Breeding Season Estrus: FAQ Part 1

Support Breeding Season Estrus on Patreon to gain access to the prototype!

Breeding Season Estrus is a free adult game and a very long labor of love. Have you ever stared up into the night sky and found yourself wondering what kind of sexy monstergirls/boys/enbies/energy beings are up there boning amongst the stars? Do you keep returning to thoughts like "I like Star Trek and all but why don’t they solve more problems by screwing?” Perhaps you too have found yourself asking the age-old question of "What if John Carpenter's The Thing was actually really hot and DTF?"

Well you’re in luck! Breeding Season Estrus is the long-awaited continuation to the original Breeding Season; following the tragic and extremely sudden obliteration of your entire planet you wake up to find yourself somehow alive and in the presence of a mysterious, incredibly advanced visitor from beyond the stars. They sought you out from across the galaxy to obtain your help in doing the one thing you know how to do best: getting monsters to fuck.

Wait so we’re in space now?

This time around instead of a fantasy setting the game takes place in a space operatic science fiction setting very heavily inspired by the works of sci-fi authors Douglas Adams and Iain M. Banks, games like Mass Effect and Citizen Sleeper, and shows like Space Dandy and Gurren Lagann. If you find yourself missing the setting and characters of the original game, though, pay attention to small details and you may eventually find hints to piece together into some interesting revelations regarding them.

What do you do in Breeding Season Estrus?

Breeding Season Estrus retains the original game’s core mechanics of monster breeding and ranch management, but now instead of raising monsters to sell them, your goal is to breed and train up these alien monsters with particular traits and skills that will prepare them to succeed when you then send them on missions of espionage and seduction at the request of your benefactors.

After your monsters succeed on enough away missions, you’ll unlock special side and main story missions to go on where you yourself get to accompany your chosen monster and decide what happens. These missions will play out as extended visual-novel-style stories in which the choices you’ll be given and their chances of success will differ greatly based on what traits and skills you prepared your monster with. The choices you make during these missions and whether or not you succeed at them will radically alter what happens to the cast of various fellow-travelers and persons of interest you’ll encounter repeatedly during the story and can even ultimately determine the fates of entire worlds.

By succeeding on missions and making the right choices (or even occasionally the wrong ones), you’ll meet and recruit new kinds of alien monsters onto your ranch who will bring with them new skills to teach, new traits to pass on, and new ranch upgrades to build.

Okay, I’m into it, how do I play?

The game is still in very early development, and much of the technology behind it is still in experimental stages while I work out the practical considerations and iron out technical challenges. 

For $5 and up patrons you will be able to access an in-progress pre-alpha prototype, as well as have access to regular updates with preview images of what's currently in development and what's coming up. 

At this very early stage the core gameplay loop has yet to be implemented; the current build is just a small prototype to hint at my intentions for the finished game, but you can view some of the opening visual-novel-style scenes I've written and interact with a prototype of the breeding menu which allows you to see the a small sample of the variety in monster portraits that my models currently allow for. 

For $30 and up you'll be able to access the discord and get the opportunity to offer direct feedback, ideas, and discussion to shape the future development of the game, as well as generally enjoy a community of other people who enjoy the game. 

Once I can start making them available, the newest playable free public release will always be found on the development blog at http://breedingseasongame.blogspot.com/

So when will I be able to start actually playing it?

I expect the amount of gameplay to expand very rapidly in these first few months as I've already laid out all the most critical foundations and climbed out of the biggest pitfalls when it comes to training and using the models. The next big update from the launch of this Patreon campaign will include a basic implementation of the mission system as well as saving and loading; at which point it won’t be much yet but it will be playable.

When’s this game going to be done?

After the first round of feedback based on this prototype and how y’all feel about the art and game ideas, and once we have an idea of what the Patreon budget moving forward will look like, I'll be able to lay out a concrete roadmap for development. 

My initial rough plans are for three years of development for the "release" version of the game, which should be feature complete for all base gameplay systems and contain roughly 10-20 hours of gameplay and story content at a minimum. From there, I plan to continue to expand and refine it for however long people still want more of it, but on a systems, mechanics, and main story level the scope of the release version of the game is something I've already thoroughly plotted out and do not intend to expand in any way until I can definitively say “yes, we have hit release, this is a finished game”.

Will there be sex animations?

There will definitely be sex scenes, and a huge number of them; I’m currently working out the kinks in my process to automate the generation of these images, but patrons will be able to see examples of monster breeding art made with my existing models in the development updates and once the process is automated the only major limitation to how many can be in the game will honestly be file sizes. I am also very optimistic about the possibility of generating full-motion animations as well, and I already have a number of ideas for approaches but it will take a significant amount of experimentation to get to an acceptable level of quality. In general, high-quality AI animation generation is something of a holy grail, current AI animations are highly inconsistent, but everyone is trying to make them better and they’re getting closer all the time.

And if generated animations aren’t ultimately possible, if the Patreon funding is high enough we can always easily have animations in the game made the old fashioned way by commissioning animators. I’ve actually already done all the legwork on how that pipeline would work as well, if that’s the direction that ends up seeming best.

Are there going to be cheat codes? 

Yep! Just like last time there will be an extensive system of debug codes that will give you instant access to all the sex scenes, let you get exactly the monsters you want, and generally allow you to crack the game open. When this system is added to the game I will add an additional $15 patron tier that will include access to them.