21 May 2022
It’s been a problem that there isn’t a proper way of sharing mods for Ditzy Dice. The existing solutions either don’t accept mods for erotic games, or they are basically just forums with a, in my opinion, non-optimal browsing experience. How to solve this?
Up until now, Blushing Defeat has been a static website. This means that it runs on a “dumb” web server, which is only able to serve static files, but can’t run any custom code. This means that the website will always look the same for all users, and any code is run directly in your browser, rather than on the server. This is fine for a lot of things, but it means that there can’t be user accounts, or any other more interactive features that allow users to send stuff to the server. For things like comments, this has to be worked around by using a third-party plugin and their servers, which is what Disqus is.
Setting up my own, proper backend server seemed like a lot of work though, so I was justifiably hesitant, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt it was a step I’ve been wanting to take for a long time. So, I decided that to solve the mod sharing issue, I would commit to the most difficult and time-consuming solution possible: to set up a Blushing Defeat backend and my own mod sharing service. Which is what I’ve done.
Thus, the Blushing Defeat Sexy Mods repository is now available. It is of course very beta, and quite bare bones, but to be able to move forward I need to see how it runs in practice so that I can get feedback on which things are the most important to focus on.
For modders, the site allows a maximum upload size of 30MB. I consider this to be the maximum size a Ditzy Dice mod could reasonably be IF all included images are optimized properly, which they should be. This is quite important for players as all loaded mods are stored in the browser, but browsers have varying limits on how much each website can store, which means that players run a higher risk of encountering problems the bigger the total size of their loaded mods are.
Many images can be optimized to be 100kB or less, with little to no visible compression. Therefore my recommendation is to convert images to WEBP with 90% quality at 600x600 pixels resolution. This can often be done by simply re-saving them in a new format from a photo editor (though this depends on the program, make sure to actually look at the file sizes to see if it improves), I can recommend Krita. Animated webp can be a bit more difficult, but you can always use an online tool like EZGIF. Alternatively, if you are comfortable with or would like to try command line tools, ImageMagick or FFmpeg can be useful for easily converting many images.
So yeah, let me know if you encounter any problems, and let’s see how this holds up :)
~ Gardamuse
11 October 2021
Some of you may have tried out Mispell once or twice. Well, it is now a browser addon for Firefox and Chrome!
It was always my intention to make it into an addon, and it is actually quite fun to use. It’s able to apply to a lot of dynamic content as well, like Twitter, or even if you’re using the Discord web client.
It does come with a few drawbacks though, mainly that websites will load slower and that it can sometimes interfere when you type on certain websites. However, it is quick to turn the addon off if you just slide the IQ to its max value, then it won’t affect your browsing at all until you turn it on again.
Check it out, and have fun!
~ Gardamuse
21 July 2021
Version 1.5 of Ditzy Dice has been released. The big new feature is modding support. This means you can create your own cards and endings. There currently aren’t any mods to download, but if you make one, feel free to get in touch!
With this update, I plan to take a break from adding any major features to Ditzy Dice for a while. There are still going to be a few minor things and bugs to fix, but there are a few other projects I want to look into as well.
Finally, as usual, many thanks to Duhad for helping me write for the new cards!
Have fun!
~ Gardamuse
04 June 2021
It’s been a busy month for me, and it’s not over yet, but for various reasons I thought it would be best to release version 1.4 of Ditzy Dice now. This update brings several new cards, updated illustrations (one card by Kobi-Tfs!) and endings are now unlocked once you get them, and you can see all your unlocked endings on the Collection screen. Oh, and epilogues can now have hidden dialogue options, that are only available if you have certain cards, but I haven’t been able to add too many of those yet.
Many thanks to Duhad for helping me a great deal with writing cards, and to Kobi-Tfs for the new Intelligence card art!
Have fun!
~ Gardamuse
01 June 2021
It’s been almost four years since my first blog post on Blushing Defeat, and 1 year since I opened up the patreon, so I thought it was high time for a couple of upgrades to the site! The menu has been moved up, all menu items are now folded into a hamburger menu on mobile and I’ve redesigned the front page to make it look a little bit more modern.
Modern web design incorporates a lot of scrolling even on large screens, which I’m not too big a fan of, but this is usually done to split longs texts into shorter, more manageable chunks, which I do like. I think I reached a good middle-ground for the front page.
I have some thoughts on bringing the blog, apps and gallery sections more in line with the front page style as well, but I think its good enough as it is for now. If you find any bugs in the new design, or something isn’t working, let me know!
Just to mention it, Ditzy Dice 1.4 is coming along as well, bringing a bunch of new cards and improvements. I hope to finish the update quite soon, but it’s difficult to know exactly how long that will take.
Cheers!
~ Gardamuse