As already announced earlier this month, the Kickstarter of my next dark/gothic yuri game in the Tales From The Under-Realm series is now live:

I invite you to visit the link below to discover more about the game: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterwolves/tales-from-the-under-realm-after-midnight

A bit of behind the scenes

And now for those curious about how I came to this game idea, here’s some “behind the scenes” stuff. A thing I often like to do, is read again my old games, with a particular attention to secondary characters. I like to imagine how they became to be like what they are, their morals, their personality. What is their backstory?

The lead can be anything, from their personality traits, to something they said about their past lives. For example, I’m currently thinking about a game story about a single scene of Season Of The Wolf, in which Vaelis mention a certain Rogan The Red and a revolt happened in some far away islands.

For this game instead the inspiration came directly from Loren, and in particular General Samael. Do you remember the first things he says in Loren? When he meets with Apolimesho?

“If it isn’t the heretic Archwizard himself. You will not bewitch me to your elf agenda. You might as well leave.”

From a simple sentence like this we can evince the following things: that Samael and Apolimesho have a past, and they dislike each other. That Samael has something against the elves.

Then as the scene goes on, when Amukiki (the ex-gladiator) speak, it’s obvious that Samael has in high consideration people like him. So naturally Samael likes gladiators and the arena.

All those things inspired me to write a story when Samael was younger and he was just the Captain of the guards, but was already aiming to be something more. It will show the ruthless man and what he was capable of doing.

But Samael is only a secondary character of this story. This time the protagonist can be fully customized, skin color and name included (it’s a stretch goal but I really hope we’ll reach it). There are two love interests like in Hazel: Tara the childhood friend who is a guard too, and Cynthia, a mysterious girl from Dingirra that arrives at the beginning of the story. But this time, there will be more death and dark turns of the plot. Many characters can die, depending on your choices.

Yes because this time the cast of secondary characters is much bigger. There’s Martha, Samael’s wife and elf. Their daughter Evelyn who is a secondary character but has the biggest impact on the story. There’s Gus, Tara’s brother, who is a guard too. Nadja, Cynthia’s mother and poledancer.

And lastly there are two other character who I cannot mention because of spoilers, but that they will play an important role.

Like Hazel, there’ll be a base version of the game with sexy outfits but nothing more. Then there’ll be an optional version with full adult content for those who like it.

As already said, I’m working on a demo of this game for the Steam Next fest, which will introduce some of the characters. It won’t be very long but hopefully interesting enough. Also, I am planning to have a full voiced trailer for the game next week, so stay tuned!

A while ago I mentioned how I was completely against the introduction of crypto-stuff on Kickstarter (or on any platform, for that matter). Since then I’ve researched alternatives and spoke with many other indie devs who ran crowdfunding campaigns on other platforms (either exclusively or beside KS).

Unfortunately the conclusion is that, unless you’re already famous (which I am not haha) any other crowdfunding platform is a waste of time. I won’t make names or figures since all was confidential, but basically every single person told me that if they could go back, they wouldn’t have done it.

But there’s more to consider. Nowadays most of my income each game (at least the initial one) comes from crowdfunding. I made a graph for 3 kickstarted games (Curse Of Mantras is still too new):

Itchio is very small so I didn’t include it, on average 10-15% of the total. Of course, as time passes, Steam sales will (more or less slowly depending on the game) catch up. Anyway the point is that, even for a game that’s been out since 1 year or more like Hazel, KS money was still the majority of income. This also because on KS you lose about 5-10% of gross, while on Steam is normal to lose 30-35% of gross amount, which makes things even worse.

As you see there isn’t much choice for me if I want to keep making games. So don’t be surprised if soon I’ll announce a new crowdfunding for a game in the series Tales From The Under-Realm!

Demos on the way!

And now, let’s talk about the Steam Next festival. This time, I plan to participate with two game demos! One is ToA: An Elven Marriage. It will be a full demo with battles and everything, probably useful to get some early feedback (and maybe bug reports) on it. It won’t be super long of course, but it will introduce Lydia and Nathir, the two new characters, and continue Rei/Myrth romance storylines if you choose to.

I’m really enthusiast of the moon elves race lore, and also on Nathir “gambling” religion (I know said like this sounds bad, but just wait to read it). They’re both very original and interesting, so I’d be curious to know what people think of it.

The other demo should be of TFTU – After Midnight, but I’m not going to post anything for now since I’m not 100% sure I’ll have all the art needed to do the demo. It’s a normal visual novel so if I get the art in time, it shouldn’t be a problem, but as always I’m being very cautious.

If all goes well I’ll make another blog post later this month announcing the Kickstarter for this new gothic game in the Tales From The Under-Realm series, even darker and full of deaths (but also romance! yay).