HoHH roadmap July '21 (Patreon)

Okay, attempt no.2 to write a roadmap for "House of Hellish Harlots" without it sprawling over 1,000 words.

As I said in the last roadmap post, most of the base features are now in place.  The vendor NPCs are implemented and there are enough harlots to give a good variety of selections for the first few rounds.

The next step is more harlots.  Lots and lots of harlots.  Rather than write them as the ideas come to me, I need to start organising them into factions and tier them by difficulty.  That way I can cover all the rounds and then add a final queen at the end.

The plan is for there to be 13 rounds and roughly 3 tiers of difficulty.

As I've hinted at in the past (and is also visible if you've ever checked the raw code), there is a faction system in HoHH.  This a grouping of harlots around a shared theme.  Each faction has their own 'queen', and she will be waiting as the final obstacle barring the player from escaping the House.

Originally, I planned to have 7 factions, but I've revised that down to 5 as an appropriate 'completion' point.  That is a minimum value.  I plan to make the system fairly extensible so players can swap factions in and out depending on preferences.  This should enable me to hit an earlier 'completion' point that will free me up for other projects while still keeping HoHH open for new content to be added later (maybe even by other writers).

Each faction needs:

- 1 Queen (endboss)
- 2 more detailed harlots (midbosses that might also be some of the NPCs)
- 14 base scenarios of varying difficulties

Some harlots will double-up on scenarios with repeat visits (Suffocatrix Mamilla currently counts as about two and a half scenarios, with the half being the non-standard ending).

The public demo had 4 scenarios for each of 7 factions, although those factions aren't finalised as of yet.  (I have plans for how to use the unassigned harlots that don't really fit anywhere at the moment.)

The next step is to pick one or two factions and round out their rosters.  I currently have three that are fairly well defined thematically.  After some brainstorming over the weekend, I managed to produce enough ideas to nearly fill all the slots for one of the factions.

So, the next big thrust will be to concentrate on filling out a faction so they can cover the full 13 rounds.  This is what I'll be focusing on for the next couple of months.

As for secondary objectives, while I don't want to get too side-tracked as happened in June, there are some other things that need doing.

The highest priority is a skip option for The Barman's segment at the start.  As with the intro and The Madam's tour, those segments are good for setting up the background and atmosphere of the House, for the first time...  Players will die and restart a lot while they learn what's safe and what isn't for each of the harlots.  Having to go through the same wall of info each playthrough is unnecessary and annoying.  For here I want to reduce the number of "continue" clicks to the minimum.

I'd also like to extend this to the harlots.  In an ideal world the game would have an external diary that is filled out as the player learns more information over subsequent runs.  Once a threshold for a harlot is reached, the player should be able to earn a 'one-click' option to fast-forward through harlots they've visited multiple times before.  I'm not sure if this is feasible for Twine, but something I will look into implementing if I port to other languages such as Unity.

Anyway, these are the current objectives.  If there is something I haven't covered, pop a question in the comments below and I'll try to answer it.