It’s that time of year again, where I pause to take a look at the situation, as we’ve reached the exact midpoint of the year.

Of course, the game I’m working on is TFTU: Lilith, and I plan to show some progress in the coming months. In case you missed it, I’m reducing my time spent in socials, just an update a week, and instead focusing on my Discord and my Patreon. Patreon in particular will be updated almost daily, with more free base content unlocked a few days after the members.

At the time of writing this post I haven’t received the funds yet, but if all goes well I’ll start commissioning artists to produce more work, since many stretch goals were reached. I can say without doubt that this will be the game of the series with the most content!

Because of all the content, the game might take longer than planned, just for the time needed to produce art. In this case, while I wait for it and have finished writing the whole story, I might start to work on the next big project, Thieves of Dingirra.

Thieves of Dingirra gameplay

I’m still doing tests with the gameplay part, since story-wise I have everything more or less planned, almost all the characters and scenes laid out (of course when I get to actually write it, I might get inspiration to write more scenes or do things slightly differently).

Haha, to paraphrase the famous saying “to gameplay or not to gameplay”? I must confess that it’s always been a dilemma for me to decide whether incorporating gameplay into my narrative-driven games was a good or a bad idea. For games where I could easily put a “visual novel mode”, like my RPG or card games, that wasn’t an issue, since players could always play the game like that. But for other kind of games, like Roommates (scheduler) or the recent House of Chavez (you could skip minigames but not the adventure part) this wasn’t possible.

In Thieves of Dingirra it would be a bit hard to offer a visual novel mode since the story would progress as you conquered the city step by step. I guess I could simulate that somehow. Or maybe, if there’ll be fights, I could add an auto-skip option.

As you see there’s still a lot of things to think about, and it’s what I’ll do in the coming months, while I wait for art for Lilith and/or take a break between writing a scene and another.

After this, what?

I believe Thieves of Dingirra crowdfunding might start this fall, and will surely take me several months to do that game (even if I decide to make it visual novel only, there’s a big cast). After that, the next big project will be the second Loren spin-off, Reign of War. Even if that game should take me less time than An Elven Marriage, due to the fact that I’ll reuse the battle system (without doing any changes this time! just different skills and items) and that I have already a draft done (this story is what Loren 2 originally was supposed to be), I am surely not going to do that game immediately after Thieves of Dingirra though, since I’ll need a break.

So, I have in mind a few small projects that I will do as I take a break after Thieves of Dingirra and the next big RPG. Also because so far all those “smaller projects” gave me very good ROI, even better than the big games, which is kind of hilarious – it’s starting to be better to make smaller games than bigger ones… what a weird market!

That’s all for now, see you next month with an update on Lilith development!