Early Design and Planning Documents (Patreon)

For the first anniversary of Succubus Stories, I thought it would be fun to look at some early design and planning documents for the game, to see what’s changed, what’s different, and what’s stayed the same. I tend to be very planning oriented, so I left quite a paper trail as I worked on the game. Most of these documents are from spring and summer 2019, a little over a year before I released the first version, v0.1, in August 2020.

In by spring 2019, I had just settled on using Twine as the game engine for Succubus Stories and had already began modifying the SugarCube engine to suit my needs. While I was mostly working on coding and designing the game’s UI, I was also drafting design and planning documents at the same time, though no actual game content had been coded or written yet. So I had a good idea of the strengths and limitations of the engine I had chosen and the systems I was designing, but I hadn’t really broken ground yet or decided exactly what I wanted the game to look like. I think because of this, this time period in development will be the most interesting to look at.

Without further ado, let’s look at some documents!

Early Plot and Story Documents

The plot of Succubus Stories actually didn’t change toomuch, all things considered. Here’s the earliest draft of a plotline I was able to find:

Right from the start, you can see that the player character is referred to as “you.“ I switched to a third-person perspective for the game’s narration before significant writing started, but the game was initially going to use the more common (for games) second-person perspective. My decision to switch was routed in the my appreciation for games like Melty’s Quest, where you don’t play as yourself, but as a somewhat consistent character. I wanted the player character in the game to have a backstory that connected with the plot more strongly, so I wanted to make them more of a character than a player stand-in. At this point in the story, none of that was established quite yet.

The contours of the overall plot are similar. The city in the final game is called Juno, by the way, not Rodain. It’s rarely mentioned either way.

The player’s home was moved into town into the backstreets. The cottage home exists still later in the story, if you make certain decisions.

You can see a guard is the first sexual encounter, and the guard who shows you home is just a nameless NPC guard for you to try out a sex scene with. This wound up changing to introduce Gray early.

You’ll see the whole backstory is similar, but the king is the bad guy, not Pelenor. There’s also a regent who claimed the land, who was sort of an early Pelenor.

The game was to have four main questlines that were interdependent. You could get to certain points in certain questlines before you had to advance another line. One of the goals was also to cure the player character of being a succubus, with the option to eventually decide not to do that.

Having four concurrent plots to follow would probably have been confusing, but the reason I cut down to one was mostly because as I developed the plot, I liked Pelenor and a more systemic injustice angle. The problem isn’t the king being an asshole, it’s that the laws of the kingdom are set up to be abused by someone like Pelenor. Getting rid of the revenge against the king angle sort of ruined the whole multiple main-quest concept, and so I scaled things back.

The last two paragraphs describe how I envision the gameplay loop to look like, and it’s not far off, really.

Miscellaneous Activities and Mechanics

This wound up being mostly accurate. Note the mention of “healing.” I completely cut combat from the game, but early on I intended to have some sort of QTE-style mixed real-time and turn-based combat system. I had early system mock-ups, but I just didn’t think it was that fun, and it didn’t fit the tone of the game to be accosted by thieves and monsters and be fighting people all the time.

It also had other problems, like you used potions to fight, but combat potions had no use outside combat, and it made balancing a huge nightmare because I wanted the combat to have stats and levels but also have the player make powerful potions just to literally throw at people, permanently losing them. For example, say you can make one potion with the ingredients you have right now, a potion to use to see something sexy, or one that gives you one strong attack one time in one fight. It’s hard to balance that.

I think scrapping combat was a really good idea. If I make another game using this engine, I will probably add combat back in, but I plan to make a more traditional magic system or something, with MP potions, not attack potions.

Also, combat is hard to make and Succubus Stories would have come out months later if it shipped with non-shitty combat.

Early on in the game, you were intended to have the ability to magically summon a penis and go futanari basically at will. Ingesting different “food” would affect whether you were more feminine or masculine, changing the character’s appearance and granting you FP or MP points, which could be spent on changing your body even more, witch some gameplay effects, too. I obviously scrapped this.

The reason it was scrapped was actually because I decided to add CGs to the game. I may have scrapped it anyway because I was scaling the game back as I started implementing things, but the real issue that made this a no-go was the sheer volume of art a dynamic character would have required.

You can see here that “turn-based sex,” or the encounter system, was initially going to have more stuff in it. Basically, you could act on yourself or your partner, or perform a general action (e.g., talking dirty). You would also choose a “pace,” like how hard/fast you moved, which you could change every so often.

What happened? Well, I decided that game’s that have these uber-detailed sex mechanics like Lillith’s Throne and Degrees of Lewdity have some shortcomings. I actually felt like scaling back would let me create something a bit sexier. I don’t know that I’ve done that, but I really think I made the right choice here.

One big negative to my simplified approach is that you have discreet encounter types, like you can’t switch from doing oral sex to anal or something. That is an unfortunate limitation, but I think the tradeoff was worth it.

Locations and Activities

Let’s look at early activity lists

Not much different here. Wardrobe would be for dressing/undressing. I never really intended to have lots of clothes.

“Mirror” was for back before I decided to have art in the game, back when you’d spend MP and FP changing your body, you’d be able to look in the mirror for a description.

Crafting was always going to be limited to alchemy, so that’s just a name change.

Journal was going to be tips, stats, completed quests—that sort of thing.

Honestly, not insanely different, eh? The “streets” became the backstreets. Uptown did not exist until later in development, and a lot of what happened in uptown was instead in the castle.

Streaking became the flashing activity, and the streaking event was sort of moved to the market, though the flashing activity was more along the lines of what I envisioned. Chat is an interesting one. It sort of become the exploration events, but I had something cool planned, and I may add chatting in the future.

“Whore” is prostitution. You would initially be limited to night, expanding into the evening based on perks. That changed to be more forgiving, you just go somewhere out of the way instead.

I always wanted a gloryhole in the tavern 😉. The drink option was basically the event option for the tavern, meaning you’d hang out there a while. Its name was changed, but it’s mostly the same. We can see the chat activity listed here, too.

So chatting. Basically, the game would look at where you are and the time, and generate a random NPC you could talk to. So it might be a drunk, a pervert, a nun, a government official, a noble, etc. Then you’d have some options to chat with them and get some lore, or you could try to lewd them.

This may not sound like it, but it’s a lot of work, and I wound up scrapping the idea. I may add it in the future though, I think it has merit, and would make the world feel more real.

“Offer self” became the barracks group sex activity.

The market had the “odd jobs” activity, which I envisioned being like the barmaid activity, get some money for some boring non-lewd work. I cut it because I thought it was redundant since I always planned on having the barmaid activity.

You’d basically get into the palace by being a sexy dancer. So you’d be able to perform for nobles and such. The work option was basically another odd jobs thing, but paid well. The version of prostitution was basically similar to what we have in uptown. Uptown was added later so the castle could be more story-related.

Orgies with both males and females were going to be here, because the bandit camp did not exist yet, and it seemed to fit with the idea of corrupt nobles.

Here’s some stuff from later in development, for comparison. Still more than ten months out from the game’s initial v0.1 release.

Already a lot closer, huh? Healing is gone, lactating it here, bathing is here! It’s actually pretty much what we have now, less a few options.

“Proposition” was “free” prostitution, which was cut as redundant. There was still no uptown.

This is a lot thinner overall. The group sex in the barracks was considered prostitution, a change that was reverted. The tavern is thinned out a bit, so is the castle. Apparently, I envisioned the castle being host to an exclusive bukkake event, though I don’t remember what exactly I planned for that.

The river became the lake and the grove became the forest. The bandit camp is close to the lake but is it’s own entry on the travel menu, while the coven is now in the forest. I was gonna have the bandit camp host to some sort of “public use” activity, but I added the stocks for that later, so the bandit camp got mixed-gender group sex.

Collecting ingredients is now a thing! For some reason you can masturbate and piss at the river, but not the grove. Weird.

On the other hand, the market looks very close to what we got!

Wrapping Up

This is very long already, so I’ll wrap it up. There are other documents, but I felt these were the most interesting I could talk about. Some of this probably makes you guys wish I had gone down a different path, but I’m pretty happy with the game as it exists now.

I’m wondering if anything in my early planning surprised you guys, or maybe seems bizarre given the game we ended up with. Let me know. And if you enjoyed this post, I can do more like it in the future, so let me know about that, too.