manyeyedhydra
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House of Hellish Harlots 1.5 - v0.001 Demo
🕑 Added 2023-08-24 10:40:32 +0000 UTCAnd finally I have a proper playable demo of the updated version of House of Hellish Harlots!
You can find it on the houseofhellishharlots website, under the Experimental tab here:
https://houseofhellishharlots.com/experimental/
Everything should be working as in the plain-text version. The intro is there, the core game loop is in place, the NPCs are all there. Currently there are only 16 harlots and the first 3 rounds of the game. I picked the harlots I had artwork of and some early round harlots that were easy to port across. Bear in mind the artwork was originally private commissions. I'm borrowing it here, but will have to get the permissions of both the artist and the person commissioning them if I want to retain the piece for a proper commercial game release.
The other art is AI-generated of varying quality. The portraits and backgrounds do an adequate job. The UI elements do not. They are there to give an idea of the potential layout and are the top priority for being replaced with proper commissioned art. I'll cover this in an upcoming roadmap post next week that will go over what is needed in terms of art and polish.
I suspect the demo will still be fairly rough. It works pretty much as a webpage, so sometimes the art will be slow to load in depending on internet connection. I was unable to come up with a title/loading screen I liked, so that's missing for now.
I also focused pretty much on getting the layout right for the desktop/laptop version. Aside from the lack of polish, I'm happy with how it looks there.
Mobile is different. It should also work there, but I suspect is a lot rougher. There are some things I need to fix, such as displaying multiple portraits, getting the focus to bounce to back to the top of the passage on entering a new one, and I suspect some of the table layouts when buying things from the NPCs look a little messy. I have a device to test on, so I'll try and iron out the various kinks for mobile as well.
This also fully completes the refactoring I needed to do once I broke the project into separate modules after it grew too big for the Twine editor. Everything is now in its own module and I've eliminated the code duplication from the interim version. I also built a nice little harlot tester, so I can test each scenario independently before adding to the main game.
I realise this is a sidestep and we've gone from 5 rounds, back down to 3 rounds. I think it's an important one, as we now have a version that looks much 'nicer' than the plain-text default Twine Sugarcube display. Porting the scenarios across only takes a couple of hours per harlot, and as I have another 60 to draw from, I should be able to quickly increase the number of rounds.
Anyway, we have a much better playable demo to play around with. Have fun with it and let me know your thoughts below.
I've also attached a local playable version as a .zip file. For desktop and laptop users, just unzip it and double-click the .html file. The images are all present so you shouldn't have any problems with them not loading quickly enough. This doesn't work for mobile users, sadly. That's why I put the link to the demo version at the top of the post. I'll need to do some research on how to convert the files to a proper app.
