the year.  I'll definitely do something quicker for my next game (probably another matching game) but then again, a lot of the time spent on this game has been building (rebuilding?) the engine.

Anyway... most recent activity has been beating the town into shape, so we have functioning vendors, quest givers, etc.  I did a fair amount of art for it, although not all the mechanics are hooked up.

Right now, just the shops are in, eventually they'll be people on the streets, etc.  I'm probably also going to make everything already revealed, so you don't have to wander around town the first time looking for stuff.

I've changed the game mechanics a bit, now healing is independent of clothing, so you can heal to full if you find a healing fountain, even if your character just has her panties left.  The Inn now heals life entirely, while the tailor will replace your clothes.  Mana (or in the case of the warrior girl, health) regenerates, but only to a certain level if your clothes are damaged, giving you an incentive to get them repaired, but not making it mandatory.

Expanding the Bestiary

No pic with this update... basically, I'm working on adding a lot more monsters to the game, to make it feel more like a true Roguelike.  That doesn't mean they're all going to have unique CGs.. I've got a recolor feature, although I may make some of the dialogue different.  Unique CGs would be nice, but especially if they're rare mobs, I don't want people to have to grind forever to try and find some obscure mob CG.

Wrote some more endings for the snakes (just common mobs with some vore) and the cockatrice (a boss.)  Other than that, a lot of detail work to do.

More artwork

My time on the project this week was spent doing some more of the artwork, in particular game over sequences from the player actually dying (girls as angels, there's no real gore in this game) and giant spider game overs, as seen below:

Not sure yet how I want to handle the giant spiders, given that really, your girl should be rescueable if reached within a certain amount of time.  I may let you add former players rescued in this way as NPCs, which should be the next big technical thing added to the game, anyway.

Also, I'll probably make the silk a little less yellow in the actual game... maybe the current color would would for getting mummified by mummies?  You never know...

Path Finding Fixed

I know it's not a particular glamorous subject, and it doesn't really lend itself to screenshots:

...but proper path-finding is now working, preventing you from cheesing monsters on obstacles, and allowing for the eventual implementation of mobile monsters, patrols, and NPCs.  Amusingly enough, compared to my rather amateurish implementation of tile  graphics, it doesn't appear to slow the game down at all.

A technical problem out of the way

Previously, I'd had problems with all the dungeon rooms actually being connected, thanks for the rather haphazard way hallways were drawn in.  I think I've solved that problem, and in a lot less time than anticipated.  Still, completion will probably slip into at least early summer, as there's a fair amount of art left to do, along with some basic game balancing before it goes out the door.

See the minimap below for an example of the new map styles:

More like a game

Yeah, long break in updates, but a lot of of it was artwork, which isn't terribly eventful, and I'm not going to post all of it to the blog anyway.  However, now I've got a lot more of the game working, so here's some shots of it as it stands:

So I added several "boss" enemies into the game, which is to say, they're tougher than normal, and have some associated artwork with them.  Some all have their own quests.  This particular bandit lady will eventually be the object of a side quest.  The quote below is before she's beaten any of the protagonists.

Since Janet just wandered into this boss when she was already low on mana, it won't be long before an h-scene:

As Rachel (the names bandit) looks on, her henchmen finish off our downed heroine.  The image is the same as the default bandit kill for this one, but text is different.

A few adventurers later, Rachel now brags about who she's defeated to the current girl.  The top insult doesn't make a lot of sense seeing as they were all designed for female casters (the tentacles) so I ended up removing the brag feature from Rachel and putting it onto the Kobold sorceress sisters.

Here's Mitzi Bravepaw (the first boss added) with her new text, but before getting any kills.

...even though I've nerfed the damage on the kobold sorceresses, running into one injured or surprised is pretty much game over for lower-level players.  So Mitzi gets her first kill this game...

Here, I come back down to her with a more experienced and nearly fully healed Enchantress, to whom she brags about doing in Megan, the gnome girl.

...and Demeter takes care of Mitzi without too much trouble, gaining 10 mana from her.  All the monsters in this game can gain XP from defeating players, and in the case of magic users, mana as well.  This adds some realism, and together with the fame option, keeps players from zerging bosses.

Some more customization

Have added randomly assigned personalities for each character, so that their lines in scenes (both hentai and non) make sense given their personality.  A relatively small touch, just trying to keep things from being too repetitive.

Other than that, mostly artwork, there's still a fair amount to do before game completion, although the game engine itself is rapidly nearing completion.

The pots are moving!

Nothing out of the ordinary here, not a monster to be seen...

Wait... did that pot just move?

...and now his cover is blown.  They still need a bit of work so they only move when you're not looking, right now in certain cases they don't correctly detect that you can see them.

Lots of other things being worked on as well, it's starting to resemble more of a functioning game now.

Bug fixes and background

Lots of bug-fixes and art work, neither of which make for a terribly exciting post.  The feature probably of interest to most of the audience, is I've added a Moria-style character bio at the beginning, just to flesh things out a little.  There'll be a whole cut scene for a "New Game" that I'll add here in the new update, this is just the first part of it.

Backgrounds (literally, this time)

So at least one background is now in the game, so everyone isn't hovering in white space.  Here we see the player confronting the first "boss":

Note the player's mana.  Here's the after shot, I've introduced maximum mana gain (both yours and the enemies') as plundered from fallen magic using opponents:

Some backgrounds will need to be changed, of course, since they're perspective shots, and things like town and special room backgrounds need to go in, but this is a start.  On a game balance note, here our Half-troll Adventuress (the melee class) comes face-to-face with the kobold sorceress boss... at the end of a hall:

 

 By the time she's closed range with the boss, she's down to just a few hit points a bit of cloth:

Unsurprisingly, she gets about one blow in and then tastes defeat (and tentacles):

...game balancing is still to come, but I may have to tweak monster sight distance to prevent this kind of thing from happening.  At the very least, the player should be able to lure a ranged enemy down the hall where they can ambush them from melee.

Revamping the UI

So, as I mentioned earlier, I wasn't working on the project for much of December or January, but I'm back at it now.  Most of the changes are "beneath the hood" but I did fix the kind of sad user interface a bit.

Here's one of our heroines looting several chests.  The old, useless, drop down menus for items and spells have been replaced, and the text box enlarged somewhat.

Pushing the "Items" button brings up a list of carried items and what number you'd need to press to use them.

Here she is with a few more items, and showing off one of the many new underwear colors in the game.  A bug previously prevented most of them from being selected.

Here's a magic-user, and the Spells button, which acts in a similar way.  There's a spacing problem evident here that has just been fixed. 

There's quite a few new spells, new animated traps, and some other things,  but those'll have to wait until the next update to show them off.  Lots more art done, but it's not yet in the game at the moment.

Release wise, probably looking towards the beginning of summer.