Proxima Introduction
Proxima is a free, adult, Sci-fi RPG / GrandStrategy / SlaveManagement game that I’m making. It is planned to have a large list of characters that appeals to a variety of fetishes. It has a serious story with an unfolding world you can discover. It is easily moddable and the source code is available to all.
My goal is to create the perfect combination of sympathetic and charismatic characters, sex appeal, power fantasy, deep strategic and management gameplay, and a novel but realistic sci-fi world.
Origins and Inspirations
Proxima started from a f95 thread where I lamented the fact that a game with interesting gameplay is on one of the worst and most unusable engines ever. That game is No Haven. I liked No Haven’s gameplay, its character management and RPG systems, the way that risk and probabilities are presented, the interesting sex and slavery development. I wanted to play a game that included these strengths without any its numerous downsides that I won’t go into here.
Please support No Haven’s developer: https://www.patreon.com/bedlamgames The amount of work that has been put into that game is enormous and that developer deserves the world for innovating in this genre and pushing the dated RAGS engine way further than it should ever have been.
Along the way I’m going to include inspiration from some of my other favorite games, including Free Cities, Crusader Kings, Station Master, and various VNs and sci-fi porn stories. Ultimately this is my ideal game for this genre, from my preferences and priorities, and you’re not guaranteed to like my game if you liked No Haven.
How it plays basics
You start off as a band of outlaw mercenary slavers, going on raids to steal and enslave, infiltrating countries, their media, their companies, and their politics. Carefully balance the rival factions, manipulate them against each other, taking care to respect their needs and core interests… or not. Meet a variety of special characters with their own goals and ambitions, support them, recruit them, or enslave them.
Grow your little organization into a major force, with many employees and slaves. Unlike other slave management games where slaves are mostly sex objects, in Proxima slaves are expected to fill a large variety of roles. Singers, models, managers, strategists, secretaries, and propagandists are among the many you will need to maintain relations and grow your power and splendor. With power and splendor you can gain territory, build facilities, take over minor cities, then major cities, and eventually whole countries.
Once you gain Official Political Power, you can start the process of creating a new world. You can make your society into one of misandry or misogyny, ethnic degradation and ethnic supremacy, embrace eugenics or equality. Continue using infiltrations and underhanded methods to slowly gain control of all of Proxima, or simply wage war.
Philosophical preferences:
Some of the preferences informing my design which may be different from that of other games.
- Humans. I find orcs, dwarfs, etc to be unappealing / boring. Variety comes in the form of different origin stories, nationalities and races. Everyone is free to add their cards in suggestions and other game types though.
- No prostitution. I’m selfish with my sex slaves. I don’t see the appeal of renting them out for money, and that in fact ruins the fantasy for me. While pimping /selling sex slaves is possible in proxima it is not the basis of gameplay, and you shouldn’t need to.
- Fantastic UI. Managing large number of slaves is really challenging to make interesting. It requires a very good interface, automation, and systems. Most adult games fails hard at this. Proxima’s interface allows you to spend the amount of time doing management that you want. You can dig deep, if you want. If you prefer to explore the world instead, the automated systems shouldn’t bother you with requests. Everything you do should be done with the minimum clicks. Information is hierarchically presented, and interlinked so you don’t have any confusion about what to do next.
- Characters that you care about. Better than loads of generic slaves is a few number of slaves that you really care about. It’s immersion breaking to have different people speak the same dialogue in generic events. Characters should be unique, have differentiated backgrounds and interesting stories. In Proxima not only are politically and setting important characters deeply written with their own quests, I’m committed to delivering the same for the phalanx of other interactable characters and “normal” characters. The games I mentioned generally feature a handful of unique characters among a sea of procedurally generated sandbox creations, I plan to have a 50/50 ratio.
- Concrete Physical Presence. In most games your presence is superficial and you miss the feeling of actually being there in the world. There’s a break of immersion when you attack the same place 10 times and the 11th time they are still taken by surprise and still haven’t heard of you. In Proxima every action causes people to think of you differently and change the game simulation. If you attack a country multiple times, your reputation will grow and invite retaliation. The country might be weakened and look like a tempting target to other nations. The people might grow fearful and ask for protection. Their allies will request missions to help the victims. The leaders might become united and determined, or despondent and divided. Therefore there is:
- Strategic consequence. In most games you just want to do everything, and there’s no real impact of each choice. You’re just picking which thing to see first. In Proxima the world changes based on your decisions. You are powerful.
- Power fantasy. The greatest power fantasy is not to have the highest damage number on your fireball but to realistically simulate reshaping people’s lives. In Proxima, not only can you control down to the detail, the lives of your slaves and their existence, you can also recreate whole cities and countries to satisfy your best or worse desires. You can make your society into one of misandry or misogyny, ethnic degradation and ethnic supremacy, embrace eugenics or equality. If other nations object, influence them so that they adopt your ideology and culture, or overwhelm them with your power or splendor.
- Power fantasy (2). Another important aspect of the slave owning power fantasy is to own the highest quality, the most elite slaves, so that their splendor reflects on you. Being able to make your slaves, especially the procedural and player-customized ones, magnificient, is key. This doesn’t just mean having great stats, but more importantly having the entire game world recognize her, give her feedback for being impressive, and stand in awe of her as much as they would do to the player character. Then the player will feel actual pleasure in owning her, rather than as just another line on the spreadsheet. For specially written characters, there are even more creative ways to make the character stand out and be desirable.
- A “serious” setting. The most immersive, most enjoyable settings aren’t porny or whacky. Same applies to art as well as writing. Maybe that’s ok in mods, but I aim for something that’s fun in its “realism”. I think a serious setting is key to achieving:
- Evocative storytelling. This is harder than it sounds, especially to do so in decent quantity, but let’s try. Generate pathos, excitement, love. If you have strong writing abilities, definitely join me. If you have an impressive writing portfolio I will pay as well, up front!
- Absolute moddability. I want to sell the game one day and be able to use it to support myself if possible, but otherwise the source code is available for anyone to copy and tweak anything. Just don’t publish your own version of the game so that mine ends up not being sellable.
Setting
Proxima Centauri X, 4.4 light-years away from Earth, is the an earth-like planet Humanity discovered in the year 2120. The United Earth Federation officially completed terraformation and colonized it in 2133, the only human planet-colony, and in 2280, the start of the game, it has a population of over a billion people.
10 years ago the United Earth Federation collapsed into civil war in Sol and Proxima was effectively abandoned. After a brief period of anarchy, Proxians quickly refound themselves under the banner of old earth nations that are used to give their new institutions legitimacy.
They are historic sounding names of America, China, Japan, Russia, Korea, Germany. A 7th faction of UEF Space Command remnants exist on the Moon.
Strategy and management
Your organization’s 4 basic stats:
Slaves — Total count of how many common, undifferentiated, slaves you have. Slaves generate power, splendor, and consume supplies each turn.
Supplies — Maintain supplies, too low supplies will cause mission penalties.
Power — Maintain power, too low power will cause rebellion by disloyal slaves as well as raids from other factions. When you are attacked you’ll need power to defend your territory.
Splendor — Splendor is needed to take cities and conquer factions.
20 Mission Types in 4 categories.
Recon, Raid, Infiltrate, Diplomacy.
100+ Traits and many other ways to customize each character.
This is a living document I’m still working on.
My Patreon if you want to support me. This will really help encourage me. Thank you!
Speculative Future Ideas
Since Dulst is a multiplayer card game platform, I want to add multiplayer with pvp combat.
