Update 18th Jun '23 (Patreon)

Quite pleased with how this week went.  Originally I was going to split it between more HoHH UI/Display tinkering and short story writing.  The HoHH tinkering went so well I decided to push that hard while it was going well.

Last time I was focusing on getting the basic display to look better than plain text on a background.

This time I was looking at replacing the basic UI sidebar with a custom UI.

This meant fiddling with Twine's StoryInterface passage.  This is a little tricky to work with, but also nicely adaptable once you figure out what Twine is doing under the hood.  The main headache I had was getting basic things like buttons to work.  It turns out you need to create special html tags, then you can dump the passage contents in there with javascript in the same way Twine does it to render passages.

One major benefit of this is I can separate the art out of the passages and put them in their own containers.  This gets rid of the flicker problem people might have noticed with Sapoonis in the little prototype I put out a couple of weeks ago.

And because I can dump the contents of my own special custom 'art' passage in there, it also means I can set which pic to use within Twine rather than writing lots of lines of CSS (which would likely have been horrific once I added more harlot art).

Overall, this should make the code for adding pics of each harlot very easy.

I think I've also partially solved the background art resolution problem.  I switched to Microsoft's AI Image Creator (which is built on DALL-E, I believe).  This gave much better quality backgrounds, even for trickier NPCs like The Doctoress and Buxom Lolibaba.  The base resolution is too low at 270 x 270, but I was able to find somewhere else that could upscale the images up to 1080 x 1080.  The backgrounds now look serviceable.

Image Creator was also much better on the portraits, so I redid those.

I think both the backgrounds and portraits are at the point where the AI art is just about good enough to do the job if I was unable to find artists to do a better job.

I don't think that will be the case for the UI elements.  I managed to Frankenstein something together to test the underlying code, but I really wouldn't want to put out a release with it looking like that.  The plan is to put out a few prototypes for people to play with.  Then, once I've nailed down what the dimensions should be, and what controls and values to display, I'll look into hiring an artist to create some corner art that incorporates all the UI elements and looks 'pretty'.

Currently:

The top element is the semen gauge.  This might look a little too crass as it is.  While HoHH is a porn game, having a pixel penis spurting at the top of the screen might be too much and not fit.  My idea was to have it look like a glass sculpture and a simple bar within to represent the player's 'energy'.  And the sculpture crack when the player is Bad Ended (I think someone, maybe Pori, uses a thermometer-like display for this in their game).

The clock is a round counter.  People have asked for something to indicate what round they're on, and I was thinking of using a clockface with 13 hours to represent time being off-kilter within the House (and there being 13 rounds).

The player portrait is a button to bring up the character sheet.  While the sidebar was fine for showing the base stats, having a separate sheet should give more options for showing charms and ailments.  The layout is very functional currently.  This can always be 'prettied' up later.  For now I was testing whether I could get the functionality up and running.

Below that is how many coins and mulligan tokens the player has.  I figured those, along with the semen gauge, would be things the player would always want to see (while the stats and everything else can be hidden away on a character sheet).

The final item is for saving games.  Even though I've done away with the regular UI-taskbar, I still want to access Twine's core save/load behaviour.  I'd rather just reskin the windows and retain the core behaviour.

I'm hoping to put out another prototype for people to play around with this week.  Once we end up with a control panel people are happy works, I'll look into commissioning some fantasy art for that.  With that and maybe a nice cover piece, HoHH should start to look more like a regular game.

Thanks for the interest and support.
- manyeyedhydra