Greetings everyone!

This week has been spent shoring up established systems in Brothel in the Woods, such as stats, equipment, and combat, as well as implementing the new Dungeon system. All things considered, it's been a fairly successful week!

One of my personal focuses for Alpha 1.1.3, the latest development build, was to fix how jarring the scene transitions when dying or passing out were. That's been fixed, and the fact that the player is debuffed is much more obvious.

Additionally, active debuffs are now shown in the sidebar, and soon their effects will become more apparent when they fall off overnight.

Proper day tracking has been added to BitW in the latest update, meaning Samuel is now able to come collect taxes on Sundays.

Don't have the money? You'll have to find some other way to pay, or try your luck against Samuel's men in combat!

In addition to the above, more features are planned for the upcoming Alpha 1.1:

Speaking of Alpha 1.1, expect this to release to ALL backers at the end of this month, and to the public soon after that! Next week we'll have a more in depth dev blog going over everything being added in that update.

That's it for this week, look forward to a much longer post next Thursday! As always, thank you all for your continued feedback and support

Greetings everyone!

It’s been a week since launching the first public alpha build for Brothel in the Woods, and there’s been a ton of good feedback from both internal and external testing. I wanted to go over some of it today, while also discussing the focus of the next Alpha Release.

Firstly, I want to make it a point to keep any news concerning The Company circulating. At the moment, the community has already taken point and started working in the Discord to set up a git repo and start working through the code. I encourage anyone interested in modding, tweaking, and otherwise creating content for the game to check it out!

I’ll be making a return to the code myself in a few weeks, working on untangling the self-created mess over the course of the year to ensure smooth and rapid development next year. In the meantime, I’m excited to see what comes from the community!

Most of the feedback received so far has come in two flavors: Bug reports, which are being addressed as I can get to them, and balancing issues. Balance will be an ongoing endeavor in terms of enemy stats and equipment, stamina usage, and economy.

Alpha 2 will be overhauling the starting equipment options in the game, as well as making a few tweaks to combat calculations. Specifically, weapons now have weapon types and strength requirements, costs have been adjusted, and armor has been improved in terms of combat math. Additionally, critical hits are now tracked in combat. We’ll go more into combat in the next section, so stick around for that.

Stamina usage is something I’m keeping a close eye on, as it’s designed to limit the number of actions you can take in a given day while still making sense in terms of what’s needed where, Right now, it’s possible to have nearly infinite stamina in a day, and passing out from stamina loss feels both abrupt and non-consequential. Passing out (and player death) need a major adjustment in terms of both impact and communication, and will be a priority after getting the next feature off the ground.

Lastly is the economy. While we have plans for how this will look, until time and taxes are added to the game, this is a hard thing to track well in practice. Money shouldn’t be meaningless, and it will be a careful thing to balance especially as the brothel starts to grow. Gold and commerce will be the main focus of an upcoming update, and I’ll share more on that front as it develops.

Other feedback…

Finally, I wanted to share a couple major features coming with the next Alpha. Firstly, combat is being radically overhauled to become an automated affair. Rather than clicking dozens of times through multiple encounters hoping for cloth scraps, the entire combat is now simulated behind the scenes and summarized with a post-combat report. Some new visual flair has been added for engagement, and I think the new system will be much more respectful of peoples’ time. It also opened the doors to our next major update - Dungeons!

Dungeons are multi-floored instances found in the game world that contain combat encounters, treasure, boss fights, and story elements. The next Alpha will immediately introduce the Light Woods dungeon, a 5 floor excursion in the woods surrounding the player’s farmstead ideal for collecting animal meat, and the Bandit Camp off the road to the village for stocking up on cloth and gold.

Dungeons are identified by a unique button icon, and will have an upfront stamina cost to enter. All non-treasure loot collected within a dungeon is rewarded to the player after completing (or otherwise safely exiting) the dungeon. Dying in or fleeing the dungeon will forfeit your acquired goods, but you can always try again later.

The Forest Keep dungeon, a 10-floor dungeon to be introduced in a near future Alpha build, will offer up the game’s first boss enemy, as well as a new brothel worker and the introduction to trading and auction mechanics involving Reese in the village.

Dungeons are meant to be fun, lucrative, and replayable, offering incentive for exploring within the game world as areas are opened up to the player.

That’s it for this week! A new Alpha build will have already dropped for Dev Build testers around the time of this post that offers a first looking into dungeon testing, and it will be available to backers and followers in the near future.

Thank you all for your continued feedback and support!

Greetings everyone!

So… it’s been a while… Let’s get right into it!

Before I even get started, let me be clear that none of what I’m about to get into is meant to be some kind of excuse for my general absence over the last few months. I think some kind of explanation is still deserved though.

To put it plainly, last year was something of an unmitigated, unrelenting shit show.

We bought our first home, only to have it start to immediately start falling apart at the seams, all while getting hit with one financial emergency after another. The Company got taken down by Patreon, and while we recovered services quickly enough, the financial impact was substantial, adding to existing issues. At the end of 2023 we discovered we were a lot less of a “Jeffrey” and a lot more of a “Jennifer”, seemingly to the surprise of no one. While I’d never walk back on that, it came at the cost of much of my family, and in fact, my second marriage. The political climate in the US now, especially in a red state, has done me no favors either.

Towards the end of fall 2024, while attempting to add minor content to The Company, I found I could no longer even recognize my own project anymore, let alone manipulate it… cue the existential crisis and full blown breakdown.

At the very end of 2024, Haseo and I sat down and had a number of meetings to address the sorry state of The Company, and The Company’s developer. I’ve been trying to fight it for months, but at the end of the day there was no more denying that burnout and feature creep had finally taken their toll, and it couldn’t be ignored anymore. In my hands, in my condition, The Company was incapable of growth. For this reason, we made the decision to make three major announcements today.

After all the lead in, this should be the least surprising of today’s announcements. The Company is going into temporary maintenance mode likely through 2025. This is one of the most difficult and terrifying decisions I’ve had to make, but simply letting it coast without seeing any meaningful updates was a far worse option in my mind. Don’t be surprised to see occasional minor fixes get pushed, but the most recent update to The Company will be the last coming from “me” in 2025, segueing nicely into the second announcement.

Today, both here and in Discord, I will be providing a link to the complete source code directory for The Company. Every passage, feature, function, annotation, reminder note, and general fuck up will be yours to peruse in its fully decompiled form.

To any budding explorers, let me warn you - It’s bad. Think of it like a look through my journey as someone who could barely write code to… someone who can still barely write code but took some online classes. It’s a mess, but all the pieces are there, and with a simple TweeGo compiler script, you can generate and share your own builds of The Company.

In fact, just like image packs, modded versions of The Company are something we’d like to offer visible sharing for. Expect channels for it on the Discord server, as well as occasional featured content pieces for particularly ambitious ventures.

While it is my intention to see Chapter 5 finished, I don’t want that to stop the community from having fun with the engine and innovating in the meantime!

Now, the final announcement of the day is a big one.

I’ve already mentioned how The Company has been an incredible, if not sometimes painful, learning experience when it comes to writing and coding. In a similar matter, it’s also felt extremely confining. That is, for everything new I learn, I see missed opportunity when it comes to the project I’m attached to. It would become a daily conversation in my head that, if I could just start over…

I think this is common among creators, obsessing over their next project, thinking about how they could apply all their gained knowledge.

So, during our meetings, the decision was also reached that by temporarily shelving The Company, it would mean redirecting all resources towards something new. We spent most of January this year in the planning phase, making sure that this next project would be something we could actually maintain a reasonable scope with. Something that could allow for some level of user generated content, and most importantly, something that would actually see the light of day in a realistic time frame.

Then I started writing.

This is Brothel in the Woods, an amalgamation of ideas from a number of whiteboarded projects including parts of what was going to be The Company 2.

While The Company focused on branching story arcs, and character and player transformation, Brothel in the Woods will offer a much more linear story, but with many more management and RPG features.

After creating your character and selecting from one of three story backgrounds, you’ll find yourself in a run-down shack in the middle of the forest. Repairing your little shack will take resources found in the woods which will need to be processed into crafted goods. Enemies can appear in dangerous areas, but drop loot and XP.

Brothel in the Woods, henceforth BitW, uses a stamina system to limit your actions in a day. Stamina can be recovered in various way, mostly through eating, but you’ll be penalized if you pass out before making it home. Gaining XP allows you to level up your character, potentially increasing their maximum stamina.

You’ll eventually find your way to the nearby village, where new characters can be met, interacted with, and romanced! As far as romance options go, you’ll have your pick of three men and three women, and one upcoming non-binary character. Interacting with these characters can increase their affection towards you, resulting in a few romantic, and a few more spicy, scenes. They may even offer to upgrade your brothel in some way!

The star of the show is converting your run down shack into a thriving brothel. After working your way through part of the story and amassing enough materials, you’ll find yourself in charge of running your own brothel! Now, this isn’t The Pit - workers aren’t randomly generated datasheets, but rather real characters you’ll meet and recruit in the game. What’s more, is that all brothel workers are loaded from external JavaScript files, meaning new brothel workers can be created and shared by the community right out of the gate.

Your workers can be assigned tasks, promoted in the village, or even “hired” for professional services, free of charge to the owner, of course.

At the end of every night, you’ll get a report on what each of your workers was up to that evening, and take in a reasonably hefty chunk of change for their efforts as well!

Honestly though, I feel like I’m spoiling a lot here, which is dumb considering the game’s first Alpha build is complete and available to everyone right now! This version of the game will also launch with three builtin image pack options - The recommended artwork, pictured above, is set as the default. Additionally, our community manager Haseo has provided both a live-action and hentai option that can be switched to and from, straight from the sidebar in game!

Updates for BitW will be coming out often starting today, both in the form of semi-frequent dev builds for people who don’t mind their toys kinda broken, monthly backer releases, with public releases trailing behind those.

New channels will be open on the Discord to discuss The Company source code and, of course, Brothel in the Woods.

I haven’t been this excited to be behind the keyboard in a long time, and I hope you all enjoy the ride with me!

Greetings everyone!

It's been a little while since a dev blog made the rounds, and there's an update looming on the horizon, so let's get into it!

So I wanted to go ahead and lead with this since it will be pretty impactful when it happens. After years of going back and forth with the current host for the official website, I've finally decided to throw in the towel. Issues with downtime, Wordpress, backend complications have been worsening over time, and with the renewal on the host coming up I've made the decision to go ahead and not continue with the site.

The alternative server, which has been rock solid for a long time now, is going to become the new primary server, and with it a new address.

You can now play The Company at thecompanygame.games!

DevBlogs will remain here and on our SubscribeStar, as well as the Discord server. We'll be cleaning up links to the old site over the next week or so.

For those who play on the current primary server, if you want to bring your save file over to the new server by exporting it to disk (enable Desktop Mode in mobile) and loading it into the game when playing on the new site. If you don't intend to bring your save over, or if you're playing the local downloaded version, you have nothing to worry about!

We expect this changeover to be finalized by the end of the month.

The end of May should see with it the release of Update 5.9.1, a followup to last month's update that will complete Penny's available content.

This will include all serum route content, new conversations and events, and MCSX content for Penny. Additionally, we'll be using this update as a way to set up John's "Dom John" route epilogue, bringing The Company's first real ending into the game!

We're looking at releasing our first dev build for Update 5.9.1 this week, if not very early next week.

That's it for this dev blog! We'll have more to share about our next update AND our next project in the upcoming development blog, so definitely look forward to that. As always, thank you all so much for your continued feedback and support.

Greetings everyone!

As I'm sure most of you have noticed, The Company is currently involved in ironing out some issues with Patreon. Now that the situation is becoming a little more clear, it's time to sit down and talk about it!

What Happened?

Simply put, Patreon finally decided to put our project on it's Trust & Safety radar, leading to the determination that the project violates its policies. Moves to adhere to their policies have involved purging old posts, modifying the opening sections of the game slightly, and severing ties the Patreon page has to services such as Discord and the official website.

What's Currently Happening?

We've made the requested changes and are now waiting for the appeal to go through. I don't know how long the process takes, but so far the agent I'm working with has been reasonably communicative. Ideally this will be resolved sooner than later and we can all go back to normal, but there's no real way of knowing at this point.

How Will This Affect The Community?

Things like Discord server roles that came from Patreon might be a little wonky in the transition, and Patreon will no longer be a source of news or downloads for the time being. As you can see, we are currently migrating over to SubscribeStar completely, and implore the community to follow us there! The official website will still continue to operate normally, though the Patreon integration may prove burdensome for the time being.

How Will This Affect The Company?

A couple of things are happening. Firstly, depending on negotiations with Patreon, you will likely see a slightly modified version of The Company on offer for online gameplay, in fact you may have already seen them. These changes are surface level with no meaningful impact to the game itself, though I would expect a SubscribeStar exclusive version of the game without modified content.

Secondly, the previous roadmap is definitely going to be impacted by this, as resources are being diverted to handle it, as well as damage control. Expect a Penny update out by the end of this month, as planned, but the next development cycle will likely be in flux. So long as we can get back on our feet quickly, there are no plans to end development for The Company, with H1 2025 still be a target completion date.

How Will This Affect The Developer?

I've never come out and asked the community for help before, as none of you owe me a thing while I owe the world to you. That said, if I'm being completely honest, I'm scared. This project pays for the room over my family's head and the food in our fridge, and to have Patreon rip the rug out from under me, possibly for good, is abjectly terrifying.

What I will ask my current supporters, is that if you are currently supporting The Company on Patreon, to please consider moving that support over to our SubscribeStar page. The pricing tiers are all identical to what they are on Patreon, and offer all the same bonuses and benefits. There's, unfortunately, going to be major impact no matter what, and making that one switch over will help to drastically reduce it.

Moving Forward

That's basically the long and short of it. For now, development will continue as normal, though some content priorities may get rearranged a little. The Discord and the official website will still operate as they always have, and we'll all continue to move forward and see this game through to completion!

As always, thank you all for your continued feedback and support. Let's all make this a great new era for The Company!