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.

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.

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.