Dev Diary: Inspiration for Lord Goblin - The Maids' Story (Patreon)

There are quite a lot of different sources of inspiration for the game and I think they deserve to be broken into several different dev diary entries, or discussed when I'm talking about specific features.

For this one, though, I wanted to mention one of the core inspirations for the maid training gameplay, which is a classic hentai game called The Maids' Story.*

What is The Maids' Story?

In short, the game is about training up three distinct maids over the course of three months, before they're expected to graduate and go off to serve at wealthy households. For whatever reason, that also includes training them in sex.

If you want to try the game for yourself, you can play it in your browser here: https://www.asenheim.org/maids-story/ 

You'll probably see some similarities with LG - and some obvious differences - but I still think it's quite fun to play today. We've tried to improve on the ideas in there a lot, but it's also been a really good reference point for figuring LG out.

I've come a long way

It's really incredible to me how years ago something like The Maids' Story, which partially inspired the concept of the game, just seemed way beyond a game I would have had the resources to pull off (even if I would have thought I could write it better). Now, Lord Goblin is shaping up to be just so much better than that game.

Okay, the industry and technology has changed and democratised a lot since then, but I still think this is a big achievement and it really makes me feel good about how I've personally come along as a developer, even if I'm relying heavily on the skills and talents of a team to get it done.

LG isn't the first game I've made that took some inspiration from The Maids' Story - I also made Pervert Action: Legacy - but I might talk about that one more in a separate dev diary. (Or I might not! I haven't written it yet.)

* Generally the apostrophe is either omitted or put before the s in the translated title of the game, but it should be after the s as it's a possessive plural, so I've kindly fixed that for them.