0.59 Reflection and 0.60 Preview

Hey, perverts! I hope you're all enjoying the recent updates. The story finale is coming along slowly in the background, but as I work on that, I've also been expanding the options in Ruin Me and adding some minigames to replace less-interesting grinding.

I've asked my Center of Attention patrons for their opinion on my development priorities, and while I consider their input first, I'd love to hear from everyone on what y'all have liked lately, where you think I could improve, and what else you'd like to see! You can comment here, DM me on Patreon, or email phanes@phanes.me.

Reflection on Exploration and Oral Sex

I'm pretty pleased with how the Exploration minigame turned out, although it was a lot more complicated than I anticipated. Like the Geography minigame, it's procedurally generated. However, the Geography minigame benefits from simple options for the names of maps and locations; you just have to spot matches in a list, and it's kind of expected for different places in an area to sound similar. Exploration, on the other hand, has you retracing your steps a lot and paying attention to how things are named and described, and I found in testing that I needed to provide a lot more variety to the generation.

For a rough comparison: the Geography game has 14 lines (2.4k characters) of name generation options for its maps and sites, while in Exploration 129 lines (12.6k characters) are dedicated to procedural options. Its puzzle generation algorithm is also much more complicated. A Geography problem involves generating three maps, the similarities between them, and some alternate names on the highest difficulty. Exploration requires generating a tree of rooms and then iteratively closing off leaves of the tree with keys, making sure that there are fallbacks for when RNG results in a problematic map. I'll be keeping future minigames more on the Geography scale than the Exploration one!

I feel a bit of relief getting the oral sex play scene out! Way back in the early versions of the game, I made notes for what play scenes I might want to include, and over the years I've gradually been checking off and adding new items on that list. Most of those have been implemented, but oral sex ended up never getting implemented until far later than I anticipated! Thank you to everyone who's been reminding me over the years to get around to it.

I'm feeling good about the support I added in 0.58 that allows me to have more advanced branches in existing play scenes. I used it in various ways to add options like piss play in the anal sex scene and the butt stuff in the oral sex scene. I hope that it continues to be a good way to make play scenes interesting to replay later in the game, and to give previews in the early game as to where the sex can go by the end.

Next Update

The biggest feature I'm working on (from a programming perspective) is the Salvage side activity/minigame. This is a new source of Ken and also serves as a replacement for getting your luggage dropped off in the entryway. The idea of getting trapped on this peninsula without your luggage is important to the game's early vibe, in my opinion, and having luggage just show up when you need it was a quick but unsatisfying way to make sure that you had the equipment you need.

As an aside: I wanted to avoid having money be a thing that Ruin Me cares about. There are plenty of erotic games out there that make job simulation part of their design, but it's not a great fit for the story, especially with Terry being independently wealthy. It's also not very conducive to the sort of horror tone I'm going for if you have to put in a shift at the office every day. This is why the game's "currency" is Ken, a sort of understanding of the setting and its mysteries. These minigames serve the same sort of pacing purpose that jobs do in those games, while hopefully feeling more like antiquarian work: exploring and doing research.

Right now, I just have luggage show up just before you need it. After this update, you'll have to visit Cathy and perform (or skip) the Salvage activity. It'll involve comparing salvage that has come in with records of claims made, vaguely like the document-comparison in games like Papers, Please. I haven't figured out yet how I want to funnel the player toward items they actually need. If I only let you collect luggage when you need it, that might feel a bit fake, but if the player just sees the full list of options at the start of the game, it might feel a bit overwhelming or lead to a "wasted" run of the game. Regardless of how that ends up working, this activity's scope should be much closer to Geography than Exploration.

This update won't just have a minigame, though! I got some requests from a Center of Attention patron recently. One of them was for urethral sounding with Terry, which felt like a good addition to the options for Advanced Depravity training; adding this will mean that you can actually choose three out of four options and don't have to just end that training stage early if you don't care for one of the other options.

The same patron suggested a few other kinks that sounded promising, but I wasn't sure how to best fulfill them. I try to, wherever possible, have stuff I add to the game serve multiple purposes. Lately, I've used a few play scenes as a framework to also provide new training or night-time activities. I don't want the game to feel repetitive, but it feels like an inefficient use of my resources to write e.g. two versions of a complicated scene like semen play instead of having some alternate dialogue for training and for play time.

As I was idly thinking about the requested kinks, I realized that a lot of them could be handled with a new night music sequence. As a reminder, these are kinky dreams that you can trigger with the music room in the mansion. I'll be adding one that provides bodily transformation, hypertrophy, and lactation of you or of Terry. Since it's a dream (or is it a visit to Elsewhere?), I can do things that would be hard to justify in the waking world.

If you have requests of your own, continue to let me know! I give Center of Attention requests priority, but I welcome suggestions from everyone. You can comment here, post on the discussion board on Itch, DM me on Patreon, or email phanes@phanes.me. Thank you so much for your support!