Rough Plans for 2026

It's been a fairly chaotic holiday season, but I think things for me are roughly getting back to normal. As I was ill in bed for most of last week I figured I'd replace the regular update post with a post detailing my (rough) plans for 2026.

First up:

House of Hellish Harlots
This will be my main focus for the year. As I mentioned in the recap earlier in the week, there was a lot of progress in some area, but some stalling in others (in particular the writing of harlot scenarios).

There are two big priorities I need to focus on.

HoHH – Notebook Implementation
This is the biggest roadblock at the moment. I think the underlying code library is fine. It covers pretty much everything and can be extended to handle the weirder cases as well. The main issue is it's slow and fiddly to implement for each harlot. I'm often having chase through notes and past implementations, and it's fairly slow and painful to add for each harlot. I'm hoping this will be fixed when I get the process properly templated. At the moment it's very slow and scratchy. I think the feature is fairly important and will be good for the game to have, but the slowness of implementing the existing harlots is blocking everything else at the moment.

I'm going to use January as a 'solve it or ditch it' month for this. I don't want it derailing progress again as happened last year.

HoHH – Imp Harem Scenario
This is pretty much all planned out. I have each individual and their specialities worked out. I know what game mechanics will be used to determine Bad Ends. It's planned out enough that I've already submitted them as part of the latest commission to marwmellow (and have included the preliminary sketches with this post).

It's just the writing now. Which is held up a bit because of trying to sort the notebook implementation out.

These two things will be my main focus for January/February and I hope to have the imps ready as February's release.

Then for future HoHH work.

HoHH 1.5 – Proper Demo
The Imp Harem is the last of Round 5 elite harlots. Once they're in, I want to get that proper full demo out. This would be the first 5 rounds and end with an elite as the demo 'end boss'. Before the demo can go out I'd like to make a few art tweaks to remove some of the placeholder art and icons (the semen gauge, potions, ailment icons, etc). Maybe also put a nice start menu in.

These are all minor things I can squeeze in while working on harlot scenarios.

HoHH – Post-Room Events
This a maybe. I've had ideas for random post-room events for a while. These can be harmful or beneficial and are also meant to give the player something more to do on leaving the room than talking to the Portly Gentleman or Elegant Woman. For this type of game, the gameplay comes from giving the player a choice of more activities than the time allows, so having 3 possible activities and only 2 actions adds the required gameplay tension.

If and when this gets done will come down to how fast it can be implemented. If it's something like the Elegant Woman's barbed leaving messages, where I can hammer out 20 or so possible events in a day, I might look to squeeze it in before the demo release. If there's any kind of awkwardness in writing or implementation, it goes right to the back of the TODO queue.

Every time I've tried to put a timeframe on the proper HoHH 1.5 demo, it's not happened, so I'm going to leave that open. First half of 2026, hopefully. I want to get it out because the game project does feel like it's flying under the radar at the moment and I want to get something out to attract more attention.

HoHH – Round 9 Elites
This is the next round of elites. I have rough plans in place.

Faction 1: Latex weaving arachne that loves asphyxiating and erotically smothering her captives.
Faction 2: Nothing yet. Maybe The Doctoress and a lot of naughty sex toy machines.
Faction 3: A sensual Kitsune.
Faction 4: The Buxom Lolibaba – naughty things summoned from cards.
Faction 5: A nautical themed huntress with ocean-themed 'hounds'

I'm not going to rush things. The elites will continue to be '5-scenarios-in-1' and about 10K words. If things go to plan, I will get these done this year.

HoHH – Queens
Depending on where I use The Madam, these will be the end-boss queens the player will have to survive at the end of the night in order to escape the House. In contrast to the elites, their scenarios will be more sequential and the player's progress in them determined by how the run went. I'm still figuring out what this will be – maybe some kind of overall faction affinity, maybe some key checkpoints need to be hit during the previous rounds, maybe even a meta element of unlocks achieved over previous runs.

Faction 1: Her Suffocating Eminence, Pulvina Velare, the XIIIth Pontifex Maxima de Obruo Suspiria – an eldritch abomination monster girl with a speciality in smothering and erotic asphyxiation.
Faction 2: [Redacted] for now. I know what she is, but it's spoilery, so I'll play those cards close to my chest.
Faction 3: The multi-armed pleasure goddess Priti Nāndyāh
Faction 4: Undecided currently. Might be The Madam, might be Temptacia at full-strength, might be multiple of The Madam's inner circle (group scene with Temptacia and other high-ranking faction 4 succubi).
Faction 5: The Grand Huntress. Probably a gauntlet of various elite 'hounds' with the Grand Huntress getting more involved the more she likes the player.

Ideally, I'd like to be on to writing the queens by the end of the year.

HoHH – Other Scenarios
There are about 4 or 5 high-tier harlot slots to fill and I mostly know what's going to fill those. I also need to let Nurse Honey properly loose to demonstrate the player only gets a limited amount of 'refills' from her before she comes to collect.

Side quest lines are also in here. To be written when I get a chance.

I think that covers most of what needs to be done for HoHH. It's fairly similar to the 2025 plan, which got derailed when I made a lot of improvements to the art version of HoHH.

Regular Writing – 8th Short Story Collection
As it was fairly effective last year, I'll be taking a couple of months off around July/August to get A Succubus for 8 ready for publication.

I still have a lot of spare stories in my stockpile to go into this. My plan is at least 3 new stories – A succubus tablet story, a Nicole story, and a Vs story. The Vs story is already written and just needs to be typed up and edited.

This shouldn't require as much new writing as A Succubus for Social Justice, but I underestimated the amount of time for general editing, manuscript prep, publishing, and promotion last year, so I'm put aside 2 months to be safe.

I'll also continue to write new stories at random. If a really good idea hits, I generally take a couple of days off to write it while the idea is hot, and will continue to do this.

H-Space Bestiary fix ups?
This kind of fell off. I think it might because they were a little more time-consuming to do than I thought, but I wouldn't mind getting back on these.

I'm also conscious I'm running out of harlots for the harlot spotlight series and I would like to be able to put out something for the $5 and higher tiers. Maybe this?

I'm not sure yet. I'll think about it over Jan and Feb while I'm posting the last of the remaining harlot spotlights.

Adopt-a-Harlot
I need to figure out a better way of organising it. Some patrons have very kindly commissioned more explicit H-scenes of harlots to be added to the game and I'd like to promote this more. H-scenes were not in the original scope, so it is stretching my art budget a little. Having patrons step in to 'adopt-a-harlot' for $150ish helps a lot with that. I need to formalise more what adopt-a-harlot means and also make it easier to facilitate payment for it. And maybe additional benefits on top, although I'm not sure what those might be (chance to name the protagonist in a spin-off short story featuring the harlot?).

Any suggestions there are welcome. It's something I'd like to organise and promote better.

And that's my rough plans for 2026. I can't guarantee I'll stick to them. Sometimes other things come up, such as the weird derailment, but also improvement, of the HoHH 1.5 version last year. It gives me a rough plan to start with, anyway.

Let me know your thoughts below.