Harem Collector September 2013 Public Release!

4Shared Link: http://www.4shared.com/file/_NJi7qBu/HaremCollector_September2013_p.html
MEGA Link: https://mega.co.nz/#!nZ5BBQRC
MEGA Encryption Key: Eci8wyKuyDTUPnbfZizy-XOvobZaje4Ov1r3UCTtKnc

What's New in this Version: 

-Penelope's love quest is now available.

-There is now a randomly generated quest that refreshes daily.

-There is a whole pile of additional CGs. Happy hunting!

-The entire relationship system has been overhauled.

-The various flower gift items have been consolidated under a single item. Two new gift items take the place of Moondrops and Pink Cat.

-The Flower Girl now sells two new reagent-type items in place of the eliminated flowers.

-The Northmarket toy store now has useful things for you to buy.

-There is now awesome boss music.

-Favoured gifts now grant +3 relationship point instead of +2.

-The “random” sex scenes that occur after some quests now include a relationship bonus for all participants.

-Doll's “Defender of Life” skill now utilizes threat rating rather than a cover mechanic. In a similar vein, Martyrdom's threat increase has been greatly reduced in order to promote granularity.

-General clothing now decreases threat by an additional 5%.

-Demon Dice now have a damage bonus dependent on the user's luck stat.

-The ledger detailing your investments in the manor study can now sort your investments alphabetically, by dividend or by investment.

-Doll has a new sprite and face

-Larelle's eye colour has been corrected in all her pics.

-Penelope's face sprites should look a little less like they were resized by a thirteen year old.

-Double doors in the game should now look like proper double doors.

-The very beginning of the game now has two extra randomly-generated names and an extra hidden bonus name.

New Stuff Even If you Are a Backer:

-Improved encourage now heals a number of status ailments instead of raising the dead.

-Florine's new art has been implemented.

We have a Wiki!

Harem Collector now has a wiki!

So please contribute to it!

Oh The Things That You'll See

One of the privileges of making Harem Collector has been the sheer amount of new stuff I've been exposed to. I mean, I know this is the internet, everything ever is on the internet for our collective enjoyment, but you'd be amazed at the stuff I A) never thought about trying, or B) would never have tried without prodding.

Firmly in category A is the whole mind control fetish thing. I value Harem Collector's fans from the mind control community, and it has been really awesome to sample the games put out by MC fans that are in that sweet spot where their fetish rubs up against my dominance/slavery fetish.

...That ended up sounding really unintentionally sexual.

Anyway, if that sounds like your boat, Hypnopics has a sizable RAGS community, RAGS being an engine for making point and click puzzle games.

Relatedly is the Overlord series of games. I started Harem Collector partly because I thought Cypress_Z wasn't making Overwhored anymore, and since his game is pretty awesome I recently picked up Overlord II on a lark. It's a very enjoyable game, although it feels really rushed and cut short. Still, I got a foursome with all potential dark mistresses. And after trying to play a domination Overlord, well, with the female victim's voice clips it's no wonder that game is popular in the MC community.

Another unexpected joy that's come my way has been Oreimo. Although Meline started out as a joke character, writing for her has put siscon and incest on mine and my wife's collective radar, which eventually lead us to an anime called Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai, or Oreimo for short. It's a very cute romcom anime series about a guy finding out his little sister is into dating sims and eroge, and is currently on our watch list.


But, yeah, in general making Harem Collector has been an exciting, weird trip. If you want to share anything you've discovered because you caught a reference to it in Harem Collector or any other h-game, don't be shy to share it below or in the forum threads.

Edit: Speaking of which, I just got Magic DotP 2013 for free off Xbox Gold, and if any of you guys wants to play a game or two and meet me and generally hang out and have good feels, drop me an email.

(Note: This is not the controversial post that I postponed last week. I don't know if I want to post something that comments on certain issues in the gamer mediaverse, or even if anyone would particularly care to hear my thoughts. The completed document sits on my desktop, unpublished, for now.)

Let's Talk

First of all, I'd like to welcome longtime fan Daishi to the Harem Collector team. Daishi is one of potentially two people who will contributing writing to the game, increasing the quality of the game for you  and freeing up more of my time to make more awesome game stuff.

Anyway, I was going to write about something completely different today, and I had actually wrote the entire blog post out in advance (a first for me). But after hearing Nekochan's comments on it, I want to make sure it gets reviewed by a couple more friends of mine before releasing it into the wilds of the interwebs. It might come out next week.

But this leaves me without a topic for this week's post. Mental Note: prepare a blog post to keep saved in case I have to do this again.

So, this week isn't about me, it's about you.

So in the comments below, tell me which of the Harem Collector girls is your favourite and why, let me know who like and why you like them, and what kind of sex scenes you'd like to see them in. Do you have a couple girls you'd like to see paired together? Is there a fetish you have that you'd like to see a girl used to explore?

I'll be paying extra close attention to the comments this week, making notes for possible future game content and just reading with interest what you guys think.

Game Reviews

Just a quick update- Kargan3033 reviewed both Dungeon Assault and Harem Collector the other day. He's putting together a review blog for free to play H-games and related projects, and has also reviewed Overwhored.

In case you're interested:

 Harem Collector Review

Dungeon Assault Review

There will be a more normal blog post on Wednesday, so I'll see you then.

New Release: Dungeon Assault

Link to Dungeon Assault

What is Dungeon Assault?
Dungeon Assault was made by No Moshing back in May of 2013. During one fevered night where, after too much coffee and Ancient Domains of Mystery, No Moshing attempted to use the RPG Maker VX Ace engine to replicate a roguelike experience. It was a mixed success, however.

In the game, you take control of a party of four adventurers who then delve into an ancient tomb in order to defeat the evil Succubus on the bottom floor. The order of floors, treasures, monsters, and special encounters are all entirely randomized, and getting to the bottom can become a real challenge if the Random Number God is especially cruel.

Ever since, Dungeon Assault has been a special bonus extra released in secret to financial backers of Harem Collector. Now that I'm working on something else to send them, Dungeon Assault is getting released to the public.

Why is Dungeon Assault getting released now?
 Occasionally I take on side projects to test some aspect of game development that I later use in Harem Collector's development. I've started a new one of those, and as such, it will be an exclusive bonus to financial backers of Harem Collector. So I've decided to release Dungeon Assault to the public, for the enjoyment of all.

What's New in Version 1.1
-At least .1 better than the other versions.
-The party has been changed to something a little more familiar.
-You now have the option to save your game between floors

Do you want us to give you bug reports for Dungeon Assault?
Not really. If it's a complete and utter game breaker, sure. But otherwise, I don't care all that much.

Please enjoy the game and happy dungeon crawling!

Sequelitis

Okay, first things first- Harem Collector is now hosted at Mega.


Now, as some of you might have understood from my forum posts here and there. you won't be able to capture all 151 girls in Harem Collector. The reason being is my original design document outlined a game that was too much game for one game. This being my first large-scale RPG Maker project, I had no idea of the limitations of the engine and my own limitations, and it seems to mean that the best thing for the game would not be creating a bloated, confused mess that runs the length of the entire plot. So Harem Collector is being broken down into five discrete parts.

Harem Collector
-Takes place in the Middle Kingdom, a very literally named place which appears to be a more-or-less productive, happy kingdom.
-Will involve recruiting about 30 girls total. For those of you keeping score at home, the current version of the game contains 16.
-There are four main questlines, which will include the Adventurer's Guild, playing the game of houses and becoming a proper noble, saving the elven race from extinction, and participating in magical research on a fallen empire that used to exist where the Middle Kingdom is now.


Harem Collector Part 2: Electric Boogaloo
-Takes place in Kellos, a heavily militarized empire that exists to the east of the Middle Kingdom.
-Again, will involve about 30 new girls. The Hero will take with him a portion of his own household, including Meline for certain but at an appropriate time I'll run polls to see who else will be going.
-There are, again, four main questlines. One will involve joining a resistance group to overthrown the current power structure. One will involve joining a cult that worships Dragons as opposed to the Angels. The others are still up in the air at this point.

 Harem Collector Part 3: Collect Harder
 -Takes place in the frigid, lawless country to the north of the Middle Kingdom.
-Again, will involve about 30 girls. The Hero will take with him a portion of his own household again, including Yamamaya for certain.
-Main questlines will include: ruling over Yamamaya's tribe as her mate, bringing law to the lawless and founding your own kingdom, as well as other things.

Harem Collector 4: Goblet of Fanservice
-Takes place on a tropical archipelago to the far south of the Middle Kingdom, across the ocean, where the Hero will be placed in charge of his own colony by the rulers of the Middle Kingdom.
- Again, about 30 new girls. The Hero will take with him a portion of his existing harem, will will be determined at an appropriate time.
-The primary conflict in this game will involve a case of colonists versus natives. The archipelago will be inhabited by a civilization of alleged "savages" that the Middle Kingdom looks down on but who in fact have a perfectly good civilization already, and the Hero will have to balance the demands of his backers in the Middle Kingdom versus the political realities of deal with the native society. Of course, this whole thing will be played for laughs.

Harem Collector 5: The Fifth One (I've run out of subtitle jokes)
-Takes place partially in the dwarf-inhabited, magitek-powered country to the west of the Middle Kingdom, and partially in another dimension entirely.
-This game will involve batting cleanup. I'm sure that very few of the other games will involve exactly 30 girls, and are more likely to go over than under. This game will involve however many are left.
-The primary conflict in this game will involve an attempt to colonize the setting's analogue to "heaven", which by this point the Hero will have extensive dealings with to the point that the invading country hires him as an consultant.

In terms of the series in general:
-The sequels are spaced apart in time, there being about two years between each. Yes, the Hero will engage in a bit of Wife (Slave?) Husbandry, attempting to win the hearts of girls that will join the harem "officially" in one of the sequels.
-There won't be a lot in terms of importing saves. The games don't involve any moral choices of real significance, and each sequel will assume that you've completed 95% of the content in previous games. IE, questlines and harem girls will be considered to be "fully completed", but things like hidden bosses and bonus dungeons won't be referred to.
-The Hero will keep that shitty, rusty greatsword from beginning to end, and by the time you close out the series it will be a weapon of truly immense power.
-Similarly, while the hero will "let himself go" a little between games, he will start each sequel a little stronger and with a full complement of skills that will get added to.

While the original Harem Collector will take longer, I'm hoping to keep the development cycle for each game to about a year. Game development involves a lot of of what us business types like to call "cumulative advantage". That is, the longer I keep at this, the greater my skills and resources will become, and the better and more-quickly-produced future games will be.

I've also mentioned before wanting to take "time off" between installments of Harem Collector to work on different projects. This is true, and I intend at least to do something slightly different after finishing up Harem Collector 1. This thing, let's call it Project Norn, is a hentai parody game (of course) inspired by the SMT: Persona series. So you have that to one day look forward to.

If you think I'm getting ahead of myself, fear not. Most of what I've outlined is from the original HC design plan, just getting properly spaced out and formed into discrete games. My focus remains on Harem Collector part one, and I intend to make tthat the best game it can be with my current abilities.