This is not how I imagined to start the new year… my cat Mirtillo wasn’t feeling good since a while, but being almost 16 we thought it was the usual age-related issues. Unfortunately about 15 days ago we discovered that he had cancer and it was already in advanced condition.
There was no possible treatment, so we decided to do nothing until he was still eating on his own. In the last 3 days, he always tries to hide, scratches his head continuously and is visibly in pain so we decided to put him to sleep.
He was almost 16 years old, and since he also was FIV positive, I can say that he lived a long life (I believe is rare for cats with FIV to reach such age). But of course, I’ll still miss him.
This is also the last male cat, we’re left now with “only” 4 cats, all females.
First of all, Happy New Year to everyone! Let’s see what I’ll try to do in 2022.
Your dirty minds are thinking about some different kind of stimulation, right?
Of course, since I’m running a Kickstarter for The Curse Of Mantras, this is the game that will have my priority in the first months of the year. Like before, I’ve already done some work prior to the KS, and I’ve been working in the past weeks (slower since I sort of took some time off for the holidays). Gameplay-wise things are very good and even the writing/scripting of the story part is at good point so that (crossing fingers) I’ll likely deliver the game ahead of its deadline once again (still considering a longer testing time due to this game having a more complex gameplay than my recent releases).
Trouble in paradise… or better trouble in hell?
This year will be 10 years since the first Loren release! It would be cool if the tenth anniversary saw the release of the first new adventure for Saren and Elenor, ToA: An Elven Marriage. And I’ll try my best to do it, though being a RPG, it won’t be easy. Also because, after finishing The Curse Of Mantras I won’t probably have the energy to do another complex game, so I might do a shorter/simpler one “as break”.
This is all I can show for now about the next Tales From The Under-Realm game
Indeed, I have plans for the next Tales Of The Under-Realm game. I won’t spoil too much but it will be set in the town of Lothark, and will see some cameos/references from my other games: Apolimesho, and Samael. Remember General Samael from Loren? He’ll be one of the main characters of the story, back when he was only the Captain of the guards.
It will be a dark fantasy murder mystery and you won’t be able to see everything / discover all that happened in a single playthrough. I have written a rough draft/idea and honestly I can’t wait to work on this, since I think the idea, mood, the character routes, the deaths (there’ll be many) are really interesting.
As said in previous post, being a smaller title will be yuri only, but even if you don’t care for the yuri part I think the story should be still worth playing, and if you like my fantasy world of Aravorn there’ll be many references, and many grey-characters. And also, many possible deaths, obviously!
Beside this, there are also a few other games that I’m working on during breaks, of some I’ve posted a few sketches/preview art on my Patreon but it’s still too early to talk about any of them, since now my policy is to talk publicly about something only when I’m 100% sure I’ll be able to release it.
Conclusions
So that’s the plan: Curse Of Mantras release, then crowdfunding for the next Tales From Under-Realm game, then ToA: An Elven Marriage and if there’s time, some other game. But I doubt it, since two of those three games are very big games with complex gameplay. You never know though, last year I never expected to be able to release 4 games!
