Leaderboard: Hunting Grounds Preview

The Hunting Grounds is the premiere nightclub of Bidi-Essem, a thumping, strobing meat market where citizens and visitors alike go to find somebody to toy with or somebody to toy with them.  There's drinks, there's dancing, there's tablecloths that drape down to the floor, if you catch my meaning.

When it's finished, the Hunting Grounds will be a procedurally-generated cornucopia of flirting, domination, and submission.  It's essentially a minigame intended to soak up time on weekends while the scripted content rolls out month to month, and there's a whole lot happening under the hood.  I've been plugging away at the Hunting Grounds all month and I seem to have slightly underestimated the magnitude of the project.  Each procedurally generated character comes at you with an agenda, and not only can you fulfill those agendas but you can also subvert them and use the club goers as it pleases you.  You need to manage their trust and libido while you keep a handle on your own arousal, poise, stress, and inebriation.  Because yes, you can totally get yourself drunk and make poor decisions while at the Hunting Grounds.  It's a thing.

You can play tourist in the Hunting Grounds here: http://dexsin.com/leaderboard/preview/ 

So this update is titled "Preview" because while the Hunting Grounds isn't finished, I wanted to show you guys a little peek at what's coming.  I'd say about 80% of the interactive options are in place, so you can explore the dialogue and game trees and get a feel for how the Hunting Grounds plays.  However, the interactive text layered on top of those options is still pretty sparse.  Everything is designed for selecting one of multiple interpolated strings and presenting that, but many of those selections are picking from sets of one very simple, even nigh-placeholder, line of prose.  The missing 20% of the options includes player-dommy sex scenes, although a few of the player-subby sex scenes are in place.

The thing I'm most curious about and I'd love to hear you all chime in on is this: I'd like to build this out so that you-the-player can pick up clues about how your "new friend" is feeling in the text.  The goal being that you just play as it feels right rather than eyeing numbers and progress bars and trying to game the system.  Part of that is the pending interactive text, but I feel like you can get an idea of the shape of things already.  But would some sort of little progress bar display thing, maybe over on the right, be helpful and not distracting?

Let me know what you guys think!  This sort of proc-gen thing is not intended to be the main event for Leaderboard, and I am looking forward to getting back to scripted content.  I just need to get this fun little diversion in place first!

— Dex