Rough Plans for 2025

First up, Happy New Year!

Initially I started this post with a recap of 2024, but it was making the post too long, so let's skip right to my plans for 2025.

As I've written 3 of the mini-bosses, and with The Trapperess also giving me a more standard blueprint, I can be a bit more realistic with timeframes. No more "I might magically be done by the end of the year and not think too much on how long things are taking to write". Temptacia is an exception. The others won't be as long as her scenario, but from writing The Trapperess I think it takes around 2 months to write and implement a mini-boss. Which seems about right given that they're around 15K words and 5 scenarios bundled into one.

There are 2 Round 5 mini-bosses to write, 5 Round 9 mini-bosses, and 5 end-queens (which will likely be the same length in words). 12 * 2 months is 2 years, which seems a good conservative estimate. That also factors in the remaining harlots + quest lines + assorted other implementation + and maybe some side writing as well. While writing The Trapperess I did also end up implementing all the demo autosave and notebook functionality. So that 2 months is probably more like 5-6 weeks on 1 mini-boss/queen + 2-3 weeks on something else.

Still, it's a lot of time and work. If I'd known I'd be writing 5K words+ per harlot, I would have gone with a standard 13-in-a-row sequential game rather than the roguelike design I ran with. I've got this far, so I might as well see it through to completion. Adding art and notebook functionality also really helps with this, as it pushes it more towards commercial game territory rather than a niche text-only Twine project that might struggle to attract eyeballs.

As for the remaining mini-bosses and queens, I have most of the ideas pencilled in, so this is what you can look forward to:

Round 5 Mini-Boss
- a slime nun devoted to erotically smothering men.
- a troupe of sexy imps specialising in different sensual sex acts.

Round 9 Mini-Boss
- a latex-weaving smother arachne.
- a kitsune expert in various sensual techniques.
- The Buxom Lolibaba summoning sexy things from her cards.
- a nautical huntress with some marine 'hounds' to hunt men with.
- [the missing one is from the artificial beings faction – I still haven't figured that one out].

Queens
- Her Suffocating Eminence, Pulvina Velare, the XIIIth Pontifex Maxima de Obruo Suspiria. She's an eldritch abomination of a monster girl. I have an idea of what she'll do to the player, but need to figure more stuff out.
- Priti Nāndyāh – a multi-armed pleasure goddess.
- The Madam herself. I'm still not sure on this. She does need a scenario. The other option I was thinking about for the 4th faction isn't impactful enough. What might move her out of here is if I want to use her as The Final Boss after the queens.
- The master huntress of the Huthswiven Manor, probably with a gauntlet of sexy 'hounds'.
- [Redacted. I have a strong idea of who this is for the Artificial Beings, but I'm keeping quiet about it for now].

There are not many slots remaining for regular harlots. Of the ones I need to fill, here are the ideas I have pencilled in.
- Nurse Honey (might be multiple scenarios depending on whether she's come to claim the player or not).
- Elegant Woman. I already have a strong idea of both her scene and mechanics. I might get her out early in the year alongside the remaining Round 5 mini-bosses.
- A wide-eyed waif and oral specialist. I've known her mechanic for ages. This one will have players pulling their hair out trying to figure out what it is.
- Saeva Diabolia. Sammy's tormentor. A brutal femdom foot scene. I was thinking of making her queen of the 4th action, but there isn't enough there.
- an evil supervillainess. Does a similar roleplay to Sister Squeeze, but really wants to kill the player.
- [open sensuality faction slot. Not sure on this one. The idea I had is better used elsewhere. I might come up with something new, or maybe give an existing favourite from the faction a repeat scenario.]

The other thing I'd like to add is a proper series of post-room events. These are randomised and may have beneficial or negative effects.

On the implementation side of things, I want to add the notebook functionality to the existing art demo. I'm currently creating a test framework so I can do that and test the various pieces separately.

I did want to put out a full public demo on places like itch.io as soon as I had the art for a title page (which I now have). The notebook ideas have knocked that back. I want to add that for all the low-tier harlots first. My plan is now to wait until all five Round 5 mini-bosses have been added to the game. This also makes a much nicer stopping point for the first proper demo.

The art assets I need are also nearly all in place. The title page will look similar to how the front page looks currently on the website (for PC and tablet users – I still need to fix it for mobile). The UI icons are pretty much okay now aside from the semen gauge. There are some other things I'd like to add such as art for the Buxom Lolibaba's charm cards, but these are extras. The pin-up art I have for the harlots looks great. Ideally I'd also like to give them H-scene art as well, but I'll need to see more interest and funding for the game for that as the money I set aside only covers one pin-up per harlot. (if patrons have a favourite they'd like to commission, marwmellow is more than eager to accept the commission and I can add this art to the game.)

Overall, my rough plan is to get the full proper demo of the art version out around May 2025. By then I should have finished the remaining 2 mini-bosses. Then for the rest of 2025 I'll be hoping to get 3-4 of the Round 9 mini-bosses written and implemented, and also port more of the mid- and high- tier harlots over to the 1.5 version of HoHH with the graphics (and hopefully notebook functionality as well).

I'm going to proceed with the assumption there will be 2 months between each mini-boss release. I still would like to have a regular monthly release, so I might look to sneak out a smaller release in between them.

My rough plan is for there to be no release for January as I expect I'll still be working on the [slime smother nun]. After finishing her, I will hold her until the end of February and switch to one of the smaller regular harlot scenes (probably the Elegant Woman). In theory I should get her ready in time for a March release while giving myself enough lead time to get [sensual imp harem troupe] finished for April's release. If I can keep to that schedule of small scenario-big scenario, I'm hoping I can maintain regular monthly updates for HoHH.

Now, I don't want to spend the whole of two years working solely on finishing HoHH. I want to squeeze some regular fiction writing in there as well. I will be taking one of the months off in the first half of 2025 to finish and prepare the 7th collection. And I'll probably be sneaking out other stories as well when I feel I need to take a break from HoHH to avoid burnout.

And that's my rough plans for 2025. It's a lot of work and might look quite daunting, but it's also worth remembering there are already 80 harlots in HoHH already, and each is a 5K+ word scenario. It's a much bigger project than I initially envisioned, but I have been mostly able to stick to a regular release schedule and keep working towards that end. (where The Madam might actually let you out of her House…)

Here's to a productive 2025!