Sorry for the large pause between updates, but progress spiked and then went sideways!

Introducing Incubus Delight: Lily’s Erotic Potion Garden! Coming soon to everyone!

The tentacle dungeon is still coming, but I hit upon a series of technical innovations during prototyping and pre-production work for the tentacle dungeon, and as a result, I've shifted focus for a short time. The result is that there will be 2 very small, almost tech-demo-esq games are in the works to put systems together and integrate in long-term planning and strategy into developing HMA as a proper game.

Let’s dive into these projects, starting with the first of the side-side projects:

Incubus Delight is a combination gardening sim and action rpg where you play as Incubus, a mysterious demon who was rescued by Lily on the verge of death and brought in to be her full-time gardener and sex friend to keep her company while she's bored running a shop!

The goal of this game is to save up enough gold so that he can travel the world, but in the meantime, Lily will have plenty of work for him as she makes potions from his harvests!

In terms of gameplay, this game will have a slower pace than the dungeon crawls, more reminiscent of the core gameplay loops of HMA, particularly this is a prototype of how gardening club may end up working in the future.

You wake up, care for plants, fight off the slimes and monsters that want to eat your plants, and then, when you're all tuckered out, you go inside and manage your energy by fucking your boss! (A dream job for many of us, a shame we aren't all feisty catgirl familiars who love fucking or have twelve-inch demon dicks and the need to feed off human energy via sex)

One of the core things this game will explore is also worldbuilding, in particular I've begun to flesh out the races of demons (Imps and Incubi both belong to the demon race), and Bunnygirls (a relative of the nekomatas, these are native to this new continent, a more wild area of the world that few have explored)

This may seem a bit superfluous, but the more I developed the more I realized that I can't properly write courses and classes in many areas yet because the content just isn't there yet. For HMA's academy to truely shine, it needs a world for it to study, and that's part of what these current projects aim to explore (as well as building out the core combat systems and dungeons for HMA!)

While prototyping, I hit upon a couple of things that are really exciting, in terms of both combat systems and life-systems. I found ways to pass and store data in the engine that shouldn’t be possible, and this will allow for so much.

One example that I'm really going to focus on here, and the easiest to explain, is multiple player characters.

These two new short stories are designed to explore these new technical improvements, starting with a new system I’m prototyping that will let me swap the player character around to allow for things like playing as party members, doing little role-playing quests while playing as them, and more!

To truly get this system working, I’m going to make this project follow a male, the next project a futanari, and then Lily’s proper tentacle dungeon (which acts as the first major dungeon in HMA) The goal here is to program a base layer that can handle the player character having a penis, a vagina, or both, and finally get some proper coding architecture into these basic layers to make things far more easily expandable.

In the combat side, I hit upon systems and methods to control targeting and aggro of enemies that I might be able to use to control how party members attack and defend, how the player interacts with flying or underground enemies, systems to run fire spread and have lightning magic interact with metals and water, ways to play erotic animations performatively and dynamically during combat, and more!

All of these systems are massive undertakings in their own rights, and I envision including them into Lily’s Erotic Tentacle Dungeon(and, by extension, into HMA proper), but I realized that it would be best to separate out these systems properly and develop on them for a bit of time before properly making the first dungeon for HMA.

After brainstorming for a bit, I decided that the best way to move forward was to create a small, very small project that explores just one subset of these systems. In this case, it’s a new core combat layer of exploiting weaknesses, a newly implemented day-night cycle plugin, plant growth and interactions, fire spread, enemy and ally aggro control, and more, via a small game about raising and protecting magical plants, fighting off enemies with magic and tools, and, finally, playing as a unique character so that the game will have to take that into account(so everything must be programmed to take into account your unique current player!)

In essence, I’m secretly building up to having proper futanarism for Olivia, as well as memory/dream style events where you can play as, say, Anya getting frisky with slimes, or Eillana exploring ancient ruins!

When I was developing pre-production for the tentacle dungeon, these new discoveries overwhelmed me. I wanted to do so, so much more than I originally planned... To the point where development was going to take 2-3 years at least to get there.

Instead I decided it was time for a change. This game follows a unique Incubus and his struggles living amongst humans, with Lily playing the role of mentor, and takes place at some point in the future of Lily’s adventures. 

It explores a region of the world that is little-known or explored, with the story starting in a small colony town along the coasts of this land, where Lily has chosen to set up shop to get adventuring and traveling funds!

The goal of this project, as well as the next one, is to limit my focus solely into the magical plants, enemies, and spells/skills, and really polish and iterate until all of these new systems, including the lighting engine, weather, time system, and more, and really make them shine so that I can focus on the dungeon-design and puzzles/combat for Lily’s Erotic Tentacle Dungeon.

The secondary goal of these projects is to vastly improve my iteration and speed with artwork and character design, so that I am no longer limited by my inability to make pixel art assets or new character designs and can properly build out new parts of the world freely.

This game’s goal and purpose is multi-faceted, but think of it as building the world of HMA out (as well as my tech stack!), and then getting proper feedback via releases to squash bugs and make sure the core systems are stable before finally spending a lot more time and focus on the proper dungeon itself, making it far better than it could be if I was focused on doing everything all at once.

I realized that, for the world of HMA to truly bloom, it needed a lot, and I mean a lot, more than just the small handful of enemies, plants, and encounters. It needs a wide variety of creature and encounters to make the magic you learn in the academy truly mean something in the world, and I intend to develop many of these interactions and enemies throughout the next two combat demos. (each of which is smaller than Lily's Erotic Potion Delivery was!)

As a result of technical improvements and iterations, Lily’s Erotic Tentacle Dungeon has been split into three unique projects, two smaller stories that iterate and get a baseline of interactions and systems, and then the dungeon itself that is the culmination of all of the world building, technical improvements, planning and iterations made over the past 6+ months of porting development into MZ.

Check it out and wishlist it on steam, but don't worry! As usual, patreons get first dibs on the demo and in-progress builds of the full game until release! (As soon as it's in a playable state for that.