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House Party Exits Early Access with the Release of V1.0.0!
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House Party Exits Early Access with the Release of V1.0.0!

House Party

House Party Exits Early Access with the Release of V1.0.0!

The time is finally here! After a long and incredible journey, House Party is officially out of Early Access! Check out the release notes for House Party 1.0.0 right here, brah!

Wow. We can’t believe how much House Party has changed since its original concept and first build. Because of your financial support, we’ve been able to expand Eek! Games from a one man operation into a small, close-knit team of artists, writers, and programmers, and it has greatly improved the quality and amount of content in the game.

Just because we are coming out of Early Access, though, doesn’t mean we are going to stop working on the game. We feel the game is ready enough to no longer be considered Early Access, but translation updates will continue to be rolled out over the next week or two, and there will still be more polish, cutscenes, and Easter Eggs in the pipeline.

We really can’t thank everyone enough for buying, playing, translating, bug testing, and sharing the game with friends over these past few years. Your support has made House Party the super fun and expansive story-rich 3D comedy-adventure it is today.

Not only that, but House Party has always had to battle against censorship and it’s constantly been a struggle for us to get the game listed on new platforms. We’ve been faced with so much journalist negativity and censorship, but you guys have had our backs through all of it. We couldn’t ask for a more brahsome community of brahs! And the community keeps growing – we love all of you for partying with us.

Today, House Party has overly positive reviews on Steam, good press, a strong player base, and is allowed both censored and uncensored on many platforms. Thanks to you, we’ve been able to add celebrities (with Doja Cat on the way), globalization/translation, a combat system, cutscenes, controller support, and even a female playable character to the game. We can’t wait for you to experience the full game we always wanted to make for you.

We couldn’t be more thankful, and we hope you’ll all continue to show our future House Party DLC and Office Party the same love you’ve been showing House Party! We’ve been listening closely to your feedback on socials, Discord, and our contact forms to hear things you’d love to see in House Party and its sequel game!

In addition to updating the base game and Explicit DLC, we’ll be releasing expansion packs like the Doja Cat DLC this fall, and slowly starting work on Office Party alongside everything!

Other House Party updates to look forward to in the near future will be more female player cutscenes and that awesome VR port we promised. And we even have some super secret projects that could see Eek! Games branch out into different genres of gaming and storytelling!

We’re stoked to explore the future of House Party with everyone, and this has been a wild and amazing ride through Early Access. Cheers to the future and let’s keep partying, doods!

Wishlist the Doja Cat DLC here!

House Party 0.22.0 Stable Release

Controller Support, UI and QOL Improvements…and the First Look at House Party’s Female Player!

The female player’s first look is here, doods!

Since adding her is a huge task, and because we want as much feedback as possible, this update will be a little different than what we’ve done in the past. Here is how we’re doing that:

On Patreon: this will be released as a Stable update, with all its features. In order to get as much feedback from our Patrons as possible, and because we’ve been super busy and might’ve dropped the ball on delivering certain perks to them ( <3 !! ), this update will be made available to all Beta-tier Patrons and up.

On Steam: We’ll be offering two versions of this update: First, a “live” or “no branch” version, which will offer many controller support improvements, UI tweaks, bug and quality of life fixes. Steam users who just want access to this version need to ensure that they do not have a beta branch selected in the game’s properties (“None”). The second version is identical to the first, but will also include the female character first look. To access this, Steam users will need to:

Click the gear icon on the House Party game’s landing page (or right-click House Party in their Steam Library) and click “Properties”
Navigate to the “BETAS” tab
Use the “Select the beta” drop-down menu to select the “testing – Testing Branch” option
Close the Properties window

On GOG: enter into the game’s Configuration menu (next to the Play button) in the GOG Galaxy client. Select “Manage Installation”. Then “Configure”. Then in the “Beta channels” dropdown, select “Change private channel password” and input the password ‘testing’ to opt into the testing version.

On itch.io: there will be two downloads available for the product you purchased. One will have no subtitle or special labeling. The other will be marked “(Testing Build – Female Player…)“. That one. Download that one.

On all Other Distribution Sites/Platforms: unfortunately, these do not support branch/version switching as conveniently, and therefore will only be getting the controller support, UI, bug, and QOL-improvement version for now. Eventually we will roll out the female player to all sites/platforms as soon as it is more fleshed out, so please be patient! It’s coming! She’s c…yeah!

So, why treat the female player first look all special-like? In short, she ain’t done yet. But we also wanted to show as many customers as possible our progress (as opposed to waiting and waiting the entire time we worked on her!), and give them ample time to provide us with feedback. While her Original Story content is not done, those with access to the female first look can choose to Start a New Game of the Original Story with her on the Main Menu. In terms of content, we’ve done a thorough first pass through the existing story lines and made a bunch of tone, pronoun, and wording tweaks to make you feel at home in the party as the female player! Unfortunately, we have not had the time to get voiced lines for much of this alternate content or fully convert all intimacy sequences, but bear with us! We’re working on it, and will continue to do so up until (and if needed, after) we exit Early Access!

Controller support is also fully functional, and we added some general House Party polish and UI improvements to this update. You can play the game without any major hang-ups on all supported controllers and the Steam Deck. We still plan on adding some quality of life features and fixes in the future to fine-tune how everything feels, but, as it is now, it’s completely playable.

If you’re curious about the polish we added, some notable changes are that we adjusted the colors for most of the interactable UI elements so they’re easier to see and fixed some cutscene issues that could cause them to get stuck. We also added a garage cutscene and a Frank mini oral scene in the yard.

Leading up to our release from Early Access later this year, we’ll be adding some quality of life features to controller support, polishing and bug fixing the hell out of the base game, and adding a lot more Original Story content, voice acting, and intimacy-specific tweaks and fixes for the female player.

Thanks for being the coolest partiers ever and staying patient as we worked through the hurdle of uncensoring Lety’s content in our last update. We’re sorry for the delay, and we hope you have fun playing as a female! We’re excited to add more of her story as we get closer to House Party’s exit from Early Access!

-Eek! Team

CHANGE LOG:

https://housepartygame.com/release-notes

Note: Updates labeled as “Testing”, “Beta”, and/or “First Look” contain unfinished and untested content. Placeholders may be present for dialogue and various assets. Older save files may no longer be compatible. Custom stories may no longer function as intended. Translations may also be incomplete. Controller support is nearly finished, but if you do run into issues, you may need to temporarily use your keyboard/mouse to restore normal functionality.

House Party Early Access Exit and Roadmap

After a long and incredible journey, we are getting ready to pull House Party out of Early Access!

After our stable build of the latest update goes live in the coming weeks, there will only be one more content update before we officially leave Early Access. Vickie’s finale coming to a close marks the completion of all of the content we have planned for our male protagonist, and the next couple of updates are going to be mostly polish, alongside the long-awaited ability to play as a female main character.

We’re sure you have questions, but we have answers! So strap in. Here we go!

When is House Party leaving Early Access?

We’re glad you asked! Here’s our tentative timeline of what we currently have planned (updated after 0.22.0 release on 4/14/22):

That said, we want to thank everyone who has purchased, played, and supported House Party throughout these years of development. We can’t stress enough how none of this would have been possible without you. The biggest thing that kept us going through all of the journalist negativity and attempted censorship we’ve had to deal with over the years, was our overly positive player review scores and feedback. Today, House Party has supportive press reviews, a steady player base, and is accepted in both censored and uncensored forms across various streaming platforms. Additionally, if you’ve been paying any attention to our latest teasers, you’ll know that we’re about to take things to a whole other level, all thanks to your support, feedback and encouragement. House Party’s graphics have been improved. We’ve added globalization and translation. We fleshed out the storyline and even added extra things we never planned for like the combat system, cutscenes and controller support. We’ve taken your suggestions to heart throughout this whole process, and we’re always trying to make House Party the best it can be for all players.

What’s going to change now that House Party is leaving Early Access?

Part of this process involved making changes to the game, the most significant of which, is that we now have a base game with a Steam “Mature” rating, and we have a Steam “Adult Only” rated DLC patch. Initially, the DLC patch’s purpose was simply to uncensor any nudity or sexual content in the game, but since then a lot of the mature content has been moved from the base game to the Explicit DLC patch. We are also now developing bigger, longer, and explicit cutscenes specifically for that content patch.

Because of this, and because we plan to add more content specifically to the Explicit DLC patch, we will soon be adding a small charge for the DLC patch. We wanted to let you know ahead of time, since if you already own the game, you can still (at the time of this writing) download the patch for free, and if you downloaded it at any point while it is free, it will remain free permanently. This price increase will only affect new players, and the base game price will remain unchanged even after we exit Early Access.

We will continue to maintain this optional AO rated patch as a counter to the changes the “powers that be” require us to make to allow the base game to maintain an “M” rating. It’s a necessary thing so that this game and our future games can continue to thrive both in and out of the mainstream, ensuring the stability of our company, which in turn means much more cool stuff to come down the line! House Party is all about choice, and we are committed to delivering the choice of adult content to our 18+ players, and to combat the regulations surrounding this type of content in video games as opposed to gratuitous violence, and exposing the hypocrisy and discrimination of creators of this type of content by the people who make these silly rules.

What happens after House Party leaves Early Access?

Even though we’re ready to call the base game “finished”, this is only the beginning for House Party. We have some wild stuff planned post release! We will continue releasing “quality of life” updates after the game leaves Early Access, and we have plans for exciting DLC packs in the future to add more content to the game, and to give players more options. We’ve already hinted at what the first one will be. Shortly after House Party’s full release and exit from Early Access, we will drop our first-ever DLC pack featuring the “mystery character” we’ve been teasing! We think your minds will be blown when we drop our full reveal on that. It’s coming soon!

Other than that, we will also be working on porting House Party to a VR version, as well as shifting more of our staff to working on our sequel game, Office Party. Expect to see a lot more of Eek! Games in the future!

It’s an exciting time for us and we’re happy to be sharing it with all of you. We’re so thankful you all have come on this development journey with us, and we’re stoked for everything in store for the future!