Prototype game loop of "House of Hellish Harlots"

"Enthusiasm time" has been... quite productive.

I liked the idea I had for "House of Hellish Harlots", but wasn't sure if I could sling it together in Twine.  It isn't just a typical branching story with the odd stats check, so I knew I needed to dig into objects, arrays, and various bits of 'proper' coding.  None of this is overly complex, but for someone like me who is more used to languages like C# and Java, Twine definitely has some quirks with how it handles objects and functions.

The nasty one is that it's not always clear whether you're working with an object or a copy of that object.  That distinction isn't so important when displaying values, but when you want to change the value of a property (such as whether a harlot has been visited or not), you definitely need to be altering the original, not a copy.  Otherwise you end up with bugs that are a bastard to track down.

I did debate whether or not to include the current progress version with this post.  It's very much a skeleton prototype, so it will look very slight.  The current list of harlots I'm using are placeholders with barely a sentence describing them.  Most of the code is currently under the surface.  I have the harlot template in place.  I also have a "scoring" system (hidden) and a few other things such as player stats and gifts (these were originally just strings, but I wanted to vary the selection, so they've become an object type in their own right).

I suspect the most complicated part of the game is the code picking out the 3 harlots for the player to choose from.  While there is a random element, I didn't want it to just be select 3 harlots at random every round.  There is a progression system (hidden and secret), and for the player to have a chance of uncovering it, I needed to seed the selection process so that some of the choices would be "correct".  I also wanted some representation of difficulty - easier harlots more likely to appear in the earlier rounds, with harder harlots requiring more prerequisites to survive showing up later.

So I came up with an algorithm, and then wrote a whole bunch of test code to make sure it was working the way I wanted it to.  Which it appears to be.  This I'm happy about as it's probably the first major hurdle to get over.

Don't get too excited about "playing" this.  As I said earlier, it's just a skeleton - pretty much a proof of concept to give an idea of how the main game loop will function.

My plan once I had the skeleton in place was to start writing proper scenarios (with all the lovely sex stuff) and adding them.  I think that might be the next step - start replacing some of the placeholders with a couple of proper scenarios with prerequisites, choices and proper sexy Bad Ends.  That will also give a better idea of where the sex content is going to be.

So.  Don't get too excited!  Still early days, and I need to create an awful lot of monster girls and succubi.  (As well as some interesting NPCs.)

Here's a look at the first prototype if you're curious.

-manyeyedhydra