Coming in v0.14.0: Teasing Minigame (Patreon)
Content
In v0.14.0, a new sub-area, the Fertility Clinic, will be made available. The main draw of this area is a new activity: "cock teasing." In this activity, the player will be tasked with edging and teasing a patient in order to help them impregnate their significant others. Because of this, the goal is to bring them as close as possible to reaching orgasm, but without actually climaxing and wasting their load.
The player has a range of options, and two bars: the goal is to get the green "nut" bar as high as you can without letting the purple "pleasure" bar totally fill. As the "nut" bar rises, it applies a multiplier to the pleasure gained from various actions. You'll want to lead with more arousing actions to gain a lot of green while it's low, then transition to more tame actions.
Once the green bar reaches ~70%, you'll be able to send the patient off to do the deed, or you can make them edge to restart the minigame, but with a new, separate multiplier to all pleasure increases to make the game a little harder.
To help make the game a little more interesting, there are a few wrinkles present. First, if you use the same action repeatedly, it will start to have a negative effect on how well it contributes to the "nut" meter. This happens in two ways: first, the total number of times you use a given action in a single instance of the minigame is counted as one type of penalty, and second, using the same action back to back is counted as a second type of penalty. These penalties are reset if you have the patient edge.
The second interesting wrinkle is that when the pleasure bar fills, you still have a chance to salvage things. A timing-based minigame that will automatically start when you fill the pleasure bar: two circles will appear on screen, and you must click or tap when they overlap. The speed of this minigame is influenced by how many times the patient has been made to edge, and it can end up getting quite fast.
There are three possible outcomes of this event. First, if you're late or you miss entirely, the patient will orgasm and you'll lose the minigame. Your score will be 0 and you won't receive your payment! You will get to keep the semen, though! :P
If you click too early, you'll manage to prevent the patient from orgasming, but they'll lose a lot from the "nut" meter and only a small amount from the "pleasure" meter, which means you could end up in an even worse position than you were in before.
Finally, if you click at just the right time, you'll prevent the patient from orgasming and with only a small loss to their "nut" meter, making it rather easy to recover and keep going.
So, it's better to be early than late, meaning it's riskier to go for the perfect result than to just click as soon as the minigame starts, but it can be quite hard to recover from an early result, so I think it balances out.
And I did mention scoring very briefly above; if you complete the game successfully (meaning the patient doesn't reach orgasm) you will be scored based on how full the "nut" meter is and how many times you edged them. It's just a bit of fun on top, so you can sort of see a representation of how well you did or how far you got.
You gain skill reputation as well based on your score, with a large bonuses for hitting certain score breakpoints, so there is some practical use in doing well. The payment received isn't too high, but also is dependent (though calculated differently) on the score. I think the pay is significant enough in the early game, and the Fertility Clinic and this game will become available about 2/3 of the way into chapter 1, so it is balanced to be comparable with low investment (meaning few if any traits) uptown prostitution without totally overshadowing it. I hope the scoring aspect will make it a fun diversion even outside of it's money-making potential, though. I'm also interested to see what kind of scores you all can get!
Other Fertility Clinic Stuff
The clinic will be updated with more stuff to do throughout the v0.14 update cycle, so it's not coming in its complete form in v0.14.0, and I do have future plans for it. For now though, one thing it also offers is a way to toggle fertility traits on or off. Yes, I made a lore justification for why you can turn off traits, and, yes, I know no one cares.
Future content will include the ability for the player character to misuse semen samples, and other fun weird hijinks. A sexy nurse outfit will probably also be in order for the future.
About the QTE and Hex
The quick-time event style minigame is actually a feature of Hex's version of the engine that I backported to Succubus Stories for a few reasons. One reason is just because it lets me use work I did for one thing on another thing--maximum efficiency, baby! But I also hope to get feedback on how the QTE feels to you guys: if it's too fast, too slow, too difficult, too easy, etc. Neither game is going to become an RE4-style QTE-fest, but QTEs are going to be a part of Hex's combat system, where it will be used to deflect certain attacks.
In Hex physical attacks can be deflected with magic by the player, and the result is based on this timing-based minigame; deflect too early and you take no damage, but it costs a lot of MP. Time it perfectly and the MP cost is massively reduced. Miss or skip the QTE and you spend no MP but take the damage as normal. While I intend to have combat difficulty settings in Hex that will make the timing easier, I still want to get some feedback on this QTE, so do let me know what you think when you try it out!
Version 0.14.0 Release
I still need more time to give an accurate date, because I want to do it as early as I can, but v0.14.0 will arrive before the end of the month, even if I have to make cuts. I don't anticipate having to cut anything, though, I should have more than enough time.
So far most of the things I want in the update are done, except for Charlotte's romance and a bit more story content I want to get in! We are on track; things are going good! Thank you for your patience, and I'll have the update out for you guys soon!