Ruin Me 0.23 Preview and 0.22 BTS on Specificity

Hello, perverts. Thanks for continuing to follow and support me! This past release seemed to be pretty well-received, which is nice to see. A bunch of people downloaded the public version and the Reddit posts got some attention. I hope I can keep reaching and pleasing more people.

My Center of Attention patrons have finished voting on what some upcoming story will explore: the two topics that ended up on top are female homosexuality and body marking/modification. I haven't picked yet which will happen first, but I intend for one to be part of the next release.

There's a poll up now about body markings for Theresa; my big dilemma I'm trying to figure out is whether I should take the time to implement body writing/obscene tattoos/mehndi for every pose, or whether it's better to save time and only implement them for her default pose. If you have an opinion, you can weigh in on that poll if you're in the right tier.

Specificity

There's a dilemma that comes into play pretty much any time you write interactive stuff. Any time a player's choices might affect what you write, you have to decide how much you want to make your writing reflect those choices.

Adding outfit customization in the last release meant I had to go back through previous scenes, checking for any places where the narration had obvious references to what Theresa was wearing and making sure they still made some sort of sense.

There are two ways to make this work without much effort. First, I could just treat outfit customization as happening sort of metatextually, outside of the narrative space, and just accept that sometimes the narration will say Theresa "removes her dress" when she's wearing trousers. Second, I could be deliberately vague, and only talk about her "clothing", avoid using any outfit-specific terms, and maybe have the occasional optional line about undressing that gets skipped if she's naked.

This is kind of dissatisfying to me, though. If I'm letting the player make choices about Theresa's outfits, I think it's best to reflect those choices in the writing, especially since Ruin Me focuses on writing first. I could easily take that too far and make a lot of work for myself, though: if every time I add a new outfit I need to add an alternative line to every scene where Theresa's clothes are mentioned, it will quickly become untenable.

In the end, my current approach is to separate outfits into a few categories. I've probably missed some lines, but scenes will generally skip references to clothes and undressing if Theresa is already naked. There are also two helper functions, theresa_outfit_breasts_accessible() and theresa_outfit_skirt(), that are used to tell if an outfit has certain properties for purposes of stuff the player is doing. This way, even if I add a bunch of options, I can write narration that generally knows Theresa's sartorial situation without having to write something new for every case.

Writing interactive narration is always going to be a balancing act, and I hope this is an approach that lets me tell the sort of stories I want to tell in an effective way!

Next Release

Next release will be pretty focused on the Reform Institute! With the start of Act III, you have more influence on how the place is run, and you'll be able to fix a lot of the abuses taking place. 

I also intend to introduce some minor ruination of new secondary characters! This ties into the overarching plot. Think of these like the horror expeditions: they'll be a few scenes each with little-to-no new art except a new background or two. There'll probably be one scene in this release, with more coming down the road.

If I end up with extra time, I may fix a bug or make a minor enhancement, but other high-priority stuff will probably end up in a new release. It's been a while since I've done a new horror expedition, so I may start on that; alternately, I might do the third training scene for Permissivity 4, which will require also implementing some planned stuff for the routines that will be unlocked. In any case, I wouldn't expect those in this release.

If you have any comments, questions, or requests, let me know! Comment here or contact me via Patreon PM or email at: phanes@phanes.me