For Christmas, the Little Troubles crew organized a gift exchange between the artists, and I got assigned to Reva, which I was especially excited about. I've known about him and his work as part of the community for ages now, and I felt well equipped to pick just the right thing to draw for him.

I made the illustrations and came up with the card titles; the rest was designed by the design team of Ace and Kit. I couldn't tell you how effective the card is since I haven't played the game yet, but I don't think they're really meant for regular play nor print anyway; just as a nice little keepsake as part of our involvement with the project on the whole.

I had fun making them, and Reva seemed to like them too, which is always a good outcome!

Last month's stream was dedicated to adding more items to Wolfie's dressup game, and a quick, cutesy little sequel drawing to round things off at the end.

You can play with the updated version of the game here, but here are the newly added outfits exported as standalone pictures. The first two were requested specifically by Wolfie, while the third and fourth were something I found inspiration for online or from our ever-growing list of shared art ideas. While they were all very fun to make, they're pretty much entirely one-piece items that won't really mix and match all that well with the other items.

I'm sure you'll find creative ways to work around that, though.

Lastly, he asked me to draw a sequel to an older piece I'd made last year (but never got around to uploading publicly yet, whoops), implying some regression following it. It was a ton of fun to stretch the toony look of my style farther than usual, and I think it turned out really cute, too.

It's a Secret

SIKE! It’s SUPER FOXLET!

Third verse, same as the Second. I'll be providing the prompts with a quick overview of the pools that they came from, without delving too much into the precise process. I'm still saving my game design observations for a single comprehensive post after Kinktober is done and dusted. Again, if you'd like to know how these were generated, I suggest taking a look at my Week 1 post.

Like last time, if you're a Tier 2 or higher patron, make sure you scroll down to volunteer for any available prompts that you like the look of! Days 15 and 16 have already been accounted for, so those unfortunately can't be volunteered for.

That said, there were still some highlights worth mentioning during this play session.

You'll notice first of all that there are 10 prompts this time! Each session added a fair bit of overhead to the process, and the batches of 7 would've needed a 5th session at the end of the month that I could do well without. I had considered doing some kind of wildcard variation in those three remaining days, but I couldn't come up with anything interesting and have been rather swamped with keeping up the pace through the first half of the month. If and when I revisit this challenge, I'll distribute them more evenly across the four batches.

Next, some prompts are actually made up of all 5 terms of the pool - I've marked the "extra" ones so that if anybody would like to try them out for themselves, you'll know what to exclude if combining them all at once proves too tricky. However, those pools seemed like a good fit for the ideas I came up with, and I figured I'd take on the extra challenge for the fun of it.

Last but by no means least, I actually got some help for this session from my friend Plushie! She was looking for any excuse to try out her new VR kit, and I thought it'd be fun to have someone around to influence the pool creation process a bit. It worked out even better than I'd anticipated, and the results were really fun, too.

Here's a few action shots of the process.

And finally, here are the upcoming prompts and the pools they came from.

Day 15: Hands, Ageplay, and Oral

This one’s obviously already been uploaded by now but I still wanted to have a complete catalogue of Kinktober’s prompts listed in these posts.

Day 16: Crotch & Pelvis, Consciousness, and Filth

I used this for four whole prompts, which was a bit of a stretch but I did it!

Day 17: Stuckage, Tail, and Teasing & Tickling (+ Money + Humiliation)

The first full-set prompt for the month. The terms just made sense together to me, but interestingly, the order of the terms do change the suggested meaning, at least to my mind!

Day 18: Size Changing, Sexuality, and Maws

Second of four prompts made from this set. So far it was easy enough.

Day 19: Penetration, Pregnancy, and Body Marking

Day 20: Roleplay, Masturbation & Grinding (Supplementary), and Fluids (Supplementary)

This is the only game I used the modifier mechanic for, and both cards turned up the “Make Supplementary” modifier. This means that the terms marked as supplementary are just used as a background detail to the other terms; in this case Roleplay takes the center stage with both other terms in the back seat.

Day 21: Slice of Life, Identity, and Sizeplay (+ Additional Appendages + Breasts)

Second full-set prompt. This one was a bit weird once I picked the first term picked for the prompt, the rest of it just kinda fell into place.

Day 22: Intangible Influence, Toys, Objectification & Objectophilia (+ Loss of Control + Suppression & Denial)

Third full-set prompt. Can’t wait to showcase this one.

Day 23: Exhibitionism, Science, and Groups

The third prompt of four, and we’re already squeezing out every last drop out of this kinky lemon; especially given that I was avoiding reusing any of the cards in the set.

Day 24: Foreplay, Figure, and Aptophilia

Fourth prompt of four from the set, and I actually had to shift around the chosen terms so that they’d make as much sense as possible without overlapping.

Remember that you're still free to volunteer even if you've already been featured in a previous prompt, and that they'll be sold to others as YCH slots after October.

If you haven't already done so, please visit your profile page and add your contact details and offsite profile info - I'll need this information to get your express consent for any art rewards (including the Kinktober slots you've volunteered for) or relevant site projects in future.

If you'd like to volunteer for some of the upcoming slots, please consider pledging at Tier 2 or higher!

Roll on week 2!

In this blog post, I'll be keeping things a little bit shorter than the first instalment and only showing the resultant card pools and final prompts I went with for the coming week. I'll save my reflections and development notes on the Inspiration in a Box cards until after Kinktober, so that the posts don't get too unnecessarily wordy for those of you following along for the sake of the art and creative process. That said, if you're curious about how I generate these cardsets you can find a more detailed explanation on my Week 1 post.

Without further delay, here are this week's prompts and card pools - don't miss the end of this post below for a surprise!

NB: Don't mind too much the cards partly visible at the bottom of some of the card pool screenshots; these are part of an experiment I'm trying with some extra mechanics related to card modifiers, so far with mixed results, I think?

While their effects aren't particularly of concern to the prompts for the most part, one of them came into play most notably in this week's final prompt, where it's explained.

Day 8: Flexibility, Clothing, and Bondage & Restraint

Day 9: Stomach Bulging, Cum, and Magic

Day 10: Aftercare, Speech, and Species Play

I used the board made from this game to generate 2 prompts, since I have 6 games to use for 7 days.

Day 11: Androgyny, Psyche Play & Adjustment, and Sexual Transmission

Day 12: Mind Control & Hypnosis, Gender, and Worship

Day 13: Birthing, Exercise & Effort, and Competition

Day 14: Expulsion & Purging (Inverse), Merging & Swapping, and Character Differences

For this week’s final prompt, one of the modifier cards (partly visible at the bottom of the screen) acted as an “inverter,” which I could use to flip the meaning of one of the prompts; namely, Expulsion & Purging. So, to be exact, that card will be used for something closer to “Absorption and Assimilation.”

I hinted at a little surprise earlier, and now that I've proven that I can do this for more than a couple of days in a row, here it is: Volunteer Slots! If you're a Tier 2 or higher patron, you can volunteer for any* of this week's prompts that interest you. I'll pick based on who I feel would be best suited for the illustration, or who hasn't yet gotten one yet.

Even if you've already gotten one cause I handpicked you in the first week, feel free to volunteer again, just in case!

Can't volunteer, or didn't get picked for your favourite? Don't worry about it - all of the Kinktober illustrations will be made into YCH slots after the month is done, too! Just keep that in mind for the art you'll be receiving if you get picked as a volunteer: others are likely to get one like it later on too.

If you'd like to volunteer for some of the upcoming slots, please consider pledging at Tier 2 or higher!

Last night I was scouring the Internet, trying to figure out some way to do Kinktober while avoiding insinuating any sort of affiliation or approval of any one prompts list. Plus, most of them had one or two prompts included that were pretty much dealbreakers for me, so I was right on the verge of compiling a bunch of them and picking whichever one I fancied the most for that day. But then it hit me:

I have my own system for generating Kink Prompts!

So I dusted off the tabletop simulator implementation of my Idea Cards play system, "Inspiration in a Box" and got to work.

With the 6 modes of play that I've designed so far, I decided to randomize which game I'd use to generate each day's prompt. The only rules I kept generally common, wherever applicable, were as follows:

1. Every day's final chosen prompt would be exactly three terms.
   • Each of the three final terms would have to feature to some extent, but do not have to be the main focus of the piece.
2. I would always shortlist more terms than necessary for me to then pick the main three from.
   • The only exception is explained below.
3. The three terms in the final prompt are removed from the pool for the rest of Kinktober.
4. I would share the full shortlist of each game, for others to mix and match from if they so wished.

Other than that, I could experiment with the variables of each game to keep it interesting, and possibly find new ways to play them in future sessions. At the start of generating each prompt, I'd reveal a card, and pick the game that corresponded to the colour of the card. You can expand the section below for an explanation of the 6 games used to generate these prompts.

In case you want the prompts I ended up going with and aren't interested in knowing how I generated them, here's the list in a more convenient format.

Day 1: Smothering + Face + Sensory Play

The first game was Cardcassonne, with which I decided to build a square 3 by 3 grid using the mixer variant. Filling a fixed space meant that I knew how many cards I would be drawing, but for this first game I also set the hand size to 5 to give me some freedom of choice.

You can see the set of three in the top left of the grid, which really stuck with me early on in the game despite some other really fun groupings to be found in the completed set.

Day 2: Underwear + Parasitism + Overwhelming

I got Basic Play for the second prompt, which was fairly straightforward but also gave me pause for thought. I didn't want to limit myself entirely to a single prompt of three cards, and at least afford myself a little bit of flexibility when picking what to go with.

This is when I decided on the second global rule, so I drew 5 and picked 3. Admittedly, the full set of 5 doesn't synergize quite as much as I'd hoped, but there are a few other interesting prompts you could squeeze out of there.

Day 3: Meta + Submission + Accidents

Day 3's prompt was made with a game of Gridlock, which admittedly isn't quite as interesting when played solo. I find that I tend to pick out a small set of cards on the board early on and try to bring them together at the expense of all the others. My eyes were laser-focused on the "Meta" card, and I saw that I could cluster it with a bunch of other fun cards. As you can probably tell from the left side of the final grid, that's just what I did.

I think it would work far better if the resultant board was used to generate multiple prompts, while forcing you not to reuse cards in multiple prompts. Might do that next time it comes up, but in the meantime, please feel free to use this tapestry of debauchery any way you see fit!

Day 4: Corruption + Arousal + Transformation

Cardcassonne came up a second time for day 4, so I tried to limit my options a little by only giving myself 4 cards in hand to pick from each turn. I also built a 3 by 3 grid, though I might expand it to 4 by 4 next time I play this game. That, or limit the number of cards, as per the game's base rules, but not the shape of the grid.

In any case, here's is the grid that resulted from this second session.

Day 5: Food + Petplay + Body Modification

Poker Prompts came up for the fifth session and I'll be completely honest here, with the Texas Hold'Em variant (which works best when playing solo) turning up Food and Muscles as the starting set, I wasn't feeling too confident in my options. This is where I really solidified the second global rule and decided I would be allowed to add three more cards to the set with which I could form the final prompt, so I did.

It was a bit of a copout, sure, but I wasn't feeling the idea of combining Food and Muscles together in something that I'd enjoy making for myself, and that my audience would like to see. I might tweak the Texas Hold 'Em rule to say that at least one of the cards drawn at the start should be incorporated into the prompt; but ultimately it's up to whoever is using the cards to decide whether what's been generated is worth using or not. The cards aren't actually your mom, after all.

Day 6: Animalistic + Substance Use + Lactation

Freestyle play finally came up for day 6's prompt (though admittedly I did keep drawing cards until I got either of the two remaining games but shhh; I might tweak how selecting games works in the next batch session) and it was... Interesting to figure out how to do this on TableTop Sim.

I started by making the game fan out the remaining set of cards, and I started flicking sets of them back and forth on top of one another until I saw something that caught my eye, and set it aside. I continued until I found 3 that seemed to work, and stopped there.

This is the one game where I think I'll be making an exception to the second global rule, especially given that the entire deck is included as part of the pool anyway. If you'd like to make your own variations on this prompt, you can use some of the cards peeking through from the background.

Day 7: Sensuality & Pleasure + Function Control + Permanence

For the last day of the week, I used the last remaining game to come up: Drafting with the Golden Ticket variant. Nothing too special to report with this one; just ran it through 5 rounds, and picked my prompt from there.

That said, I found myself drawing somewhat more "wholesome" cards into my hand and figured I'd keep leaning into the theme. There were a lot of interesting ideas floating around the full set, but this one seemed most interesting to me.

So there's the week one's kink prompts prepped and ready to go! I should have the first drawing ready and uploaded by the end of the day, but if not, there's always the possibility of playing catch up. I'll be aiming to post something every day this month, so now's a great time to subscribe and get to see every one of them as soon as they go up!

As for what the drawings are gonna be exactly? Well you'll just have to wait and see.

Wolfie came up with a cute idea I started working on during his streams, creating a dressup doll of Austin with lots of different items to mix and match with.

It's been a really fun project with a lot of practice involved in setting up the layering just right for all the clothes to work both alone and as part of a combined outfit.

Best of all, you can play around with the current version of the dressup game here! Just let it load and then use the layer list in the right toolbar (if it's hidden, its icon looks like three stacked sheets) to toggle items on or off.

Earlier this year (on my birthday, as it turns out) I mentioned designing a system for idea prompt cards that I wanted to put to work as part of my creative process.

Unfortunately, the project had to be put on hold soon afterwards. While the cards' "system" was complete and technically usable in itself, there were a few more issues that needed tackling before I could call it done and get a set printed for myself.

I figured it'd be a good idea to write up a progress post and discuss the main design challenges I've been dealing with and have held me up since then. I'm finally getting close to having the first finalized versions ready to be made, so that I can start using them myself - at least testing them out until I can get around to making some to sell.

This will be a pretty long post without any kinky art to show for it (yet), so I totally understand if you prefer to give it a miss.

The first challenge was figuring out an easy way to distribute the combinations of each card's suit (the symbols in the corners, as shown below), number and colour as evenly as possible. This would improve the "fairness" of the values' randomization across the deck.

To this end, the size of deck I settled on was 120 cards, since that gave an equal number of each suit, number and colour of which there are 8, 10 and 6 of each value respectively. I also found a way to combine each of the three so that each card would be unique within a full deck.

Further to this, I also wanted to easily distribute these values as evenly as possible if a full deck is ever subdivided into different kinds of subcategories (i.e. species, personality, appearance, etc). In this way, each of them would retain relatively equal probabilities within each smaller stack. I got this done with generous use of spreadsheets, which streamlined all the number crunching while designing the different subcategories for the first prompts deck.

I will admit that since the cards are intended as an artists' tool for improvisation, getting the values for randomizing perfectly balanced wasn't essential for the design. That said, it was important for me to have as a part of this tool, and I feel better off having designed it this way. I do think it'll be more fun for me to use once I get them printed out.

The use of spreadsheets also lent itself well to solving the next problem I was faced with. Editing card designs in bulk was a massive pain, especially given how badly Illustrator handles text that's meant to be edited as part of the graphics. Reorganizing and changing around the different values on the cards wasn't much fun either.

Several years ago, when I was still deep into my board gaming hobby, I'd stumbled upon a handy piece of software called nanDECK. In simple terms, it allows you to generate graphics using a simple but capable scripting language, primarily intended for use in making card decks. I'd already made all the necessary graphics for each element and organized the data in a way that was easily readable by this code, so it was a perfect fit.

This not only generated all the finished card designs I needed within seconds after the code was written up, but also allowed me to make smaller changes far more quickly and easily. Generating an entirely new deck is also extremely simple with this tool, as it only requires a new copy of the deck template to be filled out whichever way that I like.

With that sorted out, I needed to figure out what to put on the cards. The original idea for this tool was to generate placeholder characters and prompt interesting ideas for kink porn. Coming up with the right 120 prompts for a whole deck was a challenge, but differently in either case.

Both times, I scoured lists of words and terms of whatever relevant categories I needed to populate, then whittled them down to size. The ultimate goal is to have as much coverage as possible within the set of prompts, while keeping the amount within a set limit. Spreadsheets once again came to the rescue here, allowing me to quickly move and change things around without having to wrestle with any graphics software in the process.

The first deck got split five ways. I started out with the original idea of character design prompts that I'd prototyped the cards with, but I had some extra room to fit in a set of my personal work prompts as well. Combined together, I could use them as a standalone and varied set of suggestions for improvised ideas, but with the category labels included on the cards, I can easily split them up into individual sets when needed.

I would apologize for the extremely liberal use of alliteration in the work prompt cards, but it does something to my brain that I can never get enough of - you could be excused for thinking that it could even be a fetish of mine.

With that awful segue out of my system, let's talk about the porn ideas deck.

Minor content warning; the pictures of progress work below include simple textual references to some pretty intense kinks, so discretion is advised.

In much the same way as the character cards, I started designing this set with a seed list of fetishes. The best and honestly only list I needed to consider for this was f-list's. Last week, I ran a stream where I grabbed the entire set off of their site, and started whittling it down to size. However, the whole thing consisted of 451 terms - a simple spreadsheet would not cut it for a task this size.

Wolfie helpfully suggested that I export this list into images somehow - and this is where nanDECK came in to save my hide a second time. I threw together some basic code, plugged in the list, and generated the images. Once they were imported into Illustrator, I got to organizing.

I'm not sure how long it took me to comb through the entire stack, but I'd hazard a guess at around 6-7 hours. While the organized map didn't highlight any patterns that I could use to narrow down the scope, it still helped by reminding me of all the different kinks and sexual preferences, and how they all linked and overlapped with each other.

As a brief but fun aside, a large part of my Masters' thesis involved an identical design process with which I made a deck of emotion cards for a similar purpose. If you've frequented my streams for long enough you'll have seen them featured from time to time. I'm not sure if I want to repurpose them for use as a set of these idea cards, but I just might. In any case, it was fun to realize that my very serious design and research thesis project was foreshadowing the creation of this deck of kink porn prompts.

Given that a set of 120 cards was nowhere nearly enough to exhaustively cover the minute distinctions between each individual entry in the source list, I had to take a different approach. Instead, I aimed to offer broad but clear coverage with each card, which could then be narrowed in scope by combining more of them together. While adjusting the list bit by bit, adding or removing terms, and replacing others with broader or more specific ones as needed, I kept a simple approach in mind: if a specific kink could be expressed fairly well using up to three cards (ideally two) at most, then I considered it to be included in the deck.

After about a week of tinkering with it on and off, I've gotten very, very close to the final version that I'd like to get printed. Although I'm still making some final changes to these, here's a select sampling of them for your early perusal.

All this talk about printing brings us to the final hurdle: money. Since these decks are personalized and also still technically prototypes, I only plan on having one of each made. While I'm still able to get this done fairly easily, it keeps the per-unit cost quite high. Luckily, I recently managed to save up a little, so I should be able to obtain my starting set soon after I've decided on what all the cards will consist of.

As for that, Tiff suggested a good name for them a while back, and I've not since thought of anything better. I'm inclined to go with her idea, which I think you'll also like.

Thanks for reading. I can't wait to show you the finished product and the art it'll inspire.