Inquisitor Trainer Devlog: I Tried to Balance a Brothel Management minigame and It Fought Back

📊 Devlog: I Tried to Balance a Brothel Management Game and It Fought Back

This minigame isn’t just a side system — it’s the finale of the Heretic path update. Every bad decision, every compromise, every step into corruption leads here. This is where it all comes together… or falls apart.

Alright, progress report time—aka “why my brain now runs on spreadsheets and bad decisions.”

I’ve been working on the brothel management minigame, and it’s finally starting to feel like an actual game instead of a chaos simulator where everyone is constantly broke, dirty, and exhausted (honestly, a bit too realistic).

Balancing this thing has been… an experience.\

At one point:

- Training cost your entire life savings

- Workers passed out after doing literally one (1) job

- And “cleaning” was basically a luxury reserved for the rich elite

- Influence disappeared faster than your will to optimize

There was a phase where every decision felt like choosing which problem you wanted to lose to. Do you invest? You go broke. Do you work? Everyone becomes filthy. Do you clean? Congrats, now you have no AP and also no money. Great system. 10/10 suffering.

Now though, it’s in a much nicer spot. You can actually make decisions without immediately collapsing your entire operation. You still need to think—but it’s no longer a slow-motion disaster every single turn.

We’ve got a proper gameplay loop now:

Manage AP → choose actions → watch outcomes → read recap → regret → adapt → repeat

And importantly, failures now actually look like failures. If a worker doesn’t have enough AP or resources, they won’t just magically pretend to work—they’ll stay idle and call you out (silently, but you can feel it).

Also, Soryn the Shadowseer is in and doing great (or at least as great as someone can be while being constantly overworked by you). She’s got that mysterious “I definitely know more than I’m telling you” energy, mixed with “I absolutely will judge your management skills.”

She’s probably the most composed out of the current roster… right up until you try to make her do five things in a row with no AP. Then suddenly the ancient wisdom turns into very visible disappointment.

And yes—workers now refuse to work if they’re too exhausted. They have standards now. This is clearly a mistake on my part, but we’re committing to it.

There’s also a full recap system now, so after each phase you get a breakdown of exactly what happened—who worked, who failed, where your resources went, and precisely how everything spiraled. It’s very helpful, especially if you enjoy understanding your own downfall in detail.

👉 Tomorrow I’ll be uploading a build — this version is basically feature-complete for the minigame.

So I’d really love your help testing it. Especially the balancing:

- Does it feel too punishing?

- Too easy?

- Are there “dead turns” where nothing feels worth doing?

- Any weird edge cases or exploits?

Basically: break it, stress it, and tell me where it feels off.

From here, the next step is polish—adding more flavor, improving feedback, maybe some extra character-specific touches, and of course… more ways for things to go horribly wrong (but in a fun, intentional way this time).

As always, thanks for supporting this project—your support directly fuels both development and my increasingly questionable design decisions.