Ruin Me 0.17 Preview and 0.16 Behind the Scenes

Hello, perverts! It's been a stressful week in US national news, and I hope you're all staying safe and keeping yourselves healthy. If you're looking for a good way to support the folks fighting for justice for very little cost and effort, check out the huge itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, which has hundreds of games (and soon will add hundreds more) for a minimum contribution of $5.

In a bit of news, I've made the sad choice to block a patron who both leaked the advance patron version and strategically unsubbed to avoid actually contributing. I don't plan on being a cop with regard to folks who change their minds or have their circumstances change, but I feel like I have a responsibility to the rest of y'all to set some sort of standard.

The poll on training priorities has wrapped up! The next area of training you'll see showing up will be verbal humiliation of Theresa, followed by watersports and spit play. If any of those don't appeal to you, don't worry; this level of training will let you pick and choose what you want to engage with.

Lastly, you may not be aware that I have a Twitter! It's where I post tiny updates that I don't want to spam into peoples' mailboxes, plus a bunch of retweeting of queer/horror erotic art and other erotic games. If your Twitter account is NSFW-friendly, please follow me and maybe RT some of my updates! Now, for some behind the scenes stuff on the last release, and a preview of what's coming up!

Choice and Branching

There are a bunch of ways to handle choices in visual novels and games in general. Often games, especially visual novels, will only include player choices that have some sort of mechanical effect: you'll get long sequences of story punctuated by choices that mark hidden flags or give you relationship points if you pick the right option. I talked about how Ruin Me takes a different approach in a previous BTS post.

I was thinking about this stuff more when writing the recent oral sex training. It was important to me to design it in a queer way, so that Theresa got training in both cunnilingus and fellatio. That heavily suggested a choice of partners for her, as I did earlier with the manual sex training.

In the manual sex training, I wrote a different scene for each partner, customizing it for their personality. However, for oral sex I decided that was overkill; there's really only one fellatio scene and one cunnilingus scene, but heavily customized to reflect the partner and the player's choices during it.

In part, this was a good way to get the update done in a time when my productivity is down. But I think it's in line with the way I've done things in other aspects of sex scenes. Often, you'll get to choose a certain act or way of relating to a partner, and you'll get a few lines that are different before things return to one main narrative thread for the scene.

My hope is that the scenes still feel like you're directing them: that the sequence of choices you've made stays in your head and shapes how you interpret the resulting events, even if the code itself doesn't track them. What do you think? Does it still feel interactive, or does the fact that scene don't tend to branch widely make it feel like your choices don't matter?

Next Release

I'm working on the conclusion to Act 3 for next release! While I don't actually have many words written down, I have the structure of it very clearly planned, and I don't believe it'll require any drawn art. This will bring a bit of sexiness to the Reform Institute, thanks to Theresa visiting, and will have some plot revelations and a conclusion that should change the feel of the game for the final act.

With Act 3 beginning, I'll have a bunch of openness coming up, so this is a great time to mention if you have some weird kink you want to see, or if there's something you want to see happen with any of the characters. This act should be larger than each of the other two, so we have a lot of time before the game starts wrapping up.

If you have questions, feedback, or requests, you can comment here, PM me on Patreon, or write me at: phanes@phanes.me If you think other folks might like the game, please share it with them or on forums/social media if you feel comfortable doing so!