Sadly only a few months after my other older cat Mirtillo died, even Lilly passed to a better life. She was 16 years old, so at least not as young as some other cats I had, but she had a special place in my heart also for a reason: she was the last stray cat that we rescued in our previous place, and by pure coincidence she’s also the last to leave us.

With her departure a chapter of my life closes. I still have three cats and a dog, but this was the last link we had to our previous home and in a way, previous life (things were way different back in 2006-2007 even professionally). When I think at her, I think at the difficulties I had in my early years as indie developer, the expenses, and still the courage to do the right thing and try to save as many innocent creatures as possible. And it was totally worth it.

Thank you Lily for everything and see you on the other side.

This is going to be the month of demos! Haha, after years since I last made them (I think one of the last demos I made was for Love Bites), I’m going to participate in the Steam next fest with not one but two demos.

The first one will be for Tales From The Under-Realm: After Midnight. I got the last missing background for it so now everything is good to go:

You can play the demo right now on Steam using this link.

By the way, the Kickstarter is still active and has a (rather long) trailer:

I’ll shorten the trailer for the game official release, but meanwhile take a look since it introduces the story and characters rather well.

Regarding the Kickstarter, we hit the base goal already and we’re about halfway to the first stretch goal. By the way, I didn’t post much of the actual love scenes, but like the previous game, there’ll be a tame version, and a very explicit one. For example the image below:

Is a close up of the censored version, in the uncensored version both will be naked and… “doing things with their hands” lol. I am not posting anything explicit here in my blog/site but if you’re interested in hot stuff, you won’t be disappointed, trust me!

To know more about the game visit the Kickstarter page.

Tales Of Aravorn: An Elven Marriage

If having the demo ready for TFTU – After Midnight was relatively easy, since it’s a regular visual novel, having a demo for ToA – An Elven Marriage was much more difficult. But I did it, follow this link to play it. And don’t forget to wishlist the game!

In the end, it’s only 4-5 chapters, and it contains maybe 4-5 fights total, but it still has a lot of final content (tweaks to skills/items excluded of course). I have been working on this since last year, on and off while waiting for stuff for the other games to get finished.

When I started wasn’t sure I’d make in time but looks like I did! In the demo you’ll be able to meet Lydia, Nathir and Gruff (the first non-binary character of my fantasy games).

Now for those who still don’t know, this is the first of the planned four spin-off games with Saren/Elenor. Each game will have two “old” love interests (in this case Myrth and Rei) and two new ones (Lydia and Nathir). You can continue an old romance, or start as single and pursue one of the new love interests.

I wrote about the reasons (mainly avoiding burn-out but also providing much more screen time to each character) in this blog post long ago: https://www.winterwolves.net/blog/2020/07/a-clarification-about-loren-2/

I also hinted about the various games. Today I want to announce the full plan. Bear in mind that since are RPGs, they take a lot of time to make, and I’ll take breaks while doing them to release smaller games. So, the last one might be out even in 8 years from now…!

The other three stories revealed

After An Elven Marriage, the next three games will be (titles are temporary and might change):

Reign of War

This is what the original Loren 2 story was about. The third and final war against demons. Old romances: Mesphit and Draco. New romances: Jul and Breza

Reign of Peace

A story about the riot in the amazon citadel/culture due to Loren’s change of laws (no more slavery, more rights to men). Old romances: Loren and Karen. New romances: Odurat and Nook

The Witches Of Unforgiving Swamp

This is my favorite setting and will be about the fight between the witches and the empire/witch hunters. Lots of cameos with other characters like Vin. Old romances: Chambara and Amukiki. New romances: Selith and Samaras

A few rules

There will also be some rules: in general I’ll try to avoid at all costs to put a previous potential love interest in a story in which you can’t romance them. But for new characters that can be romanced I’ll make an exception. So for example, in An Elven Marriage you’ll see Breza. You can’t romance her until the Reign Of Peace story, so she will be like a NPC/secondary character. Same for the other new characters.

Hopefully will help those players who want to roleplay and remain loyal to their only love from Loren and that won’t romance anyone else until the game with them comes out!

Last but not least – I’m not sure if ALL games will be RPGs. Since they take a loong time to make! Take into account at least 4-5 months of extra work for each game just for design/coding the RPG part (not including testing).

So for example for Reign of Peace I could do something different, like a sim or management game and so on. I haven’t made my mind about this yet, we’ll see how burned out I am after the first game is out, hopefully at end of this year or early next!