Today I’m opening the closed beta of the game for those who backed the game through Kickstarter and Patreon. I am planning to switch to open beta in maximum a couple of weeks, the amount of time I think I’ll need to finish writing/coding everything!

Here’s a sneak preview of a CG with Labwa for you to enjoy:

The two Wealdlings will have a special treatment since they’re my first fantasy furry romanceable characters. While the other characters will have 2 romance CG depending on choices in the story, the Wealdlings will have each 2 CGs plus the threesome CG scene. One CG is the single romance scene (if you romance only one), and the other is a bonus CG of a scene in the game. In the scene above they’re caught while relaxing in an oasis and the MC has to carry Labwa on their shoulders.

For Di’Aab instead the CG will be about the “moon ritual”, a special ritual that grants him special magic resistance during the story (also in combat):

As I mentioned on socials, I’m really not missing that much: a few main plot battles and scenes, all the romance scenes (I want to do them well so I’m taking my time) and all the epilogues. Since there are many characters and choices there’ll be many variations! I think two weeks will be enough to do them and then the public beta can begin.

The closed beta actually shows already 90% of the story, it ends just before a major plot twist that I don’t want to reveal. In practice once you reach the end of closed beta you’ll see a pop-up message about reaching the end, and then you can just roll-back (using mousewheel or PGUP key) and save the game, so you can resume and finish the story once the full beta (or the final game) is done.

I decided to start the beta already since this game is so big that I’m sure people will find already several bugs to fix, so when open beta starts things should be better already!

What’s Next?

After Thieves of Dingirra, I’m going to run another crowdfunding campaign for a male protagonist comedy game called “Glamour Photographer“. It will put you in the shoes of a glamour photographer during the 1980s. I’ll do a proper introduction when that project launches but if you’re curious you can take a look at the crowdfunding page here:

That’s all for now, see you hopefully in around 2 weeks for the full build of Thieves of Dingirra, the open beta!

I was hoping to announce my next game in this post, but unfortunately, I’m not quite there yet. The truth is, wrapping up Thieves of Dingirra has been more challenging than I anticipated. It’s the most ambitious gameplay-wise project I’ve ever taken on. While the story may not be as long as some of my previous RPGs, it’s still shaping up to be at least as substantial as An Elven Marriage.

Right now I’m finishing all the character’s personal quests, and of course each of them has a different theme/setting, a different boss-fight, and a different reward (beside a boost on the relationship value).

In the screenshot above, for example, if you choose to help Ghamal, you’ll receive a permanent discount at his shop, something that can be very useful later in the game. Other characters, like Labwa, will gain a permanent First Strike buff at the start of every battle. These choices are entirely optional, but I think the rewards provide a nice incentive!

I’ve also started coding the “jealousy scenes.” These will effectively determine which romance path you want to follow, but only if you’re romantically involved with more than one character (except for Labwa and Di’Aab since you can unlock a triad ending with them!). And yes, in this game you can reach 100% relationship with anyone. That doesn’t necessarily mean romance: they can remain close friends with no romantic involvement if you choose.

As you see there’s a lot of things to do and test, even if the bigger town management and RPG part is already finished. I still believe I’ll manage to have a game beta towards the end of the month, but I’ll keep you updated.

As for the new game… well, I think I’ll delay the announcement towards the end of month too, I doubt I can make it sooner, though you never know. To be fair I’m starting to feel a bit burned out by this huge project!

And now I explain a bit how I manage to work on so many games every year.

How my release and pre-production process works

Let me try to explain it better. Imagine two games: Game A and Game B. Each game’s development typically goes through three phases:

• Pre-production (brainstorming the game idea, creating some basic assets, drafting the story or parts of it, etc.)
• Production (the real development grind!)
• Polishing/Finalization (beta testing, bug fixing, etc.)

During this final stage, I’m not doing much hands-on development anymore. The story is already written, most of the art is complete (or nearly so), and the code is finished aside from bug fixing. At this point, I spend a lot of time waiting—either for feedback from beta testers, for that last missing icon or background, or for the editor to finish polishing the text (though lately I’ve been trying to have all text edited before beta even begins).

So what usually happens is this: while I’m in the finalization phase of one game, I like to begin pre-production on the next one. That way, I’m not wasting valuable time just waiting. It’s much easier to visualize with an image:

In the current case, game A is of course Thieves Of Dingirra, and game B is … to be announced!

Of course, not always the phase are of same “size” (or better, time). Sometimes a game for unforeseen reasons, could have a longer production or shorter finalization etc. In any case, I always try to have at least the basic idea, plot and some images done for the game B before I even am into finalization phase. This is how I manage to release many games each year.

Now the game B in question is the comedy game with male protagonist, I have already started working on the crowdfunding page, but I’m still missing the trailer and so on. I’ll see if I manage to do it before the end of the month. Might even just take a small break this time, getting old, etc

But at least I can share a sneak preview from some CG scenes of the game:

See you on next month where I really hope to have Thieves of Dingirra beta ready!

Ah Summer! Once it used to be such a good season. Now… not so much, at least here in Italy / Europe. You’ve probably heard about the insane heatwave, which sadly now seems to have become the “norm” and not anymore an exceptional event.

Anyway, thank God I chose to live in a small village near high mountains, and I have a cooling system inside my house (floor cooling) so it’s not too bad, in the end. I’m still rather worn out and I can’t work as fast as I’d like but… it’s Summer! (sadly lol).

First an announcement: as usual my games are on sale on Steam and itchio, so if you want to support me, here are the links:

Steam Summer Sale

Itchio Sale

Thieves of Dingirra’s progress

Despite the weather, I’ve managed to make good progress on the game. I’ve already posted on Kickstarter this custom outfits update:

but that’s not all: Labwa’s outfit was meant for the female MC, and since I screwed up myself (misunderstood the backer but they were pretty clear lol) I decided to add that outfit too. Will use it in Labwa’s personal quest probably 🙂

Also, a backer paid for a custom character in the Traveler’s Delight one-night stand option and a new … “interesting” outfit for Halima. First, the character, a dark elf called Shalheira. There’ll be her sprite, not a CG since that would have been too expensive (and time consuming, there’s already a lot of art in this game to finish). But I managed to add a nice backstory:

And this is Halima’s outfit… kind of borderline for my requests of “something they could wear in public” 😀 but fear not, I’ll find a way to make her wear that in the story that makes some sense lol

Last but not least, I also added two custom landmarks and NPCs from backers. They both pledged for both rewards, so I decided not only to add them in the game, but each one will have a backstory as well. It’s nothing particularly long but add some depth to the characters.

They are Mr. Toes, and elf from Grandtree who runs a gemshop:

And Carissa Nevrine, who runs a sort of enchanted flower shop (really cool idea):

Had a lot of fun to write their backstories, and they have real in-game shops where you can buy stuff so they’re also involved with the gameplay with relative achievements if you play their whole backstory (will be revealed in 3 steps as you visit them from time to time).

Plans for beta and next Kickstarter

Despite all the progresses, this game is HUGE. Really big. Basically each story mission has a custom boss fight!! So they take more time to test and design. I wonder why I decided to do that lol, anyway I’m about halfway with that. Designing a single boss fight takes me a full day (finding the right sprite, deciding on a design, then a boss gimmick or skill or goal, etc).

There’s really a big variety, from boss battles where you only need to kill the boss to win (but won’t be easy), to others where you need to kill enemies before X turns, or survive for X turns, or … did I mention that there’s a big variety?

I’m also tweaking constantly the town management and guild part. For example lowered the NPC hiring and salary costs since they were too high later in the game. I also tweaked the big buildings (Library, Brothel, Temple and Hammam) so that you can do maintenance and reduce the upkeep or increase the income of each individual building:

All small details but that in the long run can make a big difference in the game’s economy. It’s the first time I attempt this kind of game and so far I must admit I’m having fun adding features and tweaking it.

I definitely pushed the estimate for beta from end of July to end of August, since I am also missing several more CGs. By the way, this game will be tamer than my most recent ones because I don’t want it to go in adult only. The plan is to have a clean base game and then an optional adult DLC.

For example in the base game, this Di’aab romance will show only this close-up, and not the full body since you could see… Dwyn’s butt lol

Anyway, even if I’ll do some censorship for the base game, there will still be some very hot scenes in the final version with DLC… for example I had to cut the lower part of this Yasemin CG because it’s still too hot to post!

So fear not… there’ll be this kind of content in the full game if you’re into that 😀

That’s all for now, I hope you’re having a good Summer (and maybe that’s not too hot where you live)!

First of all a quick update: work on Thieves of Dingirra is going smoothly, at end of May I closed the late pledges since it wasn’t getting any new money anyway (I suspect something wasn’t even working correctly, who knows).

Next month I think will be able to post some juicy previews of the bonus outfits and sketches for a plus-sized female dark elf, who will be in a one-night stand available in the brothel (only the sprite, doing a CG would have been too expensive) that was funded by a backer!

I’ve also started planning the next Kickstarter featuring a male protagonist and several girls. More info in next months! So all is going well.

Switching genres?

Now back to the blog post’s title. Let me be clear: I like telling stories so I’ll always keep doing story-based games. Even if it has to be just a simple visual novel a year. However, it has become crystal clear to me that I might be forced by the market to switch mainly to another genre. Or perhaps if I’m lucky and hit the jackpot, do a single game in another genre, get a lot of cash, and then resume doing my usual games without any strict financial goals! haha

Let’s proceed in order, in my past blog post called “the death of visual novels” I already mentioned how bad the situation is for visual novels. I then did a research, comparing the amount of games on Steam with Visual Novel tag with some other genres, genres I know I could stand a chance if I decided to make a game in a different genre. I picked Card Game, because I already made two, Point’n’click adventure, I already made House of Chavez which was “first person”, but even having moving sprites on the screen wouldn’t be an issue in Ren’Py. City Builder because I could modify Thieves of Dingirra system to build stuff. Roguelike and Strategy are more broad genres but even in this case, games like Kingdom or other turn based genres are easily doable in Ren’Py (anything that isn’t real-time or bullet-hell can be done).

Here are the results (I did this search 3 months ago, they’re not up to date but the trend is clear):

Lol, as you can see… Visual Novel is the most crowded genre, close to Strategy but as I said strategy is a bit too vague (it could include games like Civilization !). Anyway you get the idea.

Don’t get me wrong, Steam in general is super crowded now. Making not a hit, just decent money is very hard for most indies (unless they live in 3rd world countries with very low cost of living). But it’s obvious that some genres are more crowded than others.

What I’m planning to do?

Right now, nothing! I’ll finish the games I have in the works, including some unannounced games, but I might start doing some prototypes for fun on the side. This is nothing new, really, I have always done different genres, but always mixing them with visual novel. The main thing though, is that I really never made a “true” game for those genres, with all the requisites (or what people expect, I should say).

For example, Curse Of Mantras, has a very complex card collecting/battling gameplay. But having to mix it with the story, some people might not like to play it just because of that. It’s different if a genre has story as key element, like adventure games. But even there, I didn’t really follow “all the rules” – adventures usually are fully voiced. Even Thieves of Dingirra will have a mix between city management + RPG, but it also has a long story.

Some people just want gameplay and not having to read. Or the gameplay itself needs to be different, like roguelikes. More punishing, focusing on meta-reward and all that.

Now I’m not a big fan of most other genres, but when comes to surviving the market, one has to adapt. After all until 2008 I was doing sports sims… and barely surviving. Then switching to VN first and then VN/RPG later, allowed me to be full time indie until now. So change is not always bad!

Anyway as I said in the beginning and I’ll repeat here, I plan to finish all the games in the works, and I’ll keep doing story-based games, unless the sales and the crowdfunding do so badly that I won’t even cover my starting costs, at that point it wouldn’t make much sense anymore as you can imagine!

So even if I start working on other genres it will be a slow process and I’ll always make smaller VNs on the side at minimum, simply because I like to tell stories (and some VN I made recently were worth it).

See you next month with some more juicy previews from Thieves of Dingirra!

Today, I’d like to dive into a topic that we game developers often debate in our private discussions, though it might not be something players are fully aware of.

Up until around 2016 (if memory serves), I was creating games without relying on crowdfunding. Then that year, I launched a Patreon, which provided support for my projects through 2020. That year was a turning point for me, not just because of everything else going on, but because I released what remains my most ambitious game to date: Planet Stronghold 2 (though Thieves of Dingirra is about to “dethrone” it!).

After the success of my 2018 RPG Cursed Lands, which left me feeling optimistic, I had high expectations for Planet Stronghold 2. I’m the kind of person who always braces for the worst-case scenario. For this game, I set my baseline at a very modest sales figure—less than a third of what Cursed Lands earned in its launch week. (Of course, long-term sales are harder to predict, so I was mainly focused on that first week and month.)

Little did I know that back in October 2018, Valve decided to roll out an “algorithm update” that effectively tanked visibility for anything that wasn’t a AAA title or an indie darling. Over the next three to four years, I watched about a third of the developers I knew either quit the industry or turn to publisher funding, sacrificing what I’d call their “true indie” spirit.

So when Planet Stronghold 2 launched, it was an absolute trainwreck. Even now, five years on, its sales don’t come close to touching Cursed Lands. The thing is, I eventually realized it wasn’t about the game’s quality—it was all down to Steam’s new rules.

This shift didn’t just change completely my business, it hit nearly every indie dev I knew. The only ones who dodged the fallout were those with an established fanbase or enough money to fund massive ad campaigns.

Here comes the money

Later in 2020, I decided to try crowdfunding for my first game in the Tales From The Under-Realm series, and it went really well. I might’ve mentioned this before, but I like to figure out my “virtual salary” by dividing the money a game makes by the months it took me to create it.

Well, Hazel’s virtual salary was about four or five times higher than Planet Stronghold 2’s! Mainly thanks to the fact that Kickstarter’s commission is only 10% vs 35% of Steam (they say 30% but with various fee and refunds it’s closer to 35%). Of course, it doesn’t always work out that way. Some projects, like House of Chavez, barely broke even, mostly because I wanted to make the game better and ended up spending extra cash from my own pocket.

That’s when it hit me: crowdfunding isn’t just nice to have; it’s a must to keep going. It doesn’t mean you’ll automatically succeed, but it helps you avoid losing money and lets you plan better.

Here’s why: if I know I’ve got a set budget for a game, I can figure out all the costs ahead of time. Then I can decide what’s really important to spend on and what I can skip if it’s not essential to the game.

Pre-production phase and conclusion

Unlike many indie developers, I don’t hold off on starting a game until all the funding is secured. Waiting for full funding can cause serious setbacks (think of all those Kickstarted games delayed by years!) and it’s tough to convince people to back you without something tangible to show. You can’t just pitch “I’m building a town sim with RPG combat and blah blah blah” without at least a working prototype or screenshots/gameplay videos to back it up.

That’s why I made sure Thieves of Dingirra had its core gameplay nailed down before launching its Kickstarter. It’s also why, even for a basic visual novel crowdfunding campaign, I aim to have a full plot outline, the main cast’s character art and a few CGs ready beforehand.

But then comes the tricky part: once the funding’s in, do I call it done, or do I spend an extra month or two—and more cash—adding new features or content? It’s a tough call, and honestly, there’s no universal answer. With House of Chavez, I went all in, pouring way more money into it than I raised because I wanted it to be the best it could be. Looking back, it wasn’t a smart financial move, but sometimes pride in your work outweighs the bottom line.

Conclusions

There’s a huge difference between blindly sinking a year (or more!) and a ton of money into a project like Planet Stronghold 2 with no guarantee of breaking even, and investing a couple extra months and a few grand to polish something you’ve already fully funded and you do it only because you want to make it the best possible. That’s the line I try to walk.

By the way, even if Thieves of Dingirra’s Kickstarter has ended, it’s still possible to do late pledges to add more one-night stand scenes to the Traveler’s Delight! Check it out.