Sadly only a few months after my other older cat Mirtillo died, even Lilly passed to a better life. She was 16 years old, so at least not as young as some other cats I had, but she had a special place in my heart also for a reason: she was the last stray cat that we rescued in our previous place, and by pure coincidence she’s also the last to leave us.
With her departure a chapter of my life closes. I still have three cats and a dog, but this was the last link we had to our previous home and in a way, previous life (things were way different back in 2006-2007 even professionally). When I think at her, I think at the difficulties I had in my early years as indie developer, the expenses, and still the courage to do the right thing and try to save as many innocent creatures as possible. And it was totally worth it.
Thank you Lily for everything and see you on the other side.
This is going to be the month of demos! Haha, after years since I last made them (I think one of the last demos I made was for Love Bites), I’m going to participate in the Steam next fest with not one but two demos.
I’ll shorten the trailer for the game official release, but meanwhile take a look since it introduces the story and characters rather well.
Regarding the Kickstarter, we hit the base goal already and we’re about halfway to the first stretch goal. By the way, I didn’t post much of the actual love scenes, but like the previous game, there’ll be a tame version, and a very explicit one. For example the image below:
part of Cynthia love CG, censored version
Is a close up of the censored version, in the uncensored version both will be naked and… “doing things with their hands” lol. I am not posting anything explicit here in my blog/site but if you’re interested in hot stuff, you won’t be disappointed, trust me!
If having the demo ready for TFTU – After Midnight was relatively easy, since it’s a regular visual novel, having a demo for ToA – An Elven Marriage was much more difficult. But I did it, follow this link to play it. And don’t forget to wishlist the game!
In the end, it’s only 4-5 chapters, and it contains maybe 4-5 fights total, but it still has a lot of final content (tweaks to skills/items excluded of course). I have been working on this since last year, on and off while waiting for stuff for the other games to get finished.
When I started wasn’t sure I’d make in time but looks like I did! In the demo you’ll be able to meet Lydia, Nathir and Gruff (the first non-binary character of my fantasy games).
trouble in paradise, or considering the characters should I say trouble in hell?
Now for those who still don’t know, this is the first of the planned four spin-off games with Saren/Elenor. Each game will have two “old” love interests (in this case Myrth and Rei) and two new ones (Lydia and Nathir). You can continue an old romance, or start as single and pursue one of the new love interests.
I also hinted about the various games. Today I want to announce the full plan. Bear in mind that since are RPGs, they take a lot of time to make, and I’ll take breaks while doing them to release smaller games. So, the last one might be out even in 8 years from now…!
The other three stories revealed
After An Elven Marriage, the next three games will be (titles are temporary and might change):
Reign of War
This is what the original Loren 2 story was about. The third and final war against demons. Old romances: Mesphit and Draco. New romances: Jul and Breza
Reign of Peace
A story about the riot in the amazon citadel/culture due to Loren’s change of laws (no more slavery, more rights to men). Old romances: Loren and Karen. New romances: Odurat and Nook
The Witches Of Unforgiving Swamp
This is my favorite setting and will be about the fight between the witches and the empire/witch hunters. Lots of cameos with other characters like Vin. Old romances: Chambara and Amukiki. New romances: Selith and Samaras
A few rules
There will also be some rules: in general I’ll try to avoid at all costs to put a previous potential love interest in a story in which you can’t romance them. But for new characters that can be romanced I’ll make an exception. So for example, in An Elven Marriage you’ll see Breza. You can’t romance her until the Reign Of Peace story, so she will be like a NPC/secondary character. Same for the other new characters.
Hopefully will help those players who want to roleplay and remain loyal to their only love from Loren and that won’t romance anyone else until the game with them comes out!
Last but not least – I’m not sure if ALL games will be RPGs. Since they take a loong time to make! Take into account at least 4-5 months of extra work for each game just for design/coding the RPG part (not including testing).
So for example for Reign of Peace I could do something different, like a sim or management game and so on. I haven’t made my mind about this yet, we’ll see how burned out I am after the first game is out, hopefully at end of this year or early next!
One of the first scenes of the story with Evelyn being scared about the night in Lothark
A bit of behind the scenes
And now for those curious about how I came to this game idea, here’s some “behind the scenes” stuff. A thing I often like to do, is read again my old games, with a particular attention to secondary characters. I like to imagine how they became to be like what they are, their morals, their personality. What is their backstory?
The lead can be anything, from their personality traits, to something they said about their past lives. For example, I’m currently thinking about a game story about a single scene of Season Of The Wolf, in which Vaelis mention a certain Rogan The Red and a revolt happened in some far away islands.
For this game instead the inspiration came directly from Loren, and in particular General Samael. Do you remember the first things he says in Loren? When he meets with Apolimesho?
“If it isn’t the heretic Archwizard himself. You will not bewitch me to your elf agenda. You might as well leave.”
From a simple sentence like this we can evince the following things: that Samael and Apolimesho have a past, and they dislike each other. That Samael has something against the elves.
Then as the scene goes on, when Amukiki (the ex-gladiator) speak, it’s obvious that Samael has in high consideration people like him. So naturally Samael likes gladiators and the arena.
All those things inspired me to write a story when Samael was younger and he was just the Captain of the guards, but was already aiming to be something more. It will show the ruthless man and what he was capable of doing.
But Samael is only a secondary character of this story. This time the protagonist can be fully customized, skin color and name included (it’s a stretch goal but I really hope we’ll reach it). There are two love interests like in Hazel: Tara the childhood friend who is a guard too, and Cynthia, a mysterious girl from Dingirra that arrives at the beginning of the story. But this time, there will be more death and dark turns of the plot. Many characters can die, depending on your choices.
from left to right: Samael, Martha and Evelyn
Yes because this time the cast of secondary characters is much bigger. There’s Martha, Samael’s wife and elf. Their daughter Evelyn who is a secondary character but has the biggest impact on the story. There’s Gus, Tara’s brother, who is a guard too. Nadja, Cynthia’s mother and poledancer.
And lastly there are two other character who I cannot mention because of spoilers, but that they will play an important role.
Like Hazel, there’ll be a base version of the game with sexy outfits but nothing more. Then there’ll be an optional version with full adult content for those who like it.
Nadja is Cynthia’s mother and work as dancer
As already said, I’m working on a demo of this game for the Steam Next fest, which will introduce some of the characters. It won’t be very long but hopefully interesting enough. Also, I am planning to have a full voiced trailer for the game next week, so stay tuned!
A while ago I mentioned how I was completely against the introduction of crypto-stuff on Kickstarter (or on any platform, for that matter). Since then I’ve researched alternatives and spoke with many other indie devs who ran crowdfunding campaigns on other platforms (either exclusively or beside KS).
Unfortunately the conclusion is that, unless you’re already famous (which I am not haha) any other crowdfunding platform is a waste of time. I won’t make names or figures since all was confidential, but basically every single person told me that if they could go back, they wouldn’t have done it.
But there’s more to consider. Nowadays most of my income each game (at least the initial one) comes from crowdfunding. I made a graph for 3 kickstarted games (Curse Of Mantras is still too new):
Revenues of my latest 3 games split between KS and Steam
Itchio is very small so I didn’t include it, on average 10-15% of the total. Of course, as time passes, Steam sales will (more or less slowly depending on the game) catch up. Anyway the point is that, even for a game that’s been out since 1 year or more like Hazel, KS money was still the majority of income. This also because on KS you lose about 5-10% of gross, while on Steam is normal to lose 30-35% of gross amount, which makes things even worse.
As you see there isn’t much choice for me if I want to keep making games. So don’t be surprised if soon I’ll announce a new crowdfunding for a game in the series Tales From The Under-Realm!
Demos on the way!
And now, let’s talk about the Steam Next festival. This time, I plan to participate with two game demos! One is ToA: An Elven Marriage. It will be a full demo with battles and everything, probably useful to get some early feedback (and maybe bug reports) on it. It won’t be super long of course, but it will introduce Lydia and Nathir, the two new characters, and continue Rei/Myrth romance storylines if you choose to.
I’m really enthusiast of the moon elves race lore, and also on Nathir “gambling” religion (I know said like this sounds bad, but just wait to read it). They’re both very original and interesting, so I’d be curious to know what people think of it.
The other demo should be of TFTU – After Midnight, but I’m not going to post anything for now since I’m not 100% sure I’ll have all the art needed to do the demo. It’s a normal visual novel so if I get the art in time, it shouldn’t be a problem, but as always I’m being very cautious.
If all goes well I’ll make another blog post later this month announcing the Kickstarter for this new gothic game in the Tales From The Under-Realm series, even darker and full of deaths (but also romance! yay).
I’ve already talked about market changes in the past, and how quick they are in the indie game developer’s world. In today’s blog I want to talk about what you can do when this happens.
First of all analyze
The first thing to do is to check your statistics and draw conclusions. This because it’s always better to verify yourself if what other people say it’s true. Or maybe, it could be for them, but somehow not for you.
turn based isometric RPGs are dead! or maybe not
I know what you’re thinking: yes there can be generalized effects, but sometimes a small group of developers can still find profitable what they’re doing. For example: let’s say that RPGs are no longer a popular genre on Steam (that’s false obviously but it’s just an example). A developer who has built a following over the years might find that it’s still better to keep doing RPGs, than trying to reinvent themselves doing a new genre.
Of course it’s not an exact science, and also depends how quickly you release games. Since I usually release at least 1 game a year, with an average of 2-3, I was able to see market changes much quicker than other indies releasing 1 game every 3 years!
I distinctly remember two episodes, in 2016 and 2018. I had just discovered that somehow the Steam algorithm changed, or perhaps was the market. Anyway, I suddenly had much lower revenues than in the past, and I told other indies, who though I was exaggerating or maybe was just my games. A few months later, those same people finally released new games and they all went to me scared screaming “WTF you’re right!” 😀
This not to say that I’m always right (you know I am! just kidding), but that obviously if you release a game every 2 years you can’t really know what/if things changed. If you release 2-3 a year instead…
Find a solution
After you’ve analyzed your data, and discovered exactly what happened, it’s time to find a solution. I did this already many times in the course of my indie career. First big change was back in 2008 when I stopped doing strategy/sim games and moved to visual novels/dating sims. The other big change was in 2011-2012 when I did my first RPGs. The last big change I did was last year when I started doing crowdfunding and changed the way I develop games internally to be able to release games at good pace.
Sometimes a solution can be simple or obvious, other times can be a guess and very risky. But as the saying goes, if you keep doing a thing, and that thing doesn’t work anymore, it’s stupid not to change.
Yes: trying something new can be scary, and it’s not guaranteed to work, but it’s better than just keep doing the same thing that is failing over and over, and end up bankrupt a few months/years later.
A practical example
Let’s see how I applied this system myself. As said back in 2018 there was a big change. That’s when I decided to do some yuri only games (never done before) and also include more adult content (more erotic than hardcore, but a further step from the kissing and partial nudity of past games). While I don’t have and never had issues with adult stuff myself, for someone coming from tame otome games was a big risk!
Anyways, how did it go? Below you see the revenues on Steam of a few games, 1st week, 1st month and 1st year.
Now you can see that PS2 is outselling everything else ,but as already said in the past, what matters is the ROI. I spent 1 full year on PS2. So even if it sold more, in the same amount of time I could have done 3-4 games like Hazel, for example (PS2 script is indeed about 4-5 times Hazel! and let’s not forget all the branching and RPG gameplay coding part lol).
What’s interesting is that even considering games released back in 2016 (when it was MUCH MUCH easier to make money on Steam!) like C14 Dating or Heirs & Graces, recent yuri games with adult stuff like Volleyball Heaven outsell them! So it seems it was the right move, and that’s why last year I made 3 more yuri only games with adult content, and all of them did well, much better than my other recent releases (yes, even including At Your Feet lol!).
Also those graphs are only about Steam’s revenues. I didn’t include the KS. Including Kickstarter money, Hazel would be in 2nd place after PS2. I didn’t include it since it wouldn’t be a fair comparison with older games but of course in the end still matters.
In summary: I took a risk, but it worked. Of course I wasn’t sure what would happen, but I still tried. This is how you stay in business. Try new things until you find what works, what the market really wants. What people pay for, and not what the vocal minority says.
Conclusions
I must say that I was unsure if to post this last part. It seems like that I have something against certain genres of games or content. No. It’s not about me or my personal preferences – indeed I just finished a game with all romance combos, and I’m working on the first Loren spin off that once again has all romance combos. So I repeat, it’s not about my personal tastes: those are hard numbers, statistics. Which could even be different for other devs, depending on platforms, following, art style, etc etc there are too many variables to consider. But for me, that’s what happened. After doing 3 more yuri games last year, now I clearly know it wasn’t random.
As I said in the past, if you’re a fan of a genre, you should support the authors, spread the word, and so on. Complaining or voicing your opinion won’t change things. If I was just doing games as hobby, then it wouldn’t matter. But I’ve been in this business since almost 20 years and I want to keep doing this until retirement age (hopefully!).
To make you understand better my position here’s a comparison: imagine at your job one day the boss tells you that you can choose between two tasks. Both are identical to you, you have no preferences. But one pays twice vs the other. What would you choose?
