Not going to lie, 2023 sucked for me, mostly for personal reasons (so not related to business). It was also an average year for business, but I had worse years for sure.

Earlier this year had to deal with an eye surgery (and I’ll likely do another in the early months of next year!). I lost Tofu, my beloved pet in August. It was a stressing year overall for many other private reasons, so I hope 2024 will be a better year!

But back to business, let’s see what happened in 2023. But first, a little PSA: as usual I’m having the Winter sale both on itchio and Steam:

Itchio: https://winter-wolves.itch.io/

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/pub/winterwolves

How 2023 went ?

I started the year with my usual blog post, stating that I wanted to finish The Beastmaster Princess, ToA: An Elven Marriage, and hopefully a smaller VN. Well, that happened!

The Beastmaster Princess game was already at good point when I started the year, I was mostly waiting for missing art, editor, and doing some testing/bugfixes. But being a regular VN, that didn’t took long. The game did OK, art was a bit divisive (some liked it, others didn’t), but all this considered was happy with the results.

Then it was the turn of Save The World, a small sci-fi “Black Mirror” style visual novel. This went pretty well, all things considered. Tried a new artist, a new kind of story / setting, etc. A lot of people complained about the story but considering the theme I definitely expected that (you can’t have such a controversial story and hope you get no complaints). It was funny to read comments like “the dev is clearly a communist” though, like if we were still in Cold War era !

And then finally, 11 year after Loren, I managed to release the first spin-off, ToA: An Elven Marriage. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about (shame!) they’re a VN/RPG hybrid series following the events of my first fantasy RPG, Loren The Amazon Princess. This went well, all things considered! I underestimated some factors when relasing it on Steam (the fact that during a Steam Fest you get ZERO exposure… ugh, learned it the hard way) so in retrospect it did even rather well. Just think that Cursed Lands got like… 30 times the visibility of this game, and it didn’t sell 30 times more! (well also that was 2018 so a very different world).

Last but not least, the Yuri psychological horror House of Chavez, the title I’m working on right now had a very successful Kickstarter which let me add a lot of more content than originally planned (two love interests, a lot of CGs, etc). This is one of those “gameplay hybrid” games I was talking about in the previous blog posts.

Conclusions

Just a couple of months before writing this blog post, I was in bad mood. For the personal things that happened, for sure. But also because I thought I had mediocre results this year.

Then, I started to talk with other devs, read reports online and get a reality check – if literally everyone you know is having a big decrease of revenues, if many publishers are cutting funds to already started projects, if the saturation of the market is so big that’s hard to sell games full price… if with all that, you’re still in business, you’re not doing too bad!

And so I realized that what I thought were bad results, they weren’t bad at all. This is a mistake I’ve seen doing by many indies, who maybe release a game every 2-3 years, thinking that things won’t change. Here’s a thing: 2-3 years in this business is literally an eternity! Lot of things change meanwhile.

In hard times, like when the economy is not doing well or there’s trouble in a certain market, it’s really important to look at your business results from an global perspective. This helps you see how well you’re doing, all things considered. Always remember this!

Wishing everyone a joyful holiday season and a Happy New Year! Personally, I hope to have a nice 2024, especially in my private life. Business-wise, with the great fans I have, the crowdfunding, and all that I believe I can keep going like this and have a decent career.

Recently I tweeted about the challenges of making pure visual novels and I want to share more insights on this topic. Let me be honest: pure visual novels are one of the easiest types of games to make, as long as you have access to a good artist (or you are one) and a good writer (or you can write well!).

At the time of writing this post, there are almost 9000 (yes you read it well) games with the “Visual Novel” tag on Steam…!

The art and the writing are the main components of a visual novel. Once you have them, you have done most of the work. Music is also important, but… unfortunately for musicians (this is not just my opinion) it is easier to find good music and it is not as crucial as art (which attracts people to your game page) and writing (which determines the quality of your story). Having good music is like a bonus, but I never heard “I’m going to buy that visual novels only because I like the music”.

Of course, there are some visual novels that sell well on Steam. But usually, they are made by people who already have a fanbase (either in the gaming industry or elsewhere), or they make adult games (which have a higher demand than normal visual novels) or they get lucky on Steam (but that’s very rare nowadays).

So what happens now?

As a full-time indie developer, I want to keep making games until I retire. So I’m planning to move to Bali and cut my living expenses by two-thirds… haha just joking (but I would love to go there someday!).

Seriously though, I’m going to experiment with different things. I’ll still make the usual visual novels because I still think that releasing only one big game a year is not a good strategy. But I’ll also try to mix some gameplay elements with the visual novel format. Not only RPGs, but other genres as well. A good example is the adventure gameplay and minigames I’m adding to House of Chavez.

In summary, my goal in the next years will be:

• every year: release a regular VN game (for example, I want to do the third and final game of the Tales From The Under-Realm series, though that might happen only in 2025)
• every year: release a VN/gameplay hybrid game. Not necessarily a big game. I could reuse the card-framework in a different way, or come up with something new. Town sim, management sim, raising sim, etc. some gameplay but still more in a “casual” way, nothing too complex
• every 2-3 years: release a VN/RPG, at least until I finish the 4 loren spin-offs. As posted already, some of those spin-offs might also be one of those gameplay hybrids so they’ll get done quicker. For sure the 2nd game, Reign of War, will be a RPG, though I might also want to do a mix between a map with armies and a RPG, could be interesting. But Reign of Peace (the 3rd spin-off) could well be just a simulation, running the Amazon empire, etc.

Visually representing the plan for the next 2 years could be:

Of course, the year I’ll release the big game (like Loren spin-offs) I will probably only have the strength to do a plain VN the same year; nothing is set in stone yet, since with gamedev there are always unexpected events / delays.

However I think that with such plan, I should avoid burn-out (doing a big game every 2-3 years) and also keep myself motivated by doing new gameplay experiments which could even be funny to design and code. For example, I’m having a lot of fun designing and coding the House of Chavez adventure part and minigames.

Remember that I’ll also do later this month my usual blog post reviewing the year that is ending, and to make you best wishes! So see you later this month in this blog.