Breeding Season Estrus!

Breeding Season Estrus is a free adult game and a very long labor of love. Have you ever stared up into the night sky and found yourself wondering what kind of sexy monstergirls/boys/enbies/energy beings are up there boning amongst the stars? Do you keep returning to thoughts like "I like Star Trek and all but why don’t they solve more problems by screwing?” Perhaps you too have found yourself asking the age-old question of "What if John Carpenter's The Thing was actually really hot and DTF?"

Well you’re in luck! Breeding Season Estrus is the long-awaited continuation to the original Breeding Season; following the tragic and extremely sudden obliteration of your entire planet you wake up to find yourself somehow alive and in the presence of a mysterious, incredibly advanced visitor from beyond the stars. They sought you out from across the galaxy to obtain your help in doing the one thing you know how to do best: getting monsters to fuck.

Wait so we’re in space now?

This time around instead of a fantasy setting the game takes place in a space operatic science fiction setting very heavily inspired by the works of sci-fi authors Douglas Adams and Iain M. Banks, games like Mass Effect and Citizen Sleeper, and shows like Space Dandy and Gurren Lagann. If you find yourself missing the setting and characters of the original game, though, pay attention to small details and you may eventually find hints to piece together into some interesting revelations regarding them.

What do you do in Breeding Season Estrus?

Breeding Season Estrus retains the original game’s core mechanics of monster breeding and ranch management, but now instead of raising monsters to sell them, your goal is to breed and train up these alien monsters with particular traits and skills that will prepare them to succeed when you then send them on missions of espionage and seduction at the request of your benefactors.

After your monsters succeed on enough away missions, you’ll unlock special side and main story missions to go on where you yourself get to accompany your chosen monster and decide what happens. These missions will play out as extended visual-novel-style stories in which the choices you’ll be given and their chances of success will differ greatly based on what traits and skills you prepared your monster with. The choices you make during these missions and whether or not you succeed at them will radically alter what happens to the cast of various fellow-travelers and persons of interest you’ll encounter repeatedly during the story and can even ultimately determine the fates of entire worlds.

By succeeding on missions and making the right choices (or even occasionally the wrong ones), you’ll meet and recruit new kinds of alien monsters onto your ranch who will bring with them new skills to teach, new traits to pass on, and new ranch upgrades to build.

Okay, I’m into it, how do I play?

The game is still in very early development, and much of the technology behind it is still in experimental stages while I work out the practical considerations and iron out technical challenges. 

For $5 and up patrons you will be able to access an in-progress pre-alpha prototype, as well as have access to regular updates with preview images of what's currently in development and what's coming up. 

At this very early stage the core gameplay loop has yet to be implemented; the current build is just a small prototype to hint at my intentions for the finished game, but you can view some of the opening visual-novel-style scenes I've written and interact with a prototype of the breeding menu which allows you to see the a small sample of the variety in monster portraits that my models currently allow for. 

For $30 and up you'll be able to access the discord and get the opportunity to offer direct feedback, ideas, and discussion to shape the future development of the game, as well as generally enjoy a community of other people who enjoy the game. 

So when will I be able to start actually playing it?

I expect the amount of gameplay to expand very rapidly in these first few months as I've already laid out all the most critical foundations and climbed out of the biggest pitfalls when it comes to training and using the models. The next big update from the launch of this Patreon campaign will include a basic implementation of the mission system as well as saving and loading; at which point it won’t be much yet but it will be playable.

When’s this game going to be done?

After the first round of feedback based on this prototype and how y’all feel about the art and game ideas, and once we have an idea of what the Patreon budget moving forward will look like, I'll be able to lay out a concrete roadmap for development. 

My initial rough plans are for three years of development for the "release" version of the game, which should be feature complete for all base gameplay systems and contain roughly 10-20 hours of gameplay and story content at a minimum. From there, I plan to continue to expand and refine it for however long people still want more of it, but on a systems, mechanics, and main story level the scope of the release version of the game is something I've already thoroughly plotted out and do not intend to expand in any way until I can definitively say “yes, we have hit release, this is a finished game”.

Will there be sex animations?

There will definitely be sex scenes, and a huge number of them; I’m currently working out the kinks in my process to automate the generation of these images, but patrons will be able to see examples of monster breeding art made with my existing models in the development updates and once the process is automated the only major limitation to how many can be in the game will honestly be file sizes. I am also very optimistic about the possibility of generating full-motion animations as well, and I already have a number of ideas for approaches but it will take a significant amount of experimentation to get to an acceptable level of quality. In general, high-quality AI animation generation is something of a holy grail, current AI animations are highly inconsistent, but everyone is trying to make them better and they’re getting closer all the time.

And if generated animations aren’t ultimately possible, if the Patreon funding is high enough we can always easily have animations in the game made the old fashioned way by commissioning animators. I’ve actually already done all the legwork on how that pipeline would work as well, if that’s the direction that ends up seeming best.

Are there going to be cheat codes? 

Yep! Just like last time there will be an extensive system of debug codes that will give you instant access to all the sex scenes, let you get exactly the monsters you want, and generally allow you to crack the game open. When this system is added to the game I will add an additional $15 patron tier that will include access to them.

Isn’t AI art wrong?

I know that AI art is an incredibly controversial topic at the moment, and for understandable reasons. I have some very strong opinions on it myself, and admittedly part of the reason I felt it was a good time to start this project is because I wanted to directly contribute to this discussion.

My goal is to, through broader public discussion and with Patron feedback and input, help build an example for what the ethical application of these kinds of machine learning models should look like, and try to bring a lot more nuance and understanding to a general audience about what can possibly go into (and come out of) these models and how individual artists can utilize them in addition to how these models can be utilized very directly against the interests of artists or in ways that harm people more generally. 

From just my own experiences so far, I think that machine learning can facilitate artists to leverage their own work, ability, and passion to create things that were impossible previously, and that building and manipulating models through creative applications of training and merging techniques could eventually become recognized as a new form of art in itself in the vein of things like song covers and remixing. However, like music remixing, we need to reach understandings on what's acceptable and expected regarding proper crediting of and approval from the artists whose work the model is derived from as well as to make sure that we don't allow corporations to use this tech to try to remove the artists from the art altogether or otherwise apply them in ways that would further exploit an already abused workforce and would be disastrous for both artists and people who enjoy the art they produce.

More importantly, I believe that we have an ethical duty to keep these models and the architectures they're built on as open source as possible and ensure that all state-of-the-art AI development is done completely transparently and out in the open: it is imperative that we allow everyone to have access to the means to understand these models and how they work on a deep level, that we understand and quantify the capabilities, dangers, and limitations of these models in a concrete manner, and that we form open communities to build upon and spread the benefits of these models to people other than the already ludicrously rich and powerful who would consolidate them under corporations and opaque institutions under the false premise of protecting us from them. 

I believe strongly that the only real viable counter to malicious use of machine learning is the protective use of machine learning, and the most critical part of preventing abuses is for the general public to have the opportunity to understand this technology, what it can and can't do, and how it works for themselves in a direct and hands-on manner.

As an aside, I stand firmly with SAG-AFTRA and the WGA, as well as every other union fighting for the right to dictate how workers and artists will be made to interact with this technology and how it will influence their day-to-day lives and their personal livelihoods moving forward. I believe that, if there is any level at which we must successfully challenge the ways that corporations and governments plan to abuse this technology to harm workers and consumers, it must be done at the level of worker organization and through collective bargaining and labor action. Only the people who will be working with these models directly and/or the content creation pipelines that will be based around them on a daily basis can ever truly have the power to ensure that they aren't being abused.

What kind of AI models are you using?

My own custom models used in this project so far are the result of ~6 months of experimentation, training, editing, and block merging with a lot of trial and error involved, focusing on trying to keep up with the massive number of new developments and really understand diffusion models inside and out. 

Like most out there, my current models are all based in Stable Diffusion 1.5 and the open source ecosystem around it. For developing my models, I started with a base of a large number of different open source SD checkpoints (about 20 in all) and successively block merged them until I got something that I felt was both an interesting overall style and also produced output I judged adequately distinct from all the individual models it was merged from to represent something wholly new. I then used a mix of explicitly license-free artwork, renders using simple models I made myself, renders of free 3d assets, and renders of a large number of 3d assets I'd purchased, upscales and photoshop edits of images generated with the models themselves, and occasionally my own doodles (feels funny to be drawing again after all this time) in order to train and refine the models, create LoRAs, and develop a pipeline for producing assets for use in this game.

It remains a work in progress in a rapidly developing field and I'll have to do much further experimentation moving forward, but what I've seen so far has been extremely promising and I have a dozen new ideas I want to test every day. The images you see in the game currently are all works in progress or placeholders; in the long run I am shooting for a much more consistent and coherent visual style, but consistency along with flexibility while automating the work flow as much as possible to create as many unique variations as possible in-game is a very big challenge. My next step is to start building some newer, better models off the base of SDXL using what I've learned, which promises much better output than 1.5 in the long run. It will also offer me the opportunity to rely less on existing 1.5 models and unaccountable chains of training data, and especially if the Patreon funds are good then my plan is to commission artists for unique assets to use for creating training material and compensating them as they deem fair for the explicit use of their work in model production.

Though my focus has been on taking great pains to try to create work I definitely feel is distinct from the prior work of others that went into it, as I've slowly developed my own workflows and models I've still had to rely heavily on open source models trained by others on unknown datasets. I've tried to avoid models that clearly egregiously misuse the work of other artists or people's likenesses, but I also can't account for the training data that went into every model that I've used in producing what I have so far or its chain of providence. If you are an artist and you see something present in the game that appears to derive from a model overfit on a particular work of yours, don't hesitate to contact me and we can work together to address it. One thing I have been experimenting with is training particularly overfit images out of models by subtractive merging.

On the subject of ownership and copyright of the AI-generated assets in this game: it remains to be seen how the law falls on these things. This game is, ultimately, a game I am intending to release to the general public for free to everyone, at least in its release version. I won't make and am not currently making any legally binding statements myself regarding the copyright status of these assets until further decisions are made by the courts and I've consulted thoroughly with my own lawyers etc, but in a purely philosophical rather than in any legal sense: I believe this work belongs to everyone, after all that's the only reason I wanted to make it in the first place anyway; to share it with everyone. Again, I won’t be able to make any binding promises until we’ve worked out the legal situation exhaustively, but if possible I would like to have all the AI-generated assets made for this game be freely available to anyone to reuse for their own projects in any way that they would like, and at the moment I’m looking to pursue getting them covered under a copyleft-style license that could ensure that (that is, if they can even be licensed at all).