2025 Recap

Ugh, this is a couple of days later than planned. Normally I don't do much for the holidays, so I'm able to carry on working through mostly unchanged. This year was a little busier and then I've been knocked on my ass by whatever flu bug is floating around, making the holiday season a bit of a trainwreck.

A metaphor for the year?

It's been a strange one. Normally, if I'd deviated that much from the original plans, I'd think things went wrong somewhere, but overall I think I had a pretty good year.

First, let's start with the good stuff. I finally put that 7th collection of short stories out. That's been on the todo list for a long time. Some of the collection-exclusive stories were started so long ago, the real-life politicians hinted at in the stories aren't even in politics anymore. Given how long ago I started work on "Incall with a Succubus", "Mage vs Succubus Slime" and "A Succubus for Social Justice", it felt good to finally drag them off the in-progress pile and finish them.

I knew the collection would be difficult to put together. My plan was always to have this one be the collection that started to tie the various threads together and explicitly show all the characters are existing and interacting in the same setting, and there is a larger story taking place. I think A Succubus for Social Justice accomplishes this and I hope readers enjoyed some of the revelations.

It did require a lot more work to write as a result. In the end, brand new content accounted for about half of the word count and I also needed to write and add an additional new short story as well (which allowed Kiki Sumoppai to escape the House and show off her special talents). This meant that rather than taking a month off to write it, it was probably closer to two months. I don't mind this so much. It meant I didn't use as many from my stockpile of short stories and that I pretty much still have enough to put out an eighth collection next year. That won't be as complex to put together and should only need 3 new short stories, one of which I've already written. I'll talk about that more in a "Plans for 2026" post I'm planning to put out, flu permitting, at the end of the week.

The one thing I did underestimate was the time required to edit, format and basically put the manuscript together and upload to Amazon and other ebook retailers. One of the major pain points of 2025 is I'm clearly wearing too many "job" hats that are dragging me away from just doing the writing. Unfortunately, I'm not making enough to hire people in to help with that (and I've heard enough horror stories with editors and publishers to question whether it's even that helpful to hire unknowns for those roles). As I will be stuck with doing everything myself, I think I need to be a little more realistic with the time needed for those other activities. Even though I don't need to write many new stories for the 8th collection, I think I should set aside two months for working on it – one month for the new material, and the second month for the various editing, formatting and uploading-to-Amazon tasks.

On the other positive note, that fiddly formatting work did also include getting proper print manuscript versions prepared for my old ebooks. I'm currently slowly commissioning marwmellow to draw new cover art for the old collections, and as that comes in I will be finally getting print paperback versions of them out for people who prefer to physical over ebooks.

And from the side project to the major ongoing project – House of Hellish Harlots.

And first, we'll start with the bad. Originally, I was planning to get stuck into the harlot elite encounters and I was hoping I'd be nearly done with the round 9 elites by this point and thinking about the end-game queens. New harlot scenario writing pretty much slowed to a crawl this year to the point marwmellow has nearly caught up with pinup art for all the harlots.

The slime smother nun was the only new one I wrote this year. If your only interest is the text-only version and new harlot scenarios to read, this year didn't have a lot for you, for which I apologise. The elite scenarios are fairly complex to write and even though I've been working on HoHH for longer than I initially planned, I don't want to start rushing everything to get it done (and end up with the later elite and queen scenarios feeling like Lost Izalith from Dark Souls). If each needs to be 10K words, I will write 10K words and have the harlot give the player a truly elite experience!

While the text-only version lagged, the art-version of HoHH (1.5) is forging ahead into areas I never expected a Twine game to go. I put more work into the CSS/html, gave a few NPCs proper shop displays, and now I think that version of HoHH is starting to resemble a proper low-budget indie game. With the help of some patrons "adopting" harlots, I've even started commissioning proper H-scene art (which can be seen in the screenshot accompanying this post). HoHH has moved on a long way from its initial text-only beginnings!

Generative AI, while controversial, has opened up some possibilities. While I was already using it for placeholders and less-critical artwork such as backgrounds and some icons, the technology has expanded into being a fairly useful backup tool. I think human artists are generally superior, so the more important harlot pinups and H-scenes will continue to be commissioned from humans. AI art has made it possible to give each harlot their own unique bedroom background, which would not have been feasible to commission. The other thing I've been experimenting with is using it to animate marwmellow's art. In the wild days before the moral busybodies clamped it down, the early versions of grok imagine were doing some impressive and sexy things. Currently, I'm not planning to add animations to HoHH, but I'm keeping one eye on the technology. If it opens up again to be able to do lewd stuff again, I might look into adding animation to harlot pinups and – more-excitingly – H-scenes. This is something that would have been massively beyond the resources of the initial project idea, but might be possible as the technology advances (and more importantly, the moral busybodies are told to f off).

After drifting more into more positive territory, it's time to get back to the bad.

The harlot notebook implementation was easily my biggest bugbear of the year. With hindsight, I think this might have been a step too far in terms of feature creep. Once I figured out it could be done, it was an extremely tempting (and maybe even necessary) step to make. It solves what I was fearing might be some fairly bad gameplay flaws, which is why I want to add it now rather than the more sensible approach of holding it back as a feature for a hypothetical HoHH 2.

Unfortunately, it is extremely fiddly to implement on a harlot-by-harlot basis. It took me about three attempts to get the code library right and I'm still working on trying to get a nice template/work-flow to add it for all harlots. I think it will be easier for when I come to add the mid- and late-tier harlots, but for now it's slightly awkward to add for existing low-tier harlots.

I'll go over it more in the "Plans for 2026" post, but January will likely be the "solve-it-or-ditch-it" month for the notebook functionality. I want it in, because it adds a lot to the gameplay of HoHH, but it did end up being a major roadblock in 2025.

I think it maybe encapsulated the biggest problem I had in 2025 – more time spent doing things that were not writing sexy succubus smut.

While I think that overall the year was mostly pretty good in terms of progress, I would like to balance 2026 more on the actual writing. I suspect that is why most of you are here!

Anyways, that's all for 2025. Here's to a great 2026!

- manyeyedhydra.