Future Project: The Waltz of Fiends

You're hired to renovate an old mansion... and as soon as you start noticing the blood stains, all the exits lock. Ghosts stalk you through the halls as you desperately try to uncover what happened in Hexenkessel and unravel a conspiracy.

This project is me taking on first person erotic horror! Game-wise, it's a mix of exploration and time management, as you have to take various actions to reduce the supernatural threats while also solving puzzles and figuring out the central mystery plot.

"Sex as a game mechanic" is a common adage in the adult space, but in my opinion it's hard to do in an interesting way. Many words have been written about games that only offer sex on defeat, and I'll just reiterate that my position is that these are interactive sex toys more than games, so there's no point criticizing from a game design perspective. Much has also been written about "sex as reward", which is functional but conventional. Anyway, this is another one of my ideas about trying something different: sex with some of the supernatural entities is a natural part of the game, not really a punishment or reward.

Here are the entities:

This project... I ironically call it cursed because it has gone through multiple iterations, all of them unfortunately fated for one reason or other. Over seven years ago I put a ton of work into the fundamental design and mansion layout, even had fully playable tests, but things fell through.

The new version is a collaboration with Hanada Yanochi. He has been grinding hard on NSFW art for a long time and wants to jump to a project he's more passionate about, but this has been background work for both of us. This is one of my limits: if I had a larger budget, I might have been able to hire him outright and finish this up as a little side project, but instead it has inched forward as we have time. He needs to maintain a pace on his own work that sounds frankly exhausting and, like most professionals, can't just abandon his steady work for new potential projects.

Which is not to say that nothing has been done. We have the main character models done along with a whole bunch of variations. Here's one example:

So what will ultimately come of this project? Hard to say. I still feel it has some good ideas, so hopefully at some point I'll be able to throw both financial and creative forces at this to finish it up. Maybe this can be one of my interim projects after I fully polish TLS.