First of all, if you haven’t yet, you definitely should wishlist Glamour Photographer on Steam!

There has been some issues with Steam review, if you haven’t heard, they experienced a crazy amount of submissions recently, and this has delayed the review times… Since Andrealphus other game Eden Camp was approved today, and Glamour Photographer is still on review queue, we agreed to delay the game to end of month to avoid releasing the two games too close.

This unfortunately means that even the other game At Your Feet 2 will be likely delayed to January (we were thinking about releasing it in December).

Sorry about this but it really didn’t depend on us, I know many other indies that had to change their plans because of this sudden Steam review delays!

However, there’s a positive thing to that: the game has been tested a lot and I’ve fixed many bugs happening later in the game (even some serious crashes) and also better balanced the difficulty!

And now, something a bit different.

Thank You

We in Europe don’t have this Thanksgiving festivity, but I think it’s really a nice thing to do: I mean, pause your life for a moment and start listing the things you are grateful for.

I have done something like this in the past, but now I have a bigger list!

First of all, thank you, whoever you are. A die-hard fan that played all my games since 2008, someone who played only a few, or even someone who is completely new to my games.

Thanks also to my parents and my wife who supported me since the beginning.

Then, I want to thank a bunch of indies who greatly helped me. I think that not often indies thank each other or at least acknowledge when someone else was a great help to their career.

Patrice of Phelios – now he doesn’t make games anymore, but he helped me a lot in the early years. I was using his library, coding in C, and… I knew nothing of C! He basically taught me online how to code. This was when I was still making strategy/sports sims.

Georgina of Hanako Games – Sometimes you met the most important people of your career purely by chance. For Patrice was in a forum, with Georgina was because I had this weird idea of making “one of those japanese dating games” and I had already all the art, but at the times my English was terrible, and so since she had already done a few games like that, I thought to ask her to finish the game. It was year 2008, I was struggling badly at the times, and the game Summer Session showed me that there definitely was a market in the west for those kind of games!

Ayu Sakata – we met in my early VN years, she is now a famous (I think, I don’t follow much that kind of stuff but I believe so!) voice actress. At the times (around 2009-2011) she helped me writing games like Flower Shop and editing my stories for Heileen 2-3 and Planet Stronghold. She even went around some conventions (alongside other friends of her) selling my games on CD. Good times!

Christine Love – I partnered with her around 2011 for the otome game “Love & Order” (which is now freeware). I saw her early freeware games she put out on Lemmasoft and I immediately recognized the talent. To be honest the game we did together didn’t turn out really great mainly because we wanted to target it to my main following in those years (otome players, mostly cute and romance stuff!) but still I remember checking her code and I thought “this person is a genius”. We still chat from time to time about the industry and stuff.

Aleema – She was one of my early writers and she’s the main reason why Loren The Amazon Princess was so popular. I really loved how she wrote the story, turning my simple draft into something great. She also helped me doing various trailers, coding stuff etc. Sadly we had to part ways, but I have very nice memories of those times working with her.

Anima – The main coder behind the original Loren RPG Framework, which I later tweaked and adapted to various other games like Seasons of The Wolf, Planet Stronghold 2, Thieves Of Dingirra, etc. and the Card Game framework which I used for PSCD and The Curse Of Mantras (still with many tweaks).

…And everyone else who worked for/with me in these years – it’s a long list, some people no longer are in this business, some don’t want their true names (even the two above are just nicknames!). Anyway, they helped me a lot in all these years.

Then, fellow indie devs: Cliff of Positech, Caspian of Puppy Games, Jake of Grey Alien, Dave of Wadjet Eye, Ichiro of Dejobaan – and probably I’m missing someone. This is a group of people that indirectly helped me, not by making games (we never worked together) but just talking with them, having a group of people online that I can call friends and with whom we had a lot of talk about the industry, developing games, or even just personal life stuff. I got to know them from the Dexterity forums (one of the early places for indie devs) and I’m talking with them almost daily even today.

And last but not least, Andrealphus who is publishing my recent games and if all goes well, we could do another partnership next year for another very big fantasy game (not related to Loren, a different IP).

Conclusions

Sometimes when I look back and I see that since 2008 I’ve finished 45 games (FOURTY FIVE) in 18 years, an average of well over 2 games a year (and I’m not including some big DLCs!) I am pleasantly surprised, but as you can see, I didn’t do all of this alone. I am thankful for all the help I had, both in and outside games.

As Master Li Bido would say: “Pupil, remember this: the lone samurai walks nowhere. He surrounds himself with formidable allies, for no great battle is ever won by a single blade.“