Brothel City combines hentai games with Sim City style city-builders. LewdGamer spoke with Jack Darot, lead developer of the game’s team, Darot Games.

Players sitting down with Brothel City may find it a familiar experience. It’s loaded with all sorts of menus and buildings, but players of games such as the classic Sim City franchise will find the mechanics intuitive. Build simple buildings, make money, build more complex buildings, make more money. Certainly this thought process underlines many of the creative decisions made by the Darot Games team. The team is fairly new, and they don’t yet have the following that some of the big fish in the medium have, but all indications would suggest that they’re confident that their unique niche will get them noticed by the broader H-game audience. We spoke with Jack Darot, the lead developer, to discover how he sees himself and his game.

LewdGamer: Hello, we’re here today with Jack Darot, the lead developer of the game Brothel City. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today, Jack.

Jack Darot: Greetings, everyone. Greetings, LewdGamer.

LewdGamer: You’re a pretty new developer and you don’t have the same public clout as some of the people we’ve spoken to before. Before we get into it earnest, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Jack Darot: You are right, I am new to the adult game industry. I mean as a developer. I worked in the gamedev industry for few years trying different roles, though I never was satisfied with the games I had to work on.

One day I decided to leave. To try a new profession that is not connected with office and start to think of my own game. The idea to build adult project came to me as I was spending a few days playing Roundscape Adorevia. I thought “OK, I like games, I like sex, erotica and being travelling that time I had no ‘permanent’ girlfriend,” so let’s mix the sex ideas and gamedev.

I always was a fan of strategic games, Caesar and Majesty in particular, and after few months of surfing adult games I became tired of all the visual novels and incest “roleplay” projects that look similar to each other. I decided to try combining city-builder game and adult game ideas. Thus, Brothel City was born. I stopped travelling, found a programmer, an artist, and here I am.

LewdGamer: You mention Caesar and Majesty, but what other sim games and strategy games do you consider major influences on this project?

Jack Darot:Cleopatra, Sim City, Tropico a little bit. Being honest, I tried other games and found almost nothing that is close enough to Caesar III. And yes, Majesty was the game I was playing when the idea to make Brothel City came to me.

LewdGamer: What about H-games? What games did you draw from when designing the erotic elements of your project?

Jack Darot: Interesting question. My favorite erotic games are Roundscape Adorevia and Legend of Queen Opala, though, as you can see, they aren’t in the same genre as Brothel City. I understood that trying to create another RPG like those would be incredible hard. Furthermore, I prefer to interact, to play with the game like with a toy, not just “click-to-play” projects. I mean, there is nothing wrong with them, but it was a dream to create a game that even without adult content could be interesting. I hope we are reaching that goal. I understand it is also a barrier between us and those players who do not like mid-core games, but the last few months have shown that those who are into our game stay for a long time and build an enthusiastic community that we are proud of.

LewdGamer: I think we’ve gone as far as we can without first answering the question for viewers who haven’t tried the game or even heard about it. What is Brothel City?

Jack Darot:Brothel City is an adult city-builder single-player game. You start as the owner of a small flophouse near the road in the fantasy world. Different travelers walk down the road. Each has different needs and desires, such as food, drinks, bath, sleep, and so on. And, sure… sex. To satisfy those needs you have too construct different buildings, such as dinning rooms, farms, stables, brothels, etc. Sure, you have to hire some staff. Note that all your employees are females. For the most part. The Alchemist has a… “surprise”, though.

You use experience points to issue corrupting decrees and soon you’ll have waitresses giving guests blowjobs under the tables, guards fucking prisoners, Charity nuns sharing everything they have — even their bodies. Though, to earn enough EXP to corrupt everyone you need to master the city-building part of the game — or you’ll just go bankrupt and the landlord of the region will take everything.

LewdGamer: How are adult scenes and adult content integrated into the game?

Jack Darot: Two main ways:

1. Every girl (around 30 types) has a big authentic art and a Shyness parameter that varies from two to zero. Girl loses Shyness slowly by just working in such a dissolute place and this will make her wear less and less clothes. You can make girls lose their Shyness by issuing decrees and (now under development) by using Faith and/or Alchemist’s lust potions.

1. As a boss you can issue decrees for your staff, and those decrees have not only in-game meaning, but they also corrupt your girls. Every decree has an 18+ illustration. For example, you can order your Waitresses to wear short skirts, to suck customers’ cocks under the table, or to serve milk from their lactating breasts. Each girl type will have a decrees line of at least five corrupting levels each. Here are few examples of decrees illustrations: for the Guard training her posture, for the Housemaid to clean everywhere and Valkyrie praying Sister of Charity for a blessing. By the way, Valkyrie’s illustration is shown exclusively for LewdGamer it is still in progress and will be released in the next game build.

LewdGamer: What fetishes does the game cover?

Jack Darot: Vanilla sex, anal, group, demi-human, BDSM, uniform, big tits, lesbian, light bestiality (but it’s turned off by default, to not offend those who don’t want to see that kind of content).

I think it is easier to say what isn’t covered, for example definitely all the characters are adults. No toilet things, no death, no cripples. We love adult art, and love it in an aesthetic way.

LewdGamer: What artists do you have working on the project?

Jack Darot: I am proud to say have a beautiful young girl working as an artist with the passion to create our illustrations. Actually, I know that for lots of people it is possible to recognize if art was created by a man or a girl. I think the art from the game’s “decrees” extradite our artist’s gender.

Talking about artists, the original character art was created by another girl. We’re going to change them, as we do not work with that lady anymore. We like our new artist’s style better. Also, now we have an intern, a young guy trying himself as an illustrator. Our goal on Patreon right now is to be able to hire our artists full time.

LewdGamer: The artwork you have in the game is relatively high quality. Is paying for that degree of artwork a hassle for you?

Jack Darot: Thank you for kind words. At the start of the project, yes. I was the only one who financed the art. Now, thanks to our Patrons, it is much easier to afford and once we reach our Patreon goal, we’ll have more art of that same quality.

LewdGamer: However, some of the artwork in your game has a very divergent art style, with a more cartoonish feel as opposed to the hyper realistic character art? Do you see the lack of a consistent art style as a problem?

Jack Darot: You know, at the start of the project it was needed to have as more art as fast as possible.

From the very start, I decided that we won’t use any arts “from the Internet.” It is one of the core things for me, making unique and original artwork.

Now, as we have a stable artist, we think we’ll re-draw existing scenes at some point, though none of our players said anything wrong with it. We’ll continue focusing on creating new scenes, new emotions, than re-draw existing illustrations. Maybe in the future, but not now. We’ve got so many things to be illustrated.

LewdGamer: Does your game have a storyline?

Jack Darot: Interesting question. I was discussing that with a friend just yesterday. I mean, I can say that city-building part of the game is almost finished. It’s been my focus. I wanted to keep the game mid-core difficulty, not the hard-core.

Thus, only now I have time to think of the storyline. It’s partially thanks to our community, all those guys and girls who write us their suggestions, they helped me a lot in forming the plot. All those ideas about charity cults, aristocrats and fractions. Oh Goddess, they gave me lots of inspiration. At the moment, I am writing a storyline that will be realized as a continuation of existing campaign. It will feature Jessie, your Manager, Ashley, the Waitress and so on. I will have around a month to think of it as our programmer is taking a business trip during June.

LewdGamer: Looking forward, what are your plans for the game? What do you imagine the game will look like when it’s done?

Jack Darot: Oh, this is such an interesting question!

Art: First of all we should finish illustrations and functional of all the girls. Game mechanics: Faith miracles, Alchemistry and Fractions are at the frontier of the game dev plan.

This is just few words to describe a lot of work to do. Maybe it is wrong not to know the final result of the game, but sometimes I think it lives its own life. The community and my everyday life experience create lots of new features. Sure, not all of them can be realized but some I just can not hold them back. So the game will grow and mature as long as there are people who love it and have ideas how to improve the gameplay and the general experience of it.

LewdGamer: Do you have any plans for what you want to do after you finish Brothel City?

Jack Darot: Sure, I have been thinking about it. I have two main ideas: an “urban-fantasy” RPG and a card-game like adult M:tG are floating in the air and my mind. That said, Brothel City is my priority right now to finish.

LewdGamer: An issue with your game that some have observed is that your English grammar isn’t very good. Do you have plans to have the text of your game edited at any point?

Jack Darot: First of all, we apologize to English speakers for the mistakes. We’ve found an editor to help us with the writing and storyline.

LewdGamer: Where do you see yourself and your game in the broader H-game market? Do you see potential to be one of the big names based on this title?

Jack Darot: I think every creator wants to believe his project can be one of the big name project. Though for now, our goal is to create quality product. A product where people can play an interesting game while enjoying adult content offered as a reward for skilled playing. Not just a click-click-open new art way. We believe in our community and their support and are sure we’ll definitely take our niche. After all, as of now we are the only one in this genre.

Our goal is to create fun games for ready-to-think players. Where will it lead us? We don’t know. I want to try creating interesting games, and will try always to search for new gameplay mechanics within the adult industry.

LewdGamer: Thank you for joining us today, Jack.

Jack Darot: Thank you so much, too. Both for interesting questions and for an opportunity to talk to players via your website. We hope you enjoyed our interview. We wish all the best to LewdGamer and your readers. It is so cool you have this kind of resource and an honor to be interviewed by you.

Let me finish with our traditional Brothel City wish: May the Boobs be with you!

Darot Games runs a team Patreon, which features downloads for the newest versions of their game. It also provides a venue for those interested in donating to the Brothel City project.