Battle-Arena Reyka

At this point I've more or less wrapped up the scenes I want in the next update, and I'm starting on coding up the first arena, which is kind of fun, the plan is for the first (or first several matches) to take place in the classic night-games arena, which means I'm looking at the Night-games map and more or less re-creating it. As I dig in it strikes me that it's been over a year since I've played NG, and I think since the community has heard anything from SilverBard. I super hope they're doing well, and I gotta say I can, at this point, certainly empathize with the absentee h-game creator archtype. Working on a project like this really is just SO different from any other kind of software or art project. You can't just jump in and out of it as time allows, an investment of time really requires an emotional component that is probably pretty fucking unhealthy in all honesty heh. You need to take that basically manic uncontrollable, horny energy and kind of pour it into this **extremely** slow moving complicated, intricate, easy-to-fuck-up process which necessitates that you maintain that energy for hours on end.

It's not just a question of _do I have some time to make a little progress on this h-game side-project. The question is really more like, do I have the time and inclination to work myself into a fuck-needy lather and then write code, diction and make art like that for 4-6 hours, and then keep feeling the aftermath of it for days?

I barely have the beginning of an operational game, and I find it difficult to believe people do this all day every day as a job. Maybe that's why, for the most part, the good games get abandoned and the ones that get finished are sort of uninspired. The chunk of meat these projects take out of you is substantial, unless you're just not really invested, and in it for the morally-questionable cash.

Anyway back to the grind.

Greetings battlefuck aficionados. I have not posted in so long I actually forgot I had a blog, which is maybe something that happens to people leading secret double-lives where they surreptitiously create lurid video games about demonic wrestling leagues? Looking back at my last update in (jfc) December (well.. ALMOST January) I neglected to even post about the v0.0.2 update, which dropped 1/1 and is available at the f95zone thread here: https://f95zone.to/threads/battlearenareyka-v0-0-2-artisnal-depravity.119792/

Since then, having mostly completed the fight system, I've mostly been doing scene work. There are two, possibly three scenes I want to have in the bag before the next update. One scene with joy, which will give the player some background on the various factions involved behind the scenes, and kind of spells out how I see the whole patron/benefactor dynamic working, Joy will also tease some upcoming content related to "VIP parties" and the like.

Another scene with Harry, which will give the player the opportunity to "opt in" to a partnership with him, where Harry provides some goods and services from the outside world in exchange for, well blowjobs mostly. This dynamic is intended to reflect the "shopping" mechanic of Night-Games. You'll "earn credit" with Harry and use them to buy stuff in his shop. You won't be able to buy zip-ties, but I have in mind analogous things that work better given our Narrative direction. For example, I expect the player to be able to purchase magical wards from harry, that will bestow in-fight advantages. Think: a symbol magically drawn onto Mayas forearm which, when touched in a certain, deliberate way, will temporarily stun her opponent, and etc.. The size of the ward will dictate how many maya can hold, and smaller wards cost more.

Harry will also be able to use his influence with the Patrons to help Maya delay or dictate the tournament schedule, enabling the player to more or less click a button to enter "tournament match" mode whenever they want. All of this is, of course predicated on sucking his dick, which I grant some players may not be into. We'll see what kind of feedback I get, and depending on that, I may hack up a scene to give maya a means of blackmailing harry into cooperating instead, giving the player the option to still patronize harry's services, without patronizingly servicing harry.

And finally some fight-related scenes involving holly and octave. These are intended to more or less establish that Holly's demon dick isn't JUST a problem for Maya, and will be the starting point for the first quest, where the player can work with octave (or against her) to mitigate the threat Holly's demonic gift represents.

I am done with the aforementioned Joy scene, and about 3/4 through Harry's scene, I probably wont' have the shop up and running in the next update though. But I do intend to have a working tournament match done in the next update, so lets talk about that.

In Night-games, the tournament was always the same, and took place on campus at night beneath the noses of the "normal" students and staff. Reyka's tournament is not likewise constrained, and will include several different tournament games with a more "squid-games" sort of flavor to them. Don't worry, it will mostly still be running around and fucking each other, but goals will change.. sometimes the winner will be the first across the bridge, or last atop the platform. I expect there to be opportunities to form alliances, and betray people, and of course the original tournament on a demonic mock-up of the university grounds will also be included.

Lastly, one thing I feel I'm not doing a good job of already, even though we're barely out of the intro at this point, is providing sandbox content, by which I mean things for Maya to do in the house. I expect that the player will spend most of their time training, learning new moves, sparring and etc. But I also want to provide some other off-time activities, and I'm not sure what these will be yet. Having a shower, seems like an obvious one, and I added a kitchen with the intent to include a cooking dynamic, but yeah. I generally want there to be a means for Maya to improve her base-stats or at least maintain them, in the standbox style we all know and love. Maybe she takes a charisma hit if she doesn't shower every so often? Anyway food for thought.

Until next time, I leave you with a teaser from the upcoming scene with Harry..

Working with the Holly 3d model early on, I really didn't realize how buff she is compared with her competitors. Now that I'm about half-way through her fight-art though, the full --ahem-- weight of her physicality has -ahem- impressed itself upon me. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I'm personally not really a "muscle girl" type of guy, but I'm definitely here for Holly. Working with her has been super fun, and honestly she's just sexy as hell.

If you've wrestled or rolled, you will have met people like her.. who are just difficult to deal with because of their athleticism or size. I've been able to work this into pretty much all of her positions so far, and I continue to be surprised by how each of the fighter's personalities and fighting-styles work into their position art. Here for example is Octave's closed guard:




Relaxed and dynamic.. as an expert bjj player, Octave is comfortable on her back, and not particularly worried about your pass attempt. She would prefer an open guard to this position, but that doesn't yet exist in the game, so she'll chill here, and look for arm bars or chokes, or perhaps sweep you into full-mount if the opportunity presents itself

For comparison, this is joy's closed-guard.



High and defensive. As a judo player, Joy isn't crazy about working from her back, and prefers to work a high closed-guard to make it harder for you to pass. As you push for space, she'll look for sweeps, or other opportunities to take the fight back to her feet.

Now here's Holly...



Heavy, relentless and aggressive. It doesn't matter what position you're in, or whether you have advantage or not, Holly is a handful. She will force you to carry her weight, and use painful overhooks and forehead grinds like she's doing here, and otherwise just generally assail you with how much it sucks to do anything other than what she wants. With her, you're never on-balance, never comfortable, never truly on your game. She will grind away at you until you quit, and then she'll make you sorry you did.

Anyway like I said, her art is about half done.. and I have high hopes of holiday-related free time to finish her off and hopefully bang out a couple scenes. then it'll be v0.0.2 time!

getting some work done on healthbars this morning. I think they're coming out pretty well

The finish-phase work I've been promising is pretty much ironed out, and I've spent the last few days in micro-tweak mode, obsessing over this or that detail and squishing little bugs as I notice them. But in the interest of getting a v0.0.2 out there (finally for fucks-sake), I'm going to stop fiddling with this, and call it "done for now". It's still a little rough, but I think it gets the job done, and I really need to move on to fleshing out the art, and making the storyline stuff I want to get into .2. I already have the octave-revenge scene done, and I need to add the joy interrogation scene hinted at the demo, and a scene with Harry, which you probably didn't expect, but will be super fun.

Enough gabbing.. lemme share a couple end-to-end fights between maya and octave, to give you a sense for the current state of the fight system. In this first fight, Maya starts out well, pulling off some sneaky boob-gropes, despite being caught in Octave's head-and-wrist control. One more grope probably would have won her the fight, but Octave manages to pull o-soto-gari and get side-control. Although Maya can still grope from this position, but Octave's BJJ affinity gives her a defense bonus in side-control, which is sufficient shut-down Maya's superior seduction skills. From side-control, Octave wastes no time, transitioning immediately to an Arm-bar and forcing Maya to submit. From here, you'll see phase-2 for the first time, as octave imposes a finger-fucking session. Despite having Octave's fingers buried in her pussy, Maya was still able to fend off the raven-haired BJJ fighter's slaps and spanks for a few turns, but eventually she succumbs to the passive pleasure-damage incurred by the position, bathing Octave's hand with fem, and giving her the win.




In the second fight, you'll get a feel for Maya's natural play-style. Octave gains an underhook almost immediately; a dangerous prospect for Maya since it opens not only several judo-throw take-downs, but also the standing guillotine -- a quick and lethal submission. But Maya sticks to her seduction game, aggressively groping up on Octave's tits while countering her osoto-gari and keeping the fight standing. It doesn't take long for the sexually-inexperienced fighter's composure to crumble to Mayas expert stimulation. Maya is awarded the goddesses gift when Octave goes weak in the knees and more or less begs her for a good rough fucking, which Maya delivers in the form of a doggie-style finish-phase. The sexually inexperienced Octave is completely out of her depth with Maya's cock buried balls-deep in her baby-maker, and brokers no resistance at all, cumming on her knees and baptizing the seductresses cock with her dignity in a single turn.



Maya's sensual superiority is evident in both the amount of damage her grope attacks do as well as the amount of turns it takes octave to finish her, vs the immediate sploosh suffered by Octave when Maya is on top in phase-2. At the moment, there's not much Maya can actually DO while she's persevering through the fingering, but eventually I'll implement recoil damage, and some actions sex-oriented players can train to pull off wins from disadvantaged positions in phase-2.

Again, there's a lot to tweak, but I think I should move on to fleshing out the art for joy and holly. I'm interested to hear if you think I'm on the right track here with the fight-system, so feel free to drop me a line in the f95zone thread or on the night-games discord.

Had a job interview at the end of the week last week for a big-ass tech company. I think I did aiite? I guess we'll see. Keep your fingers crossed for me. This week more to come. But given how super responsible I've been with respect to preparing (go ahead, ask me to write a Fibonacci function I dare you) I allowed myself a little time this weekend to model up the first two finishing moves, the finger-fuck finish and the doggie-style finish. These will probably be the only two finishes I'll ship in the next version. Here are some close-ups of octave's (in game they'll be angled a bit differently...)







Anyway like the last update said.. I'll probably be heads down this week interviewing and prepping. Hopefully I'll land one of these and progress will ramp back up on the second release.

Wanted to share a gif of the first-phase of a fight.. In this one Octave wins the initiative and uses it to take Maya's back immediately. She then sinks this deeper, transitioning to back control, using elbow tweaks spanks and titty-slaps to sap Maya's stamina before pinning her in back-mount.

"Bitch slap" and various gropes from disadvantaged positions have also been implemented, but Maya didn't get much of an opportunity to showcase them in this match. It was like octave could tell the screen-cap software was running heh.

Over the weekend I got a little time to play around with that inbetween portion of the fight between phase1 (fighting) and phase2 (fucking). I'm still not entirely sure I know how I want it to work. I know a few things:

* i'd like there to be a proper cut-scene
* the cut-scene needs to transition to an actual fight position

I want there to be a cut-scene, because I'm working around the whole "wardobe" problem by introducing the very convenient mechanic that whoever wins the fight is magically bestowed a dildo, and I want that to be a kind of boom-ahhh event.

It needs to transition into a proper position so we can carry on within the fight system, and to do that you need a position to take actions from. As you know if you've been reading my complaining about creating static assets, this means I need 2 graphics per fighter minimum one for the phase-transition cut-scene, and one for the proper position. I think I want to make at least 2 of these per fighter though, depending on whether the fight ends in a standing position or on the ground. So that means 4 *6 total phase-transition graphics. Here are a couple cut-scenes I worked up for Octave, just to see what they might look like, one standing, one on the ground.

dayjob is busy, but also kind of pissing me off with their bullshit, so I've been making progress while ignoring them this week muhaha. Anyway just wanted to share this screen of my kk_studio load screen with all the new positioning work yay.

Finished the scene I was working (octaves revenge), which came out about 3x larger than I'd intended and caused a bit of main-story-arch contemplation on my part. The very best scenes are the ones that teach you about your own world as you create them. As if the creation itself exists of its own accord; massive and wonderful but buried in obscurity, and as a storyteller, your actual task is the unearthing of it.

I made 35 static graphic assets to go along with it. Typically I try to limit myself going into a scene.. eg this should be a 10 graphic scene... I figured this would take 20 pngs to lay down, but hey, what's 15 extra png's between friends.

With that, I begin hacking on the fight system again. I have some finishing-move actions to code up, and then I'll be working on a MASSIVE array of graphics required for all the fight-scene poses. Currently the fight-scene requires 2n*p pieces of art where n is the number of Maya's opponents and p, the number of positions.

currently there are 21 positions coded; these are:
Closed_Guard
Half_Guard
Full_Mount
Side_Control
Sitting_Back_Mount
Back_Mount
Face_Sit
North_South
S_Mount
Full_Mount_Pin
Back_Mount_Pin
North_South_Pin
Face_Sit_Pin
Bowing_Angel_Pin
Standing
Wrist_Control
Standing_Back_Control
Standing_Underhook
Standing_Guillotine
Sitting_Arm_Bar
Arm_Bar_Bottom

With three competitors that's 2*3*21 == 126 images I need to make. There are actually fewer than that because most of octave's images have been done for a long time now (those were used in the fight in v0.0.1). BUT I'll also be adding another 10 or so positions (60 images) before the next release for all the finishing moves so, the grand total will probably be ~150 or so.

better get to it.