LEWD is an erotic text adventure game, currently in development.
The goal of the game is to create a persistent living world that’s constantly changing by your actions.
Even when you log off from it, the world will continue to change, leading to new an unexpected experiences when you return.
You play your own character. Whether that’s breeding aliens, spreading around nasty things, rising up the ranks of “space academy”, buying up all the panties repeatedly and then burning them so no one can afford panties, or just trying to fuck or not fuck every single thing – you make your own story.
With enough support, there will be millions of words of content, as well as an immeasurable amount of procedurally created content. The engine is already in place to make this happen. LEWD is similar to MUDs (multi-user-dungeons) and other online text adventure games of the past. What I've mainly set out to do with it is to make a new engine that is far easier to make content for, with a powerful and flexible development tool, and to make the game itself very accessible.
I originally started LEWD with a prototype I made in about 3 weeks in May 2013.
Then I spent a few more weeks with it to both gauge interest and to figure out all the sort of features I'd need from an engine, and how best to set up the workflow for tools to make content for the game.
That's why you see a long gap of nothing happening. I didn't have the support to work full time on it at the time, and had a bunch of work to get done elsewhere, and was still figuring out where to go with it.
It was about a year later before I started working on my new engine, which took a long time. I've just recently got all the content then working on my new engine, worked on finding new writers, and...
Alpha 1 is now released!
This is the first release with the game running on my new engine, along with some more polish, features, and about twice as much content as the old prototype.
Some of the additions and changes since the old prototype are:
- Almost 100% more content
- Redone and improved ways that content is parts and descriptions are generated for your character
- Improvements to the character generation and how you can personalize descriptions (It's a huge disorganized mess of listing out like 100 body parts, I know. That's just alpha things)
- Client modding API for character descs
- Feedback system for supporters to leave their feedback on scenarios
- First of its kind(I think) Patreon rewards system. Patreon has no API for this, so I made a bot to handle it.
- Updated rendering
- Updated, more flexible, quests system
- Efficiency improvements and slightly prettied up interface
- Changes to the networking to use interpolation in many places so it feels more responsive
- More improvements to polish, down to how sliders for stats work, selecting traits works, updating stats outside of chargen, it not waiting until the end to tell you if name is empty, and all sorts of little things like that
- Lots of little bug and annoyance fixes, such as how the scenario box would move around when pressing tab (which should only happen when there is a chat window below it to scale against). Hopefully fixed that bug with getting "stuck" and unable to move
- More settings, including the ability to disable NPC images for a more text-only experience
- Progress/character saving
- All new tutorial, which is more of a walkthrough and should be far clearer.
- An introductory preword about the world
- Updates to the site itself
- This is still just the first alpha release, and just the start. There's lots more to come
How to play; there are two ways to currently get early access:
1. Either get a hold of a key from a supporter who has gotten some, or by being one of the older registered accounts on the LEWD website that'll be emailed keys fairly soon (probably for Alpha 2 release).
This gives you access to the main server(http://www.playlewd.com/main) that is typically a bit behind the test server, but unlike the test server doesn't go down for updates and debugging often.
Keys can be redeemed on your account page, and you can find your keys to share or use there.
2. Support our Patreon for instant access to the test server.
The test
All you need to do is pledge on the Patreon, and then you can link your Patreon account to your LEWD account for instant access.
Then you can play right now on http://www.playlewd.com/test-server/!
Otherwise, you'll just need to be patient and wait for wider access.
LOOKING FOR WRITERS
Generally we're looking for writers whenever there is room in the budget for more.
See: http://www.playlewd.com/blog/?page_id=571 to learn how to submit an application, and if you have the talent when a position is open I'll let you know.
