Welcome to the Hotwife Hotline Launch Devlog!

Hey everyone,

We did it. After months of scripting, testing, breaking things, rebuilding, and obsessing over every little interaction — we’re finally live with Version 1.0.0!

This is our first public release, and it feels amazing to see it all come together. In this devlog, we’ll walk you through the systems that power the game, how we designed it, and why we’re so damn proud of how everything fits together.

🧠 What Is This Game?

At its core, this is a visual novel-style messaging simulator — but instead of traditional dialog boxes, we opted for a modern chat interface. Conversations unfold like real texts, with simulated typing, profile pics, media messages, and even branching choices that impact the story.

You chat, you flirt, you collect pictures, and you unlock more stories through your inbox. That’s the heart of it.

💬 The Chat System

Every conversation in the game is powered by a dialogue scriptable object that stores a sequence of messages. These messages can be texts, images, choices, or even audio clips like phone calls. The messages are tagged with a type so the game knows how to display them — and when to show choices, it temporarily pauses and presents the player with two responses.

Once you pick a response, your reply is shown as if you typed it, and the conversation continues based on that choice.

We also implemented a fake “typing...” indicator to give the illusion that the character is thinking or responding in real time. The speed is adjustable based on your settings, so you can go slow and immersive or fast and snappy.

Bonus: message sounds play when a new message appears, just like a real texting app.

📥 Inbox System

To organize all the characters and chats, we built a full inbox system. Each message thread is a prefab, and we track the player's progress using internal save data. Finish one message thread? A follow-up becomes available. If you’ve completed everything, we show you a celebratory message (and tease what’s coming next 👀).

The inbox also handles things like the tutorial message, demo/patreon content toggles, and letting you reset your progress for a clean slate.

🖼️ The Gallery

Yep — you can collect images during chats. If a character sends a spicy pic and it’s marked as “saveable,” it’ll be automatically added to your private gallery.

The gallery keeps track of which images you’ve unlocked, how many remain, and displays a small notification when there’s something new to check out. It loads saved data so your collection stays intact between play sessions.

We even added a “Dev Mode” toggle for testing, which clears everything for a fresh debug build.

🔈 Audio Features

The sound system in the game supports multiple audio channels — one for music, one for SFX (like button clicks and messages), and one for dialogue/voice clips.

Volume sliders let you adjust everything independently, and we save those settings between sessions. The transitions are smooth and clean because we used logarithmic scaling behind the scenes (which just means the volume changes feel natural to your ears).

🧩 ScriptableObject Architecture

We designed everything around ScriptableObjects — a flexible and powerful Unity system for organizing game data. This makes it incredibly easy for us to add new content.

Want to make a new character? Create a new “character profile” asset and assign their name and image. Done.

Want a new chat story? Drop in a dialogue object with message entries. No code changes needed.

The whole project is modular and expandable by design.

🧰 Other Nice Touches

• The "typing..." object always stays at the bottom of the screen, even as new messages are added.

• Each choice button is dynamically generated and cleaned up after the player makes a decision.

• You can reset your inbox or gallery anytime from Dev Mode (great for testing) - available as the reset game button for players.

• Every piece of UI was designed to feel clean, mobile-friendly, and natural.

🧭 What’s Next?

This is just the beginning.

We’re already working on:

• More message threads

• Patreon-exclusive content

• More collectable images

• New characters and new choice branches

• A few surprises we won’t spoil yet 😉

🫶 Thank You!

Thank you for checking out our game — whether you’re here to flirt, collect, or explore all the endings. This release is just 1.0.0, but we built it with the future in mind. All the systems are scalable and ready to grow.

And if you’ve read this entire devlog? You’re a real MVP. Seriously.

Go check your inbox. Someone’s probably waiting for you.

— The Dev Team 💌