Origins

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Bonus Feature #4:
Enemies are more than just little blobby tentacles now. Here's a peak at one. One of the enemies from DG will be making a return, but the animations are all new. Right now it's looking like there will be 5 or 6 enemies types in total.
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Jungle Girl.

It came out of the blue, suddenly and without fanfare. Just sort of appeared one day. Another flash game in the pile of thousands of flash games that get submitted to newgrounds every day. It got average ratings, missed the weekly top 20, and wasn't promoted anywhere. Now it iss the 67th most popular flash on NG out of hundreds of thousands of entries and approaching 5.5 million views.

Where did it come from? Why was it made? What's the big deal?

Hentai games suck. I've gone over this before, even listed a bunch of reasons as to why that is, and you're free to disagree with me. But in my mind that is how it goes. Most hentai "games" can be divided into these genres:

• Animated Storybooks: Focus on plot and characters, except the characters struggle to be even one-dimensional and the plot is either completely stupid or horrifically cliched. Takes forever to get to any actual nudity and often delivers little more than a static image or two. Quality writing generally equates to a clever wisecrack now and then.


• Dress-up Dolls: Little to no pornographic content. Little to no animation. Little to no gameplay. Little to no interesting features.


• Interactive Movies: Small cartoons that you have the incredible privelage of clicking through. If you're really lucky, you can choose one of three poses!


• Slideshows: Interactive movies without the interaction, or the movies.
  

None of which really deserve to be called games. Which is pretty sad, when you think about it. Pong is a game. It involves moving a white line up and down. For maximum excitement, you can get two people to move white lines up and down. Someone made a game out of two white lines and a white square yet entire studios of people working for months can't come up with anything better than Dialogue Tree Adventure #3451.

Here I am, with hentai and gaming as two of my favourite hobbies. The two seem like a match made in heaven (or hell, being sinful and all). But I look around and see nothing but derivative, painfully boring crap. So I sought out to change everything! To challenge what the concept of a hentai game can be and uncover the true potential of the genre!

Right!? Partly. Did I want hentai games to be better? Yeah, of course. If making Jungle Girl took even a tiny step in the right direction that was definitely desirable. But then again if you look at the game its primary (read: only) gameplay mechanic is three-button pattern recognition. Not exactly tearing down walls with that, eh? So logically for me to go and half ass it like that there must have been other reasons too.

You see, if everyone is making picture books it means that no one is making hentai games with actual gameplay. Yet, obviously, that sort of game is possible to make. What this means is that there's a void to fill when it comes to both hentai and gaming -- two large markets. There's a desire for content that isn't being delivered. The result is that anyone who fills the gap gets to be a super attention whore! ^^

And to top it off I was curious just what the response would be. What is it like being the guy who makes stuff like that? Who is actually interested in it? Just how far can you go with this sort of thing? I'm still finding out.

Ambition, self-promotion, and curiosity. I guess that's where Jungle Girl came from. Hmmm, not too interesting, but that's how it is.

Oh, and to the people who want more images in these posts: Nyaaaaaah!

Quickie

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Bonus Feature #3:
Mystic Girl has a magic crystal called a Sentinel that flies around her. While she's dodging, it will attack enemies automatically. She can swap it between 4 elements which work differently and are stronger against certain enemies.
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I don't really want this blog to just be the "Mystic Girl update page". I like delving into aspects of hentai that don't always get much attention and penetrating a little deeper into the material. But right now I'm shootin' blanks -- no inspiration to get my creative juices flowing. I should have lots of subjects to cover but, eh, got writer's block I guess. Maybe I'm just working toooo hard on MG. Yeah, I should slow down, ease up a bit... ^^

(I'm joking! Don't hurt me!)

So I am opening the floodgates for you guys. What's nagging in the deep, dark recesses of your minds? What great confounding mystery would you like me to unravel next Want a second opinion on that dementedcompletely reasonable fetish of yours? Throw up a comment on what subject I should write about next time, and I'll see if any of them catch my interest.

In the meantime, aren't you so glad 3D porn doesn't suck anymore? Really, even Poser stuff looks good these days. Whether it's all out tentacle impregnation like Mr. X's stuff, or some of the more tasteful girls out of Japan, it's nice to see we've advanced a little beyond... well, this.

Just thought I'd put that out there.

Randomness FTW

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Bonus Feature #2:
Spanking and anal = yes and yes. You can rest easy tonight, mysterious anal commenter guy. ^^
Footjobs, not so much. Unless people want to see a bootjob? I don't like drawing feet. I really don't like feet in general...
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Chins up, everyone! Mystic Girl is going well. I got a good chunk of work done on it this weekend and on the whole, I am happy with how it is turning out. There is a long road ahead but bit by bit it will come together.

It is also hot. Did I ever mention how hard it is to work on a hentai game without getting, uh, distracted? ^^;; Yeah I've just got to... test this feature a little more... see if the animation is working right...

As a couple people have pointed out, Demon Girl has been spotted in the top 50 highest ranked games on Newgrounds. That is, simply put, insane. For all the bitching I do about peoples' expectations and not being able to devote enough time to my games, it is good to know that people are happy so far. All of your support is appreciated. I mean, I really don't care what score it has, but it is pretty cool anyways. The top 50 gets shown on the main portal page so that helps more people find the game.

And the more people who see it, the more people we corrupt to our perverted ways. Hahahahaha!

Wait, what was the law called again? Oh yeah, corrupting morals. Whoops.

So an anon commenter last post brought up the idea of having fans contribute to Mystic Girl. It sounds good at first but I am reluctant to do that sort of thing. For a few reasons:

1) Mostly, it is just my own problem because I get to be a control freak over this sort of thing. I know this about myself, so I don't want someone to put in a lot of time drawing out an animation only to have me turn around and reject it, or have to spend about as much time fixing it the way I like as doing it from scratch. On the flip side, maybe someone makes an animation that totally blows mine out of the water, and now it is out of place and the rest of the game looks half-assed. It might just be a little hentai flash game, but I still like to keep some consistency (and to save face -_-).

2) Making content for this game is a lot more complicated than just drawing. I use a lot of tricks to make all the bits and pieces work together, so I would need to pretty much teach people how to do it. And more time spent teaching is less time spent actually working.

3) Now I would need to go around organizing everything, distributing files for people to fill in, waiting for people to finish their parts, putting together parts from a bunch of different places, checking over everything to catch mistakes, making sure anyone hasn't broken anything, etc...

4) It would basically just be me saying "do this, do that". Fill in those frames, lackeys! No creative freedom for you! Largely because, like in #3, adding anything substantial is a lot more complicated that it looks.

5) The idea of making a commercial version is not completely dead (just mostly). Which means (in the off chance it actually happens) I get all teh monays, and people get shafted and annoyed at me. "I worked on it too!", "But you filled out 2 frames, I'm not paying you for that!", "Lawsuit, bitch!". The alternative being I need to practically start a business to deal with it all.

And just a note, when I mentioned the idea of charging for an expanded version of Mystic Girl, most people seemed to jump to the conclusion that it would be like $39.99 or something. No no. If I ever do something like that, we're talking about $2-5 if that ($10 max if the distributor was a real bitch about it). I probably won't, lest I suffer the wrath of The Man, but if I did that is what it would be.

Anyways, random update post over. As always, check back in a week or two (or three or four) for more updates!

Hentai Game Design 100

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Bonus Feature: Each time I update I'll list a new feature of Mystic Girl (and save the really good ones for later just to be a tease). First up: Customizable hair colour! Yippee!
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Remember how not too long ago I listed some reasons why hentai games are inherently limited? And remember how soon afterwards I announced that I was making Mystic Girl? Well, being the intelligent perverts you are, you quickly caught on to the idea that perhaps I was planning to be the one to finally make a hentai game that is not completely lame. That I was ready to go all out and blow everyone away with a gushing flood of brilliance.

Which is a perfectly legitimate way of thinking that is unfortunately completely wrong.

You see, I don’t like making generalizing statements if I can not apply them to myself as well. If I had intended to make the greatest hentai game EVAR!~!1 then I probably would have just come out and said it. Screw this industry, I’m gonna show ‘em all how to do it! But I’m not, and mainly for the reasons that I already applied to other developers.

Chief among those is that at any given moment I’m splitting my time between:
a) Work
b) An independent project
c) A side project
d) Personal life & free time
e) Hentai

And when one does that it becomes hard to do a very good job on whatever is on the bottom of the list. Mystic Girl is on the bottom of the list.

Now here’s where we get to game design. You see, the popular view of game design is that the job of a game designer (read: me) is to sit around coming up with cool ideas to put into the game. Bzzzt, wrong. If designing a game is like dating, thinking up features doesn't even constitute reaching first base. The reason being is that I can sit around all day figuring out "tons of positions" to use and "awesome gameplay mechanics" to implement and "sexy characters" to include and none of it means anything because I can't feasibly make any of it because I don't have the time. Even from a practical standpoint it would be a waste to think of that stuff as you guys will do it for me. I can go through my email inbox and pick out thousands of great ideas in a matter of minutes (some less great than others, but still), all of which I can't reasonably pull off.

So what exactly does "designing" Mystic Girl mean, then?

I have a set of requirements I have to fill. I need to make a game with more features than Demon Girl, I need it to take less work than Demon Girl, I need to it run in Flash which lacks hardware acceleration (read: runs like utter shit). When I think of a sex position, how erotic it is takes a backseat to how little work it takes to draw it. When I draw a background, how good it looks is trumped by how badly it drops the frame rate. "How awesome would it be if" is less important than "how well does it work for me".

Designing a game is about filtering ideas.

Don't get too down about it. I'm not being doom and gloom here, this is nothing new. JG and DG went through the same process and if you are here then chances are you enjoyed them. Taking the experience I got from making them, I can make a better game in less time with less work. I just can't make 50 levels with 10 monsters in each one all of whom trigger 5 positions if they get past your 100 techniques and items for fighting them while the 3 AI girls with you, running at 24 hand-drawn frames per second, get covered in dynamically generated cum patterns.

But if anyone wants to send me $50 000 that would change things.

Feature Complete

...and the requests for Mystic Girl come piling in. Hey, there is no problem with that. I listen to them all, I really do. Sometimes I even take inspiration from them. Mostly I just laugh and ignore them like the prick that I am, but even my cold heart can warm up to suggestions now and then.

Of course they have to be good suggestions. But who’s to judge? Why me, of course! Didn’t I mention I was an authority on this stuff? (Oh! The power is so sweet!)

1) Double-teaming: Really, you people need to stop and think about these things. What a ridiculous suggestion! Here I am trying to make a great game and you throw these silly ideas my way. Why on earth would I stop at “double”? The party don’t start with two.

2) Make a game about snakes: Tentacles were starting to get boring, anyways. Snakes have much more interesting features, like eyes. Just look at that raunchy look the snake is giving her. Those beady little eyes turn me on like nothing else.

3) Sell the game in retail stores: I’ve already finalized a deal with my publisher and am making connections with adult stores across the continent. Now all I need to do is hope my CD burner holds out and my fingers don’t cramp up from cutting all of these cardboard boxes.

4) More Dragon Ball Z: Now we’re talking. Oh Goku, you stud.

5) More Furries: Furry porn is ranked higher than Demon Girl on Newgrounds. Obviously you guys aren’t obsessively voting 5 enough. You have failed me and I will punish you by withholding the numerous sexy catgirls that I had definitely planned to put in the game.*

6) Hurry the fuck up and fucking update your fucking site and making a new fucking game already: ... fuck!

7) Make the game in space: Those must be astronaut pants, baby, because your ass is out of this world! Lemme just slip off this space suit and I’ll explode all over- OH DEAR GOD.



*I bear no grudge against furries or the furry game in question. Also, ohmygodyouvoteddemongirlintothetop100iloveyouguys.