Dev Blog #7 - 2025 Roadmap
Greetings everyone!
Today's dev blog is going to be a fun one, as we lay out the roadmap for Brothel in the Woods and The Company for 2025, and talk about some of the upcoming features in BitW! Settle in, this might go long.
The Roadmap
Below is an overview of what's coming from both games. After that, we'll dive in a little deeper and expand on what can be expected from these various phases.
Brothel in the Woods - Alpha Roadmap: (Now - July 2025)
- Complete all systems implementation with room for cleanup and improvement
- Introduce all major NPC's and their first round of quests (Claire and Saya, for example)
- Complete the first chapter of the Velvet Root quest line
- Add more items, quests, locations, enemies, images, etc.
- Expect to enter beta End of July 2025
Brothel in the Woods - Beta Roadmap: (July 2025 - December 2025)
- Enter beta once the above goals have been achieved
- Complete all quests and scenes for NPCs
- Complete Velvet Root quest line
- All systems are complete and stable
- All character endings added to game
- All quests, content, images, etc. added to game
- Free Play (NG+) added to game
- Expect to enter full release End of December 2025
Brothel in the Woods - Post Launch: (Q1 2026)
- Open more modding option where applicable
- Release modding / whore creation documentation
The Company - Backend Roadmap:(June 2025 - December 2025)
- Reevaluate and rebuild condition checks throughout the game
- Update code base, improving readability and efficiency and removing (lots) of depreciated functions and passages
- Update UI elements and identify QOL improvements
- Expect to re-release The Company January 2026
The Company - Release Roadmap: (January 2026 - December 2026)
- Start work on implementing Chapter 5
- Finish adding character content for characters lacking it
- Wrap up any remaining systems that need it
- Add endings and epilogues
- Expect to release The Company in H2 2026
Brothel in the Woods - Growing through Alpha
While we are nearly out of Alpha, there is still a lot of major work that needs to be done. What we're going to go over in this section are items that players should expect to see getting attention very soon.
Intro progression is still getting dialed in. Players are already getting creative with subverting the event flow in the game's opening, which is itself fine, but the issues that are arising from it need to be addressed. Expect another quest or two plus a handful of fail-safes added in to ensure that nothing gets missed or overlooked while starting your journey.
Character progression is also going to see a more defined change with the removal of Affection. Think less stat grinding and more confidants from Persona. Each romancable character will have their own series of quests for you, approximately 6 per character. These quests will unlock at various stages of the game, often relying on other milestones or objectives to be completed, and will offer gradually increasing rewards... particularly of the spicy variety. Of course, options will be in place to avoid being intimate with characters you don't care about in that way, so there's nothing to stop you from completing the game and reaping the clothing-mandatory quest rewards.
Combat and equipment re-balancing is a major priority, and will likely be the theme of the next major update. Combat itself feels pretty good, but lacks ability variety. Things like AoE, status effects, and enemy healing are all going to find their way into the combat system, hopefully making for a more dynamic experience, particularly when it comes to boss encounters. What doesn't feel good is spending half your MP to miss with an ability, that could do anywhere from 3 to 14,819 damage depending on RNG... this is getting addressed. Risk in combat shouldn't come down wholly to a bad die roll.
Equipment felt good on initial implementation, but has kind of petered out when it comes to progression. I don't want to speak too much to this as we're still evaluating options, but the way equipment works currently is going to get a complete rework to allow for more, and more types, of upgrades. Right now there's not a sense of "Oh cool I got a better weapon!" and getting that is critical.
Leveling up feels bad! I mean... I guess it doesn't really feel like anything right now... which is still bad, right? Leveling is, at present, a complete afterthought that we now need to address, and I'm excited to get into it! First, XP is being decoupled from characters completely, instead opting for a full on Pokemon XP Share system. Your party members, even the ones not in your party, will always be the same level as the MC. That's fine, basic stuff, the real meat is in giving players something to "do" with those levels.
Skill points will be given to each character with every level up, and can be used to increase base stats like Health and Mana, improve or augment abilities, and apply passive bonuses like weapon specializations and resistances. Some characters may even have leveling perks that apply out of combat bonuses like lowering food usage or increasing brothel functionality.
Navigation and gathering will also be seeing some improvements. It's already starting to get a little clunky trying to get around and with more dungeons coming soon that's something that will need to be address. The current plan is a sort of "world map" system, making it easier to jump around from your farmstead to the village to gathering sites, to dungeons. Gathering will also see a rework to make it less grindy, but more info on that will come later.
The Brothel itself will see some further expansion and upgrade options that will affect workers' trust, affection, health, and income. Speaking of income, both the numbers and the nightly report will see adjustments as the in-game economy expands.
Reese, the local slaver, will see actual functionality added. He will provide a way to acquire new non-story brothel workers, and give players a chance to recruit story workers that they may have passed on for some reason... at a steep cost, of course.
The Economy sucks, and also in the game, too! Everything above is going to have some impact on what you can spend all that gold the brothel is generating on, while still navigating your tenuous relationship with Samuel. New gear, weapon upgrades, building upgrades, various progression systems, will all be tied to gold with the intention being that players will need to set goals and have an idea where their finances are going every week. This will, of course, take some time to balance, but that's the intent.
Also... mail system, NPC dialogue expansion, party member management menu, and probably other stuff I missed!
Entering Beta and Release
Once systems are shored up in Alpha, we'll be entering Brothel in the Woods' beta era. This will see a major focus shift from gameplay to content, as characters all get their personal quest lines built and expanded, databases get filled in, more brothel workers are introduced, and the main questline is further established and completed.
Once all that's wrapped up, so too is Brothel in the Woods! Bugfixes and modding documentation will release soon after 1.0 does, and whether or not it gets officially maintained and expanded after that will fall mostly to the community. Regardless, with the release, The Company will make its way back into the spotlight.
The Company - Working Under the Hood
So for those who have been paying close attention, this won't be super illuminating, but right now the biggest thing holding back expansion and development of The Company is the fact that over the years of learning and stumbling, the game has become a tight, entangled web of mysteries... which sounds cool but super isn't.
To put it more plainly, if I wanted to add new scenes or change how something works, or even address bugs and issues, it means navigating a dark labyrinth of conditions and events that reference events that reference events that use a macro that was made for the one event that has to be referenced by... you get the idea. This specific complexity is further complicated by the game's inherent need to account for all possible MC and NPC states in any given scene, which is of course the game's bread and butter.
The only way to address this is to go in with a sledgehammer and start ripping out legacy, antiquated systems and functions, and rebuild the engine in a way that is presentably familiar (if not identical) but mechanically sustainable... and the only way to do that is too effectively halt development on the game entirely until renovations have completed.
Without the need to release steady updates for the game, this is a task that I'm now actually excited to tackle, time consuming and frustrating as I expect it to be. The end result is going to be a version of The Company that, from a developer point of view, actually MAKES SENSE for once. For the players, this translates into a way to quickly and easily introduce new content into the game, and identify where things are going wrong.
I expect this to be finished by the end of the year at the latest, which means 2026 is going to "start" with The Company going full bore on implementing Chapter 5, wrapping up character arcs, and introducing proper endings and epilogues to the game. You can expect dev blogs to drop from now til then going over progress being made to this end!
This has been a lengthy one, which is actually kind of comforting for those who remember how we operated from the beginning. I can't wait to share more on both games, and until then, thank you all for your continued feedback and support!