Log inHouse of Hellish Harlots - Mid 2026 Roadmap
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
