This week saw a new release for House of Hellish Harlots [text] that added the Imp Harem to the House. This is a pretty big waypoint as the Imps were the last of Round 5 elites. With them in place I can finally start to move to next stages such as upping the number of playable rounds, correctly zoning the harlots (so dangerous high-tier harlots don't show up in Round 1), and finally put a proper public demo out for the art version of HoHH.

My plan for HoHH [art] was to use the Round 5 elites as temporary endbosses for a demo that only runs to 5 rounds. There is still a fair bit of work to be done here as I need to port the 5 elites over, finish off the notebook code for them and the rest of the low-tier harlots, and generally add a little more polish so I can put it up on places like itch.io without it looking like crap. I'll leave off talking about that for now. I've got a big TODO list and I'll keep chipping away at it while writing the Round 9 elites.

HoHH [text] is where I'd like to focus on for this post.

The text version is in an awkward spot. It would make sense to pause development and put all my attention on the art version. I think it's going to be a while before I've ported all the harlots over, especially if giving them notebook functionality as well, so I think the text version is still the best place to release new harlots, and I think they will eventually all go in here and it will be given a proper ending where the player survives the last queen and earns their freedom.

What I shouldn't do is add new features to HoHH [text]. The two codebases have diverged enough that trying to add anything fancy to both is a recipe for disaster. At this point I don't want to make any changes to HoHH [text] that muck about with the core code. Adding range boundaries for the harlots is fine. This was implemented from the very beginning and is just a minor change to the init data for each harlot.

The Round 9 elites will work a little differently in the text version. My plan was to have their sub-scenarios unlocked after receiving clues from harlots in preceding rounds. I'm not going to mess with existing harlot scenarios, so for the text version the player will just get a choice of all 3 (or randomly 2 of 3) right from the outset.

One thing I will add is additional lore drops from The Barman, Elegant Woman and (maybe) The Madam. This will add background to each of factions within the House as well as giving the player hints on what is needed for each faction route.

At the moment I have 3 release tasks lined up for the text version.

1) Add the arachne high-priestess of smothering Round 9 elite.

2) Add the nautical huntmistress + aquatic hounds Round 9 elite.

3) Raise the playable round cap to 8. This will require a couple of things:
- Setting the round boundaries for the existing harlots (1-4 for mid-tier, 5 for the elites, 6+ for everything else). The player will still be able to select them outside of their range by talking to the Madam.
- Adding the faction lore the player can learn from The Barman. Maybe also The Madam, but she will be evasive and her information unreliable. This is to keep the NPCs to their designated roles – Elegant Woman for individual harlot information, The Madam to set up socialising with harlots, and The Barman for overall information on the House and its factions.

3 is probably a pretty small release. I want to get back to putting a harlot out every month, and as the rough drafts of two of the Round 9 elites are already written, that should be doable. If I have it ready, I'll bundle 3 in with one of the elites. If an elite isn't ready by the end of the month, I might make 3 the release for that month.

Currently my plan for August is to write the Kitsune Courtesan rough draft and add the Nautical Huntmistress to the House.

If I get a chance, I'll also keep chipping away at adding notebook implementation for the remaining low-tier harlots in the art version of HoHH.

And that should keep me busy for the next month or two. Pop any questions down below.

As we're at the midpoint of 2026, it's a good time to put out one of these.

I can't really sugarcoat it – between the 2025 roadmap and this one I definitely got lost in the woods a little. Some of that was to take time off to get a new book out, and some of that was adding new features that will improve the final game a great deal, but development is definitely taking a bit too long. The project is teetering along the edge of becoming one of those forever Patreon monster girl projects and I need to make a big push to get a 1.0 finished version out.

Here's what still needs to be done to put out a 1.0 version to my satisfaction:

WRITING
This slowed up markedly when I hit the Round 5 elites. While the Imp Harem did suffer from me hitting a block, there is only one sub-scenario remaining, so it shouldn't take too long to finish off when I get back to it.

Round 9 Elites.
To avoid the same problems as the Round 5 elites, I've cut these down to 3 sub-scenarios and I've launched myself at them in an attempt to get as much done of them while I'm in a relatively "hot" writing mood. The Faction 1 scenario is written and I'm in the middle of the Faction 5 scenario. I'm also hoping to get the Faction 3 scenario written fairly soon as well. That leaves the 2nd and 4th faction harlots. I'm still figuring out what their scenarios are going to be. If I can break the back of the Round 9 elite writing, that will be very close to taking the overall writing to the finish line.

Queens
I'm planning these to be more linear than the elites. Depending on the player's choices on a run the scenario might end swiftly with a Horror End, a more pleasant Bad End, and maybe even all the way to a game-winning Good End escape by the player. Writing them is also going to be a big chunk of work, but because of their more linear nature, they should be just smaller than the Round 9 elites in terms of word count. Once I'm up to writing these, the writing part of the game will be pretty much close to the finish line.

Regular Harlots
There are only 5 slots left. These are just regular harlot scenarios, so they should not (hopefully!) tie me up too long. I mostly have their mechanics and scenes sorted out in my head.

Team-Ups
I did have ideas for harlot team-ups. The project has been in development for too long though. I'm not going to ditch them, but I will move them to after a 1.0 release and treat them the same as adding new factions after the 1.0 release (I have ideas to split Faction 5 into two factions and also add a leech and vampire faction).

Nurse Honey
Nurse Honey's scenario is fairly integral to the game, so that is still going to be added before a 1.0 release.

Overall, it's still a fair bit of writing to do, but as I'm now making good inroads into the Round 9 elites, it feels like I'm finally getting near the end.

MECHANICS
A small section covering the remaining game mechanics (in the abstract sense rather than the programming sense).

Round 9 Elites
I have a nice mechanic for these. The sub-scenarios are unlocked depending on clues the player has picked up in previous rounds. These clues will need to be seeded, but as I already have a system in place to handle harlots giving hints on other harlots, this can use that, so it should require minimal changes to existing scenarios.

Queens
I still haven't finalised their mechanics. The way they'd be done in the old Fighting Fantasy books is the player would reach the end-boss and then be faced with a checklist of clues or items they needed to have found throughout the adventure. Given there is a lot of RNG with what harlots are encountered, I'm thinking of using some form of hidden score system similar to the faction affinity system already in place. (I might even just use this, but add more points to the scoring depending on how the scenario went.)

Post-/Pre-Room Events
This is the last additional mechanic I'm thinking of adding. For each of the pre- and post-room phases, the player has a limited number of actions they can make. Post-room is a little bare as currently they can only talk to The Elegant Woman or The Portly Gentleman. I want to add some random events here that might have beneficial or negative effects, but will most importantly give the player more clues/information on the various harlots and faction lore.

I've held off adding this as writing the individual harlots is more important. I think it should be in the 1.0 version, so I will sneak some work on it at some point. On the positive side, I'm going to keep it fairly simple. Each event will be very short – barely more than a page. It's something I hope to get done in about a week and then keep sneaking in more events in future as I think of them. The main requirement is they need to be short. If I start to find I'm writing more than 2 pages in my notebook for each, this idea is getting shit-canned quickly!

IMPLEMENTATION
This is the actual coding. Pretty much all the core coding is in place, with one notable exception…

Harlot Notebook/Replay Mode/Autosave
This probably scares me the most. Replay mode and autosave are trivial to add. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts to streamline the process, the harlot notebook parts have remained fiddly to implement and test. With hindsight I should have held this feature off to a HoHH 2. However, my fear was that without some kind of progression system, players would quickly lose interest on dying and being forced to go through the same early rounds again, which would result in the game failing and never even getting to a HoHH 2. As it is, I've implemented enough of it that's it probably better to push through to the end rather than turning around and ripping the existing code out.

The good news is that after a couple of false starts, the underlying code library for the clues is done and pretty stable. It's just fiddly and time-consuming to add to each harlot. The main issue is I need to focus pretty hard on it while doing it, otherwise I make dumb mistakes and then it takes even longer to implement and test. Those periods are really uninteresting to patrons, who'd understandably rather see me write more succubus smut than fuck around with a feature where the benefit won't be fully seen until the game is finished.

I think this problem is only with the low-tier harlots already in the art version of HoHH. When it comes to adding the mid- and high-tier harlots, adding their notebook sections will be part of the porting process. It will be less boring to patrons as they'll be seeing regular releases with the new harlots entering HoHH 1.5 with their pinup and H-scene art.

Adding it to the current low-tier harlots is very boring for patrons. Thankfully I'm over the halfway point with them. I just need to have something lightweight running at the same time so it doesn't look like I've locked myself in my room and done nothing but code for two months. I think typing up the Imp Harem and Round 9 elites might qualify for this, so I'll be planning to do both of these together for the 3rd quarter of the year.

Porting Harlots to HoHH 1.5
Aside from the notebook fiddliness, this is very straightforward. Once I get the Round 5 elites into HoHH 1.5, the basic harlots should follow very quickly and I'll finally be able to start pushing the number of playable rounds up.

Custom Routes to Rooms
This is partially implemented already to account for harlots like Eve Satana, where the scenario takes place on a stage rather than upstairs in a room. I'll also extend it to other harlots that have weird rooms.

However, the main purpose will be to add a "skip" check. If the player has fully unlocked the harlot's notebook and meets the conditions for a Good End (right stats/gift), the game will give them the option to fast-forward right to the end of the scenario. This should solve the problem of the player getting bored of going through the same early-round harlots over and over.

Version control with autosave
I don't want the player to reset progress every time I put a new release out. I think this might not be as hard to implement as I was fearing. I've already separated the persistent vs run data, so the old versions should include the new harlots the moment the player starts a new run. It might get tricky if I need to change persistent data in a player's save.

Prebuilt Player Characters
I want to add pre-built player characters for the player to select. These will be the usual stereotypes – the Jock, the Priest, the Scientist, etc. They will have preset stats. There will still be the option to create a completely random character. This shouldn't be too difficult to implement.

Proper Tutorial and First Run
The intro is close to working fine as is. What I'd like to do is make the first run a proper tutorial run that fully explains the various mechanics. The way I've seen other roguelites do this is stagger the introduction of the various NPCs so the player doesn't get overwhelmed. Now that the game has persistent data saved between runs, this can be used to make the first run a special case with fixed harlot choices and the "vendor" NPCs being introduced one-by-one (Elegant Woman before round 1, Doctoress before round 2, Buxom Lolibaba before round 3, and finally Nurse Honey before round 4). This would only apply to the first run. For subsequent runs the game would detect the player has already played the tutorial and make every NPC available from the start.

It would be a nice feature to have, but is not currently a priority. It comes more under Polish, which I'll talk about below.

ART

Pinups and H-scenes
I want every harlot to at least have pinup art for the 1.0 release. Currently (because writing slowed down dramatically while I slogged through the Round 5 elites), every written harlot has pinup art. Marwmellow will likely be able to keep pace with the 15ish harlots left to add, so this should be achievable.

H-scenes will depend on what commission time was left and which were adopted by patrons. I don't expect all the harlots to have full H-art by the time a 1.0 version is done. Finances permitting, I will continue to commission H-art to be added after the 1.0 version is out.

AI Stuff (backgrounds and animations)
I know some people hate it, but realistically it's the only way I can fill in the gaps. The backgrounds will be AI-generated. I have limited funds. Those would be expensive to commission and I think it's better if I use my limited budget on commissioning more sexy H-art instead. Periodically I'll generate new backgrounds or edit the existing ones until I'm happy. Same for the animations. It's not something I'm going to spend a major amount of time on. This is where gen-AI is a good fill-in tool as – while not as good as a human artist – it can plug those gaps with minimal time and money investment.

AI Stuff (icons)
The charm cards came out well. No need to replace them. The ailment and potion icons need work. That's more for the Polish section below. I think the UI is fine apart from needing something to replace the placeholder art for the semen gauge.

SOUNDS/MUSIC
This is very low-priority. I don't think I can release HoHH with no sounds/music at all, but I'm not going to allow myself to get too distracted here. I think I'll be raiding the same open-source music packs all the other Japanese H-games use and just have something vaguely appropriate play in the background of each section.

I'll probably add the classic semen spurt sound effect as well if I can find it. That will be about as far as I go though.

POLISH
This is extra things I think I need to do to make HoHH look a more polished game. Thankfully, none of these changes are major and are mostly just tweaks I can work on when I have spare moments.

Title Page and Start Menu
The title screen looks pretty good. I'd like to add a little animation to show the curtains swing open as the player enters the game.

I'd also like that start menu to look a little less bare. Maybe a fancy font and pretty background. Not high priority at the moment, but something that will need to be done at some point.

Shop screens
The layout of these is already fine. I just need a little extra polish for the "buy" buttons and nicer art for things like the Sold Out overlay. Again, not high priority, but something I'll fiddle with when I have a spare moment.

Tutorial
I've mentioned it already, but it maybe belongs down here as a low priority tweak to be done when there's a spare moment.


And I think that covers everything. It might look a lot, but it's not as much as has already been done on the project (about 85 different harlot succubi and monster girls and something like 500K+ words of writing). The core code is pretty much all in place. The two big remaining tasks as I see it is to finish the writing for the remaining scenarios and to get the rest of the notebook implementation done for the low-tier harlots. Porting the harlots over from the text version and giving them notebook functionality might also be a good chunk of work, but those will at least give me regular releases of "new" material to give patrons confidence the project is moving forwards.

One thing I don't like is that a lot of this roadmap is the same as the last roadmap I put out. I underestimated how much both the Round 5 elite harlots and notebook implementation would slow me down. While I was originally planning to take a month or two off to get a new collection out, I think I might hold that back and focus on getting the two major chunks of outstanding HoHH work out of the way (the writing and notebook implementation). While HoHH overall is looking far better than I initially thought it would, it has been in development for a while now. I need to make that final big push to get it to a 1.0 release.

- manyeyedhydra

(Pt 1, covering the writing, is here.)

We're getting near the end of August, so I thought I'd drop part 2 of my mid-2023 roadmap for House of Hellish Harlots.  The first concerned the writing left to do, which originally was all HoHH was going to be.  Since then I've experimented with Twine enough to improve the display and add art.  It now looks closer to a regular game.  Despite this, text will be the focus, and the project will remain 'words words words' plus the occasional picture to brighten things up.

This is what I think I need to do, or rather commission other people to do:

ART
This can be divided into 5 areas:
- Title Screen + Logo
- UI
- Harlot pinup art
- Character Portraits
- Backgrounds

TITLE SCREEN
I have some ideas - either the exterior of the House, or maybe curtains across the stage.  Either way, I'll need to find an artist for it.  I tried the AI art approach... and it wasn't good.  One option could be to reuse harlot art.  A lot of DLSite games take this approach where they cut and paste a mob of sprites from the game on the cover.  I need a background and I need some nice titles spelling out the name of the game.

UI
This is the collection of icons at the top left of the screen (and top right, if you're playing on mobile).  It displays various player stats ('health', round number, money) as well as buttons to bring up the character sheet or sav/load menu.  I cobbled it together out of various bits of AI art.  It's functional and does the job of presenting that information to the player, but it isn't good.  Getting someone to redo the art and integrate it all within a nice panel (maybe curtains, maybe a batwing) is a high priority.

HARLOT PINUPS
If I had infinite money and resources, the ideal version of HoHH would have animations for every different sex act carried out by every harlot.  Sadly, I don't have infinite money and resources.  HoHH also has a lot of characters, way way more than a typical hentai monster girl game.  What I'm going to try to do is commission a single pinup for each harlot.  Even that will likely be expensive as HoHH will probably end up with around 100 harlots.  I've put enough funds aside to start the ball rolling, but will likely need to look for additional funding at some point to avoid being left dangerously out of pocket.  Any suggestions there welcome.  Maybe higher subscription tiers?  An adopt-a-harlot push for patrons/subscribers to directly fund their favorites?

I have started negotiations here with an artist for the first pieces.  Fingers crossed that will prove fruitful.

CHARACTER PORTRAITS
This is one area where AI art seems to be fine.  Female NPCs will get overhauled when I commission pinups for their scenarios.  I might just leave the car NPCs and Portly Gentleman as is.

BACKGROUNDS
Backgrounds is also an area where the AI art is adequate.  Ideally I'd like to replace them with proper art, and might need to do this if I want to put the game on Steam.  It will come down to resources.  I'd rather focus the limited funds on creating nice harlot art, especially as the backgrounds will likely be more expensive to commission.  If fundraising goes really well, and there's money left over, maybe...

OTHER
There are also a few other potential areas to add art/graphics.  This would be for the vendor NPCs - charms, potions and ailment cures.  It would be better if the player was selecting from a point'n'click shelf of icons rather than a list of text.  The same is true for gift selection before entering the harlot's room.

I have some ideas there and might experiment.  I put these as weak maybes.  Maybe for a hypothetical HoHH 2.

SOUNDS?
Music and sound fx is something I haven't put much thought to.  Maybe the stock ejaculation sound.  Maybe some ambient background noise.  Maybe the same stock music every RPGMaker monster girl H-game seems to use.

I'm not going to put any thought to it for now.  If the game project starts shaping up to be good enough for something like a Steam release, I probably should add some sounds and music.  Everything else is a higher priority at the moment, so it's off the table until it needs to be on the table.

CODING
The core game logic is pretty much all in place.

What might be needed is a bit of optimisation and polish - for instance delaying showing text of a new area until the background jpg has finished loading in.  I'll try to figure this out myself, but at some point might need to get an expert in to iron out the last wrinkles.

I might also need a second pair of eyes when it comes to packaging the game up as a game on Steam or app on mobile.  That's uncharted territory for me, and I'd be terrified of fucking up something basic.


Anyway, that's an approximate roadmap for the fancier parts of HoHH.  The ideal goal is a fully complete game I can release on Steam/DLSite.  However, I'm also aware a lot of monster girl hentai games have big ambitions and then end up becoming bogged down and never finishing.  If I feel I'm out of my depth and it's not something I can realistically do, I'll pare it back down to a simple text project with the odd picture to brighten things up.

This is a little vaguer as it covers aspects I'm not going to be in personal control of.  If you want clarification or further details, ask away below. 

Time to take stock of where I'm at with House of Hellish Harlots.  I figured I'd put a couple of roadmaps, one focusing on the writing side of things (which I'll be doing) and the other on plans for art and other assets (which I'll need to outsource and pay for).

First off with the writing and this is going to focus on the harlots.

Regular Harlots
Currently there are 74 harlots completed and present in the House, some with multiple scenarios.

There are 8 regular harlot slots left to fill.  Of those, one is a repeat scenario (Assphyxia), two are in progress (poison frog, forbidden smotherer), and two are roughly planned out (Sister Squeeze, a wide-eyed 'waif' succubus).

That leaves 3 slots.  Two of those I'm thinking of throwing open to patron polls to give an existing harlot in the faction (sensuality and classic) a repeat visit and different scene.  That leaves one slot open in the 'classic succubus' faction.  I'll fill that once I get a cool idea that fits (another performance in the bar or Sandy's tormentor are currently floating around)

I'd also like to add another neutral harlot that will basically be a rewrite of elements of Nicole's waterbed massage scene from "Locked in with a Succubus"

That's the minimum count of regular harlots to add.  Because of how the project is designed, I can add more than that, and new factions as well, but that will wait until after a version 1.0 is out.

Mini-Boss Harlots
Now we come to the mini-boss harlots that show up in rounds 5 and 9.  These are more powerful members of their respective factions.  They will likely be harlots with 3-5 different scenes.  This is to give them some repeat playability as the player will need to go through them multiple times to experience all their scenes.

Of those I need 10 - 2 per faction.

Of that 10 I have 7-8 roughly planned out in my head.  Current ideas include Temptacia (finally!), a slime nun, a latex-weaving arachne, an artificial scylla, a harem of imps, a fluffy-tailed kitsune, and Amoebella Glup.  The tentative 8th might be a nautical-themed huntmistress.

This leaves 2 mini-bosses for me to figure out.

Faction Queens
Lastly we have the end-bosses, or queens, for each faction.  This is the round 13 encounter and determines the overall game ending.  They will also have multiple sex acts, but will likely be sequential and how much the player sees will likely be determined by some kind of 'devotion' attribute.

I have pretty solid ideas for 3 of the queens.  I have a name for the smother queen, but haven't figured out what she is yet.  Classic succubus is still wide open.  That might be The Madam, but I also have other thoughts on where to use her.

Lore
I'll also need to give the 3 lore NPCs (Barman, Madam and Elegant Woman) enough dialogue to guide the player through the later rounds.

Writing-wise, this is the bare minimum I need to complete the game to a 1.0 release.

There are, however, a few things I really want to add, and probably will add unless I feel the project is dragging on and needs to be brought to a conclusion.

These are:

Post-room random events
These are just randomly occurring events that might provide bonuses, hindrances, or advance some side quests.

I want them, as I think they'll improve the game, but they're also not essential.

Harlot team-ups
I have ideas for letting a couple of harlots double-team a player.  These might be related to side quests that result in the player unlocking an alternative round 9 encounter for a particular faction.  Ones I have rough ideas for are Mamilla & Assphyxia, Calliophi & her sister, Aphrou and Sapoonis, and the two huntmistresses.

NPC scenarios
Originally, I was thinking these would belong to a different faction and be a regular or mini-boss encounter from that faction.  The Doctoress is a clear fit for the artificial beings faction, then it gets messy.  Elegant Woman, Madam and Buxom Lolibaba all probably want to be in the 'classic succubus' faction and I can't really see Nurse Honey belonging to any faction other than her own.

I don't think I can tease Nurse Honey in the game and not let her do anything sexy, so she will definitely get a scene, and will probably be a severe late-game threat to the player on most playthroughs.

As for the others... I want to give them scenes, but it's working out where to put them.

This is what is needed for the writing.  There's still a fair bit to do, but I estimate I'm around the 75% done mark.  This ended up being a bigger project than originally planned because I put more into the individual harlot scenarios.  They are better as a result, but each is the length of a short story and takes about the same amount of time to write.

Despite this, I've kept a fairly steady release schedule.  I understand people have concerns about overly ambitious Western eroge projects never getting finished, so I hope this - and my release-every-month schedule - will reassure them that I do work on this in a professional manner and do have a clear endpoint in mind.

Thank you for the continued support and I hope you're enjoying how the project is developing.

Next week, or once I've completed the HoHH1.5 demo with all the art assets, I'll go over what's needed for the newer version with art I've been tinkering with.