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

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.

The Numbers

If you like numbers (and why wouldn't you?), here are the referring sites as of the latest data:

TF Games Site: 1,147
Head Roulette: 172 (my other blog)
Metamorphose: 52
4chan: 31
Fictionmania: 7

If you can think of another site that might be interested in a game like this, let me know and I can try posting it there.

Expanding Body Thief

Body Thief began as a simple proof of concept. I actually had a version, some time ago, that was confined to a single room whose description would gradually shift after you swapped bodies with DeeDee. It had no bells or whistles whatsoever, no conversation, no inventory, and no ending.

This version has been greatly expanded upon that general concept, but it is still at heart a proof-of-concept game. I'd like to expand it beyond those original borders, but I'm not yet sure how.

A swap other than Jake/DeeDee. If you had a person to swap with other than DeeDee (or Jake as FTM) then you'd be experiencing the same map through different eyes. However, the existing map is pretty boring stuff unless you like the intelligence shift.

A swap after Jake/DeeDee. This would involve creating additional map locations and plot points so you'd have things to do in your new body. Tracking down the person who stole your body would be the most obvious plot to follow.

Watching other people struggle with being swapped. This could end up as a large expansion, given how many potential combinations there are with even a handful of characters. Inevitably some of the combinations would be pretty dull.

More things to do as Jake/DeeDee. This seems the best route for expansion: more scope without adding too much additional length or complexity.

Let me know your thoughts on this in the comments.

Am I wasting my time?

Signs point to yes.

On the TF Games site, where there seems to always be a thread where people are complaining that there's not enough content, not enough free porn, too many unfinished games, and how content creators should work harder, make games bigger and better and more complete, I have posted 3 updates in 30 days.

Only five people said anything.

This is the same website, mind you, where posters are so adamant to receive new content that many propose (or support) the frequent suggestions that authors should hand over their creations to unnamed "others" so that beloved games could be completed or more content produced.

But I had comments only from five (5) people.

Okay, you might say, there probably is demand, just no demand for the things I like to make. And fair enough: I like the old-school command-line interface of Inform and the free-form nature of interactive fiction, compared to (say) the dreadful linearity of Twine; everything is clickable but nothing is interesting, and any link whatsoever can lead you down a one-way rabbit hole toward an ending — or, likely as not, the wet paint and exposed rebar of "this path hasn't been written yet."

If that's what people like, then that's what they like. But it does mean I'm wasting my time making what I like. I have tried to accommodate what other people might enjoy, but as it turns out, I should just make what I personally enjoy. And this whole business of compiling, uploading, updating, and promoting is a waste, too; it would be much easier if I just didn't post at all.

Am I wasting my time?

The Magic 8-ball says "yes, definitely."

Is it worth it? I have no idea, but right now, I'm not feeling it.

Is it a game, is it a puzzle, or is it porn?

I spend a little bit of time — actually, quite a lot — thinking about player motivation. This comes from being a gamemaster whenever my group of friends gets together for D&D or other tabletop role playing game. The players never do what I expect them to do. The story I want to tell isn't always the story they want to be in.

When it comes to interactive fiction it is similar, but trickier. The player is wrestling with the interface, the command lines, the available vocabulary of the game, the room layout, the non-static things in the game, and whatever resources he has been allotted. What he wants to do is not always anticipated by me, the author. What's worse, I have no way of receiving feedback from the game; I cannot tell what commands that players attempted, or where they got stuck. If players don't speak up, I can't tell what to fix.

Sometimes players getting stuck is exactly what I intend. It may seem cruel or uncaring, but it is my philosophy that the player ought to work for the thing he wants in a game. It shouldn't be handed to him. Therefore, the rewards of the game — the sexy content the player wants — shouldn't be given out like candy, but should be hidden behind the "correct" sequence of moves.

But is that always what players want?

Back to the title of the blog: maybe. If it's a game, I am giving the player resources to manage and rules to manage them by. One of those resources is the player's choices. If they choose to spend a choice doing one thing, I do not feel obligated to give them the other choice for free. It is a path; choose which direction to follow. If I view it as a puzzle, then I intend for certain content to be concealed until the right player happens upon the right combination. I leave clues behind and allow the players to find them.

Sometimes what players are looking for is porn. And that is completely contrary to the design goals of games and puzzles. Porn is an uninterrupted buildup of the player's enjoyment. Puzzles get in the way, and make players stop to investigate what went wrong. It is, I feel, more rewarding in the end to find your way there to the end; but not all players want to be challenged in this way.

That's why I have settled on my philosophy: I provide hyperlinks to the bare-bones choices of the story. There is more to it, if the player learns the interface. Simply clicking hyperlinks will not unlock every secret. That's the way I like it.