Time flies! Seems yesterday as I wrote this other post when I celebrated my 40th birthday: https://www.winterwolves.net/blog/2014/04/my-first-40-years-10-as-indie/

And here we’re again, 10 years later, but still going!

In retrospect, looking back at how the market was when I wrote that post, things were going rather well. My games finally were on Steam, Loren The Amazon Princess had a great reception. I had just released Roommates, my second most successful game after Loren. Mobile games were still very profitable, and I was still selling direct rather well!

For comparison, the gross revenues of that year (2014) of my direct sales (I was using BMT at the times) is higher than my past year Steam revenues!!! As I’m writing this, I can’t believe it myself, but it’s true.

So things changed a lot during those 10 years (for the worse, lol) business wise. I had my Google account banned by the “modern inquisition”. Of course, it’s not all negative! I had some more successes (like Cursed Lands, my second most popular RPG!) or the recent Tales From The Under-Realm series which albeit shorter games, have a very good ROI.

In summary I made several more games, some successful, others not. I started making some yuri games only (just recently though, first one was Volleyball Heaven in 2020!). I had my games ported on console. I did my first crowdfunding campaign. And so on.

As I’m writing this, I just got my next game, House of Chavez, approved by Steam, and I’m happy to announce that it will be out the 22nd of this month. You can wishlist the game here.

Mid-life crisis ?

Haha no, I’m not having a mid-life crisis! However, I must say that while going from 30 to 40 years wasn’t a big step, somehow I feel reaching 50 as something “different”. Even if I’m good health, I probably have lived more than half of my time on Earth. I am very grateful for my life so far. Being able to be my own boss, live with my wife far away from the polluted and chaotic cities in middle of nature has been a real blessing. I wouldn’t exchange this with all money and success in the world!

However, I’m also a competitive person (even if maybe it doesn’t look like from the outside). So I want to explore new opportunities in future. Which ones? I have no clue yet! For sure, trying new games genres or mix VN with new gameplay like the House of Chavez (point and click adventure). Perhaps also trying to do something different from games, like comics (of course with a crowdfunding campaign). Or still make story-based games but with more animation and interaction (I’m preparing an animated intro for Tales From The Under-Realm: Lilith game and it’s turning out well!). Or maybe, still do narrative games but with a different focus. I admit I really liked doing the scary part of House of Chavez, and I think I’d like to do a “real horror game”, Bloodborne-inspired. I have already a lot of ideas in mind.

But if I don’t manage to do all those things, it will be fine. I like the kind of games I do, enough people like them to let me survive, and sometimes you just need to be happy with what you have, without eternally chasing what you think will be more successful!

Conclusions

When you reach my age, you’ve seen things… ROFL OK, seriously. When you reach certain milestones, like being 50, you start to appreciate other things in life beside career and money. I have talked about my business, but right now I’m mainly thinking about how I want to live the rest of my life. I lost many pets, and several people, some were friends or other indies, and younger than me. So all those events really make you stop and think about life in general.

Indeed, I also want to start enjoying life a bit. Because of all the pets, I really didn’t take a break in 20 years, a proper holiday away from home. It was a personal choice, but I’m starting to feel the need to travel and explore the world, maybe to get inspiration for future projects.

If you’ve read until this, thanks for your patience. I hope your life is going well for you too. I hope you don’t have too many regrets (I really don’t have many!) and that the future will be full of positivity for you and your beloved ones.

As the saying goes, “The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.”

In this case, it was a sort of forced change. I won’t go in details (I posted on social media) but because of recent events, I’ll need to help my parents more than usual, and this of course will take away time. But it’s not just that, I feel also stressed because of it, and so embarking on a big journey like making a new gameplay (town sim) it’s really too much. Lastly, my dog Skipper passed away early past month, which didn’t help either to make me feel better.

I was hoping to announce the final release of House of Chavez, but it’s still in beta on itchio, albeit at very good point. You can already buy/play it if you want, the only thing left is a placeholder CG in Dolores’ path (there’s the WIP image below):

This of course also delayed/changed my plans for the next games. In short: Thieves of Dingirra Kickstarter, which was supposed to be my next game, will be postponed later this year. Meanwhile, I’ll do another Kickstarter for TFTU: Lilith, the third and last game in the series.

Tales From The Under-realm: Lilith is a simple visual novel, albeit much longer than previous two, but as you can imagine it’s much less stressful to make. I have also written a good amount of the draft, and done the base characters, choices, etc.

I think for me this is the best decision, this way I can keep doing experiments with ToD gameplay and when I do the KS later this year I’ll have a clearer idea of what I want to do.

Yes, because doing a game like that has two main elements:

• deciding the gameplay type, design, code and test it several times to make sure it works and it’s fun
• once that’s done, fill all the game content (which requires less mental efforts but more time)

For a game like ToA: An Elven Marriage, I had to do the second part, design the classes, skills, etc but the first part (the core game framework) was already 90% done – I added a few things here and there, but most of it was ready and well tested already.

With a completely new gameplay genre? A town sim, which I have never attempted before (and which I think no one has done before in Ren’Py, but I might be wrong)? And the plan is also to have a sort of simplified RPG combat as well… so as you can see this is definitely a BIG game, one I can’t tackle right now with my mind too busy and with so much stress.

TFTU: Lilith

I’ll probably make another post about the game later, but for those curious about this story, I can tell you a few things about it to pique your interest:

• it will take place a few years after the events of TFTU: Hazel. So, there’ll still be the witch hunt on
• Odette, the other love interest, is a fallen paladin, and she’s Hazel and romance adoptive daughter
• it will feature Evelyn as love interest, and so there’ll be references to that game as well. But you don’t need to have played the two previous games to enjoy the story
• it will assume two canon endings from both games. I won’t say which ones to not spoil things
• you’ll be finally able to see the evil wizards, also called “The Seven”. In particular, two of them will be some of the most bastard characters I wrote in my games!
• it will be very dark, with many deaths and horrible things happening. But of course, with romance and potential happy endings as well
• the first scene of the game will probably leave you with open mouth
• Evelyn’s personality will be … a bit of a psychopath, but one you can learn to love (sorry ahah) and maybe “fix her”!
• there’ll be a cameo of Amber from Amber’s Magic Shop, and Rowinda’s niece, who’s called Rowinda herself (but she’s not crazy as her mother)
• a planned scene involves a masked dance and maid costumes!!! /nosebleed mode on

If all those things aren’t enough to pique your interest, I don’t know what else to add to the game! haha. Ah wait, maybe a potential threesome ending… that could be a good stretch goal for the Kickstarter!

See you later this month, hopefully with House of Chavez full release !