2nd anniversary of In Her Service [PART 1]

Hi folks !

On 28th of February two years ago, I released the first public version of In Her Service (v0.39). On this occasion I want to talk a bit about myself, In Her Service, future games, where we are, where we’re going, and so on. I’ve divided it into parts so that they can be posted every day or every other day, so you guys don’t have to read a whole book here at once :)

Some stats first.

Initial release V0.39 [28.02.2024]
✅ 2h Gametime
✅ 20 Events
✅ 2500 Lines of text
✅ 300 Images
✅ 4 Animations

1st anniversary V0.74 [28.02.2025]
✅ 7,3h Gametime
✅ 96 Events
✅ 26981 Lines of text
✅ 3253 Images
✅ 196 Animations

2nd anniversary V0.91.01 [28.02.2026]:
✅ 11,4h Gametime
✅ 149 Events
✅ 42894 Lines of text
✅ 7337 Images
✅ 525 Animations

Looking at those stats it seems that my work pace again increased compared to last year, especially in animations department. Or it is the nature of events where with game heading toward the end there are more and more sex scenes and various combinations. Almost every update for past year had new sex scenes where in past it would be every other update or every third.

Gametime is worse mostly because I count single playthrough for someone who reads all text carefully using auto-forward feature and it doesn't count replaying game. In reality if you want to play game multiple times to see everything it should be higher. Especially now that game at the end diverges so much.

Overall I am quite happy with my work rate. I thought that 2nd year will be less efficient due to amount of sex scenes involved but it seems that I managed to somehow increase my efficiency.

With 7k+ images and 500+ animations we also arrived to big leagues reserved to games that usually have 2-3 person teams or really really really long dev time. What do you think about amount of content in the game ? Do you find my game big ? small ?

As a creator I am very happy that what I make found so many fans like you. 2 years ago when I started my project I had fears that my project won't find audience but you guys did like it for which I am very thankful.

There are still things to do but we are at the finish line. With how game goes I think 1.0 will be ready by fall of this year, many endings are needed and thus still there is a lot of work to do.

How "In Her Service" became a thing.

In Her Service actually started out as a very different project. Around 2020 I began working on an erotic game with a specific design in mind, and I put serious effort into it for about eight months... planning, writing content, and building the foundation. While developing what was supposed to become the first public version, I did some back-of-the-napkin math to figure out how long the whole thing would take me. The result was sobering: around 10–12 years at the rate I was progressing.

Obviously, that timeline was a non-starter. I was painfully slow when it came to writing scenarios, dialogue, rendering stuff, and all the rest... and again, that was just back-of-the-envelope math. You don’t know what you don’t know, so in reality it could have taken way longer. Plus I was working a full-time job the whole time.

I already knew game dev was tough. As a student I’d tried building an ARPG once, and it crashed and burned... starting with a feature a day and ending with a bug a month. That’s the brutal charm of going solo.

Big studios don't have armies of people (high-paid specialists, budgets in the tens or hundreds of millions) for nothing. I was fortunate to have been obsessed with game-making my whole life. Watching studios, GDC keynotes, dev interviews, etc., taught me enough to dodge the dumbest pitfalls. Even if I was mostly just a curious fan who secretly always wanted to create my own thing.

After some serious soul-searching, I gave up on that original erotic game and decided to scale way back. Eventually I settled on a new concept: an erotic game built around swapping as the core theme. From there I jumped into rough designs... sketching out small character arcs, figuring out the overall look and feel, nailing down the key features, and so forth.

Initial concept

I settled on Jack and Anna as a pretty conservative couple who recently moved to the city after Jack landed a good-paying job there. Anna was basically Sylvia from IHS character-wise, though she's a newlywed stay-at-home wife and a bit younger. Iris wasn't really part of this.

Jack and Anna met the married couple Julia and Henry. Both hailing from high society, they were far more open about sex. One thing led to another: Julia and Henry invited Jack and Anna into their sexual adventures... visiting each other, swapping partners, introducing new people, etc. I had already planned that this would be more than a simple swap game. Like all good stories, I wanted the characters to respond to choices and have many endings, similar to IHS.

As you can see the similarities are there alas this is widely different at the same time. No IHS setting, no marriage coming, no kingdoms, etc.

Choosing theme

Among the ideas I considered, the contrast between conservative couple and open couple felt the most compelling to examine. I was curious about how the characters would interact, their reactions, their arguments, and how everything would play out.

So I started to write. I experimented with the wife character, Jack as his own character versus a player‑driven one, Julia’s nature, and Henry’s character. The first events went smoothly, but then I ran into a problem.

I wanted the player to have meaningful choices to make. If I wanted to do that, then I had to give the player the ability to refuse to do something. And that's where the problem emerged.

The problem

If your game is about swapping and involves a conservative couple versus an open couple dynamic, what happens when something doesn’t fit? What if you, as the player, say no? It instantly changes the whole relationship dynamic, and you end up with a game‑over screen or nothing at all if you decide... for some stupid reason to keep going with that choice, or the game morphs into something else.

From my experience with other games this usually means three things: either you give the player an ending where the couple simply stops swapping and everything ends instantly (as in Anim/Atelier Sakura games), you continue on a ‘pure’ path that focuses only on your girlfriend/wife for the rest of the game which is very rare, or you introduce a cheating element where only half the party wants to quit, dealing with its consequences; but that often feels half‑finished, or it becomes the main part of the game while previous choices are essentially fake.

Solution - Kingdom Come

Then I had a brilliant idea. What if that choice were impossible to make at all? What if our main protagonist couple couldn’t even consider it because they literally couldn't? I started thinking about this concept and landed on the debt idea. Jack and Anna initially carried huge debts, which was why they left their village, they needed better jobs or they'd be in serious trouble by staying. This quickly led to Jack forcing his way into friendship with Julia and Henry, who were his clients at work. It became a means for him to gain wealth by exploiting Julia and Henry... it was brilliant! The protagonist had an active role; it was a fight for survival, leading swiftly into trying to satisfy Julia and Henry, swinging, cheating, drama ensued, like what if Julia discovers Jack cares more about her money than her? What about Anna’s part in all this? So brilliant! So rewarding!

... and not something I wanted to make.

When I envisioned the conservative‑couple vs. open‑couple concept, I had in mind a much more relaxed experience... reactive, yes, but not forced. This new idea would quickly push me into writing things I didn’t want to, alter character relationships, and the more I thought about it, the harder it became for such a game to have a proper ending. In fact, with this design, unless I introduced more fake choices, it would lead to many very quick endings... which I wanted to avoid from the outset.

After about a week of feeling a bit depressed, I spent roughly a month after work writing scenarios for this concept, only to realize it wouldn’t work properly. One night, after finishing my shift, I sat back with a few beers and started prototyping the hook again. After a handful of quick drafts that didn’t pan out, I returned to the debt idea. I liked its initial premise. It gave a motive... but I didn’t like how it was executed: rushed, forced. So I thought about it more. What if the debt wasn't imminent? Then what’s the point of it in the first place if the couple doesn’t need to interact and Anna says no, ending everything for the player?

Okay, debt stays... it can’t be imminent but must still hang over their heads. I don’t want forceful interaction; I want it to feel natural and relaxed. Remember how I was developing an ARPG back when I was a student, as mentioned in the first part of this post? Back then I had already laid out the whole setting: a very low‑fantasy medieval world infused with modern touches. There were kingdoms, nobility, wars, and a clear vision of what the world looked like. Modern items existed, like laptops but not others like internet. Laptops were present but no internet because the nobles preferred to keep enemies from instant communication thus that technology was not invented. And then, hidden in plain sight, beyond everyone’s notice, there were fantastical yet unknown elements: secret societies, something akin to magic, cults. Most people treated these like myths or stories... essentially stories for kids.

Kingdoms, castles and dragons.

That is how IHS got its world. I used my old setting for arpg which I really liked, and used it for my new game. Julia now Talia of House Godroy a politics oriented family, a noblewoman of one of almost top houses in the kingdom formed. Aside from being seductive lady she also had her noble side now which you can feel sometimes in-game. Henry of the house Lister a smaller warlike oriented house. They were small house but due to their lineage, each of men there was killing machine and despite being very small house they were respected (but not at the top), Henry's house and in part he was inspired by Game of Thrones Clegane character. What if there was house in this kingdom where due to share tenacity of its members all of them were like Clegane? Not a lot of them would survive over generations but each of them would be superior soldier, build for battle. That is where Henry's bulk stature comes from. Their rather chill attitude too. They don't rely on schemes so they didn't need learn much politics and scheming.

Slavery was a thing in that world, but it was more like the slavery of serfs in Europe, not chattel slavery in the US. Slaves had rights and freedoms that nobles couldn't abuse, and the world was ruled by honor society rules. Nobles rarely were punished directly by other nobles or kings, but they did not want to break honor society rules under any condition. Obviously, like in real life, some nobles could be assholes, but usually, they were ostracized from the society of nobles.

So debt is a reason for slavery and servitude. Thus we have the perfect tool to make hard decisions, and for our couple to stay together even if they don't like it. They can't be forced to have sex but they have to stay and work. Player can make choices that don't lead to an instant game over (aside from one small game over very early in the story).

Another issue with swinging stories, is that they don't have good ways to end them on a high note right? The game risks of not having a proper finish and the story just drags on forever until everyone's bored, or the writer decides to end it in some stupid way.

How to end things ?

Endings aren't easy. You either have a poignant ending that ties up the whole game, giving players a sense of accomplishment, a story told to be remembered, or you drag on into obscurity until it dies on it's own, and it becomes too boring to continue watching or playing.

The choice of settings has also helped me in this case. When designing the swinging game, I was constantly struggling with the ending. It was either strange, hasty, or simply dull.

Thankfully, my earlier problem with how to keep two couples together even if stuff breaks between them has resolved that issue. Kingdom politics force Talia to remarry and thus lands ourself a slice of important time in which our protagonist can change things and be important in the story, despite his status.

Right now we are in middle of me building those endings and I hope that my work is satisfactory to you guys.

It has numbers

Now that i had everything laid out, I wrote rough stories and events for the whole game in about 2 to 3 months. Swapped events, removed them, added more until I was happy with structure and how the game would play, how story flowed by itself, where things needed spice, and when there were downtimes.

I finished that around summer 2023. Since then, I scoured the net in search of tools that could help me deliver on that vision. I was already an avid enjoyer of Virt-a-Mate, a VR game sandbox, and I decided that my game would be in VR. It had pretty robust model store, and there was plenty of community around it.

IHS in VR? Yeah, that was the idea. Release IHS as one big scene in VAM and update it. Alas, as much as I liked VAM, it wasn't an engine to deliver visual novels. It could do short scenes but a multiple-hours game? Nope.

I searched further, and finally, I found Renpy. I was already a bit familiar with it due to me playing some games with that engine, but never developed in it. After about a month of setting up my first workflow, I realized I could do it there and be quite efficient. My VR game dream was dead, but I could deliver IHS in 2D.


And thus my work began. I started to acquire 3D assets for my game, contacted some people from the community to get their approval of me using their assets (you can read credits for that). Played around with VAM and Unity to help me render it. After a while, I had prepared everything I needed. Just to test the workflow, I made Vertical Slice. A short fully featured segment from the game (that was later not used) that has all things my final game would feature: animations, choices, alternative events, etc. It was a test of my pipeline.



During that time, I really worked hard (almost 3 months) to get Global Illumination (really high-end lighting) working in my rendering pipeline. Alas, the Unity engine I used to create my assets was just too old a version for that, and I couldn't upgrade otherwise VAM wouldn't be supported, and VAM itself had too crude of lighting for that. After 3 months of constant battle, I gave up, and that's how the game's final graphics turned out to be.

This is what I targeted for IHS graphics:

As a developer, you have to be mindful of time. Time is the most precious resource you need in order to create things. If you are not mindful of that, your creations never arrive because they will always be a day/month/year away from release until you tire out and lay down your quill/pencil/mouse and keyboard and decide it is enough and time to put up the white flag.

It was a hard choice to make that had further repercussions. I initially planned for Talia's house to be much bigger in player exploration. It was supposed to have a pool, garage, some green space and environment around it. But because I couldn't do GI, and how VAM lighting was so crude with natural lights I had to cut all of that otherwise it would look horrible. Already in my game scenes where you have natural light make some scenes look less than good and with outdoor scenes it would look even worse. Thus the cut. Another reason the pool got cut was that VAM had serious trouble with water.

On the other hand, this allowed me to focus more on the characters themselves and tighten up the story between them and their interactions. The house was just a stage for the characters to play within it. Overall, as much as I hate the GI cut, it improved the game in a different way.

The idea itself to close down whole story to only one place was inspiration coming from watching 12 Angry Men. The entire movie was literally set in just one room for like 95% of it's running and you never felt like movie was worse of it, in fact it i was an asset to the movie. It forced writers to write better dialogs, watch how much time something takes, organize story better and so on and in the end it is one of the best movies ever created and one of the best I ever watched.

Time before release

Around 3 months before February 28th 2024 when I released first version for you guys, I started full production. Not just testing things, not concepting, not creating workflow, not getting better at something. Pure production, using my created workflow, using skills i learned in animation and rendering and so on. Not every other day, not this week maybe 2 days after work. I told my employer that I will be working half time from that day to which he agreed and I worked 2 weeks, day in day out on my game and 2 weeks in my job with some extra time after my time in job to speed up IHS first version.

That's right, everything you read above, nearly 2 years of preparations was just pre-production. Obviously it would be faster if I would be working full time on my game but alas I would quickly go insolvent from lack of income.

This is where I started building my game seriously, launched a Patreon with the hope that some kind souls would support me, and focused entirely on delivering the V0.39 version that some of you experienced.

After 3 months of hard work, it was the 22nd of February when I finally had V0.39 in my hand. Out of around 100 events in the story that I planned (since then, the game grew to around 120 per playthrough), I had 21 and, in my opinion, a good prologue and something interesting. I wasn't happy with everything I did, as a creator/artist, you never are. But either way, I was proud of it.

All I hoped was that people like you would enjoy it. I gave myself two years to work part-time in order to finish the 1.0 version, and even if the game didn’t find success, at least I could tell myself I had given it my honest effort.

On the 28th of February, I prepared that first version of the game. I spent a whole day testing it just to be sure there were no bugs. I bought a Mac to test the game on macOS, which arrived a day before (it turned out there was a bug I needed to address on Macs). And I waited, actually pretty depressed.

It has been the last two years of my hard work, and perhaps even longer if you consider everything involved, such as developing the concept long ago. Now, there is a specific date that holds significant importance for me... a moment when I will finally know whether this endeavor was a costly mistake or something truly worthwhile.

...to be continued.