I’m happy to announce that Tales From The Under-Realm: After Midnight is out both on my own website (through itchio) and on Steam:
https://winter-wolves.itch.io/tales-from-the-under-realm-after-midnight
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1816710/Tales_From_The_UnderRealm_After_Midnight/
So far reception has been very good, people seemed to appreciate the murder mystery and the unpredictable characters. And of course, Evelyn. Yes I’m already thinking about a new game with her as protagonist, playing such a character could be fun.
Adult content problem again
As you might have noticed, even this game ended up in Adult Only section on Steam. I’ve said it a thousand times, I have no issues with adult content in general: the only problem is that people that browse games in that category might look for… less plot and more sexual stuff.
Which in my case is bad since this game like all my games has character growth, relationship, a complex story with many branching choices and so on. The erotic scenes naturally happen in the couse of the love story between the characters, and it’s not the main goal of the game. The main goal is to find out who is the murderer and how the protagonist died. But apparently, for Steam review team, “the game appears to be adult in nature, from the story and setting, to the goal of unlocking sexualized CGs.“
Anyways, it could be worse! I just heard from the company porting my games to console that even Nintendo who seemed to be OK with adult stuff is now changing their mind, and they’ll have to censor all the games they ported on that console… so ending up in adult only category on Steam it’s not the end of the world.
People from Germany won’t be able to see the game, but if they buy it on itchio they can play it there and also redeem the free Steam key coming from the purchase. I think that by this point people from those banned countries have learned to not look for such content on Steam.
The kind of games I make
Last but not least, recently got some complaints from people about the kind of games I make, some even saying that there’s “too much LGBT”. First of all there isn’t a thing like “too much LGBT”, second in the end I can make the games I want (that’s why I became indie!) and last but not least, it’s not true.
If you like straight romances only, just looking at the last few years:
2020 – Planet Stronghold 2 which had all kind of romances (so, including straight ones)
2021 – Love Notes who had all kind of romances
2022 – The Curse of Mantras which, guess what? had all kind of romances
2023 – I’ll likely finally release ToA: An Elven Marriage with… ta-dah! all kind of romances (even more straight than LGBT romances in this case).
Consider that most other indies just release 1 game a year, and many just with one kind of romance, I don’t think I’m doing too badly! It is true, that I make more yuri games, but because on Steam they really do well (I made a blog post not long ago about this).
So the real question, if I had to analyze it from the business side of it (because I need to live with my job) would be: why I still make non-yuri games? lol. But if I can, I’ll always try to make one game a year with all possible romances.
Last days of the Beastmaster Princess Kickstarter!
Speaking of having more romance options, at the time of writing this blog post we’ve almost reached the base goal, but I would really like to have a male protagonist for my next fantasy Kickstarter. Below you see some sketches for the male CGs:
So if you haven’t already, consider backing up The Beastmaster Princess Kickstarter! Thanks