Announcing…

[BOFH666]

A sneak preview of the House of Tickles! We’ve been working for months now to build something a little different for all those in this wonderful community and we’d like to offer you the chance to test our first attraction, the (interactive) Ten Minute Tickle! Come along and see if you can break our lovely volunteer and win an item from the house’s vaults in the process.

81.86.197.23

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Note, if the link above doesn’t work, please post any problems here. Because of the way my net connection works I can’t actually test the link itself, so there may be some teething problems. Just remember I’m in the UK, so any problems are likely to get fixed between 09:00 and 00:00 GMT, anything outside that I’m probably dead to the world.

Alright, now for the plain English version of the above. For the last few months I’ve been trying to put together what amounts to a ticklish AI (artificial intelligence) and this is the first version. Actually, this is one of two, very different, approaches I’m currently working on, and is by far the simpler of the two. In time I’m hoping to add a few more ‘volunteers’ to the dungeon, but we’ll launch this with just the one for now.

A couple of quick pointers: I have done my best to test this and I think I’ve caught most of the problems, but there’s always something you miss when writing an application, so please report any bugs either here or by e-mail to the address in my profile. Second, this is currently running off my own server at home, so if it’s seems to be dead try again in a few minutes when (hopefully) whoever’s using the bandwidth has finished.

Most important, I need to get some indication of how much time I should put into this aspect of the site (there’s going to be the usual story, image etc archive as well in a few weeks, along with some other ideas I'm working on) so I’m desperate for feedback on this. As I said, this is the first version, so any suggestions on what you’d like to see done to improve the experience would be welcome. Oh, and I know it looks awful, site design is the first thing on the to-do list.

 

[ultimatetkster]

I tested it and found no problems here.... cute girl.😉

 

[BOFH666]

*Wipes brow* - Phew, now I can shut down the development machines and head to bed. Thanks for the test ultimatetkster.

Enjoy folks.

 

[critterlord]

Well, it was pretty fun, but I think it would be better if you had shots of her being tickled on the places we choose. Also, is there anyway to actially break her?

 

[BOFH666]

That was the original idea, but finding a set of images of one person that seemed to fit proved surprisingly difficult. I'll have a look and see what I can come up with.

And yes, it is possible to break her, though I might have made it a little too hard to do so. I'll turn it down a bit, see what you think.

Edit - okay, changes done, and a couple more files uploaded as 'rewards'. Let's see if that's any better.

 

[Raul]

I just broke her. Somebody's a foot and lower body person.

Raul

 

[milagros317]

Very nice pictures of Catwoman tickling Supergirl as the prize. Thanks a lot. 😀

 

[Darth Vegeta]

I am following this

I think I am going to keep my eye on you... yessss... you're good...

 

[BOFH666]

Raul - actually the personality's generated randomly every time you play so it changes game to game (umm, well, kind of anyway.) Congrats though, nice to know it IS beatable.

Milagros - you're welcome, but the prize is random as well so there's more where that came from 😉

Darth - Now, I know I'm a Star Wars fan and therefore am probably taking this the wrong way, but my brain put your post in a Palpatine voice and that's just too creepy. Where'd I leave that lightsabre... The nice thing with doing all this stuff simply in VB Script *hawk, spit* is it looks just like work to the untrained eye, so there may be some revisions coming soon if work's quiet this week...😀

 

[Darth Vegeta]

oh?

Is that so (breath) ? (breath) You underestimate me (breath). I find your confusion insulting (breath) I am not talking like the Emperor (breath)...

 

[BOFH666]

Ha, that silly mask and rather disturbing breathing doesn’t scare me, for I follow the path of a true Jedi butt kicker and always aspire to...

Be Like Maul!

(Lord, I really didn’t get enough sleep last night)

 

[The Pianist]

Hehe, sorry... but I seemed to have worked out the way to beat her. Just simply repeat any two selections 5 times (10 in total) and you beat her. The thing is though, my computer doesn't know what application your prizes belong too... so I've just got the contents of your .asp files lying about the place (that I worked out are zipped files).

Some suggestions:
1. Like above, get some pictures of the girl being tickled... or at least looking like she's just been tickled in that place.
2. Perhaps instead of selecting the text to choose where to tickle her, point and click on the picture... which gives the possibility of her covering up tickle spots.
3. Have links from spot to spot. I noticed that each time you choose a new tickle spot, she goes right back to saying "Meh, I feel nothing" where as in real life, she'd either start laughing more because of the unexpected change... or slowly calm down because it didn't tickle as much... either way she'd still be laughing.

 

[The Pianist]

Coincidently... you might want to change the security of your reward.

I found out that if you copied the link, and just changed the end number of the file path, you can download the rest of the rewards 🙂

 

[BOFH666]

*grin* don't apologise, I was expecting someone to twig it within the first few minutes of going live, two days isn't bad going.

As to specific comments, I'm totally behind the image thing, and think I may have worked out a way to get this to work without having to spend hours trawling for a suitable image set. Point 3 was actually in the original design, and I’m going to tweak it slightly to not drop back to the first response, but the idea of doing a fully realistic model got dropped when I started doing the math on how much scripting would be required.

Umm, okay, this next bit's way boring so feel free to jump a paragraph. Basically, and this is a horrible generalisation so don’t quote me, there's two ways of doing this sort of thing. The first, and what's seen here, is scripted responses where the whole response is stored somewhere and retrieved when triggered by the code. This means that every single event needs to be scripted, so every possible mouse click would need an event to go with it based on what had been done previously. So in this case the first click would need 4 replies, the second click would need 16, the next…well you get the idea. This would give a much better feeling of spontaneity but at the expense of my sanity from writing hundreds of responses. The other way is to provide the vocabulary itself rather than complete phrases and a grammar engine that lets the program build something that makes sense from that vocabulary, and this is what's planned for the next, umm, victim 😉

I've just started version 2, which is designed to be far more natural, responding to user actions based, not on pre-written replies, but on current state, personality traits, sound, vision and a few other things as well. The idea is she'll put together her own replies and (hopefully) present a far more challenging target than the current victim. Of course this is also pretty tricky to get right, so don't expect it in the next few days or anything. To go with this (if the idea works at all of course) there should be some sort of dynamic image system to address that particular problem and a new set of rewards as well. Assuming I can get it to work at all of course, I’m not exactly a great developer of software and this sort of thing is starting to push my limits.