Incubus Stories - The Cutting Room Floor (Patreon)

You guys liked it! Or at least liked it enough, so I'll make the cutting room floor a regular feature around here, at least until I run out of stuff to talk about.

Before I settled on basically anything in the game, I was actually going to allow players to select between playing as a male or a female. When I was first conceiving of the game, the player was actually going to be, for lack of a better term, gender fluid, but like, physically gender fluid, in a sort of TF-ish way. Basically, as the player collected ingredients (semen, milk, urine) you could use these not just in alchemy, but directly on your body to do things like increase your bust size, or your cock size, stuff like that. Different items would have different effects--generally stuff you collected from ladies would be more effective when used to make you more masculine and vice-versa, but that wasn't a limitation or anything, just something I thought might be cool.

When I decided to add art, I decided to remove the body changing stuff and go with just a female or male "manifestation" that you could spend resources to switch between. I started with the female one, and well, I just kinda had a lot of fun with it, and decided I wanted to fully commit to the succubus concept. Earlier in development, the player character was much more of a straight ditz and way more of a weirdo, but after I started nailing down her personality, I think I just stopped being able to see her as a sort of blank slate, which influenced my ability to make her that open to customization, I think. Honestly, I think I just really liked the character, and I didn't think she'd land the same as a male. So I gave up on the idea of the male "manifestation." But gender/sex selection didn't completely die there.

Instead, I moved the choice to the start of the game, where you could choose to be a man or a woman before you were turned into a succubus. Now this I thought was rife with possibilities for player expression. Of course, in the final game, I decided to start in media res, with the player arriving in the city, and flashback to those earlier parts of the story. I felt this made a way better play experience and story experience, to sort of get the player invested a bit first, show them some sex, a little of the sandbox, then hit them with the first flashback rather than having a big long intro sequence.

Because I moved the part where the gender selection mattered and was relevant to later in the game, it didn't really work anymore. Having previously been a male was something that was supposed to flavor a lot of stuff (our girl would've still been a big fan of dick, don't worry) and none of that could really be done if the gender selection didn't happen first, and ultimately I scrapped the whole thing. 

I probably could have worked it out, but I'm actually glad I didn't try. I think I sort of accidentally narrowed the scope to being an unrepentant female protag story, but if I hadn't, I actually think the game would've failed. There is no way a game like this would be as deep and as detailed if I had to balance two gender experiences, and I think instead of being all things to all people, the game would have just felt like another in a long line of cheap CoC knock-offs.

So...how far did I get with this gender selection stuff? Not toooo far. All of this was well out of the game prior to the v0.1 release. I had begun working on a model for the male character for flashbacks, but never completed it. As far as the earlier, fluid gender stuff, I had the body stuff all set up at least as far as the data was concerned, and I had it just list the attributes, kind of like how Lilith's Throne does it, but less in neat paragraphs and more as like a gross spreadsheet. But that got even less far. 

Some of the code for these ideas is still in the game, but the greater effect is in the way the code wound up being designed. Since I expected the player to be able to change forms and even things like genitalia, there is a lot of unnecessary compartmentalization of things in SS's code base--Hex, by way of contrast, has a super flat data structure that is soooo much easier and nicer to work with, like the deepest anything goes is like two levels down. That was the first thing I wanted to change, in fact! I hate the way some of SS's code works, especially how onerous just setting and retrieving some values is. It was so bad there are suites of helpers I made around v0.5 or 0.6 just to make accessing some data properties take less time to write out.

The other side effect of some of this design is how the original three encounter types were written and programmed. Partners actually have full move lists with all the same effects as player moves, because they kind of were player moves; I intended those moves to be used by the male player on female partners. This is one of the reasons why encounter moves probably feel so random in SS, the partners all swing the pleasure bars just as much as the player. In Hex, partner moves are vastly simplified, and encounters are way more player driven and player-centric, with less random-feeling swings since all the partner moves are much weaker in effect compared to player moves.

Anyway, this is getting long, but I hope it was at least somewhat interesting!