What Is My Harem RPG?
My Harem RPG was my attempt at the waifu collector / lewd dungeon RPG genre on mobile. The idea was simple: you're a guy, you fight through dungeon floors, and the characters you recruit are all drawn-from-scratch girls with their own personalities and combat roles. Think dungeon crawler meets visual novel meets stuff you'd get banned from advertising on Instagram.
I designed it, built a working prototype, commissioned some art, and then quietly shelved it. This page is the postmortem. It's not a pretty story but it is an honest one.
And here we have a look back at the mobile project that was never finished, My Harem RPG.
My Harem RPG, as the working title, was stopped in its tracks upon realing how over reaching the project was. It was intended to be a mobile/desktop idle-rpg game set in a dungeon
It was intended to be completed in 2018 and released first on the Android Playstore since at the time that is where i held the bulk of my experience.
How the My Harem RPG Concept Started
I've always had a soft spot for mobile RPGs with gacha-style character collection -- not because I like spending £400 on banner pulls, but because the core loop is genuinely satisfying when it's done right. You progress, you recruit, you build a team, you care about the characters.
The lewd angle wasn't shock value. There's an underserved market of adult players who want an RPG with actual mechanical depth and proper art, not just a visual novel with a combat skin slapped on top. My Harem RPG was supposed to fill that gap.
The gameplay was clear, we hunt down cute looking waifus we can buy from an artist, copy the combat cycle of Summoners War or 7 Knights and let players gasha their money away on their favourite waifu.
So what went wrong? Everything. It actually originally started as a simple match 3 game but my ideas went overboard and before I knew it was i was making "an epic mmorpg fantasy adventure"
The joke above is a common reference to new developers who very quickly start out with a project that has a small scope but feature creep quickly see's its workload becoming that of a triple A game
I must confess that dispite being an experienced game developer at the time, I too fell into this trap
The Characters and Art Direction
Each character in My Harem RPG had a defined role. They weren't interchangeable sprites -- the idea was that your tank played differently from your mage played differently from whoever the annoying support healer with the broken passive was. The art was commissioned to match the character's combat personality, not just to look good on a loading screen.
Getting artists to commit to a lewd indie project at budget is its own adventure. A lot of the back-and-forth you go through when commissioning character art for a game like this is the same regardless of genre -- if you want to know what that process actually looks like, I wrote about it in this piece on commissioning artists.
I built a match 3 system that would lead to the unlocking of the Waifus that I had acquired from an artist who sells a package of them. Suriyun (Website Link); If you have not checked out his assets you really should; (I am not being paid to endorse whoever he is).
His assets were at the time releatively cheap, high qualify and just work right out of the game in Unity
Why My Harem RPG Got Cancelled
Scope. Always scope.
The game as designed needed a meaningful roster to feel like a collection game. A meaningful roster meant more art, more writing, more balancing, more everything. A solo developer can absolutely ship a small RPG, but "small" and "collection RPG" are basically opposites -- they fight each other in the design document and one of them has to lose.
I also hit the same wall that kills a lot of adult indie games: platform distribution. Steam allows adult content with age verification but the mobile storefronts are a much grimmer picture. The target platform was mobile-first, and that's a problem with no easy answer when your game's whole identity is the lewd angle.
I've written about what it looks like to kill a project and start something new in Goodbye Pan Airways Of Apes -- the feeling of closing a door on something you built is the same whether the project was two months old or two years.
Due to personal issues at the time, I was able to realise the errors of my ways and can the project. The design material that was usable help lead to the next project that was eventually uploaded to the Google Play Store, Galaxy Raiders
All in all, I happy that this was attempted.
What I Took From It
My Harem RPG wasn't a failure in the way that word usually lands. I built the thing. I commissioned real art, I wrote a real design doc, I made a prototype that ran. The game exists, just not on a storefront.
The lessons from it fed directly into how I think about scope and platform fit now. If you're curious what came out the other side of that thinking, the game I'm actually shipping is P For Pistol -- smaller scope, clearer platform, same weird energy.
Whether any of this was worth writing about is a question I'll leave to the SEO gods and however many people googled "My Harem RPG" at 2am.
