Happy New Year again! As usual I’m doing a blog post with my goals for this new year. After posting about my previous year’s goals, this year I want to be more conservative, since doing 3 Kickstarters and releasing 3 games in a year is not so easy as it seems… I did that in 2023 but I’m getting older!

Glamour Photographer

This obviously will be my primary focus during the first part of the year. I don’t have an estimate release date yet of course, since development is still in early stages, but I think it should be definitely out this Summer!

The gameplay so far is turning out as I wanted: not too simple, not too hard. The match3 is a classic match3 with some bonus/malus depending on location, model’s unique preferences, improvements you can buy and so on. The simulation part, albeit simple, adds some strategy to the whole thing. The trends that change each month means you’ll need to adapt your location to them, you could wait to sell some photos until next month to see if they match the new trend, and so on.

Overall pretty satisfied and it seems also well balanced on difficulty (though of course I’ll also need to wait for beta testers’ feedback later).

Story-wise I’m also happy about the progresses, also writing a story set in the 1980-1990 decade is really cool, because it’s when I grew up so writing this feels almost like a trip down memory lane. Trying my best to capture those years vibes. While most of the younger players will miss many references, if you’re my age, I think you’ll really like this setting as much as I do!

ToA: Reign Of War

This will be my next BIG roleplaying game featuring 6 love interests, however I think I will work on it part-time, alongside other projects. Why? Well, it’s a big game so takes a lot of time, and as I noticed recently, it’s not a good thing for me to wait many months between each release, like happened several times in the past (Planet Stronghold 2, Thieves Of Dingirra).

I did the same thing for example with An Elven Marriage, the previous Loren spin-off. I started planning/developing it back in 2022 but I released it only in 2023, and I took breaks while writing it to do some smaller games.

You might think that this is a bad idea because it could be distracting and if I stop writing then resuming it might be difficult since I need to remember the details of the story, and so on. Well, for me personally it isn’t. Often, I write a draft of a story, and then I take my mind off completely from it, by working on another game. Then, months later, I come back to it with a different mind and I think it helped me write better stories, since I reduce the inevitable burn-out and tiredness.

So, for me this system works! And this leads to me hinting about the next game…

At Your Feet 2

Haha! Believe me, this is the latest game I’d ever expected to make a sequel, since I did the first game almost for fun / as meme game, but it did so well especially on Steam that I decided to make another. Also because feet puns are never enough!

This time though, I decided that alongside the foot fetish kink, I’ll also have each girl with a specific different kink as well, so this game could please both people into feet and people not into that.

Also, I’m going to use characters that were originally drawn for another game, that I decided to cancel. Why? Well this is the story for another blog post in future! or maybe on Patreon.

But the good thing is that they’re going to be used now in this game. And I think I’ll use comic-style scenes for the CG scenes and…the hot stuff, to have much more variety of poses/situation in them.

I plan to create a Kickstater page and show some previews in the coming months.

Mysterious Fantasy game

Life wouldn’t be interesting without a bit of mystery, right? There’s this game that I’ve been planning since several years and I got some really nice character art for it. Sadly artist seems can’t continue working on it, so I should use someone else for the CGs, or perhaps still use comic-style CG even in this case since it’s a system that was well received in Lilith.

Current working titles is simply “The Escape” and it will still be a fantasy story and I’m thinking about adding a light RPG element as well, using a single character this time, but with more detailed skills (even non-combat). I won’t reveal too much but basically you’re going to travel to a remote island as an Envoy (but this time only female, sorry) right before the beginning of a civil war and you’ll need to safely escape back to Grimoire, carrying with you two guards and two heirs to the throne. There’ll be two male and two female love interests so a otome+yuri game in practice (can’t add or change anything now since it’s all the character art I got!).

So I’d say not a small but a medium project (depending how deeply I want to go in the RPG part).

There’ll be cameos of some characters, for example above it’s this artist rendition of Breza from Loren… not bad eh? (I think I like it maybe even more than the original art!!).

Goals Summary

Before doing a goals summary, a small announcement: I’ve decided to shut down my forums. Over the years they ended up seeing very little activity (sometimes close to zero posts per year) and they had become increasingly hard to maintain, especially with ongoing security updates and upkeep. That said, I didn’t want all that history to disappear, so I put together an archive to preserve the content.

The forums had been online since 2005, which means 20 years of my indie career. It’s honestly a bit sad to close that chapter, but it also feels like a reflection of how times have changed. In the videogame world especially, things move incredibly fast. Still, I’m proud that the forums lasted as long as they did. Of course, you can still use socials or my Discord to interact with me now.

And now, back to this year’s goals!

So in the end, what are my goals? First, release Glamour Photographer during Q2 this year (like June maybe). Second, do a crowdfunding for At Your Feet 2, and release it probably around August/September (being a simple VN will have a shorter development time) and then… maybe do the crowdfunding for Reign Of War, with a goal to release it in 2027!

However I’m not sure about this last part, depends how much I’ll be able to work on it during this year. I might release another game like the mysterious fantasy game before it. In practice I would do the KS and work on that game, while I keep working on Reign Of War so then it can be out in late 2027, but mostly depends on things beyond my control like burn-out, real-life stuff happening, getting older, etc.

One thing it’s sure, I’ll do my best as always! Again, Happy New Year! May this year be happy, relaxing and healthy for all of you reading this post.