Calamity John update

I have been working on Calamity John in my spare time. If you're curious about the premise, look here. This is what I have completed so far:

• A large amount of behind-the-scenes design and planning has been done. I now know what specific NPCs and plot points the game will contain and how they balance.
• Starting (female) clothing has been created.
• A few introductory NPCs are built: Clay Hancock, the telegraph operator; Gideon P Lemley, the snake oil salesman who gives you the transforming potion; and a scrawny cowpoke that dispenses some essential exposition before he skedaddles off.
• The FTM transformation potion has been created, and the transformation routine has been tested.
• A few other basic objects have been made and introduced, but they mostly serve to act as placeholders for if-then statements. For instance, if you have a gun, you can demand Doc Lemley give you his pocketwatch. The gun and the watch exist; but at the moment, they do nothing much.

Calamity John

I previously mentioned that I wanted to create a game with FTM as the central purpose — one where the main character begins as female and transforms into a male. My first foray into that area will be a game set in the Old West called "Calamity John."

Since I have been told that the FTM gamers might appreciate a world in which they can exercise their  new manly strength, sex, status, and sexual prowess, I thought immediately of the Western genre. It offers a high contrast between male and female: the clothing, the opportunities, the amount of power and prestige, and the level of strength and independence offered to each.

My plan is to begin the character in a mining town in the mountains. The railroad has not yet come through but a tunnel is being built nearby: a long route is being cut directly through the mountains, blasted out with dynamite. It will revitalize the town's fortunes when it is finished. But the citizens in town aren't the only ones who know this. The Naughton gang knows it, too, and want to take over the silver mine. When the train line is complete, they'll cash in.

You play Jane Simon, a young woman in town. When the Naughton gang starts throwing its weight around, someone must do something. With the aid of a slick traveling salesman and his Manly Recombobulator concoction, you transform into a male and can now try to strap on your guns, take back your town, save the pretty girls, and be the new marshal. Or — and I'm still contemplating this part — join the gang and help make the town your own.

This is the skeleton of the game environment, with room descriptions written in old-time Western lingo. Warning: this is an empty environment with no interactivity. Don't complain to me if you didn't read this and were expecting a full, playable game with sexy content, because it's not there yet.

Calamity John (incomplete, room environments only) va1

Games For Autoandrophiles (Women Who Want to Be Men)

Is this a controversial word? Yes. Yes, it is.

Most of you are going to skip this blog post, and that's okay. My polling shows that the population on TFGS (that's the Transformation Games Site) is about 90-95% MTF and 5-10% FTM. This is probably meaningless for describing the population at large, since the TFGS population is self-selected from among people who a) searched for and/or found the website, b) liked the games enough to register a username, and c) answered the poll. There may well be more than 5-10% of the population interested in women who transform into men, or women who fantasize about having a dick.

Some people call it autoandrophilia, some call it crossdreaming, or crossdressing, and others call it some form of suppressed transgenderism. And it may be all of those or none of those, for all I know. Some will object to the word "women" on the grounds that transmen are men who were born differently. Believe me, if I had said "men," some women would object on the grounds that they don't identify as transmen; they consider themselves women who merely have a sexual attraction to the fantasy of being men. I'm not here to settle the question of why it is, or what it ought to be called. I err on the side of letting people decide for themselves what their sexuality ought to be called. How would I know better than them?

That's not my point, anyway. What I'm really asking is how I go about writing a game for FTM players. Since I see so few of them, it's hard to get reliable information and feedback.

There is presently a contest to create a FTM game, with a few basic restrictions: one, the transformation is slow; two, no MTF is permitted; and three, it must be a transformation (no body-swapping). I am debating how to approach this.

Naturally, I have polled on this too. As of this post there were responses from about 22 different people, or at least that was the maximum number of responses to any one question. I hope they were FTM fans, not MTF fans tweaking the polls, but I can't be sure.

Most of the responses were pretty even across the board, as you can see, with respect to what gamers want to see. There were no strongly prominent choices other than having sex with the player's new cock. In other words. I'm going to have to rely on my instincts in making FTM content.

Nevertheless, I still intend to do so.