Incubus Island Monthly Goal #10

It's been a while since I posted.

I took time off from development in the latter half of December, and found that in Jan I did not feel the sort of creative/perverted energy that often propels development of my games. I'm not fully sure why, but at some point I started wondering if I was sick, or lacking sufficient sleep, or something to that effect, or maybe just drained from IRL shit I won't go into. Eventually I decided to try doing some little fiddling with sideprojects to see if I could get the gamedev juices flowing again. I started making two different very simple text-only games: a brothel sim and a murder mystery whodunnit type game. 

Cathouse/Sheriff

Neither of these are projects I intend to focus on, I just want to be clear. They were just a way of getting my brain on the right wavelength again. Also I tried a few things and got a few ideas of what to try in future. Anyway:

The brothel sim - called 'Cathouse' - was inspired by the game Whore Master EX, which featured a pregnancy mechanic I remember fondly for allowing you to impregnate your whores, raise your daughters to be whores, and soforth. This helped me see what functions of a brothel sim I think I should retain in II for that part of the game and which parts are needless complications. (I'm starting to think that owning multiple venues in II was an absurd idea and am reconsidering it.) It works - you can hire girls, put them to work in any venue you own including your own house. They accumulate money, filth, fame, skill experience, and lose stamina and health based on what job and what happens during their shift. I like the semi-medieval setting and random generation of text content that helps add variety to the repetition inherent in such a game. For the purpose of the latter I made a new macro to turn a string like "She got [fucked|fingered|pounded|eaten out|buttfucked] [all night|hard|violently|excellently] by a [dirty|handsome|wealthy|rude] [peasant|knight|blacksmith|merchant|priest|cousin] until she [told him his time was up|had an orgasm|couldn't take it anymore|realized she was in love with him]." into "She got pounded hard by a rude knight until she couldn't take it anymore." or one of a fousand other variations. It's nothing revolutionary but it makes it easier for me to do this type of variation than what I was using in II, so I'm going to be bringing it over.

The whodunnit - Sheriff - is more rough around the edges and I'm not really sure if I could turn it into a game, but I approached it as a board game or card game concept. Basically there's a town in the wild west (or wherever - the setting and theme are arbirarily chosen) with 8 citizens (50/50 male/female split) and the player, and at the start of the game each character is secretly assigned one 'crime' card representing which of the pool of eight crimes they comitted, two 'trait' cards representing personality traits that affect interactions with other characters (the player also gets two of these), and is assigned a 'lover' among the opposite sex, two 'friends' among their own, and an 'enemy' among any of them. The player has to find clues for each of the 8 crimes in 7 days, interrogate characters, and (in theory) receive a different ending based on which criminals he caught (with the solving of the main mystery - the murder of the town's sheriff - being the ultimate goal of a playthrough). A character might confess to a crime if you have dirt on someone they love or like, or may rat out someone if they hate them, and the player can blackmail someone to be their deputy in exchange for overlooking their crime (or if the player and character have the correct corresponding trait cards, ie if the player has the 'Attractive' card an the character has a 'Horny' card and they are opposite sexes); this would give the player access to the benefits of that character's relationships and their trait cards.  It's a neat idea but I have no clue where to take it or how to make it fun to play, so right now it's just a tangle of ideas coded together. 

I like the idea of group of people who are all set characters but are assigned certain roles randomly at the start that the player has to figure out or fail to at his own peril. I think I got this idea from what I heard of an old Bladerunner game (which I've never played) wherein every playthrough has a different arrangement of which characters are synths and which are humans. I may also have got it from a board game I once played with a vaguely similar premise, except maybe they were spies, or possibly impostors (like a Body Snatchers/The Thing sense of the term, creatures imitating humans). 

One alternate direction I could take it is less crime and more scandal, like you're in a group of friends, or a paparatzi among celebrities, trying to figure out who is having an affaire with who, and use these secrets to your advantage. Obviously, this being a Wape game, you could blackmail characters with incriminating evidence to get them to fuck you and at least one of the endigns would involve you learning that you fathered every couple's subsequent child (the biggest scandal of all). (Would have to think up different endings for if the player is female.)

I don't have specific plans to do anything with these two ideas. I might play with them on the side in future and - if I like where they go - release them as standalone games or incorporate them into something else.

Back To Work

My to-do list will just be what I posted previously, which was:

• Patch up IC some more, release a full zipped latest version (the html-only patch thing I've been doing seems to confuse new players). 
• Rewrite event system in JavaScript. 
• Add psionic trainer storyline. 
• Add jobs/expenses mechanic. 

These are pretty modest I think. Also, I might take a brief detour here and there based on whatever whim trikes me.