Is the gameplay any good?

The gameplay is good! A key element is the custom active time battle system that features fully animated enemy sprites and unique, highly detailed character artwork for every action. Characters have access to different outfits and weapon types that will modify their stats, play-style, and most importantly how battle H-content gets carried out.

Here's a brief summary of gameplay elements that are either integrated already or are being planned/designed:

A fast paced active time battle system featuring a party of two with real-time H-content
Complex skills, status system, balancing, and actual challenging gameplay (gasp)!
Quality AI
A fleshed out story told through events with detailed character artwork
An array of armor types for each character with their own unique visuals and play-styles
Crafting
Armor and weapon upgrade system
A whole lot of loot to feed the crafting and upgrade systems
Non-linear story/quest/progression elements
A custom user interface designed to maximize effectiveness of the biggest feature: H-content

What's special about the H content? What will this game feature?

This is where the game really shines. The design goals of this project aim to overcome the design drawbacks of many of the H-RPGs that have come before it. Instead of H-content feeling like it has been tacked onto the gameplay, this game is being heavily designed around the H-content.

Many games demand that you lose to see H-content. While it situationally makes sense, it is completely counter-intuitive to what makes a game fun: progression and overcoming challenges. Discovering a new enemy only to have to wait for a game over screen to collect H-content simply isn't that fun.

In this game, you are rewarded with H-content by surviving. Most of the H-content occurs during battle scenes, and does so using a completely original system. The game features a struggle system not unlike many RoR titles (Shinobi Girl, Witch Girl, etc.) built within the active time battle system. This opens up a whole new realm of gameplay possibilities such as skills and stats designed to affect the outcomes of the struggle system, as well as story/event battles designed completely around this system.

While there are a ton of details I could go into (and yes, many details left to be fleshed out as well), here's a basic summary of the H-content elements that are being designed for the game:

Real time battle H-content that is strongly influenced by characters' armor, level, and stats.
In-battle H system that combines the best aspects of RoR titles with traditional RPG H-games.
Unique clothing destruction system.
Unwarranted amounts of happy jelly.
Highly varied enemy types (humans/androids/robots, beasts, insects, tentacles, and more!)
Beasts, tentacles, insects, vore, and more will be included.
A ridiculous amount of highly detailed artwork
A gallery system to view higher quality versions of the ridiculous amount of highly detailed artwork

Different armor and outfits huh? Explain!

A lot of games in the past utilize picture overlays to simulate different clothing/outfits. In Malise and the Machine every outfit truly has its own unique artwork, and every single H attack has different artwork for each character and outfit (and many times the attack changes entirely!). In addition, each outfit type has a unique progressive armor damage pattern that affects how H attacks play out!

The artwork looks unique! How is it being made?

As I mentioned, the game has been in the early development stages for about a year. A big chunk of that time was devoted to experimenting with art styles, programs, and processes.

The art style I've settled on uses pre-rendered graphics made from 3D models. I'm using a highly customized set of shaders and post processing combined with hand painting in Photoshop to achieve this style, and the result is that I can create highly detailed artwork relatively quickly without being a master 2D artist. This route also allows me to pay to license models/parts from artists and customize them to my liking for use in the game. This isn't a magic button that does the work for me by any means as a lot of customization goes into everything, but it is the next best thing to having a team of artists working with me.

Who are you? Have you made any games previously? How many people are working this?

I'm a professional programmer, but this is my first game. I also have a background in various mediums of graphic design and music, and have pushed my creative abilities to new levels to lay the groundwork for this project.

I did much of the early work by myself, but the development team now consists of myself, a full-time programmer, and a second part-time artist. Due to the nature of the game content and the specific skill sets required for making the artwork (and coding my ambitious ideas) the pool of candidates is very small. Naturally I can't expect such talented people to work for free, nor would I want them to.

New Features
A continuation of the main story featuring a new (generally loathed) area and the addition of Malise to the party.
New story H content
A new enemy that is fully H-compatible with both characters.
Added a new boss encounter.
Added enemy armor damage.
Expanded enemy battle spritesheet functionality.
Added prototype framework for what I'll call "enemy reinforcements" for now. Basically new enemies can join mid-battle, and for these battles K.O. enemies will fade out so as not to clutter the scene.
Added prototype framework for the enemy level system.
Added framework for windows with custom skins.
Added prototype framework for equipment based status effects / buffs / etc.
Side-scrolling maps.
Added framework for animated battle and dialog backgrounds.
Added a new music track.
Changes / Fixes
Improved the way doors behave when entering (player must face the door).
Improved the readability of fuse markers
Previous map is no longer faintly visible when loading a new map. Transitions in
general have been improved.
Loading times for maps has improved.
Narrative text is now consistently colored gray so as to not make it ambiguous with dialog or choices/instructions.
Added 'Default' button to the Options menu.
Fuse panels have a new graphic for when they are powered on/active (keys light up white)
Fixed an issue where sprites at the edge of the screen would disappear during the map scene.
Added first batch of map optimizations. Depending on map, performance gain ranges from 1 to over 20 FPS.