Interview with Tender Troupe!

If your farming days are over and your political career at an end, Tender Troupe has just the follow-up for you. The acclaimed developer of Kink Inc and Booty Farm are back in the saddle, and this time, they’re riding rough through a magical world of sexy fantasy. Long Lost Lust, the studio’s most ambitious game yet, is a deep but accessible RPG that takes place in a world nothing like ours. The game is best described as a Western isekai: a hapless nerd is whisked away from his comic books, then forced to do battle with fearsome monsters and shack up with a bevvy of magical babes to save the kingdom.

But Long Lost Lust’s development has been a bit of a quest itself, according to Tender Troupe’s Tarantulic and Djuradije, who sat down with us to discuss their new game last week.

“The game’s been in development, I think, for over two years right now,” Djuradije says. “The thing is, though, we scrapped it about two times. We created something we hated, and just went straight back to the beginning.”

That version of Long Lost Lust that was scrapped is nothing like the version you’ll be downloading today. According to the devs, the original vision for the game was built around collecting cards, building decks, and duking it out in a classic TCG format. According to the team, however, it just wasn’t working out.

“Initially, it got started as a card game,” Djuradije says. “That was the thing we wanted to make – a collectible card game, where you collect characters through cards and play them. It was a simple idea for card combat that just didn’t work. Then that got scrapped, so we sat down and talked about what we wanted to do with this world we’d set up.”

But figuring out a new direction wasn’t easy. Tender Troupe’s previous experiences tapped into well-known mobile trends, such as farming sims and idle clickers, to deliver fun and sexy twists on tried-and-true formulas. Long Lost Lust, however, turned out to be a much bigger game – and unlike anything the team has made before.

Djuradije continues. “We had the initial chapter or two down already, and knew that we wanted this fantasy adventure – like a sprawling epic – that this clumsy protagonist just gets thrown into. So we sat down and said, ‘what do we want to do with this?’ And this is what got spit out!”

“Originally, the card game didn’t allow us as much freedom to juggle different ideas and features as this version does,” Tarantulic adds. “A lot of it has to do with our development team functioning really, really well when they do their thing.” 

And Long Lost Lust very much is, according to the duo, the team’s “thing.” The game draws from countless sources, ranging from video games to books to TTRPGs, and winds up looking like a particularly horny love letter to all things fantasy. Tender Troupe let their imagination run wild on this one, and the results are as creative as they are fantastically hot. If there’s a fantasy creature you’ve ever had a kink for, odds are, you’ll find it here. Pirate girls? Catgirls? Bird girls? Orc girls? Ghost girls? They’re all here. One of our personal favorites is Tender Troupe’s hilarious take on a certain classic game’s Medusa head – a floating, disembodied lower torso held aloft by some slimy tentacles.

But Long Lost Lust’s innovation doesn’t stop at shaggable monster butts – the team is also trying to address some long-standing issues with fantasy porn.

“I’ve seen a lot of media shy away from showing orcs as the amazing, barbarian-strength characters they should be,” Tarantulic says, proudly. “Our girl is real big – and real orc-ish. She looks really hot! I’m really tired of, ‘let’s paint this regular person a different color and now this person is a different race,’ and we don’t have to stick by those rules in Long Lost Lust.”

In fact, there are very few rules that the game plays by in general. Aside from being a narrative RPG, Long Lost Lust features interactive comics, PVP, a rogue-like dungeon to grind loot in, and much, much more. It’s an ambitious game with loads of content planned, so much that we wouldn’t dream of spoiling it all! There’s so much, in fact, that Tarantulic feels even their most diehard fans have still barely seen anything. But the team isn’t too worried about that, by all accounts. Much like their previous games, Tender Troupe has been relying on feedback from their Discord and Patreon to guide development – something that Tarantulic describes as “truly instrumental.”

The duo tells us that responses have been overwhelmingly positive so far.

 “Because it was such a long process – we’ve postponed five or six times, something like that – we were overambitious by a lot,” Djuradije says. “But I’m just glad the people seem to not mind it at all. Each time we delayed, their reaction was good – like, “just take all the time you need.” I’m just grateful they’re understanding, and so supportive.”

Tarantulic agrees. “Also, there’s just a lot of understanding coming from the fact that they know we’re rather small. And we already have two live games for which they see the same names on Discord pop up. So they know most people are handling most things, even if they don’t always know who’s in each development team. They’re aware that if we’re working on something, we have proof of consistency with our other two games.”

It's a good thing, too, as Long Lost Lust is much more than a sexy twist on fantasy RPGs. The team, comprised of veterans from the AAA and mainstream spaces, have poured their heart and soul into making the mobile gaming experience they’ve always wanted. Djuradije, in particular, describes the project as a passion project.

“This was what I was most comfortable with creating, and what I wanted to create,” he says. “I’m fortunate enough to work in a company that allows such creative expression. Because this game is basically just my crazy pipe dream – it’s everything I ever wanted to put in a free-to-play game. It’s all here, and if it isn’t, it will be! I’m putting everything that inspired me, up to this point, in this game.”

Well – ‘nuff said!

So, when can you take your first steps into the dangerously sexy world of Long Lost Lust? Well, as it turns out… today! The game is out in soft launch in seven different countries, and pre-registration is live right now. If you pre-register, you’ll get a little something extra, too!

“We’ll be giving out shards for a character that the Discord audience voted on – there are fifty or so girls at this point, and they voted on one Bethany,” Tarantulic says. “She’s going to be a reward on the preregistration page, so it’s worthwhile for players. And as far as the game itself goes, global launch should be happening mid-April.”

You can toss a coin (and maybe something else) to Long Lost Lust today by signing up for pre-registration right here, which’ll make you among the first to play when the game officially launches next month!