NOIR: Skin Deep — my next game

With Eyes Closed is wrapped up, and I've been looking forward to talking about this one for a while. Here's what I'm building next.

The case

You're a homicide detective in Mirage Bay — a sprawling coastal city in Southern California, circa 2015. A Tuesday night call: two men dead at a strip club. The owner in his office, the shooter beside him. Looks like a gang hit. Should close fast.

It doesn't.

The deeper you dig, the more suspects surface — people close to the victim, business rivals, and officials who should have had no connection to a strip club murder. The evidence keeps pointing in multiple directions. Every thread you pull opens another. And the question stops being who pulled the trigger and becomes something harder: who do you believe?

The women

NOIR: Skin Deep has 8 women with developed roles. Some are connected to the case. Some aren't. Part of the cast is available as romance options — fully developed storylines, adult dynamics, explicit content if that's where you take it.

• Victoria Ellison — the victim's widow: platinum blonde, striking, the kind of composed that makes rooms adjust to her. She wants answers the department isn't giving her — and she's chosen you to get them.

• Elena Voss — a local artist: auburn hair, warm, already a part of your life before any of this started. Will there be enough of you left after this case to keep it that way?

• Samara Reyes — 21, working nights at a neighborhood store, paying her own way in a city that doesn't owe her anything. You stopped in once for reasons that had nothing to do with her. The reasons you come back are different.

• Jenna Whitfield — the detective's aide at Homicide: sharp, blonde, and has been paying closer attention to you than her job requires.

• Kira Tanaka — the department's digital forensic specialist: blue-streaked hair, a basement lab, and a talent for getting answers out of things that weren't meant to give them.

• Thea Mercer — the forensic officer: cool gray-blue gaze, precise, and the one person in the building whose conclusions can't be argued with. She notices more than she says.

• Nikki & Candy — two dancers at The Velvet Room, working the night everything happened.

The next posts will introduce each of them individually — with renders.

The game

Choice-driven, branching, two genuinely different endings. Mature 18+: violence, strong language, explicit romantic content.

Built on what came before — and further

If you've been here since Going Rogue or With Eyes Closed, you know what I make: choice-driven stories, adult content, animations that take the presentation seriously. NOIR: Skin Deep continues all of that. The animation quality from the second half of With Eyes Closed S2 carries forward, with the same specialist on board.

What's different is the foundation.

Going Rogue was built largely on instinct — I knew the start and the end, filled in the middle as I went. With Eyes Closed gave me more structure: I knew the characters going in, knew the general arc. For NOIR: Skin Deep, I mapped the entire story before writing a single line of dialogue. Every scene is planned — who's in it, what it needs to do, how it ends. The dialogue gets written during development, but there are no gaps waiting to bite me, no storylines I won't have room to pay off.

The characters got the same treatment. Every main character has a written profile — psychology, history, what they want, what they're hiding. Not just in my head. On the page. It shows in the writing.

And the detective mechanics are real. You'll choose who to believe — not pick the "right" answer, because there isn't one. Every path through this story has evidence supporting it and evidence working against it. You decide. The story gives you your version of the truth.