Side-Write: Interactive Flexibility

We've been speculating a lot about the world for PWO, so I feel like it's a decent time to take a break from building up background lore and try something a little different. This month I'm exploring a basic design challenge to try and find a solid solution I can use going forward. Hopefully in exploring it I can both gain a little perspective and maybe shake some new thoughts loose, and give you some interesting perspective on why certain things are surprisingly challenging!

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So let's talk through a logic situation. Right now, Project Wild One's engine doesn't really care about how all your parts are arranged on your body. It's meant to be very flexible and present a lot of freedom for doing whatever you want. If you want to have a naga or a centaur or a big feral dragon in there, it's not going to stop you.

But at the same time, it doesn't stop you because it doesn't really "know" about all that stuff, and it's not going to do anything to support that or reflect it short of saying so. It can track stuff like body mass and length, but how everything is arranged on the body is left to the imagination. It doesn't do anything to make problems or challenges for you based on anatomy, and to a certain extent, an important part of "feeling" like something is true in a game is for it to be inconvenient. If the sex is so intense you can see your Willpower draining, it feels more "meaningful," more like it really is happening.

One of the complaints I've gotten about PWO currently is that people are too "flexible." A common one is that characters will casually sodomize each other... at the same time. Which to the game, makes sense. That provides a very intense and pleasurable experience for both parties. It doesn't know that that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to pull off. There's some porn out there that plays with the idea of being able to do this, but it certainly seems like it should be "harder" to accomplish, or something only a few people can do. In this case, the game making it this easy to do something destroys some of the sense of immersion. It's important for the game to recognize, at the least, that some positions are impossible or very difficult.

Now, there are some games out there that put a lot of work into specifically slotting characters into sex positions and only enabling certain kinds of sex in certain positions. I don't intend for "positions" to be a significant focus in PWO: it's meant to be more flexible and free-form than that. And it always bugged me when these games would decide you can't do certain things because of your position, or because you're already doing something else. I want the player to have more freedom than in those games, but I'll acknowledge there's a certain minimum of restrictions we need-- at least for "normal" characters. Maybe those that explicitly gain notable flexibility will be able to ignore even these restrictions.

But the restrictions are needed at least to start, as a default for most characters, and they need to be something that can work for many different body types. Something flexible and intelligent for governing how all sorts of different life forms can and cannot make the sex. If I were only trying to organize how things work between normal humanoids then it might be simple enough to just say "you can't penetrate each other in your holes down there simultaneously" and maybe "you can't give someone oral while also anally penetrating them," for example, and call it good. But we need something more robust than that. What if you have multiple penises, or multiple sexual orifices, on different parts of your body? What if you have a long, flexible neck and can easily reach down to give oral, or if they have a dick so long it's no problem to give them oral, but you can only take so much of it? What if you are so different in size that the distance between their anus and their dick actually makes it quite easy for you to lick one while humping the other?

My first thought was that maybe you could have some sort of basic "distance relationship" system where you can say things like "on this character, the mouth can only come within 1 foot of the dick, so if the other character's dick only extends 10 inches away from their vagina, they can't reach each other," so they couldn't make it work, but if either character had some feature that made those numbers change, then maybe they'd be capable. This would allow for most of the situations above, where each piece of anatomy has a sort of maximum and minimum range away from each other. Long dicks would still need some kind of special figuring for limiting how deeply they can penetrate or something, but it would mostly handle the problems and create a very basic "map" of the body for the purposes of allowing or disallowing actions.

I thought that might cover the problem, but one thing still stood out: how do you account for people not being able to bugger each other at the same time? They'd literally be equal distances apart. You can't just put anatomy in clusters and say "you can't have double interactions with the same cluster," or else people with two dicks couldn't double penetrate, and where's the fun in that?? So it's more like... you'd need to be able to say "these anatomy are specifically pointed away from each other and cannot easily be arranged to interact." Or something? But I'm really not sure how that could be retained as a rule that's consistently followed for all different situations. Trying to account for all the angles different parts of the body can possibly be arranged into sounds entirely impractical. But maybe it wouldn't need to be tracked for everything-- just that certain parts would have the relationship, "cannot be angled too closely too each other," and they consequently don't allow interactions specifically between two other parts that can't spread sufficiently far apart as well as coming close enough together. So a vagina and anus next to each other wouldn't have this relationship, but they would have it with the penis just above them.

This system still wouldn't cover some situations very accurately. In the instance of extreme size difference putting your mouth level with the base of their dick while you hump them, that wouldn't allow for actually being penetrated orally so much as just licking at them. You probably couldn't be penetrated very well anyway at that size difference, but you shouldn't even be able to reach their tip. For that matter, in many cases where oral is possible at the same time as something else, taking it deeply would seem impractical thanks to the curvature of the body itself forcing the dick to bend an awful lot in the process. We can probably develop systems for these, but it certainly feels like diminishing returns to put so much work into corner cases just to stop the characters from doing what they want, and the more complicated it gets, the more likely it is to stop things that it probably shouldn't even stop.

To what extent is it important to be stopped from having fun, in order to still have fun? Challenge is arguably important even in a porn game, and being restricted from what you want but with a way to get past it is one of the core dynamics of engaging gameplay. And of course, it's also true that some things just seem overly unrealistic if they're too available and easy. I'm not entirely happy with this system as it stands, but unless I can find something better, it looks like I may have to go forward with a "distance map" and the occasional "angle conditional" relations.

I hope this made for an interesting insight into the weird stuff going on in the background with this game. If you have ideas for a better way to handle these problems, I'd be happy to hear it!