A New Direction

So, it’s been awhile, hasn’t it?

My month off had it’s ups and downs, and it was a nice break. Mental healthcare is always a challenge, but I feel refreshed and more importantly, I decided on a new direction for Bad Kitty Games. But first, some other news.

Neko and I are moving to a larger house, so that Neko will have her office space. This will also keep such things such as the perpetually-backing-up sewer from being a factor in our lives. Whether or not the new place will have it’s own quirks is a question- it’s an even older home, but much better cared for than our current place. We will be moving at the end of the month, and I promise that as soon as we’re set up I’ll show you all around the new office.

So, the first big change- Bad Kitty Games is no longer holding ourselves to update deadline. We all have other things going on, our own challenges, and nobody deserves to have their mental health put at risk. That goes for me and every other member of the team. What we are going to do instead is push a backer update every month. Like the mini-updates, these are meant to be not-necessarily-complete previews of what we’ve done. And, when we feel good about one of these updates to make it a release, it will come out to the public two weeks later, as usual.

If you’re concerned about schedule slip because of this, don’t worry. We will still be working at our usual pace, just no longer rushing or crunching for deadlines. I feel that by this point, we’ve proven that we are in it to win it, and so you can rely on us to keep pushing out new content at a decent pace. If an update takes two months, like we’ve been doing, great! If it takes three or four months, also great. Our new policy is that it is no longer acceptable to put your health and wellbeing at risk for a deadline. Similarly, it is no longer acceptable to justify putting something “bad” in the game for a deadline, either, which I feel I’ve been guilty of doing.

In a similar vein, “quests” are no longer going to be our benchmark for progress. All progress is good progress, and even if we publish an update exclusively of, say, sex scenes and bug fixes, that still counts. So there is a possibility that you might get an update of nothing but new sex scenes, or dialogue, or other side content.

I’m not going to lie, this is going to delay the end of HC and the start of ILTSDK. But that’s okay- Harem Collector brought this community together and helped us get to where we are. HC and HC fans deserve better than for us to rush through the ending just to satisfy an arbitrary deadline I set a year ago.

And to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t be comfortable making these changes except for how fantastic our community has been throughout this whole odyssey. You guys have been great, and I hope everyone will keep in mind that I’m doing what I feel is best for not only the team but for the quality of the game overall.

There may be more changes coming as we go, but the benefit of being small and scrappy like we are is that the whole team can adapt and overcome any challenge that comes our way. Thank you for believing in us, and I’ll do my level best to make sure that your faith does not go unrewarded.

Iron Waifu 2021 Review

Hey everyone, Conash here! Sorry for the delay on the blog post, I’ve been taking the past few days to rest now that Iron Waifu has past. It ended up just slipping my mind that I should talk about how things went. Sorry about that!

I first wanted to take a moment to thank everyone on staff for helping out with the tournament. It was a lot to cover and I know that I couldn’t have gotten by without the help and support from all of those involved ranging from the more apparent things like Omni’s constant vigilance against cheaters to the more background jobs like Romeo taking basically all of the image duties for the entirety of the month. Being able to lean on Nekochan and Moomabelle to help handle the blog posts was also a huge help and while it was an immense help, though I wouldn’t hold my breathe for weekly blog posts given how quickly those can burn people out. I think that we’ll try to have more regular blog posts again but we’ll see how things will go.

Now as for the tournament itself, this was my first time being the driving force for any sort of event like this and all things considered I’m very happy with how things turned out! While the absence of NoMoshing’s creative touch was felt at least by me, a big reason why me and Romeo tried to lean so heavily on last year’s format and quips. It was definitely a new experience having to get the word out and organizing things with people. Still, it was great seeing both a lot of returning and new faces around for this years tournaments, which certainly had it’s own fill of excitement and twists all throughout! Getting to be there and doing what I could to give you all as great of a time with Iron Waifu made it all worth it!

Personally though, I was really happy to see Brigandine win this year. See, I’m not sure how many of you were there back during the original Iron Waifu 2016, but back then I was basically the face of the Brigandine fanbase. I wasn’t part of the team yet and had recently done a screenshot Let’s Play of Harem Collector where she just really clicked with me immensely, she scratched an itch that I had felt was sorely missing in the game. So come the first ever Iron Waifu tournament I did as much campaigning as I could to try to help push her as far as she would go. Now, I know that people voting for her both back then and now are doing so because of their own reasons, but as the biggest vocal fan of hers at the time I was shocked to see her do better against Therese in that tournament then any of the other girls, including her finals match against Alina. A lot of people slept on her but I was hopeful that she had a powerful following behind her, which 2017 proved to be the case. From there she kept coming so close to winning every year, but she was always a strong contender every year. So it just made me happy to see that my favorite girl, who I fought so hard to build good will for back when I was just a fan finally get a victory. I know that a lot of you out there have your reasons for disliking Brigandine, including just not getting her or feeling like her presence “stole” any hopes for your favorite girl to win, and I can certainly get that. This year’s tournament, while it certainly took a lot out of me did not leave me blind to how I noticed that this year especially has had a bit more of a sombre vibe to it, which is something that I’m hoping we’ll be able to address a bit more in future years.

Speaking of future years, I wanted to take a second to talk a bit about next year’s Iron Waifu. There is still a lot that we will be figuring out over the next year, but there are a few things that I can clear up. First of all, this year was the final ‘Iron Waifu’ tournament for Harem Collector 1. While we’ve had a lot of fun with the tournaments here and there’s still plenty more for that could be done with the girls here, we want to pivot towards our next project “I Live To Serve Dungeon King!!” for next year, and at this point we feel that Harem Collector 1 has had a good six years of Iron Waifu. This isn’t to say that your Waifu won’t ever be able to be crowned Iron Waifu though, as when we get around to Harem Collector 2 and future games in the franchise, your favorite HC girls will be looking to get their shot for the crown once again! That said, we probably won’t be sticking to the same format that we’ve used for previous years for Iron Waifu 2022, while we’ve got some ideas in the works trying to fill out a roster for a full 32 characters would probably run into issues similar to what Iron Waifu 2016 had. Just know that we’re looking over everyone’s feedback and thoughts over the prior few years and will be using this shift in game to try to improve the format of Iron Waifu as a whole!

That’s about it from me. Looking forward to an announcement from NoMoshing himself in the next couple of weeks, while we’re still ironing out some of the finer pointsit looks to me that we’ll be taking Bad Kitty Games in a better direction overall.

Bad Kitty Games Current Affairs

Hey everyone, Conash here. Since NoMoshing has taken a much needed sabbatical, (which all of us at BKG support him in), we thought that it would be good to give all our fans an idea what everyone is working on and our current goals for the near future.

First, as many of you probably know, we are currently in the middle of Iron Waifu 2021 which has been progressing well! We’re still in the early stages and it always blows us away to see our fans’ enthusiasm! I know I was surprised to see our first tie of the year not even a week into things! Making sure this year’s Iron Waifu runs smoothly is our top priority right now, as it means a lot to us to interact with our fans, get your feedback on how you feel the girls are doing, and deliver some greatly anticipated content! We really hope that you’re excited too and, if you can, check in daily to vote and participate!

On that note, it would probably be best to start with what I’ve been focusing on. My primary focus has been on Iron Waifu. I’ve taken over a bunch of stuff NoMoshing would usually handle, but I have also been getting help from several others. I expect that there will come a point where one of those helpers will take over making the match threads. That said I am still taking the time to check in with the other members of staff to keep things moving forward. To that end, I’m hoping to be able to get out a 0.50.4 release out sometime this month as well as make significant strides towards the ILTSDK tech demo.

As for our esteemed Spokesneko, Nekochan, I suggest you keep your eyes on NoMoshing’s twitch channel as it looks like she may have taken over! Don’t let the increase in gaming fool you as Neko has also been handling a lot of the administrative duties as well, like making sure my rambling nonsense is coherent (Neko edit – Conash do you only write in run on sentences??), and working on new concept art for the remaining harem girls, so look forward to seeing more of her amazing character work in the future!

Speaking of character work, let’s take a second to talk about the Pixel Professor, Kumiho! Recently she completed her own concept art for Penelope’s redesign, and if staff and backer opinions are anything to go by she did a really awesome job. She hasn’t forgotten her standard pixel work and has been hard at work getting new sprites for the Sunnyshore Islanders and the pirate ghosts ready for all of you. We hope you’ll enjoy the HC vacation updates soon! If you’ve been following our discord you may have also seen a few previews of some of the other sprite work she’s finished for a few notable characters and also some very impressive statues. On the ILTSDK side of things she’s also been experimenting and working on various character and tileset sprites. Look forward to seeing Kumiho without the constraints of RPG Maker in the future!

While on the subject of art, let’s talk about our resident Porn-Drawing Raccoon, Hilent! Recently, Hilent has been hard at work making a few wallpapers and –gasp– putting clothes on the HC girls! Don’t worry though, as she’s currently now finds herself working on a bunch of girls in various states of undress. Some of these girls might even be in the middle of having sex! Hilent may even be starting work on the Harem Collector finale soon, but don’t let her know that I told you that.

To help keep you all quiet how about we pay a visit over to our Musical Mistress, Moomabelle! I’ve got it on good authority that her upcoming weekend is going to involve a lot of gambling and chivalry… Or at the very least, that she’ll be working on some rather amazing music with a ‘casino’ theme and a ‘knightly’ theme! There’s still a fair amount of work to be done with both compositions and she’s very confident about the work to come on both tracks. Given her “record” with amazing tracks she has every right to be in my book.

Finishing off our roster we’ve got our Community Manager and Professional Hype-man, Omnius! On top of his normal duties of making sure everyone plays nice, he has been working getting the word out about Iron Waifu to the far reaches of the fanbase! This helps ensure this year’s Iron Waifu will be a great success! Iron Waifu is an especially busy time for Omni. On top of doing what he can to spread to spread the word, he’s also our main support helping fans who are having trouble getting their forum accounts verified or their passwords reset. He’s also been our expert to maintain an even playing field and to make sure that the staff aren’t missing any fan feedback .

I hope that all of this helps reassure you that that while the 1.0 release of HC and tech demo of ILTSDK will be delayed until NoMoshing is ready to return, our team is doing our very best to keep things running and focusing on getting what we can do done in the meantime.

Cheers and happy fapping!

Status Report

Okay, so with the way things are I’ve decided to put off releasing the RELIC update until the end of the month. That’s the big news you’re all waiting to hear. If you want more more details, keep reading, but I also want to say that if this frustrates you, I understand completely. I don’t think anyone is happy with the situation as it’s unfolded. The schedule will be updated later today to reflect the new release date.

So, what went wrong? Last Tuesday evening I somehow injured my back and shoulder. Not sure exactly how it happened, but it did and it was so painful it’s been difficult to even think let alone type for more than a half hour or so at a time. I’ve been more or less couch-bound ever since. Not just the pain, but my ability to move around in general was severely impacted. Because of COVID restrictions, I was only able to get medical attention yesterday. I am feeling a lot better today, thankfully.

On top of that, sapping what little time I could stand to sit in front of a computer and type has been this issue with Patreon over Merch. When it comes to the Megafan tier collectibles, the posters that were supposed to sent in February, but as far as I know they still haven’t been shipped. I’ve managed to get to the bottom of why, though. Apparently, instead of just having the cost of the collectibles deducted from my Patreon total on the first of the month like they have every other time, they’ve since started a policy of waiting a few days and didn’t tell me. And when they did tell me what day it was supposed to happen, they made a mistake, so when I paid out the Patreon total so I could pay Conash, Hilent and Kumiho, it delayed the merch even further.

Adding to the utter nonsense of the situation, Patreon refused to entertain any other way of my resolving the situation. I offered to pay for the outstanding cost of the merch with Visa, Paypal, Venmo, anything and it was all refused. Nothing would work for them except for having a Patreon balance on the mystery day they choose to take money out of the Patreon account for this. I’ve since given money to a fan I trust for the express purpose of them increasing their donation so that I have a balance for whenever the merch people decide to finally do this thing, but I have no fucking idea when that will be.

If you can’t tell, I am fucking livid over this merch situation. It has absorbed way too much of my energy this past week.

Onto more important matters- with the game so heavily delayed, we’re doing our best to cram in every drop of content we can for the RELIC update. Kyrie’s last few scenes are being worked on, including her vacation and Sex a la Carte scenes. We’ve implemented all of the new Kellosian sprites and Kumiho is working on new sprites for the armed forces of the Middle Kingdom. Clara has produced a little something that I think will add some fun polish to the game- special leitmotifs for some of the characters in the game for when they level up their relationship. On top of that, I think we will be able to fit in the sequence that starts the endgame, so you’ll be able to get a little taste of what Harem Collector’s finale will be like.

Anyway, I hope this all serves to mollify you all about what’s going on with Harem Collector. Until next time, adios.

Well that was a dumpster fire….

So 2020 was like a whole thing.

But, for Harem Collector, it wasn’t as bad as it could be. My depression and the general malaise of just… everything… did affect development to a degree, but I think despite everything we managed to get some good work done, and I’m looking forward to story-complete Harem Collector in 2021. We accomplished a lot last year- more new CG, more quests, pages and pages of new dialogue, as well as the promised cosplay photoshoot, and of the triumphant return of Clara Middleton to the team as our composer, cranking awesome new music again and again.

Unfortunately, that also came with a lot of hardships. Nekochan and I lost a member of our family in November, and it’s been busy settling their affairs ever since. Still, we’ve struggled on, and it looks like we’re on track to close out the main story of Harem Collector this summer!

So how does this look going forward? Well…

Quests: This upcoming update, which we’re naming RELIC, is going to cover the last two quests of the final plotline, Ancient Mysteries. Finally get to the bottom of the mystery of who left all these ruins dotting the Middle Kingdom, and what secrets they might be hiding. Following that will come the real end game content, so get ready. The end of the game is going to change the map to such a degree that we’ll be cooking up a separate instance of the world map to account for all the changes that are going to flying at you.

Hentai: Porn gnome Hilent is currently working on the new stuff for Kyrie, and when she is done we’re doing the once scene with the dark elf antagonist of Save the Elves, then Florine (as determined by backers), then it’s on to the end game orgy involving all 34 eligible harem girls!

Sprites: While it’s perhaps not as flashy as straight up porn, Kumiho has done some incredible sprite work this year, really giving her special something to a lot of the characters you know and love. As you can tell if you’ve seen the ARCANE update, we’ve started the process of adding NPC sprites to the game. I’m not sure to what degree we’re going to end up revising the NPC sprites in the game, but at the bare minimum we’re going to finish new sprites for all the major harem girls and named characters in the game, as well as make NPC sprites for all the elves, orcs, the Sunnyshore Islanders, the Kellosians, and a new suite of unit looking adventurers that fit in with the kind of people you’d expect to be doing that kind of work. As well, we’re going to get some enemy sprites done that better fit the different enemy themes.

Music: Clara’s still trucking along, focused mainly on dungeon tracks. In terms of BGM, we’re about halfway done in total, and I’m hoping that by the end of 2021 the BGM will be completely done. Clara’s also exploring the idea of doing different leitmotifs for each of the harem girls for when they level up their relationships.

Other Stuff: This May will be the final Iron Waifu for Harem Collector, so it will be your last chance to get your favourite character to win the coveted crown. Also, we have an exciting, and mysterious new way of connecting with fans of HC coming this February. What will it be…?

I think that’s it for now. Obviously, there’s a lot of specifics still to be determined, but we hope you’ll agree that 2021 will be the best year yet for Harem Collector. See you again soon!

Big News

Those of you who have been paying attention to the Discord, my Twitter, or Patreon lately have already heard this, but as promised in this year’s Iron Waifu, Bad Kitty Games is teaming up with ero-cosplayer Mikomi Hokina for a sexy photoshoot of Kyrie this November! Everyone at Bad Kitty Games is really excited to be working with Mikomi, who you might know her work from cosplaying for fellow erotic game Future Fragments earlier this year. We’d also like to give a big shout-out to our friend ArchitectofDystopia for helping make this happen, so please when you’re done checking out Mikomi’s work, please take a look at ArchitectofDystopia’s first full-length game, Overgrown: Genesis!

Things are looking pretty good up here at Bad Kitty Games HQ, so here’s a few other updates for you:

The latest patch to Harem Collector contains a couple extra goodies more than we usually put in a patch. First of all, Elaiya’s skill trainer can be encountered a few time ahead of when he unlocks for good, in case you wanted to get her new skills in earlier. Also the Florine text-only dungeon scenes are finally fixed, and Chimei’s new face set is in the game.

Meline and Chimei’s solo scenes are going to be done very soon, as well as the threesome with Alina and Therese and Miri’s random scene. All of these sex scenes are being worked on by Hilent, and while things have been a little rocky due to the unusually high proportion of threesomes she’s had to deal with, it’s looking good for all of that getting into the v0.48 release. She’s been working hard as hell lately, so if you’re on Discord please take the time to tag her and give her some thanks.

On the music front, there was a small delay on Clara’s end but she now has all the equipment and software she needs to get working, and we will have a new track to share with our Patrons very shortly!

Also, Jalila’s character design is done, so the last 100% brand new harem girl is going to be in the game for next update as well!

Please, if you’d like, take the time to check out the Harem Collector Manor Invasion Grand Prix speedrunning contest currently happening in the forum. The prize for the top 3 finishers is an alternate outfit of your choice for your favourite Harem Collector waifu, no overly-complex voting process involved!

I think that covers everything, so I’m heading out for now. Thanks as always for all the support, and please look forward to lots of new content to come!

Road Map to Victory

The backer release is just getting the last little bit of polish courtesy of Conash right now, so while you’re waiting on that, I figured I’d discuss a little bit of the future of Harem Collector.

So we finally have something of a road map to version 1.0 of Harem Collector. Like so many things we’ve been using as guideposts in this long, long adventure, it’s rough and kind of crude, but it’ll get us there.

I’ve had dysthymia creeping up on me all day today, so please excuse me if I’m not exactly wordy and eloquent about all this, but the plan looks something like this:

July 2020: v0.47, the SAVIOUR update
The last two quests in the Save the Elves questline go live. Meiriona is added to the harem.

September 2020: v0.48, the RICHES update
Jalila, the elf village shopgirl, is added to the harem. Florine can be freed from the dungeon. Florine’s love quest will be available. Game economy is re-examined and re-balanced. The final push on the Ancient Mysteries quest line begins.

November 2020: v0.49
The Iron Waifu themed update, with the Iron Waifu winner’s love quest. More progress on Ancient Mysteries.

January 2021: v0.50
The last Ancient Mysteries quest is in, and the end game events begin. Brigandine and Hanelore are added to the harem. A new enemy arises, taking advantage of the chaos in the declining Middle Kingdom.

March 2021: v0.51
May 2021: v0.52

Updates covering the end game quests. A new enemy arises, a resistance is formed, a betrayal occurs, old enemies become allies and fallen foes return, and a desperate battle is won. The last few mechanical overhauls take place. Also, in May will be the last ever Iron Waifu for the first Harem Collector.

July 2021: Harem Collector v1.0
The end game is done. The final harem has a big ol’ orgy. Credits roll.
Also we’re going to have a big fucking online party and all HC fans will be invited.

September 2021 and Beyond: v1.x
Fitting in the last few side quests, Love/Respect Quests, and art updates while we plow forward on our next project, I Live to Serve, Dungeon King!! Might not be a proper, fully featured 1.0 but who the fuck are you going to call, the version police? The main story is done.

I’ve also broken out the leash and collar and will be chaining Nekochan to her drawing table so that in the v1.0 release we will have the end game orgy scene complete and available to be enjoyed.

So yeah, that’s it. I’m going to go send out that backer release. See you all next week!

Sunshine and Rainbows

Haaa, I don’t want to be too optimistic just yet, but it seems that, finally, the cloud of depression I’ve been under since last summer has finally gone away. I’m feeling good, I’m being productive, I’m getting more sleep, I’m cleaning things when they become dirty instead of when people come over…. All in all, I’m doing okay. I look forward to channelling some of this new energy into Harem Collector for you all!

I don’t mean to harp on my mental state so much, but I get very easily frustrated when it comes to my mental state. Obviously, it’s not impossible for me to be creative when I’m stuck in the fog, but it is very difficult for me to be creative in the specific way I want to be creative. Focus becomes very difficult.

But now I’m feeling a lot better, so hopefully I can focus even better and continue doing good work for everyone who follows my various projects.

I’m thinking of starting a Kofi account to support my writing, not for Harem Collector but so that I can (hopefully) get some artwork done for My Isekai Life in D&D. Art is expensive after all, and Patreon frowns on people who run separate accounts for different projects.

Things are looking good for the mini-release today. It might be a challenge to get in all the new sex scenes, but for that I’m just going to prioritize the stuff I currently have art for. Hilent’s been busy, but as of last night Apple Kid’s sexy a la carte scenes are all done. I might luck into getting the latest Doll stuff from her later, and then it’s on to some accelerated Therese art before returning to Doll.

Anyway, I’m going to get back to work. Happy fapping, and I’ll see some of your tonight for the mini-release!

Conash things in 0.44

Hey people, Conash here! Today I thought I’d talk about my contributions in the 0.44 release since I haven’t quite gotten my thoughts organized for one of my little mechanical analysis posts… Also because I haven’t quite talked about this yet!

So to start off with, I think that I should note there won’t be any major scripting changes. Between the holidays, family, a bunch of different games that I’ve got to play with different groups of people, but most importantly it taking about 2 weeks after the 0.43 release to finally narrow down what was causing all those game crashes in the Golden Tomb I didn’t quite have enough time to handle any big coding project, just a bunch of little ones added in over the course of this release. Always sad to not get to have a ton of fun with that, but it is what it is, let’s move onto the stuff that I did get in!

The first major thing that I got into was working on the reward for Gargan’s upcoming quest. Backers may already be aware as to what this new quest will unlock to some extent or another, and having been privileged to such information back when NoMoshing was talking about it on old backer streams (well before I was on the team), when NM outlined what quests we were handling this update it became my first priority to figure out a way to implement it in… Right, heck I think that I might have even made a blog post analyzing the sorts of things that I was worried about when designing it, but despite my concerns the solution came relatively quickly, and after some back and forth with testers I more or less knew everything that I needed for it before the 0.43.3 release (though none of it is in the base game yet, lots of little scripting things that I was worried about that may have caused problems). I’m also currently working on the enemies for Gargan’s quest, I’ve talked with NM and I know the theme of the enemies, I’ve theorized a few things that I think will be important for the boss battle, and gotten some feedback from fans about some of what they’re hoping the enemies bring to the table, but it’s still in the planning stages and subject to change so I’d rather not make promises that I have to go back on.

Next up, Kevin’s respect quest! This one I’m actually a lot farther along as once I was done with the reward for Gargan, I went immediately into trying to setup Kevin ‘right’. See I try to put in the time and effort to try to keep the ludo-narrative together when I can, and I’ll probably talk about this in more detail later but suffice to say there’s a reason why Nerys doesn’t leave you feeling like you want her as a permanent party member, and Kevin won’t give you that feeling either. With Kevin though, I wanted to capture more of a ‘random Joe’ feeling as I haven’t quite hit that with the more civilians that used magic like Nerys or Professor Ambitis (yet at least), so I had to very carefully craft both his stats, his growth, give him a custom exp curve, and create enemies specifically designed in a way to capture this feeling. Kevin inherently couldn’t be designed without also designing at least half of the enemies on his quest alongside him, so his quest ended up with it’s enemies done first. I still need to go back in and add the finishing touches to the boss, not to mention adjust some of the fights to have different enemy combinations now that I don’t need to test anymore, but based on the feedback I got from testers I’m very happy with how all the Kevin stuff turned out.

Now, with those big things out of the way, I mentioned that back in December I spent a lot of time working on fixing the crashes in the golden tomb, well I didn’t want that to be the only thing that I got done in December so I sat down for a bit and realized that I was in a good position to add in the 4th bonus boss into the game! It took some discussing with NM as my inherent focus on mechanics left quite a few holes that he ended up having to figure out how to resolve (resulting in more work for him than I had intended during a release that he was already facing a time crunch on >.>), we managed to get it in! I also decided to reach out to the fans for some suggestions for the reward here as I noticed that the other Bonus Bosses all had rather varied rewards. I’m quite happy with how both the boss and the reward turned out, so look forward to that!

The last thing that I’ve really got planned for this release I honestly didn’t think I’d have time for, yet another revamp! Originally I thought that between Gargan’s reward and making Kevin from scratch, there wouldn’t be any room in my head left to revamp a character, but after I had figured out what I wanted from Kevin and had finished testing Gargan’s reward I ended up getting into a discussion with some users about how the Damage over Time statuses aren’t very rewarding as you usually kill common enemies in 1-3 turns, so doing 1/20th of their HP per turn (at best) for 3 turns isn’t worth inflicting the status on those enemies, which is a fair assessment as when you have to fight 100 common enemies, spending an entire action to inflict 1/20th their health just isn’t worth it unless you’re in a challenge run. This got me thinking about what I could do to make poison and bleed fit in better against common enemies specifically, without making them over-powered against bosses, and well, by the time I had that figured out, I was basically half-way done to figuring out how to revamp Bronwyn, so look forward to a Bronwyn revamp in the 0.44 release! I’ve already got my ideas for it ready, but if I end up running short on time I may have to push this one back a bit.

And that’s about it for the 0.44 release. I could go into more detail about the Bronwyn revamp, but I don’t like talking about stuff that I haven’t gotten feedback from the testers yet. While I do generally trust my ability to play with numbers and take approaches that seem to typically be close to what we end up with, I just don’t like the idea that I might give you guys the wrong idea if I change gears, so maybe I’ll talk about it in more detail after the backer release is out! Bye!

My Favourite Things I Made This Year

I was going to use this week’s blog to moan some more about my depression, explain why the update to Quinta’s second sex scene took so long, and in general beg for forgiveness. While I do feel bad about those things, and I do ask for your forgiveness, I’m worried about this sort of thing becoming dull and rote. So, rather than that, I’m going to talk about some of the things I am most happy made it into Harem Collector this year.

These are presented in roughly chronological order, and just numbered for my convenience, but nonetheless please enjoy this semi-listicle.

#1- Officially Announced ILTSDK
I know it’s not the biggest, most exciting thing, but finally announcing I Live To Serve, Dungeon King!! to the public felt pretty good, like it was making the leap from theory into practice. I’m still slaving away at the pre-production, though, so it’ll be awhile yet before we have a functional build to show off.

#2- Introduced New Scenes and Dialogue for Lilac and Violet
The new content for the twin maids was very well received and I’m pretty proud of it, to be honest. Definitely looking forward to these two coming up in the art queue. Mission accomplished on helping define their divergent personalities more.

#3- Set Up A New Forum
I learned how to do a MySQL and now we have a fancy new forum we rarely use. But, hey, it’s there and I really feel it’s a worthwhile supplement to the Discord community, as a home for content like my erotic writing and the Iron Waifu contest.

#4- Epic April Fool’s Prank
The 90’s-style April Fools website update was a lot of fun to make, and I have no idea how I’m going to match it next year. 😀

#5- The Actual New Website Launch
It was a massive headache at the time, but it feels really good to have gotten rid of our amateurish, outdated old website designed by a certain someone I don’t particularly like, and replace it with our new, slick website filled with all sorts of art representative of what Harem Collector is all about!

#6- Kaguya
Solving the ominously growing PC issue here at the home office without having to impact the Patreon or art progress was a really huge boon. I know it had a lot to do with a random windfall I received from a relative, but still, very happy about that.

#7- Victory Barks
Time to tout something that Conash did! I am very pleased now that victory barks are implemented and in a final form that makes it so people can enjoy them without it disrupting the established flow of the game. Conash did a lot of great work this year but I really think the end of battle update from PRINCESS is among his slickest and nicest looking UI changes.

#8- Miri
Getting a new harem girl in the game is always something worthy of celebration

#9- The End of Demon Cult and Kellos Invasion Stories
Sort of partnered with #8, having Bell and Quinta get implemented and finally finishing off the Demon Cult and Kellos Invasion plotlines was a huge win this year! It finally feels like we’re getting close to the end of the game.

#10- Pandemonium Fortress
My personal winner for Dungeon of the Year is the Pandemonium Fortress from Hell to Pay. It’s a really big, meaty dungeon with it’s own story to tell, a lot of really unique looking areas, homages to multiple games on my all-time favourites list (including Resident Evil, Super Mario RPG and Silent Hill 3), and just really felt like an epic way to send off the Demon Cult questline in style. And then, while we were working on it, the whole lootbox scandal happened, inspiring a whole extra section of dungeon, with it’s own mechanics and stuff going on. Sometimes our chaotic, inefficient, fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants style of game design really gets to pay off dividends.

Anyway, those were my favourites bits of the year. Please feel free to share your own highlights as a comment, Discord message, forum post- whatever form of interact floats your boat!