GOCKHAUS Retrospective (Patreon)

Hey all! I was specifically requested by a few people to write this up, so here we are: few months after release, the GOCKHAUS retrospective! I talked a bit about the characters in the card release post, but here I'd like to discuss its development.

Character release post:https://www.patreon.com/thatcombatwombat/posts/gockhaus-card-166796805

For those of you who read my BreedTown 3 retrospective, let me start by clarifying that this is not going to be anywhere near as regretful. I wouldn't say Gockhaus is perfect or anything, but I am very happy with how it turned out; it's the hardest I ever worked on a project, positive feedback has been overwhelming, and negative feedback has mostly been pretty fair and constructive. This might change after BreedTown 4, but for the time being, it's the first game since BreedTown 2 that I've felt could be my current magnum opus. For those of you who played and enjoyed it; thank you :D

A sentiment I've seen a number of times about Gockhaus online though is, "This is a pretty weird game, especially in relation to the mainline BreedTown games." So, let's explore that a bit: why is GOCKHAUS the way it is?

A BreedTown Spinoff

As I've said before, pretty much as soon as I made BreedTown 1 I had a plot outline in mind for the series. I've always been someone who has too many ideas to meaningfully act on, and this includes a bunch of game ideas. I'm also a completionist though, and devoting too much time and effort to developing these other games before finishing the BreedTown series just feels wrong. The perk of a BreedTown spinoff was that I would still be working on the franchise, but had some freedom to experiment with other genres.Genre experimentation wasn't even the original plan though; when I wrote the Reed siblings into BreedTown 2, I was envisioning something much more structurally similar to the main BreedTown games, just with a swap to "futa" or "gay" content for Brandi and Barry respectively. I didn't necessarily feel the need to make Barry's gay BreedTown games (but who knows what the future may hold, aha~) but right away I was thinking that I wanted to make a Brandi spinoff. I envisioned Brandi as still being big and muscular like her brother, going around a town knocking up random ladies, but in a much more sheepish fashion; again, a BreedTown game, just with a different type of protagonist. (I wasn't always into futa, but over time I've developed a certain admiration; it's like a compromise between lesbian and straight sex).Alongside the desire to finish the BreedTown games and make a Brandi spinoff though, I had, and still have, other game ideas. The most prominent of these in my mind was a horror game. It might or might not surprise you to learn that horror is one of my favorite genres, and there's also a sense in which I consider it very influential to the BreedTown games. In BreedTown 2 I started consciously writing Brandon as a serial killer analogue in places, and BreedTown 3 has the entire abandoned office section; I just can't resist wanting to scare people, I'm sorry, but I hope BreedTown 4 also has some moments that scare you so much that you lose your arousal. And then regain it a scene later when you knock up a clown girl. It's funny because I hated horror when I was younger but I love it so much now. Quite frankly, there was a several year stretch after the release of BreedTown 2 where the desire to make such a game was overwhelming.Anyways, a thought occurred to me at some point: "Why not kill two birds with one stone and make the Brandi game a horror game?" It was a very attractive thought. At one time the plan might've been to wait until the mainline BreedTown games were finished to make any spinoffs, but to be quite honest after BreedTown 3 my desire to be done with the series so that I could work on some of my other game ideas had increased. It seemed that once I was done with BreedTown 4, the likelihood of me making a spinoff would drastically go gown. I still had the very attractive thought of a Brandi Reed futa horror game, so the feeling was "I either make this now, or not at all." And, well, the rest is history.

The Setting: My Ghost Story

For a horror location, a haunted house is about as iconic and classic as it gets, right? The Lockwood Estate and its history are based very heavily off the Joseph Forepaugh Mansion in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I myself may or may not have had a supernatural encounter when I was younger. To keep it brief, the history of the house is that it was once owned by a wealthy businessman named Joseph Forepaugh with his wife Mary and their five kids. Joseph had an affair with a young Irish maid of theirs named Molly, which may have resulted in her getting pregnant. When the affair came to light, Mary dismissed Molly, and Joseph sided with his wife. Molly hung herself on the third floor, and a few years later, Joseph himself wandered out into the woods and shot himself. Tragic stuff. This was all in the late 1800s though; nowadays the house is a historic site, event space, and restaurant, as well as a famous local haunt, with visitors occasionally claiming to see the spirits of Molly and Joseph.I'm not terribly superstitious, generally, but I can't completely write this stuff off because I might have seen a ghost here.

When I was a child, my aunt had a wedding at the Forepaugh Mansion. The event was held on the first and second floors, with the third floor being roped off. So of course, while the adults were preoccupied with the wedding festivities and my younger brother and I being the adventurous types, we snuck up to the third floor where we weren't supposed to go. There was nobody up there, not even staff; just a bunch of empty rooms, and a dining table that was set for what I presume was some other event scheduled for another time slot. It was very quiet and still, but while we explored, the walls and floor suddenly started shaking violently, with the plates and silverware rattling loudly. My brother and I thought it must've been an earthquake, and we ran back down to the second floor. Suddenly the shaking stopped, and when we asked the adults, they said they didn't notice any such thing. We briefly snuck back up to the third floor and things were quiet and still again. Strange. It spooked us enough that we didn't go up there again. However, we're not quite done yet. Later in the day was the wedding ceremony itself, held out on the balcony pictured above. My brother and I stood there while vows were read and relatives got weepy; it was a nice day. As the ceremony wrapped up, and we started to head back inside, my brother looked up and I saw a strange look on his face. Much of that day is fuzzy to me, but I remember this very clearly."Do you see that up there too?" he asked me. I followed his gaze. Standing in one of of the upper windows was a maid, glaring directly down at my brother and I. I looked away for a moment, and when I looked back, she was gone.

Spooky! My brother still vouches for this story to this day, though nowadays I feel like half of it happened in our heads, and as clearly as it exists in my mind, I'm not even positive we really did see a glaring maid up there. Or, if we did, there's certainly a chance that it was just a staff member who was pissed at us for sneaking into a space that was prepared for another event, haha.Still, the "encounter" was very formative for me, and as an adult I have a fondness for haunted houses, particularly in fiction. Having then settled on the Brandi game being a horror, I naturally wanted to set it in a haunted house. But this is a porn game too, and a BreedTown spinoff; why would there be a bunch of breedable babes in a haunted house? Obviously there'd be at least one ghost impregnation, but there needs to be living women to knock up too (though a game with nothing but ghost pregnancies does have its own kind of appeal). I could contrive a bunch of coincidences for a bunch of hot women to be in this house for their own individual reasons, but it seemed to me more logical that they'd be part of some kind of organized group. Some kind of squad. A... cheerleading squad! Cheerleaders in horror is a trope too, so it felt natural.And there we have it; the cornerstone idea for GOCKHAUS was "Brandi and a cheer squad in a haunted house!"

Dev Time: From Six Months to Over a Year

I started earnest development on GOCKHAUS in April of 2025. The plan was to develop it over the summer and release the game in October; looking at the finished product now, that seems insane, right? But there were a few reasons I thought that was doable, most of which stood in relation to BreedTown 3: Gockhaus would have a smaller cast size, less writing, an even smaller map, a less complex story, and simpler gameplay mechanics. BreedTown 3 had taken, all in all, about 9 months to develop, so Gockhaus felt like it should take less than that; maybe even 6 or 7 months. As eager as I was to work on it, this was a spinoff game, after all; it shouldn't take THAT much time. I had a plot outline in mind, and I was going to follow it. And you know what? I DID follow that plot outline. The bloat in dev time wasn't because of straying from that outline, it was from adding to it.A good example of me adding things is when the cheerleaders first arrive at the Lockwood Estate in Chapter 1. The original plan was that they get there, go inside the haus and look around, with the player catching glimpses of Brandi sneaking and hiding in the shadows. The cheerleaders would eventually catch her, we get Brandi's introduction, and sex ensues."But Wombat," I thought at this point, "Isn't it a little boring and simple if they get to the haus and can just get inside, easy peasy? Shouldn't the door be locked at first, and the player has to find the key, thereby forcing them to explore the exterior first and build some suspense?" Boom, now the haus is locked and players have a reason to go into the surrounding woods. Where should the key be? A graveyard, this is a horror game after all."But Wombat," I thought at this point, "Isn't it a little boring and simple if players just pick up the key in the graveyard with nothing else happening? Shouldn't you have some kind of spooky supernatural encounter there?"Boom, now you get attacked by graves. Yuki fights them off because she's gonna have a ton of action later and we wanna go ahead and establish that she's strong. The graves can't actually be supernatural though; the existence of ghosts has to be uncertain, with Elena's appearance functioning as a sort of twist, like "That's right, she IS real!" So the graves are actually just squirrels. But now here we are, the player gets the key and enters the haus! Not long until breeding now!"But Wombat," I thought at this point, "The whole reason Brandi is here is because she wants to commit suicide. Wouldn't it be fitting for the player to find a noose from a failed attempt?...Also, wouldn't it be fun if she was hiding in a suit of armor and we get a Scooby Doo chase scene?"Boom, boom, nooses and zoom. My outline of Chapter 1 didn't really change, but in terms of the actual content, it went from a five minute segment to a forty minute one. It went from something that would've taken a couple weeks to develop from one that took a month and a half.The whole game is like this, I could go on. It might be a case of feature creep, however I do sincerely feel that Gockhaus is a much better game because I was willing to implement all these random flashes of inspiration, rather than shave them off for a more streamlined experience. The original plan was for Gockhaus to be a few month mini-project, but GOCKHAUS ended up being a year-long gem of my art career. I don't regret that, though I do wish I knew in advance just how much of an undertaking it would be.

Voice Acting

I won't talk much about the specific voice actors; they all killed it, I'm very happy with how the voice acting turned out. (okay but I will admit that Akuji Saito as Elena is my favorite)That being said, I'm not sure that I'm ever going to do a voice acting project of this scale ever again; at least not without some vast changes to my workflow and budget.Wanting most dialogue voice acted means figuring out what exactly I want voiced and what I don't, and writing up scripts, and writing up directing notes in those scripts, and spending time communicating with the VAs. Getting voice clips delivered in this quantity means a LOT of audio editing, and sometimes retakes. It's a little hard to quantify all the little ways, but I wouldn't be surprised if I were to somehow math it all out and found that the voice acting doubled Gockhaus' dev time.This is also not to mention the financial cost, I won't get into specific numbers but I definitely had to dip into my savings and am still recovering. Paying a VA to voice a 2 minute video? Easy. Paying 6 VAs to record what are essentially audiobooks? Hard.Again, I don't regret this one bit, I love how it all turned out. But when future big games (like BreedTown 4) don't have nearly as much voice acting, now you know why.

Cut Content

There is NOT a lot of cut content for GOCKHAUS; like I said, for the most part I implemented basically every little idea that came to mind. There's only a few things that come to mind that I had to scrap for one reason for another:

The biggest one is the Blue Day sex scene. I wasn't even entirely sure by what mechanism I would've done this; after all, Blue Day is basically just a figment of Cindy's imagination. It probably would've happened sometime in the Spirit World, and the explanation would've been something like "Cindy's soul has been split up while she's here." Ultimately it just didn't feel like it fit the flow of events in the story, Brandi is more focused on trying to save her friends in the Spirit World. But also, time, money, and file space.-At this point Gockhaus had gone WAY over its planned dev time, and I could sense fans getting impatient for it to release. By the end of Gockhaus I was definitely crunching to get it finished, and adding a whole bonus sex scene with Blue Day felt like it would take too long.-A whole extra sex scene to animate also meant a whole extra sex scene that would need to get voice acted since I'd committed to all the sex scenes being fully voiced, effectively doubling the time needed to produce it and costing me even more money. Adding extra sex scenes on a whim is easier in a game without voice acting.-As it is, Gockhaus is cutting it close on file space; the limit on Itch is 1GB, and Gockhaus' ZIP is 934MB... actually, I think I could've fit an extra sex scene in there, the sex scenes when compressed are like 10-20MB. Especially since I've learned that Butler, Itch's app / tool for uploading games, apparently lets you bypass that limit. Hmm. Okay. This one might not be a real problem.

I thought about having some extra ghost sex scenes in the Spirit World, but decided against it for similar reasons as Blue Day. This idea had additional problems though:-The ghosts would be new characters, which would probably require new, different voice actors.-Brandi having the idea to breed Elena Lockwood is supposed to be a moment where she has a flash of inspiration, an idea that pops into her head at just the right time to save the day. If Brandi knocks up other ghosts on the way to Elena then that moment just can't really happen.

Not a sex scene, but in the Spirit World there was a ghost who gives a scathing review of Valmar's comic "Eddie's Last Halloween." I cut it for a couple reasons:-It was way too long.-It was way too mean-spirited; I've actually spoken with Valmar and he's a cool guy.

That's about it for cut content. Some of you might be wondering, "Wombat did you ever have a plan to do one big final orgy sex scene?" and the answer there is "Not really." Honestly if I wasn't basically required to show the girls pregnant, I wouldn't even have had the epilogue, I would've just had the game end after the final car drive / credits. An interesting comment I got several times about Gockhaus is "It feels less like a porn game that has horror elements, and more like a horror comedy that happens to have some sex scenes in it." I don't actually disagree with that; it's not something I did purposefully, I just went with the flow and made the game in a way that felt right. To me, the game has as many sex scenes as it needs to have. Maybe this is a sign that at some point I'd be down to make some SFW games?(That being said I might like to make a bonus comic or video about the characters at some point).

Conclusion

When I was in high school, an acquaintance named Sam committed suicide. I didn't know or even like him all that well, but we'd shared a class together and spoken many times. We were about the same age too, it was a very strange feeling that he was just gone suddenly. I didn't even know what kind of struggles he had that made him do what he did, or that he was feeling suicidal. Even though we weren't really close at all, I couldn't help but wonder if there's anything I could've noticed, said, or done that would've caused him to make a different choice. And I guess I'll never know.I don't know exactly what else to say in my retrospective here, I don't think it's as interesting as BreedTown 3's. I'm not sure how effective GOCKHAUS is as an "Anti-suicide Game," because even though I've had suicidal thoughts before, I've never been particularly close to taking my own life. When I've been at my lowest points, I don't know if Gockhaus is the type of game that would've done a lot to help me out of it. But I hope that it is for you. I want GOCKHAUS, and all my work, to be something that can make you say "I'm really happy to be alive!"

That's it for now. Thank you for reading all this if indeed you did, and feel free to post any GOCKHAUS related questions or comments you have below (maybe you'll be able to think of something interesting that's missing from this retrospective).For now, I hope you have a wonderful day, and please take care of yourself ^^