Jessika's Curse - The Journey So Far

We've been developing away at Jessika’s Curse for a while now and felt it was high time for a recap. I’ll briefly touch on the concept of the game, what we’ve done, what’s in the pipeline, and what the challenges are going into 2019.  

Jessika’s Curse?
Jessika’s Curse is a hand-painted Roguelike x RPG experience currently development on Patreon. The focus lies on deep turn-based combat, erotic Battle-Lust animations and good dose of geeky humor.  

The story of Jessika’s Curse revolves around a proud knight that is cursed - as the game’s name suggests - to deal with an alter ego personality. When it least opportune Jessika feels her personality give way to someone else. That someone is called Jessy, and she is the polar opposite of Jessika: instead of justice and honor, Jessy only craves only one thing - sex.  

The core concept 

When we started Jessika’s Curse we gave ourselves a “We can do anything” pass – what would we make if we could do the ultimate adult game? We ended up combining Roguelike elements with JRPG ones, tongue-in-the cheek humor inspired by anime classics like Slayers and Golden Boy, hand-painted characters and monsters, and of course copious amounts of crazy sex.  

We made a conscious decision to design a real game that offered players a proper challenge, and work the hentai elements into that. For this we designed lust as a mechanic that you constantly deal with and try to stave off, but can never truly conquer. Often enough you’ll need to pause your quests to go back to town to restock and ‘normalise’ your sexed up party members. Part of the challenge will lie in deciding when to push on, and when to tactically retreat for the time being.  

Starting out
To showcase a hentai game you need to showcase the good stuff: the sex scenes. Since our sex happens during combat - and as we also wanted to demonstrate that Jessika’s Curse is a real game - we were tasked with a hefty challenge for starting up. We had to set up the system that generates the hand-painted backgrounds, we needed two party members fully animated complete with skills and icons, we needed some enemies, these enemies actually had do something, and then last but not least we needed a host of sex animations. What we wanted is dreadfully ambitious for a team that runs on a single artist and a single developer, but so far we managed to make it work.  

We delivered five downloadable proof of concepts as we went along, which each showcased what element of the game we had been working on (Patrons of any level can download and play our prototypes). We’re very close to releasing our first 'big’ download, which not only brings a lot of stuff we’ve done together, it will also show the work we’ve done on the city’s town Venkmar.  

Gameplay & combat
Starting up we faced a difficult question: what assets are required to showcase our concept of challenging combat leading to lust animations? We eventually decided that with 2 party members and 2 different enemies, and with 12 skills between them, we could give players a good idea of what to expect. We started work on the protagonist Jessika, with whom we tested our Spine: 2D workflow ideas to see if the idea was at all feasible. Creating Jessika was a lot of work, but the results spoke for themselves: the cute hand-painted character art looked great once animated. From there on we added assets step by step: the charming rogue Mouse, a lowly Goblin with a club and a funky looking Myconoid were all added one after another. 

Combat itself is turn-based and tactical. The game checks the speed statistic of the characters and enemies involved, and determines the order in which everyone gets to act. From there on you can use offensive and defensive skills to end the conflict as quick and efficiently as possible. Efficiency is key here, as your characters do not regenerate their lust bar. This means that the encounters start to wear on the ladies of your party, and that eventually some of them will succumb to lust. Once a character Succumbs to lust they are no longer useful to you in combat, as they have other things on their mind… like groping monster and your party members!   

 Lust animations
The lust animations in the game are designed to work flawlessly as a factor in combat. We didn’t want the sex element of the game to be strictly payoff or be tied to losing fights, since that feels like bad design to us, Lust happens as the party gets worn down, and is something you need to manage and deal with.    

Lust animations come in 3 variants: characters can play with themselves, start groping other party members, or jump monsters. They’re all designed to be fun and over the top, but also sexy and rewarding. We currently have 8 of these in the current build of the game, and we expand on these with each new party member and enemy.  

A living city
The game’s single city provided us with another challenge in terms of assets. Venkmar was designed to be a living city that provided the player with a base of operations outside of exploration where every aspect of the game is managed: players take on quests in Venkmar, go back for the inevitable rewards, level up, assign skills, buy and sell items and more. We not only needed to decide on the user interface for all these things, we also needed the operators of the required buildings. This meant a lot of art and coding was required to demonstrate this part of the game.  

Currently we have two operators ready for interaction. The perverted blacksmith Alf is available for itemisation purposes and as the first quest giver, and the proud warrior Bekarah allows players to level up and equip new skills. Over time Venkmar will grow in both buildings and operators, and it will even get a day and night cycle.  

Awesome collaborations
One of the cool things about crowdfunding is meeting other creatives who are doing similar projects or just flat out inspire you. Since Jessika’s Curse is a game that doesn’t take itself overly seriously we have ample opportunity to feature characters from other games and lore’s without breaking immersion and credibility (our characters sometimes even seem to know they are in video game!).  

We have two collaborations in this early stage of development we are very excited about. One is a character inclusion as an enemy from the king of futa Dmitrys, who turned his character Meryl into a wicked axe-wielding Incubus the player can try to take down. The other is something we’ll announce very soon, but I can spoil it is a feature of two characters from one of the most popular adult games currently active on Patreon.

What’s next?
We’re currently happily losing sleep over our next release, which looks to fix a host of issues our last prototype introduced whilst adding a bunch of new content. From there on we implement the rest of the party, slowly add to Venkmar, and start adding new quests and enemies.

We just released a new demo for Patrons that shows off the game’s town Venkmar for the first time. If you like the concept of Jessica’s Curse or want to play the demo please consider pledging on our Patreon!