Lust Complex : Gameplay insight (Patreon)

It's been a while since I lat talked about Lust Complex and I wanted to let you know that I'm still working on it each month. It's going quite slow compared to what I expected due to some issue with the models I use and Unity. The biggest one was the sex animations I bought online were actually not compatible. I found an alternative but it means I have to animate myself in Unity and let's say it's quite a pain in the ass.

Anyway, I've kept working on the basics of the game for the past months whenever I could, Glassix taking most of my available time and I wanted to explain what I'm aiming with this new game.

I already said Lust Complex would be a simple tenants management game where the aim of the game is just to pay back some huge debt by using several means to earn money, mainly blackmailing your tenants.

With my work on Glassix, I had a much better grasp on how to properly organize my ideas right off the bat and I'm going to share those thoughts with you. My main objective here is to have a game simple to play, hard to master so here are my thoughts on how to do it.

General management :

As an apartment complex manager, you'll have to improve your reputation to attract better quality tenants and increase your income to pay back your debt. At the moment, I'm planning to have 3 rooms per floor and 3 floors in the building, meaning 9 tenants max. There will be 3 levels of rooms, girls requiring a minimum quality of room based on their rank (rank system explained below) : 

• Shabby room : Max rank D, low rent
• Standard room : Max rank B, average rent
• Deluxe room : No rank limit, high rent

So basically, you'll start with one room then will have to purchase additional rooms to find more tenants and get more money then upgrade your rooms to get better quality girls, the classic system. Of course, each room will have different models in game.

The trick here is that with great debt comes great interests :D The interests amount will change depending on the amount of opened room to balance the game and make it more difficult to pay back the debt. This is actually what will force the player to resort to alternative means to raise money, making him not really a 100% bad guy but a victim as well (victim with benefits :D)

As time passes and tenants live in your building without troubles, your reputation will raise, attracting better quality tenants however harass tenants too much and they'll leave, harming your reputation. It'll be a game of patience and finding the best ways to make money without  harming your reputation.

The gameplay itself :

The game will be playable day by day, with a weekly rent cycle. A day is split in 4 shifts :

• Morning
• Afternoon
• Evening
• Night

Most of the time, you'll be skipping the whole week to just gather rents but you might want to find out the girls schedules to be able to enter their apartment while they're not there and find blackmail material or place spy cameras to create blackmail material.

To find tenants, you'll have 3 ways :

• Online ad : The basic way to find tenants however the quality and amount will be quite low this way. It'll increase a little as your reputation goes up but there will be a limit.
• Agency : Once you get some money, you'll be able to get an agency to find better tenants for a small fee. You'll be able to request a few basic things for the search to help you getting what you want a little better but still not enough.
• Headhunter : If you want the best of the best (or the worst of the worst if that's what you want :p) and if you have the money, the headhunter will basically find what you want.

The customized tenants you prepared in advance will appear randomly in these polls.

Once you have some blackmail material, you'll be able to request stuff from your tenants such as sexual favors or simply money but this will raise their fear. You can also use the blackmail material to reduce their fear and avoid having them run away. As you train them sexually, their corruption will increase and once maxed, you won't have to worry about them leaving and requests even more dirty stuff.

Earning money will come from the rent, blackmail material you'll be able to publish online to get viewers, extorting tenants and pimping them. With the money, you'll unlock or improve rooms, buy stuff such as spy cameras or new outfits for your tenants and of course, you'll have to pay interests each week too while paying back the debt. Failing to pay interests several times will result in game over obviously.

That's basically the gist of the game. It should be pretty simple to play but the depth of the game will come from the diversity of the tenants, not only their physical appearance but also their backgrounds.

Tenants :

To make the game entertaining, easy to play but hard to master, I've tried to create a tenant system which would make them different from each other and not only visually. What I'm planning is actually somewhat similar to some other H game out there. You've already seen the tenants customization from the demo where you can change their appearance. What I've been working on is their background which will give them good side or bad sides. For those of you who know about SimBro, it'll have some similarities. Some parameters will be public, some hidden, some dynamic and some static. 

The public and static parameters : Those are assigned when a girl is generated (or customized) and won't change during the game. They are shown to the player.

• Name : The girl's name, duh ;)
• Personality : The personality of the girl. It will change her daily animations as well as the way she speaks. It will also impact her hidden static parameters (explained below). This means there will be some good personalities and some bad personalities. Since it affects both their dialogues and animations, there will be few personalities at first but I'll add more as the game is updated.
• Job : The job of the girl. It will change her daily schedule as well as her daily shifts. You'll have to watch out for this to know when you can enter their apartment without being noticed. To make it easy to remember, I'll add a dynamically updated calendar in game which will be updated when you interact with your tenants and will remember when there are at home or not. Or there will be a wiki/walkthrough in the future to give the complete list.
• Traits : Girls can have up to 3 unique traits, some good, some bad, which will impact their hidden parameters or daily behavior as well as their rank. Those traits are what will make girls even more different from each other. At the moment, there are 17 unique traits, 9 good and 8 bad. It uses an opposite trait system, so for each good trait, there will be an opposite and exclusive bad trait. For example, the good "Nympho" trait which will make a girl easier to corrupt will have the "Frigid" trait as its opposite. If a girl has the "Nympho" trait, she won't be able to have the "Frigid" trait. Traits will be assigned randomly so girls with only good traits will be the best tenants and sought after by the player.
• Rank : To calculate how advantageous a girl is, the game will calculate her rank based on her physical appearance and her parameters, such as the traits or her personality. They will be ranked from E to S, E being bad and S being the best (S > A > B > C > D > E). With this rank system being based on both her appearance and her parameters, it should bring a lot of diversity to the tenants during the whole game. For example, at first, you'll only attract E or D ranks due to your reputation, meaning most of them will be badly proportioned (based on the weight, breasts and curves sliders, let's say fat or skinny :p) but maybe among those low ranked one, you could actually find one not too fat or too skinny, so physically attractive, but with bad traits, meaning she'll be harder to deal with. It'll be up to you to decide what kind of tenants you'll want during your playthrough.

The public and dynamic parameters : Those will change depending on your actions and will be what you'll try to increase or balance during the game.

• Fear : Your action might cause fear within the girl and upon reaching max, she will leave the apartment, giving you a reputation malus.
• Corruption : Your aim will be to raise their corruption to the max so you can control them and requests more H stuff, similar to Glassix.
• Blackmail : By finding blackmail materials on them using different means (mainly camera), you'll be able to use this to reduce their fear or   requests things from them

The hidden and static parameters : Those will change how fast or how much a girl will be affected by the different actions in game. They are not shown to the player (but could still be calculated if the player knows 

• Fear factor : Bad actions will increase the fear of a girl and will have a base value. However, depending on her public parameters, the base value can change, either increase or decrease. For example, a girl with the "Fearless" trait will gain less fear from the same action compared to a girl without traits. But a girl with the "Coward" trait will gain more fear and will be more difficult to control.
• Corruption factor : Same as fear factor but for corruption
• Income : Based on her job and traits, a girl will have different income which will determine what room she can afford as well as the amount of money you can get from her when extorting money.
• Bargain factor : When acquiring a new tenant or extorting money, you'll be able to bargain with the girl to get more money. The max amount will change depending on this bargain factor.
• Retries : When you bargain, girl will allow you to keep trying for as many tries as this parameter will allow. Some girl will allow you to retry several time while other will stop you at the first mistake. A failed bargained will either lose you the tenant contract or fail to get the money requested while increasing her fear. So having easy going girls would be best if you feel like testing how much you can get from them :p
• Events factor : Some girl might have higher or lower chances to trigger blackmailing events, such as masturbating or walking around naked depending on their traits so you might want to pay attention to those.

The player :

Similar to tenants, the player will be able to customize the main character as voted per patrons. A simple "Special skill" parameter will be available to give your main character a boost to control the hidden stat better. For example, a boost to the corruption factor to train girls faster, or starting with more money. So depending on what you aim, you'll have different choices accessible.

Customizing girls :

As voted by patrons, I've been working on a Save/Load feature for the customized tenants so they can be shared and played in game. If you followed so far, it means that even if you create your perfect sexy girl with a perfect S rank, she'll only become playable when you have enough reputation and high class rooms. Meaning you might have to create uglier girl or some with bad traits to get them earlier on ^^

Current status :

To finish this post, I wanted to share the current status of the game and give a rough roadmap.

First, I've been working on the basics of the game as well as important features which would speed up my work time in the future :

• Debug feature : From my experience with Glassix, I decided to implement a proper debug log right away. It does delay the main features but it should reduce the hassle of debugging in the long run.
• Translation : I want all my game to be translatable, like Glassix, so anybody with time and will can do so. For Lust Complex, I went with a json format rather than a XML format like Glassix because it will reduce the amount of translation required since duplicate strings won't be there anymore.
• Customization (Male/Female) with Save/Load : It's almost complete and more clothing and hair will be added later. I'll start with a few at first to avoid a big mess if something goes wrong.
• 3D modelisation : Rather than buying all 3D assets online, I've been learning to use blender and create my own stuff. The idea here is that it'll give me more freedom in the long run rather than be limited by what's available in the shop. This means at first, I might (will) produce some low quality models for the game, such as the building and rooms, and I'll improve them as I get more experience with Blender.
• 3D animations : Here again, more delay since the animations I bought were not compatible, forcing me to animate stuff myself and thus, learning how to do that in Unity. I might go with static poses for the first version to speed up the first version release and animate later on.

And here is what I have to complete before a first version would be available, with the estimated required effort to complete in brackets :

• Room management (big) : Unlock and improve the room. Also interact with the rooms to find blackmailing material or place spy cams.
• Tenants finder (medium) : The 3 ways to find tenants
• Tenant interaction (medium) : Visual novel style, like what you have in Glassix and options to choose what to do with her.
• Shop (medium) : Buy items to use, the usual thing
• H scene and animations (big) : Once you request sexual favors, you'll go in H mode with a menu to switch between poses as they become available. Depending on the fear and corruption parameters, the animations for a same pose might be different. For example the girl might express disgust at first and as her corruption goes up, she'll begin to show pleasure.
• Pregnancy management (medium) : Voted by patrons, pregnancy will be added to the game and you'll be able to get your tenants pregnant if you're not careful (or don't care). Since the game is played week by week, you'll be able to see the evolution of the pregnancy little by little until the delivery. I still need to think about what to do with the baby after that though, lol. This feature might not be there in the first version, depends if I have time but it'll be added asap anyway.

Those remaining features will take me quite a while to complete, I'm guessing around 3 to 5 weeks of work full time. So far, I've been able to work about 1 week each month on Lust Complex and about 2 weeks on Glassix (1 week being required for my web dev work). I think I'll release a poll later to get my patrons opinion and know if I should spend more time on Lust Complex (like 2 weeks on it and 1 week on Glassix instead). I'd like to release it asap because it would bring some freshness to my game catalog but we'll see.

For the moment, I'll go back to Glassix and will post about the 0.26 content pretty soon too to keep you in the loop.

Thanks for your time and support!