Introduction: In Their Own Hands (Patreon)

I've been promising this post for a while. This is part summary/part prospectus/part proof of concept. Basically an introduction to the game.

The new game that I have been working on is called In Their Own Hands. Obviously, it is slightly related to our first game, In Her Own Hands. It takes place in the same world --- the characters live in a familiar apartment building. And yes, they will run into some familiar faces. It starts about two years after the start of IHOH so the characters will have been going through changes since the time of IHOH.

I (coder on IHOH) will be creating this one entirely by myself. This way, I will not be waiting for content from anyone else. I know that I have some big shoes to fill in terms of the writing quality, but I hope that I will be up to the job. I am a published/award-winning writer myself, though my experience has not been in erotic fiction specifically or even in fiction generally. The writer on IHOH has been great and I am using her work as a model for developing my own voice. And I was in charge of most of the story of IHOH, while not the writing itself.

In order to play to my strengths as a writer, ITOH is written from the male perspective. The main character is the husband in a young married couple. Some scenes will show from the wife's perspective, when the husband is not present. (This can be toggled on/off at the beginning of the game to create a greater "mystery" surrounding the wife's actions. If you think I should add the ability to toggle the wife's pov at any point in the game, let me know in the comments below.)

At the most general sense, ITOH will be a relationship sim. The "goal" of the game will be to negotiate the ins and outs of the main characters' marriage, keeping your wife happy mentally, emotionally, and physically. I am still working on getting enough events to positively or negatively affect each of these three factors; this will be one of the points of ongoing development.

In terms of erotic content, the game will contain corruption (of the wife), exhibitionism, and various types of non-monogamy (cheating, swinging, cuckolding, hot-wifing). There will be multiple potential partners for both husband and wife. I hope to also do a better job of introducing bisexuality relatively early in the story so that it can be incorporated more thoroughly as a playable option.

How is it different from IHOH?

ITOH is different from IHOH in several ways:

First, the world is a lot smaller (fewer locations) and the game is a lot less focused on "free-roam"/"open world" gameplay. Instead, I am trying to create more events that will occur automatically in a relatively dense time-frame, to reduce the amount of "grind." This is not to say that there won't be any freedom, just not as much empty time to fill doing nothing. Some additional places will likely be added as the story progresses, but a lot of the locations will be attached to events rather than events that trigger in specific locations.

Second, a lot of the extraneous game-play elements are not going to be used:

• There is no wardrobe to worry about. Just "get up and go," so to speak.
• The phone has been stripped down to include fewer features.
• There are fewer statistics that need to be considered/tracked.
• Money is present but is not really a concern (at least for now).

Third---and this is something that I am excited about---aside from a handful of daily tasks, the wife moves freely around the apartment, even leaving the apartment altogether sometimes. In addition to this, there are several different activities that she can do in each location. All of it is of course decided randomly. And finally, as far as this goes, the Wife POV setting will allow you to see what she is doing (innocent or not!) when the Husband can't see her. But if the setting is turned off, she will still be doing something and storyline progress or preferences will still be affected, even though you won't be able to see what she does. The overall (intended) effect is to create an NPC that basically behaves like an autonomous character. This creates a unique experience, as the "events" are frequently the result of one or more random events combined with the husband's choices. The completed game will necessarily be pretty dense in order for this to work properly, so it will take some time to get there.

Fourth, the visible statistics are more determinative. In IHOH, as I'm sure you noticed, there are both "visible" and "hidden" statistics (though both are visible if you know your way around a web browser). The "visible" statistics are entirely dependent on the main character's experiences (the "hidden" statistics). But a lot of the available choices are not stats-based at all, but more progress-based, and in fact relatively few choices are based on the "visible" stats. Basically, this is a result of the initial game design changing/evolving over time as the game itself was developed.  While I can't guarantee that that won't happen in ITOH over time, I am trying to be a bit more transparent about how the statistics interact with the story.

Plans for the future

As this game will be solely my work and I do have a full-time job, development may not be very fast. I believe that it will be steady, with a couple of new events being added each month. Once I get into the routine, I should be able to produce more frequent polls so that you can help with content decisions, etc.

I have several major events already written and coded into the game, as well as a lot of the smaller, repeatable/variable daily content. The last step is finishing up some of the basic descriptive text and some of the transition scenes, so that the story flows.

The first release will be more like a playable demo. There are some scenes that I would have liked to include in this version but at this point I feel like I am in "perfection standing in the way of progress" territory. I will be releasing it to the public as soon as it is ready, probably at the beginning of October.

So what do you all think? I know it's a little bit different from what brought you here, but unfortunately I have had no control over what has happened. For any of you who aren't interested in what I have described here, please do not hesitate to end your support. I have greatly appreciated all of your support up to this point and wish that things had turned out differently. I will be addressing the future of In Her Own Hands in a separate post here.