New Game: Lust & Lead in development!

Hello everyone! It’s been a couple of months, but I’m finally happy to unveil this little project I’ve been working on: Lust & Lead.

The title originally started out as a working title until I could come up with something better, but the more I used it, the more it grew on me.

Lust & Lead is an erotic action-horror wave shooter with a retro visual style inspired by sixth-generation consoles. The gameplay takes a lot of inspiration from titles such as Killing Floor and Darkwatch.

You take on the role of Richard "The Revenant," a legendary gunslinger who earned his nickname thanks to his seemingly undying nature. No matter how many claimed they had finally gunned him down, Richard always came back... until one day, he didn’t.

But sometimes, legends refuse to stay buried.

Clawing his way out of the grave fifty years after his death, Richard awakens to find his home county of Bellemort consumed by monsters, cursed artifacts, treasure hunters and countless other horrors, all seemingly drawn to a singular, mysterious entity known only as the Shadow Queen.

Armed with nothing but his sharp tongue, trusty revolver and whatever firepower money can buy, Richard must carve a path through the horrors of Bellemort, uncover the truth behind his resurrection and confront the darkness. Along the way, he’ll make unlikely allies, dangerous enemies and encounter an array of terrifying female monsters. Some almost human... and some otherworldly.

Gameplay

Lust & Lead has a straightforward premise. Fight through waves of enemies, use the downtime between battles to buy weapons, explore and then prepare for the next encounter. Once the fighting is over, you return to the Saloon to purchase upgrades, catch your breath and meet the various characters you'll encounter throughout the game.

The goal is satisfying combat where careful movement, weapon choice and crowd control matter just as much as raw power. Richard may be undead, but he certainly isn’t invincible, and getting surrounded is a great way of getting sent back to the grave.

Fortunately, guns aren’t your only advantage. Throughout the game you’ll discover Artifacts that grant unique perks and abilities while you’re in the field. You can’t equip everything at once, though, so choosing which Artifacts to bring becomes part of your strategy and overall progression.

Beyond that, Richard also has another ace up his sleeve. Every enemy has a hidden stamina meter that, once depleted, causes them to stagger and become vulnerable to Purification. If you’ve played Sin Spire, you’ll already know what this means.

Purifying enemies restores Richard’s health, giving players a reliable way to recover while also granting additional bonuses. Unlike Sin Spire, however, there’s no timer or pressure to rush these sequences. Once a sequence begins, every enemy except those directly involved will freeze, letting you approach things at your own pace.

Development Goals

So, it’s been about two months since I started development on Lust & Lead, although the idea itself has been lingering around for a bit longer. When I travelled around Japan, I had just released Sin Spire and its first couple of patches. The next game I wanted to work on was a fairly large-scale departure from the horror genre, but I ultimately found myself coming back to this idea instead.

Essentially, I wanted to make something that felt focused and immediately fun, giving me the chance to experiment before jumping straight into a potentially multi-year development cycle. Wave shooters have always been a favourite genre of mine, and some of my earliest game development experiments were built around them, so in many ways this feels like returning to my roots.

Everything I’ve shown here is still very much a work in progress and subject to change. Unlike Sin Spire, I’m approaching Lust & Lead much more experimentally, treating it as a sandbox where I can prototype mechanics, test ideas and see what sticks rather than working towards a rigid set of specifications.

I’ll go over these developments and more in future Dev Logs, as I plan for the first few to essentially recap everything I’ve been working on over the past two months. It’s also worth keeping in mind that there are a lot of mechanics that I have planned that aren’t implemented yet. Even systems such as the Artifacts system aren’t actually in the game and are more of a concept at this point. I’ve been focusing almost entirely on refining the core wave gameplay loop, and at the moment there are only two enemy types.

The screenshots are mostly renders that I picked out to hopefully make a good first impression. That said, as I’ve mentioned, everything should be considered work in progress. For example, the zombies shown in the gameplay section all have the same character model, but I do plan to introduce more variation for them as they’re a fairly low-tier enemy that you’ll be seeing a lot of in the early game.

There are still a lot of things I don’t know about this project, and honestly, that’s one of the things I find most exciting. It means I get to bring you guys along for the journey, as sappy as that sounds. I’m very much open to ideas and feedback, and to help with that I’ll be opening dedicated discussion channels for Lust & Lead on the Discord server.

Things will get messy, and I can't promise a playable alpha anytime soon (just look at how long Sin Spire took for a rough idea of the timeframe), but I hope you'll enjoy following the development process regardless. Once I’ve built a strong enough foundation, the goal is for development to become much more about adding fun new content and working together with the community to shape the game.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling for now. The next round of rambling should arrive in the next couple of weeks as I plan to return to my usual bi-weekly posting schedule.

I hope you're all having a great summer, and I'll see you all next time!