0.58 Reflection and 0.59 Preview

Hi, perverts! I feel like I'm in the middle of some spring cleaning for Ruin Me: filling in some gaps and smoothing out some rough spots while I work on bigger stuff in the background. I hope that you liked the last release!

My Center of Attention patrons have been very helpful by providing feedback on the recent development direction. Last time, I talked about my plans to switch to a demo version in the future; I'm now thinking that the demo cutoff will be just after the Ritual of Agrat in the middle of Act III; the Reform Institute and any training past level 2 will be reserved for the full version. This seems like a better balance than cutting off the demo at the end of either Act I or Act II.

We're also almost done with a poll on the new geography minigame from the latest update. The majority of respondents seem to think the game is fun enough as a side activity, with a few others being just fine with skipping it. That's the sweet spot I was aiming for, so I'm feeling pretty good about further minigames and adjustments to "grinding," discussed further below.

A quick note on Patreon: a bunch of adult content creators are seeing their accounts closed for unclear and ill-defined reasons. I'm careful to stay well within the rules, but I don't feel immune to the risks of getting closed down by puritanical payment processors or cowardly corporations. I haven't set up an alternate patronage option yet, but if this account does ever get closed, you can find news on phanes.itch.io or phanes.me.

Reflection on Geography and Exhibitionism

One of the things I wanted to do when I first started working on Ruin Me was to make a porn game that works well as a game independently from the porn. A lot of adult games exclusively depend on their porn for player motivation; if you took out the erotic parts, you wouldn't be left with something you'd want to play. I think that's totally fine; most porn is art that wouldn't be interesting with the sex removed. It's not how I wanted to approach this project, though.

I know I've succeeded with at least some players, although I still think the game would be rather thin if you took out all the explicit sex. Still, one of the areas that has remained tedious is grinding for Ken. A lot of "training" or "life simulation" porn games ask you to do the same thing over and over as a way to make you work for their pornographic rewards, relying on the tantalization of more sexy pictures to make you put up with some boring play. I use Ken as a way to pace the game in a similar way: there are a bunch of things that require Ken, forcing you to pick which ones you want to prioritize, and motivating you to grind Ken if you want it faster than the game doles it out. But clicking "Wander" repeatedly and getting a bit of random text was a bit tiresome.

So the map-matching minigame was a way to give you a more interesting way to grind Ken and feel like there's some sort of investment in what places you explore. It's not the most exciting minigame, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it kind of fun in testing. It's got vaguely-similar vibes to the easier puzzles in Curse of the Golden Idol or doing a word search: even though you know how to solve it, there's a little bit of satisfaction in going through the motions. I knew not everyone would find it fun, especially on the third or fifth time, so I made sure to make it skippable.

Regarding the new play scene: I've started to try and do some writing that works in multiple places. I've done this already for cum play training, which is reused for an equivalent training scene. This release brought a new public sex play scene that can also be triggered when visiting Terry at night in certain circumstances. I hope having multiple paths to access the same (branching) story feels fine to y'all; I like it showing up circumstantially more than you only fucking Terry when you choose it from a menu, but I don't want the game to feel repetitive or copy-pasted.

The scene itself was fun to write, although it had a whole lot of branches even after I cut it down in scope! It helps to at least partially satisfy requests for sharing Terry in town, Terry being dominant, orientation play, and exhibitionism.

Next Update

I want to keep expanding play scenes! There are a few new bits I'm going to add to the public sex play scene, now that I've seen responses and had a few days of distance from it. There's also a hole missing in the catalogue for oral sex, and that should be a relatively short and straightforward scene. I think I like how the extra branch for massage play went, so I'll be looking around to see where I could add that sort of thing for maximum benefit.

I'm actively working on the next minigame! Esther will have a minigame that replaces wandering in the mansion: you'll optionally do a tiny little hypertext adventure to find your way through procedurally-generated disused parts of the building. I've always wanted the house to feel a bit like a monster of its own, and hopefully this will help give it an unheimlich feel.

I don't know if he'll end up in the next update, but I've been working on a new NPC. He'd be the last of the secondary NPCs (Arthur, Cathy, Pappy, etc.) and would help a bit with gender parity in the game. He's a cis guy who will be dominant toward the protagonist, if you want. The limiting factor in his introduction is art, I think; I don't want to actually release him until I feel confident in his character portrait. A side effect of my drawing work will hopefully be more art for expeditions and mementos!

Further in the background, I'm continuing to work on the finale! As a reminder, this is a big piece of writing that I'm planning to release all at once. You won't see it for a while, but I want y'all to be aware that it's coming along! At the moment, I'm still working on the introduction and have a very rough sketch of the structure of the rest of it.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the latest update or anything else about the game! You can comment here, post on the discussion board on Itch, DM me on Patreon, or email phanes@phanes.me. Thank you so much for your support!