Re: Flexible Survivor (Text game, sequel to Flexible Infection)
Nuku, I rather like your game. I might spell-check it at some point, because I’ve noticed (and then almost immediately after, forgotten) the occasional glaring error, but in its totality it still manages to be great.
I have an idea, and though implementing it would be hellish and not something I expect will actually happen, I thought I might as well get it out there.
The main appeal of ero-transformation games like FS, I have personally found, is that the transformation has an effect; it is one thing to say that your penis is 900 inches long... but if the girl you are supposedly having sex with is not even that tall, and the text is telling you that you fit in nicely, having such equipment just feels pointless. FS does a good job with this to the most part - encounters take into account the size of the character's various sexual organs, which makes the hyper fan in me very happy, and generally improves the game even when it instead leads to the infectees chiding you for being too small.
However, while the four main sexual characteristics all have an effect on what occurs in the game due to their size... none of the other, non-stat mutations have much of an effect. I can be a full demon-brute wielding a chair, and a German Sheppard will still demand that I surrender to him or he'll rape me. I can be a walking penis abomination, and people will look at my engorged purple 'head', smile, and say "Oh hello there, new in town are you?" I can even be such an avatar of sexiness that inanimate objects grow boners as I walk by, but the masturbating latex fox is always going to decide that moving a few feet to jump me is not worth the hassle.
The problem, of course, is that a person's appearance does have an impact on how people respond to them - especially when your appearance can quite easily include totally inhuman features! The main aspects of a person's appearance that factor into a situation in FS, as I see it, are how intimidating the person is, how attractive the person is, and how freakish the person is. Attractiveness can be further split into three subcategories; feminine sexiness, masculine handsomeness, and cuteness.
My suggestion, which I realise will take a considerable deal of work, is that three to five variables are created – intimidation/masculinity, sexiness, weirdness, and optionally; cuteness and handsomeness. Every single body part that a player can be mutated into; all the different infections for heads, torsos, lower bodies, etc. that a player can get will have to add a different value to these variables.
A breakdown:
Sexiness is fairly self explanatory; a measure of typical female sexual appeal, exemplified by curves, dat ass, and also potentially increased by the size of the character's breasts.
Masculinity, or Intimidation if Handsomeness is added, is a measure of how fearsome a character appears. This is usually male, which is why it can be overlapped with male attractiveness, but sometimes is not: the bear, for instance, is very intimidating but female. Of course, you don't need to be male to be masculine, but if you separate it into scariness and handsomeness, you can make scenes specific to non-intimidating but attractive males.
Weirdness is a measure of how freakish the person has become; all mutations would give a small degree of this, because any regular human will find someone with a dog-head odd, even though that would be less infected than the norm for the survivors in FS. The only exceptions so far would be the 'Awesome' mutations, which have an oddness of 0 (and which I love), and the demon hound's 'gift'. But, tolerant as the survivors are, someone with tentacles for legs like the parasitic plant mutation, or a demon brute face, or a constant unwavering smile - or being nothing more than a gigantic disembodied penis... is something that even some of the other mutants would find a little freakish, and should be taken into consideration during interactions.
Cuteness is another self-explanatory variable. It is an attractiveness that does not need to be attributed to either gender, and usually causes a desire to protect the person possessing the cuteness. The exemplifying characteristics are small bodies (- though not always, the city sprites are more sexy than cute -) animal ears, disproportionately large hands and feet, and a generally innocent and usually youthful appearance. Just as they do in real life, some people may break down into ooohs and coochy-coos around something cute enough, like the Cute Chinchilla Woman, or the Drone Wasp, or the Felinid (or whichever one the cute cat girl was).
Handsomeness is the last form of attractiveness that shows through looks. Neither cute nor intimidating nor sexy, a person who wants a male that is not a circus strongman or a child, wants a creature who is handsome. The German Sheppard is probably best described as handsome, possibly the Latex Fox and Naga as well. The actual traits are hard to describe, but light muscles and tall bodies seem to be prominent.
All of these characteristics that show up in a person's form can have a significant impact on the things that happen in game, and adding in these variables would allow the game's scenes to become increasingly more dynamic based on the changing appearance of the player - something that only improves the game. It's one thing to add in a momentary description of the player character's body parts during a sex scene; it's another to have their partner actually remark on the character's attractiveness, and not just be using a stock line.
Imagine a group of infectees who will only allow you in if you are mutated enough; if you had the awesome set of mutations, they would technically be mutations and the group would let you in – but with a weirdness based check, they wouldn’t let you anywhere near. Think a person that will refuse to talk to you if you are too mutated; currently there is no way to tell the difference between a cock cannon, a parasitic plant, an Ashen, or any of the more normal mutations - not without making a ton of different checks for specific body part combinations. With weirdness, you can specifically mark the mutations as very weird, allowing such a situation to exist easily. A high intimidation might let the player bypass some enemies that are not suicidally stupid, and engage in some scenes of intimidating creatures into submission after beaten – it could add a basic description of how fearful and submissive the victim is during the scene. A high attractiveness, of all the different kinds, could be easily remarked upon during basically any sex act in the game so far – and could even allow for certain unique encounters, like the earlier mentioned latex fox trying to have sex with you instead of continuing to masturbate when you encounter it.
...Of course, the amount of work this would require could quite probably be crippling - just getting the variables on all the currently existing mutations would take a while... let alone modifying any of the currently existing scenes to respond to the new variables. However, if you think it sounds like something you would like to implement, do keep it in mind for if you ever decide to do a significant overhaul of the system.
