Lustful Mind - Development Update - Warren and Expedition Lab: What I’m Working On

Just a quick note up front. What you see in the gallery are some older character designs I’m attaching separately. Some of them might make it into the game, some might not. These are just experiments. The main article is below — I’d be glad if you read it. And if you only want to look at the pictures, that’s fine too. This is just so you understand what this is about.

Hi everyone. I wanted to share a small update on the game I'm developing. I've mentioned it a little before, but then things went quiet: I simply couldn't find the time to sit down and write a proper article.

Since then, the mechanics have changed, some things have improved, and others have had to be reworked almost from scratch. I feel like I've finally found the direction I want to take, so I decided to talk a bit more about the project. Of course, plenty of things may still change along the way.

The project is called Warren, which is a working title for now. In terms of genre, I'd describe it as a browser strategy game with base management and auto-battler combat, set in a dark fantasy world with NSFW elements.

You play as a dungeon lord whose old world was destroyed by a cataclysm. Gathering the last of your strength, you move your altar to a new world, where you have to start from scratch: rebuild your base, grow stronger, explore your surroundings, send monster girls on missions, and gradually influence the world around you. You'll also be able to choose your own approach, from a pragmatic antihero to an outright villain.

The first layer is managing the base itself. It consists of a 20×20 grid with three levels: the surface, the main level, and the depths.

You start on the main level, with an altar and a few basic structures. From there, you gradually expand: clear space, dig tunnels up to the surface and down into the depths, construct new buildings, research technologies, produce equipment, and gather resources. Each level will have its own features. For example, you can build a market on the surface to begin trading on the black market, while the depths offer rarer resources and space to build prisons for captured enemies.

Since the game includes NSFW elements, every character apart from the player will be female, drawn from different races: monster girls and other female anthropomorphic creatures. These will range from familiar elves, orcs, and succubi to less conventional races such as gargoyles, djinn, nagas, kobolds, and others.

Character management is another part of running the base. Fighters you recruit or obtain through other means will have a broad set of attributes that affect their skills, work efficiency, and performance in combat. Your servants have a huge impact on the base: without them, it can barely function.

The skill system is somewhat similar to what you may have seen in Palworld. One girl might have a research skill, allowing you to assign her to a project once you have the right building. Another might be better at crafting items, while a third is suited to mining or gathering. A character's skills and their levels determine which tasks she can perform and how efficiently she handles them.

Alongside work skills, characters will have familiar attributes such as strength, agility, endurance, intelligence, and others. These will also affect combat and how effectively they carry out different tasks.

The next layer is the world map. It's a large continent divided by a mountain gorge, with several small islands around its edges. Here, you'll interact with other factions, which will also be able to interact with each other through trade and various events.

You'll send monster girls on assignments, intercept caravans, complete missions, gather resources, and explore points of interest.

You can carry out tasks for particular factions to improve your standing with them, or take the opposite approach: attack patrols, intercept caravans, and stir up unrest in their cities. Actions like these will draw attention to your base and may provoke a retaliatory attack.

In that respect, the game is partly reminiscent of X-COM, particularly the original 1994 game, with its discovery of points of interest, interceptions, and deployment of squads on individual missions.

I wouldn't quite call the third layer a fully separate mode: it's mainly an auto-battler, supported by preparation and squad management.

It begins when you discover a point of interest and send a team of monster girls there. Before setting out, you need to assemble the squad, choose their equipment, and pack supplies: healing potions, torches, lockpicks, dynamite, and anything else that might be useful on that particular expedition.

The squad then leaves the base and gradually makes its way to the destination. Travel progresses in ticks, the units of time that advance character movement, construction, production, and the game's other processes. I'm still deciding exactly how long a tick should be in real time.

A point of interest might be a dungeon, a newly discovered location, a moving caravan, or another event.

Once the squad arrives, the game calculates both the combat and the journey through the location. This happens automatically, but it takes all your preparations into account: whether the characters brought a torch to light a dark passage, whether they have a lockpick for a door, whether they have enough healing potions, and what their own attributes are.

For example, an agile enough character might dodge a trap and avoid an injury. The squad's composition, equipment, route, and consumables should all have a bearing on how the expedition ends.

Characters will also have individual traits, similar to the system in Darkest Dungeon. These can be innate or acquired, positive or negative. Some traits can be treated, while others will stay with a character permanently.

At this stage, I'm not planning to include permadeath on missions. If a fighter falls during an assignment, even if the entire squad is defeated, the characters return to the base wounded and without any loot. After a lengthy recovery, they can be sent on another expedition.

During missions, you'll also be able to capture enemies and take them prisoner, then turn them into recruits through several different systems.

There will be dedicated facilities for this. For example, the halls of possession will let you recruit ghosts to possess captured opponents, after which you can add them to your roster. Other buildings will allow hypnosis, corruption, and other ways of transforming prisoners.

These versions will look different, too. The same character, an elf girl for example, could have distinct appearances in her original, possessed, hypnotized, and corrupted forms. Their attributes may also differ, while still preserving important features of the original character.

A large part of the work right now involves the project's visuals. I'm experimenting with my own LoRA models, prompts, and different generation methods to create characters who are genuinely enjoyable to look at.

Originally, I planned to integrate a generator directly into the website so players could generate characters while playing. It's technically possible, but providing a smooth server-based generation experience would require too many resources, and long queues would quickly become frustrating. For now, I've decided to use characters prepared in advance instead.

I'm planning a large number of ready-made variations. Each character type could have up to a hundred different images, so there should still be plenty of variety without generating them in real time.

As for the NSFW side, right now it mainly comes through in the characters' fairly revealing designs. I plan to add sexual scenes in the future as well, but first I want to get the core gameplay into good shape.

In the future, I'd like to develop Warren into a multiplayer game. Some systems would need to be reworked, but the basic structure is already being designed with that possibility in mind.

In the single-player version, you can pause the game. In multiplayer, that would probably have to go so that time could keep moving for everyone. Otherwise, the idea would remain similar: several players could have bases on the same map and interact with each other.

I imagine separate servers or worlds, each containing a limited number of dungeons, perhaps around ten. There could be many of these servers, so the map wouldn't become overcrowded with players.

The version of Warren currently in development is still a single-player game with no microtransactions. You build up your base yourself, and mistakes can be corrected through normal gameplay. If a building takes twenty minutes to construct, that's there to give time and the eventual result a sense of importance, not to make you pay to speed things up. I don't want to add time gates or paywalls in the usual sense.

Access to the game itself is currently planned as a benefit for paying subscribers. That model might change over time, but this is how I see the project for now.

Realizing how much the project had grown, I decided to try out some of its mechanics in another project on the LustfulMind website. It's a simpler game in a similar setting, letting me test some of the core combat and expedition mechanics in a more compact format.

It will have a hub from which you send characters into different dimensions. Characters can be summoned through a gacha system, either using dust, an in-game currency earned by playing, or through a free daily summon. There may be small differences between subscription tiers, but I'm not planning any microtransactions. I'm generally not a fan of games with microtransactions and paywalls, so I hope it stays that way.

The available dimensions will change, with dungeons presented visually through different stages and branching routes. You'll be able to choose where to go, who to bring, how to equip your characters, and which consumables to prepare. The outcome will depend on your squad, their traits, attributes, and other characteristics.

Unlike Warren, though, the expedition won't be resolved entirely automatically: parts of it will be calculated as you progress, because your route choices will influence the journey through the dungeon.

You'll be able to develop your characters, buy them equipment, and send them on new expeditions. While Warren will probably take quite a bit more time, I hope to launch a test version of LustfulMind Expedition Lab much sooner, possibly within the next few months.

I’ll leave it there for now. Honestly, I’m not especially good at writing and organizing articles about something this complicated, but I hope I’ve managed to give you a sense of what I’m working on and where I want to take it.

And I’ll emphasize this again: I’m still making image sets and comics the same as before. I’ve been working on the game in parallel with that for a long time already, so nothing changes in terms of content releases. I just wanted you to understand what I’ve been working on.That’s all for now — thanks for reading.