Update 25th Jun '23 (Patreon)

The first half of the week I carried on working on the new House of Hellish Harlots proof-of-concept display.  I wanted to see if I could add UI elements such as a 'health bar', a sprite map to visually show current round, and some rudimentary effects and animations such as an indicator for when the harlot gets the player to ejaculate.

I thought this would be straightforward, and it turned out to be a lot trickier because of how Twine itself interacts with the HTML.  I was following some basic JavaScript examples and getting baffled as to why they weren't doing anything when plugged into Twine.  The reason for it is Twine dynamically creates the HTML from the passages, and any scripts within the passages will run before the page is actually created, so you need to make sure every function is waiting until "on:passagedisplay", otherwise any changes will just get overwritten.

The other thing that was surprisingly tricky was passing the variables from Twine into JavaScript (for modifying the semen gauge, round counter etc).  You cannot do the obvious thing of:

<<set $aVariable to 11>>

<<script>>doSomethingOnTheUI($aVariable)<</script>>

as the script has no clue what $aVariable is.

Surprisingly, it took me a while of looking online to work out what I was supposed to do.  You're supposed to use SugarCube's API to get the values from the State object.  Something like:

State.getVar("aVariable")

So, what I thought would be a quick tweak on Monday to get the semen gauge to change width turned into a couple of days crash course on JavaScript, JQuery, and SugarCube's API.

On the plus side, now that I know how to get past the two major hurdles (passing the Twine variable values to the UI elements and knowing the right point to run the code to change the appearance of the UI elements), this opens up a lot of potential for modifying the appearance of Twine games.  This means HoHH doesn't have to look like plain text with the default UI sidebar.  I can actually make it resemble a regular Indie Game.

I put out another experimental version on Thursday.  You can find it in one of the previous posts.  I'd love for people to try it out and give me some feedback.  I think with a minor investment in an artist to make the control panel look better, I'll have something that will look more like a proper 'game'.

After getting the experimental demo out, I went back to regular HoHH work.

The Squishy slime girl twins are now fully typed up.  I've also done most of the implementation for Brittnee, the bratty 'teen' succubus.  I'll be queueing her up as July's release.

While the coding and mucking around with Twine Sugarcube's API to beef up the display is fun, I'm conscious I'm falling behind on the regular writing.  I don't mind this too much as I think I've made massive progress this month in making HoHH look like a regular game.

For next week I'm planning to switch focus back to short story writing while waiting to see what the feedback on the HoHH demo is.  I'm not going to panic on the 7th collection.  I have four stories outlined.  Two of them are in progress.  I'll keep working on them amongst doing the other things and then put out the 7th collection later this year when they're finished and edited.

Thanks for the support!
- manyeyedhydra