First of all, the good news, I’ve made exceptional progress on Glamour Photographer. I’d say I’ve done about 90% of the work. The story is all written, still needs to edit/tweak some parts, I’m waiting for some missing imags from artists, etc.

Of course I also need to do a bit more of testing and bugfixing, but since this game is simpler compared to my previous one (lol full townsim+RPG+roguelike vs light management sim + match3!) I am confident it won’t take much work.

What’s really left is, beside some images, also the animations. The characters animations are almost all done, but I recently spoke to the publisher and … they want to add sex-scenes animations as well! That’s the first time it happens in any of my games. So this is the good news, the bad news is that of course that will take time. And obviously NOT all the scenes will be animated, there are too many!

This confirms the planned demo release for the Steam Next Fest next month, and a potential release somewhere in Summer, depending how long adding animations takes.

But the good news don’t stop here. I am thinking to enter the Steam Next Fest also with my other game, At Your Feet 2. There’s two months of time, and for a demo I don’t need to have a lot of content, also because this game is a plain VN, doesn’t have any extra mechanic like other titles. I believe that I could manage to write enough content for a demo in this timeframe. We’ll see!

I’m going to provide more details on both games now.

Glamour Photographer

As I posted the 1st April (but it wasn’t an April’s Fool!), after some pressure by some backers/fans, we’ve added a short one-night stand scene with Lila Stern, one of your guides.

It’s only a simple scene but it turned out very nice. I’m getting a habit of adding those one-night stand scenes for secondary characters. In this case she isn’t even a real person in the story! Indeed the scene takes the form of a lucid dream by the protagonist.

Because of this, I had to add a way to change your spiritual guide while in game:

See at the top-right of the screen. This way, you can play most of the story for example with Master Li Bido (objectively the most fun of all guides!) and switch to Lila just before the final choice scene and unlock the scene, without forcing people to replay the whole game.

Speaking of content: the game current script is already past 200k words! And as said I’ll have to finish writing/tweaking some scenes. The amount of art content is also very high, with over 160 unique images done in comic style, plus over 50-60 photoshoot images (though I have to be honest and we’ve reused many body poses in this case and changed only the faces, hair style, skin color, etc).

We’ve also started adding some bonus scenes and outfits from backers, but I’ll speak about this more in detail next month!

At Your Feet

As I posted already before, the character images of this game were initially for another game. It was still a yuri game, but more toward the romantic side, set in the 1980s. It was a story about a black woman who falls in love with a rich white girl who is supposed to marry a man. They would meet each year toward the end of summer (that was also the working title of the game) to talk. Since it was set in the 1980s, the world was much harder back then for lesbian women, and you can imagine many of the topics and situations (also the social class difference).

Then there would be a final plot twist, which I won’t reveal just in case one day I’ll somehow make it.

The reason I decided to cancel it wasn’t about the overall story (I had already written a full plot outline and some scene drafts that turned out well). The reason, or better the reasons, were two: 1) that there wasn’t enough adult content, and 2) after Christine’s Care release I understood that just a simple, serious yuri story doesn’t sell well anymore on Steam, no matter if it’s well written and the art is great.

This is the sad reality. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I believe a title like At Your Feet 2, yuri with a clear, recognizable kink and also a comedy setting with very fun characters, inner monologues and situations, would have more chances. Nothing big, of course; the visual novel market on Steam is basically a wasteland, only porn stuff survives.

The setting is now modern times. The location is the island of Trigue, which made a perfect way to have Alex show up again as a love interest (it rarely happened in my games that a character was a love interest in two different stories with different protagonists!).

And as already mentioned, this time beside the feet stuff, each character has a kink, this way even if you’re not into that, maybe you’ll find something interesting anyway! I am going to use comic-style CG for this game too, since I can have a good variety with same amount of money I’d spend for a high quality CG.

I have only started the game pre-production but I’ve already over 36 unique images done this way for the story, and the final amount once funded will likely go above 100.

For example below is the scene where the protagonist Linda first meets with Alex, who’s singing as usual:

Being distracted by Alex, Linda will pull a “Grace-move” and pour the drinks over the unaware guest nearby!

This is instead when you’ll first met with Rose, who comes accompanied by Paige, Linda’s ex.

Paige was a character originally made for C14 Dating but was never put in the game, so I decided to have her show up in this story (not as love interest though, just as secondary character).

And last but definitely NOT least, Jennifer. This image/pose might be familiar if you’re a true WinterWolves fan:

Yep, I sent the artist same reference as Dolores from my 2024 game House Of Chavez, since I particularly liked that pose and was perfect for a foot fetish game.

Conclusions

That’s all for now: as you can see I’m working hard to bring some fun and happiness your way, even while everything else seems to be falling apart… see you next month for a new update.

As you might know if you follow me on socials, last month the campaign for Glamour Photographer has ended. However, since I got several people asking to, I decided to leave the late pledges on. This means you can still support the game, and in particular this last stretch goal that wasn’t fully reached:

It’s a… very interesting goal, don’t you think?

Some people asked several questions about the game so I thought to try answering them directly here:

Estimate release date

Hold your horses, the Kickstarter campaign just ended! haha while I’m renown for always finishing my campaign much sooner than the deadline, in this case bear in mind that I’m working with another company, and in particular since they’re going to add animated characters and other features to the game, in this specific case it also depends on that.

In any case, we have as goal to release a demo for the Steam Fest in June, and I think that by that date a beta version should be ready as well. A potential release during the Summer is definitely realistic. That’s only 3-4 months away after all!

Optional Adult Content and Steam

We want to have a game playable by anyone, so while there’ll obviously be some optional spicy content (and probably some of the hottest stuff ever seen in my games!) we also aim to have a clean, streamable version of the game.

In the base game there won’t be any nudity obviously, but not even any vague reference to some of the models kink. Some of you might be a bit disappointed, but I’d like to remind you that my previous game Thieves Of Dingirra got forced in adult only section just because of an image of a character in a leather suit with a whip. Stop, that was it. So as you can imagine, we’ll be very very cautious this time!

I just hope that sexual jokes are fine since it’s a comedy game (but you never know, the inquisition is back at full force!).

This will also mean that pretty scenes like this one below won’t appear in the base game:

As you know, lingerie = extreme pornographic content! (though I admit the image is … hot!)

As I already mentioned before, if you go in any random beach in Europe you’ll see women with micro-bikini much more revealing than that image. But that’s how the rules are, and since you can’t have a PG-14 on Steam (unless you pay some insanely high fee to get an european rating!) we’ll just play safe and not have anything even vaguely remotely sexy in the base game.

Then we’ll have a separate, free adult DLC which will let players enable the optional adult stuff (or even just lingerie outfits).

Game Length, Romances and Gameplay

Another question I got asked is how big is the game and how the romances work. The game is currently already 160,000 words and I think the final script will be close to 200,000 words, more or less. Regarding how it will work plot-wise and in particular related to the love interests, I decided to go with a system suggested by several fans.

Premise: normally my games (but any classic dating sim, really) start with a story, then introduce the various love interests, and then you unlock each character’s route scene by scene, until at a certain point you have to choose a romance (of course there are cases in which you can unlock polyamorous routes, but that’s another matter).

The problem with forcing a choice too early was that people had to save at a specific point and then redo the story from it. If there’s a main story that occur, or a lot of gameplay elements, that might take a long time.

So in this case, you’ll be able to see about 80% of the scenes for each love interest before committing to a specific character. This way if you want to see all the other characters (something that’s rather normal I’d say) you can simply go back to that point and not need to replay a huge part of the game.

Last but not least, a few of you commented negatively about the match3 gameplay. Each match takes about a minute, so they’re very short, and I already added an Easy mode. Normally you can schedule two photoshoots each month of the game. So assuming 24 photoshoots that means one year is only going to take you 24-25 minutes of match3 gameplay. That’s honestly not much!

After the first few years, you become rather famous in game and so you don’t need to do two photoshoots every month, but just 1 is enough to not go bankrupt.

I’d hope players try and play the match3 since I put a lot of effort in it, however I am also thinking about adding a Visual Novel Mode, for those who really don’t like it. You’ll still need to schedule the photoshoots but they’ll be done instantly.

If I go this route I’ll still have a few achievements related to playing the match3 though!

Conclusions and At Your Feet 2

That’s all for Glamour Photographer for now, remember that if you backed the game on Kickstarter I’ll do monthly updates on it. I’ll do almost daily updates on socials instead.

In other news, I also put up the Steam page for the other game I’m planning to work on this year, At Your Feet 2. Of course, the game was instantly forced into adult only, apparently for this screenshot:

Which I thought was completely harmless and funny even, typical comedy style. But, just writing the word “foot fetish” triggered the inquisition at full force apparently!!

So, the game ended in adult only, and because of that I have added some X-rated screenshots now. There’s nothing worse to end up in adult category and then not have anything really adult displayed…no one will wishlist the game!

You understand now why we want to be very careful with Glamour Photographer content?

That’s all for now, see you next month!

If you follow me on socials you already know that I’ve started the Kickstarter campaign for Glamour Photographer last month, and so far it’s doing well, close to the third stretch goal at the time of writing this. Below the next two stretch goals:

For a full list of the stretch goals please visit the Kickstarter page.

Since the base goal was reached very quickly, I have already started working on the game at full speed. I’m particularly happy how the comedy setting is turning out, and the addition of the “Spiritual Guides” adds even more crazyness to the story! Check for example the short video I made below:

It’s a scene happening early in Miyoki’s route, and the combination of comic-style + spiritual guides seems to work well in this crazy comedy setting. In case you missed the characters introduction on my Kickstarter, Miyoki is the model “obsessed by food” and it’s one of the most fun character routes I’ve written in ages!

For a full list of the models, their personalities and… their kinks, check the Kickstarter page updates (I posted an update for each different model).

Steam Next Fest

I spoke with my partner Andrealphus and we are thinking to have a demo of the game for the Steam fest of June, with a potential release in Summer. It’s not 100% sure yet, but that’s what we’re currently aiming at. Personally I’m at good point myself regarding writing, coding, etc but this is a big game and there’s a lot of art and animations left to do. So even when my work is done, then there’ll be animators animating the characters and so on, and that might take a couple months more, depending on various things.

But for a demo I’m confident enough we could have it ready in June.

For the final release not sure, depends on several factors. Still it should be out this Summer!

Next Project

As mentioned in my previous post, this year I’m also planning to do At Your Feet 2, which will still be a game focused on foot fetish but also other kinks, but this time using very different artists. I am planning to reuse the comic-style scenes even in this game since I am very happy about the results I am getting in Glamour Photographer.

Below, a few scenes from the game (still early work of course):

Using comic-style (which means more scenes at slightly lower quality vs a single CG) I believe works better to show what’s happening in the story visually. It’s a bit more “cinematic” vs just a lot of texts and fewer images.

The plan is, when I have done all my work (or most of it) with Glamour Photographer, while they add animations and all that, I’ll start working on this game (so around this Summer), and if all goes well At Your Feet 2 will be out this Autumn, since I plan to have it be a simple VN, so much less work than VN with mechanics like Glamour Photographer.

You can already wishlist and see the trailer on the Steam’s official page here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3996520/At_Your_Feet_2

I didn’t even hope to get this game outside the Steam adult category, so… if you’re from Germany, no worries, the game will also be on itchio or you can back it on KS later this year to get a Steam key reward!

Last but not least, towards the end of the year I might also start working on that fantasy game (still set in Aravorn) I mentioned last month, which is actually my first attempt at making a single player RPG, much more focused on actual roleplay and not just combat.

I already know it will be a nightmare to code (many skills!) and design (a lot of branching) but it’s a project that intrigues me so I want to try it. However I don’t want to push it too much, need to always be careful to not get burned out, so it’s really unlikely that this last fantasy game will be out this year.

That’s all for now, see you next month for another update!

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.

As usual, in the latest blog post of the year I review what happened and do some considerations. But first of all, my games are on sale on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/pub/winterwolves

and also on itchio: https://winter-wolves.itch.io/
(Steam keys comes with each itchio purchase)

Going back to my “New Year Goals” post earlier this year: https://www.winterwolves.net/blog/2025/01/new-year-goals-8/

I was enthusiastically saying “If I can achieve all that, finish 3 games and do 3 crowdfunding campaigns, I’d consider 2025 a fantastic year!“

Haha obviously that didn’t happen, indeed I finished 2 games and did only 1 kickstarter, however it still was a very productive year! But let’s start in order.

Christine’s Care release

Throughout my indie career, there have been some games that, even if they didn’t make much money, stayed very close to my heart. Christine’s Care is one of them.

About half of the story was written by an external writer, and I finished the rest with the help of my editor. I added more scenes, the Marlon/Liz triad, and other details. I really enjoyed writing a story that included a disabled character, and Hannah became one of my favorite characters from all my modern-day stories.

The Steam release went “okay”, not great, but not terrible either (especially considering how crowded the visual novel market is on Steam!). Honestly, I didn’t care: I knew from the start that with its setting and genre, it wouldn’t be a big seller (are you planning to sell a plain VN on Steam? Good luck! You’ll need it.). But it was a game I truly wanted to make… a story I needed to tell. And while Hannah is my favorite, I also really like Marlon, Liz, and Donna. To be honest, I even liked the “alone” ending!

The game’s art style is also one of my favorites. I loved it so much that for my other release this year, Thieves of Dingirra, I decided to work with the same artist again for the CG scenes.

Thieves Of Dingirra

The game has been out for too short a time to draw any real conclusions, but so far it’s performed better than I expected. While very different from Christine’s Care, in a way it still shares something with it yes because this is a game I wanted to make too, as a personal challenge. I remember when I told some other indie friend about my intention of making a town management in Ren’Py, they laughed, almost saying “are you crazy? that’s impossible”.

And to be honest, it wasn’t easy! At all. But, somehow, earlier this year I started working on it, and everything clicked together. It was HARD. Very hard. It’s the most difficult game I’ve coded in my indie career. And most importantly, I did it all alone! Yes, because for Loren I had the help of an external coder, and for Amber’s Magic Shop or PSCD: Colonial Defense as well. With this game? I did it all on my own!

I still remember early this year, I think was February and I was having a very hard time figuring out some complex coding stuff and for a moment I thought “why I decided to complicate my life with this game?”. But the satisfaction I had once it was complete is hard to express by words. Probably the closest thing I experienced before was when I finished Planet Stronghold 2, another very big game.

In the end, I spent about 10-12 months on this game, and honestly it was a bit too much, in the end I was exhausted. And this leads to the final consideration.

From lone wolf to pack member

I’ve always made games mostly on my own in the last 20 years (crazy, I know). I did only a few collaborations, but in general while obviously I outsourced stuff (art, music, writing, etc) I was the one doing the games, putting everything together. And in recent times, things went even more extreme, to the point that I was doing all the coding, writing, and even some GUI stuff or videos myself!

This year after finishing Thieves Of Dingirra I realized that I was so tired that I couldn’t even think about trying to do some marketing. Now, while I think marketing as most indie intend it is overrated (I plan to write a blog post about this in future) it’s still something that you HAVE to do. In general, I realized that what I want to do is… make games. And this is why I decided to try partnering with Andrealphus for my next game. After talking with them, and knowing that I could still develop the game on my own, and they would take care of the parts I don’t like or don’t know how to make (marketing, adding animations, etc) I thought, let’s try!

Talking with other indies, they had some positive experiences doing partnerships. I think the important is to pick the right person/team to do that. Doesn’t mean “the best or most famous you can get”. For me the best is someone who shares the same vision about the games I make, that has good work ethics, and so on.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that while before I was absolutely sure I’d never work with someone, now I’m more open about the idea, since I think joining forces can bring more benefits to both parties involved.

I will still make many games “solo” of course, but if this experiment with Glamour Photographer works, it won’t be the last time! And remember to bookmark the KS campaign page since it should be launching earlier next year: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterwolves/glamour-photographer/

That’s all for now, I hope you’re enjoying the holidays and I wish you all a happy new year! In the next blog post I’ll talk about my ambitious goals for 2026.