Birthday Boy

This is the beginning of a longer FTM transformation game whose working title is Birthday Boy.

As always, if you wish to sample it, you will need an Inform interpreter such as Glulxe or Gargoyle.

This game interacts with Preferences in a number of ways to allow you to adjust the game's settings. Among the changes that Birthday Boy recognizes:

• sexual orientations (likes girls only; always bisexual; likes boys at first, but switches to liking girls). 
• whether MTF transformations are allowed (required in order to invite your boyfriend along)
• whether FTM transformations are allowed (required, along with MTF transformations, to wish for other couples to change sex)
• profanity filter
• the name of the main character

During the game itself, you will be able to choose the following things:

• whether you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend (requires appropriate sexual orientation)
• your boyfriend's or girlfriend's profession/body type
• girlfriend may be bisexual or lesbian
• boyfriend may be straight or TF-curious
• which of your friends, including BF/GF, goes with you on your birthday vacation

This game is in its initial stages of construction. The only thing you can do at this time is choose the above settings. I have a more advanced build that I am working on containing the scene of FTM transformation, but it is not ready for release at this time.

Birthday Boy (incomplete) va1

Anything You Can Do

This is it: the reincarnation of my battle-of-the-sexes game Anything You Can Do in the Inform engine. Here's what you should know:

• It is not complete. After you speak to Bryan, there is no more content. This should be obvious because the game comes to a hard stop at that point.
• Condo 202-N, where the girls are staying, is available during this phase. This is for ensuring the NPC AI is doing what it should behind closed doors. Ordinarily, this room is off-limits until the player reaches a certain stage of the game.
• You will need an Inform interpreter like Glulxe or Gargoyle.
• You may wish to check out the Preferences app if you wish to set things like your character's name, sexual orientation and how he reacts to being transformed.
• The game is not complete. See point 1.
• Also, see point 1.

Anything You Can Do, release 1 (incomplete, no version number).
Anything You Can Do, release 2, incomplete, version 0.20.
Anything You Can Do, release 3, incomplete, version 0.21.

Preferences

This is it: the Preferences extension.

Download the latest version here in .i7x format and install it into your version of the Inform environment. You're ready to start writing stories that incorporate player preferences into your Inform title!

You will want to direct your players to the stand-alone app that makes it possible to save their settings, also. That is to be found here.

Release #4:

• Added preferred names
• Added retroactive change to history/reality to the transformation options
• Added a new category (willing) for reaction to transformation

What does it do?

• Automated loadup routine to import player's saved settings
• Tables to define the unavoidable content contained in the author's game
• Automated verify routine to check game settings vs the players

What are the settings?

• Sex of main character (male, female)
• Sex of main character can change yes/no. If yes, permits additional categories:
• Additional possible sex of main character: MTF or FTM
• Reaction to change of sex (eager, secretly eager, reluctant, willing, change for medical reason)
• Preferred names for starting sex (male, female)
• If sex of main character can change, can also set preferred names for (becomes female, becomes male)
• Sexual orientations allowed by player (likes boys, likes girls, bisexual, neither), can be set separately for each starting sex of the main player
• Sexual orientation can change yes/no. If yes, permits additional category:
• starts liking boys, becomes bisexual
• starts liking boys, switches to liking girls
• starts liking girls, switches to liking boys
• starts liking girls, becomes bisexual
• Main character has a history of sex change yes/no. If yes, permits additional category:
• History of voluntary sex change
• History of voluntary permanent sex change
• History of involuntary sex change
• History of involuntary permanent sex change
• Which characters are allowed to flirt with you (men, women, or depending on your current orientation)
• Other characters allowed to sex change or not (MTF, FTM)
• Transformation of main character:
• bimbo
• identity erasure
• retroactive change of reality/history
• breast enlargement
• corruption/evil
• gynoid
• age regression
• non-human or partially-human living thing
• inanimate object
• Other questionable content:
• mind control (player is victim)
• mind control (player is perpetrator)
• unwilling sex (player is victim)
• unwilling sex (player is perpetrator)
• bondage (player is victim)
• bondage (player is perpetrator)
• incest
• urine
• feces
• semen
• lactation
• menstruation
• pregnancy
• male pregnancy
• oral sex
• anal sex
• masturbation
• crossdressing
• girls with penises
• boys with vaginas
• Various sexual partners set separately for each possible starting sex (player is first-listed participant) 
• male-male
• male-male-male
• male-male-female
• male-female-female
• male-female
• female-male
• female-male-male
• female-female-male
• female-female-female
• female-female

In progress: Preferences

I have come quite close to a first release of Preferences, my app for determining the player's likes and dislikes in the Inform environment. This first release of Preferences will allow the player to specify a number of things he would rather not see in an adult interactive fiction game, including:

• Starting sex and sexual orientation
• Profanity filter on/off
• Which, if any, sexual pairings are acceptable (male-solo, male-male, three men, male player with a man and a woman, male player with two women, male player with woman, female player with man, female player with two men, female player with a man and a woman, three women, female-female, and female-solo)
• Which, if any, sexual fetish material is acceptable (such as crossdressing, urine, scat, lactation, menstruation, graphic use of semen, pregnancy, mind control, unwilling or forced sex)
• Whether the main character is transgender or has a history of previous sex change
• Which character transformations are allowed (sex change, age regression or youthening to less than 18 years old, intelligence loss, inanimate transformation, animal transformation, breast expansion, gynoid, corruption, identity erasure)
• How the character reacts to sex change (reluctant to change, eager to change, secretly wants to change but doesn't tell anyone, changes for medical reasons)
• How (and if) sexual orientation changes over the course of the game (starts liking only girls but begins liking boys, for instance)

Future Inform games will be written to accommodate the user's preferences, or at least to warn the user when the preferences cannot be accommodated.

Download release 2 of the Preferences app here. It shouldn't be long before the app is working well enough to release the extension for other authors to use.

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

Porting from RAGS to Inform 7

I started a game in the RAGS engine which showed, to my mind, a great deal of promise. It stalled for a number of reasons, most of them related to my personal schedule, and some of which were related to the RAGS engine itself. If you have never made a game with it, RAGS is a blessing for players and a nightmare for coders. The programming, or perhaps I should say scripting, is done through a cumbersome graphical interface; the code is not reusable from game to game; it is far from modular. Worse, at least to me, is a reliance upon a player GUI where art occupies >50% of the screen. RAGS and similar games breed a type of player that depends upon pictures and mouse clicks as a crutch to actual gameplay, problem solving, imagination, and understanding. The kind of game usually produced in RAGS is one where any player could randomly click on things until pictures of boobs appear. One not even understand the story, read the text, comprehend the intricate possibilities, know the choices presented, or pick a path with care.

There are advantages to a primarily visual interface and I do not mean to say there are no good games in that format. I merely observe that players who rely on a RAGS-like system to play a game are not challenging themselves. Perhaps this is acceptable in a game that is primarily for sexual satisfaction; the goal of such players isn't to be challenged but to have an uninterrupted build-up and climax. I'd rather have the intellectual experience of figuring out what to do, where to go, and what it all means. This presumes, of course, that the challenges are intentional and not merely obstacles of poor game design, bad writing, or buggy code that must be worked around.

Therefore, importing the game "Anything You Can Do" into Inform will create a great deal more challenge than existed before. My writing partner and I will be able to introduce more complications, more random events, more varied text, more outfits, more locations, and more artificial intelligence (albeit primitive) than was available in RAGS. Partly this is because I am switching to a language that handles such variations, conditional statements, and branches more gracefully. It's also because I am abandoning the need for art. The precious RAGS version had some 200 images of the player, in all four available races, with multiple hairstyles, with three different breast sizes, with and without makeup, and depicted wearing various combinations of clothing items. Now that I am switching to a text-only format, the complexity of the wardrobe can be much more easily multiplied — and the game itself is leaner and faster without all the image files hogging up memory.

I am sure some players will say "go back and finish it in RAGS." I will let others do that; I am going to make the game as I want it; and if someone wants to rebuild it in a clumsy visual format, they're welcome to it. I'll send you the code.

What the player wants

Like the old saying goes, you can have it cheap, quick, or correct; pick any two. Work that is inexpensive and fast is rarely of any quality; work that is fast and good usually comes with a high price; and work that is both correct and affordable will rarely be done by your schedule. Something similar applies to finding out what the player wants in his game. The author can ask the player an exhaustive list of highly specific questions, at some cost of time; or quickly breeze through a few questions, sacrificing either completeness or comprehension.

This is especially true when we are dealing with games that simulate social activities like flirting, relationships, and sex. Humans rarely ask for what we want; our social rules do not always allow us to. Sometimes what we want is for someone else to take charge, to not ask us what we want, like a handsome stranger who seduces the player despite her breathy protests to the contrary. Paradoxically, what we want is sometimes the very thing that it is impossible to ask for. In the real world we insist that no means no, but in a fantasy we might wish for no to mean yes.

In order to solve the problem of making a game where no can mean yes, I am writing an extension for Inform called Preferences. It allows the player to specify, in some detail, what is encompassed in his or her sexual fantasies, and to exclude that which is not. It's impossible to be complete in this endeavor, for every fantasy has myriads of sub-categories that would take infinite monkeys, splitting infinite numbers of hairs, to define. And we can't be entirely accurate in every fantasy, since what constitutes a fantasy is somewhat variable from person to person. But we can eliminate the time factor. Rather than have every game ask the same basic questions, Preferences will let the player define these things once, for all Inform games.

I will have more to say about the Preferences extension as I get closer to a release date. I do know that Body Thief will be the first game to incorporate it.

Extensions

Inform 7 is my platform of choice, because it is modular. I can write an extension that can be re-used multiple times, without reinventing the wheel each time.

My current list of extensions under construction:

Weather [complete]. An extension to govern whether rooms are indoor, outdoor, or covered, and how they are affected by weather effects like rain, wind, heat, and humidity. Indoor rooms are defined by whether weather effects can be seen (such as lightning or rain on the windows), heard (like wind or thunder) or felt (like rain, snow, or cold). The author is allowed to define what weather effects are taking place, and when.

Dynamic Clothing [complete but being tested]. A complete model of the human body that can be defined by certain dimensions like height, muscle, breast size, shoulder and hip width, breast size, hair length and style; and other values calculated from them, such as inseam, waist size, cup size, shoe size, etc. Includes a layered clothing model where clothing is described based on what is visible; underlying hidden items are not mentioned unless there is reason to do so. For instance, wearing a black bra under a thin white shirt may be visible. The body model includes a 2-axis descriptor of skin tone, hair length in 3 regions, shaving areas of the body, pregnancy that affects waist size and cup size, presence of genitalia that is independent of the actor's gender, and more. Uses Weather (for rooms that are cold, nipples may be visible).

Basic Help [complete]. An expandable hint system that prints a table of commands that new players can refer to for assistance in Inform. The author can add new lines to the table for any custom new commands.

Body-Swapping [under construction]. An extension to automate the process of assigning a body to a specific actor. This can be used to assign a body, as when the player takes on an alternate form (such as Ranma Saotome's girl-form, or Mystique imitating someone); or to exchange the bodies of two characters; or to assign the player a specific predetermined body after a transformation (as with Jeykll and Hyde). Requires Dynamic Clothing.

Beautiful Faces [under construction]. Attempts to do for faces and makeup what Dynamic Clothing does for bodies.

Preferences [under construction]. An app and extension that allows the player to specify what kind of content he would prefer to avoid in Inform games. Authors who use the Preferences extension can read in the player's desires, and either accommodate them (that is, skip past content the player doesn't like) or warm him that such content cannot be avoided. Users can specify their preferences for many things, such as starting gender, starting name, post-transformation name, response to transformarion, and whether to allow content like unwilling sex, mind control, bodily fluids, breast enlargement, bondage, and many others. Requires Names.

Body Preferences [conception stage only]. A separate preference app to define the player's preferred starting form, and preferred post-transformation form, if any. Requires Dynamic Clothing.

Names [under construction]. An extension that contains thousands of common English names along with the appropriate formal, nickname, diminutive, and opposite-gender forms. For instance, Chris corresponds to Christopher, Chris, Chrissy, and Christine.

Links will follow (as well as code) when I get a moment to upload them somewhere.