As you probably already know if you follow me on social media, my latest dating sim, The Curse Of Mantras, is out on itchio.

It’s out since about a week so it’s too early to draw conclusions even if early numbers are encouraging. To be honest, I’m already happy that I’ve managed to finish it!

If you backed it on Kickstarter, you should have got a private message with the itchio links. I’m also going to send you the Steam keys in the next days, since the release on Steam is coming soon too.

The Adult Content dilemma (again)

I hoped we would be done talking about this, but sadly, when I submitted the game to Steam, they put it in the “Adult Only” category: https://store.steampowered.com/app/618000/The_Curse_Of_Mantras/

Which is bad for two reasons: people browsing that category usually expect much more explicit stuff, while the game has nudity but in general very tasteful love scenes, and second because it prevents the game being viewed, or worse even purchased, in certain countries like Germany (this isn’t due to Steam but to some Germany laws I think).

The same thing already happened in the past for my games Volleyball Heaven and At Your Feet. But in this case it’s a pity, since it’s not just a plain visual novel focused only on romance/sex relationships: the game also has a very complex, detailed and fun card battling game, and I think it’s really bad if people can’t even try it because it’s labeled Adult Only.

Why this game was important to me

This is not a postmortem since as I said it’s too early and I can’t draw any conclusions about the game performance and so on. It did a successful Kickstarter, but that money was barely enough to cover its development costs (not even including my own time).

But this game was important for a lot of reasons: it was a game in development since around 2013-14. I had this idea of the afterlife/limbo, but at the time it was supposed to be a sort of Pokemon-style battle game. I hadn’t a clear idea how the game would be, but since I put out the first sketches/concept art, fans seemed enthusiast about the idea. I admit I was a fool to let myself carry by this enthusiasm too, because you can’t do that, it’s dangerous. And indeed, until 2018-19 I still had no idea which gameplay to use, until I finally made my mind and picked card battles.

The main issue was that in 2020 I released Planet Stronghold 2 which, despite being one of my biggest/better games, greatly underperformed compared to my expectations. So it was clear that the market had changed, and maybe such big games weren’t profitable anymore. But I had already started doing it, already invested time and money.

At the beginning of last year, I was still struggling with a bad burn-out, and even if I didn’t post about this in public at the time, I thought to cancel the game. Yes, even after I had already spent so much efforts, I briefly considered that.

Why? Because I couldn’t see a reason to finish it. It was a dying genre of games – big games with a lot of romances that had to be sold at a proper price, since it’s not one of those silly porn VN with 3 scenes and no plot, no character development, etc.

Also, because I was tired, burned out, and I feared of working months and months only to get the same results, if not worse, than making one of the games mentioned above – short, silly porn games that seems to sell well on Steam nowadays.

In the end, I thought this: this year (2021) I’ll make a few shorter games, to give myself some breath, both economically (those games are usually profitable) and also to relax, not having to code anything complex.

It worked: TFTU – Hazel, At Your Feet, Summer In Trigue and Love Notes were all fun, good games but not a huge, epic, 10 love interest game with ALSO a complex gameplay. So that was good, and by the end of the year I was ready to resume working and finishing The Curse Of Mantras.

This game will decide the kind of future games I’ll do?

Honestly? Probably. I mean, I’m definitely going to do the 4 Loren spin-off games in any case (indeed I’ve already started working on the first game in the series), but all those games have “only” 4 love interests each. I think, unless The Curse Of Mantras does extremely well, this will be my last “big game” I’ll ever make. For the reasons above. I love being indie and making my fans happy doing those big games, but I also need to keep an eye both on my health and finances.

Time for some news about this game! First of all, you might remember that I wanted to put this game on the next Steam Fest event.

In the end, I decided not to. But don’t worry, not because the game isn’t ready or not in a good state. Not at all! Indeed, I might start the full beta of the game towards the middle of this month!

The state of the game

As I already explained in the past, some devs use Kickstarter (or any other crowdfunding) as a way to recoup money spent, maybe to add more content, but when they do the campaign they might have already an alpha/beta of the game. In my case indeed, when I did the Kickstarter I had already done a lot of work on the game coding before. I had already started back in 2020, then paused it, and resume working on it.

Since the beginning of December to now, two months have passed, in which I’ve made very good progress, but I know that being a complex game the beta phase will take some time, so that’s why I put a longer deadline.

I wanted to participate on the Steam Fest, since with Summer In Trigue went well. The problem is, that with a visual novel is very simple to have a demo. You pick a point of the story, cut everything after it, and done.

With a complex game like this ? Not so simple. Also because how the framework was coded. So in summary, even doing a demo could lead to bugs present only because I had to cut content from the full game to the demo (cards, scenes, gameplay stuff, etc).

I started doing it. But after spending 2h on it, I quickly realized that it wasn’t a good idea, for three reasons:

1. I was effectively wasting my time to work on a demo that, once the Steam Fest ended, I’d have removed. So hours that I could have put to improve the full game instead
2. if by mistake I left some bugs, it could have even backfired: imagine, people playing the demo, finding crashes / bugs, and it could have made a negative impression on them
3. I said in the past that indie games aren’t directly competing with AAA titles. Sure, especially if are visual novels (and even better with adult content, which is not present in AAA titles for sure). But I also said that it might be different for more gameplay-oriented games like this one. I really think the next Steam Fest visibility will be much lower due to big AAA titles coming out around same time

And last but not least: since the game is such in an advanced state, in the end I’d have both a full beta out on my own site and a demo on Steam, which means I had to mantain two bulids and anyone who is developing games knows that this is a bad idea!

What’s Next?

I’m taking some time to polish stuff, and the editor is checking some last texts in the game. Then, sometimes around mid-February, I’ll start the beta as usual on my own site using itchio. Anyone who pre-orders it, or anyone who backed it on Kickstarter using the beta testing tier will have immediate access to it (with option to also have a Steam key later).

How long will take before the final game is out? I have no clue honestly, it all depends on how testing goes. For my previous card game I think the testing lasted 2-3 months but that was because the framework was still new, so I think this time should be a bit faster.

In any case, as always I’ll be sure to announce here once the game is officially out!

This is not how I imagined to start the new year… my cat Mirtillo wasn’t feeling good since a while, but being almost 16 we thought it was the usual age-related issues. Unfortunately about 15 days ago we discovered that he had cancer and it was already in advanced condition.

There was no possible treatment, so we decided to do nothing until he was still eating on his own. In the last 3 days, he always tries to hide, scratches his head continuously and is visibly in pain so we decided to put him to sleep.

He was almost 16 years old, and since he also was FIV positive, I can say that he lived a long life (I believe is rare for cats with FIV to reach such age). But of course, I’ll still miss him.

This is also the last male cat, we’re left now with “only” 4 cats, all females.

First of all, Happy New Year to everyone! Let’s see what I’ll try to do in 2022.

Of course, since I’m running a Kickstarter for The Curse Of Mantras, this is the game that will have my priority in the first months of the year. Like before, I’ve already done some work prior to the KS, and I’ve been working in the past weeks (slower since I sort of took some time off for the holidays). Gameplay-wise things are very good and even the writing/scripting of the story part is at good point so that (crossing fingers) I’ll likely deliver the game ahead of its deadline once again (still considering a longer testing time due to this game having a more complex gameplay than my recent releases).

This year will be 10 years since the first Loren release! It would be cool if the tenth anniversary saw the release of the first new adventure for Saren and Elenor, ToA: An Elven Marriage. And I’ll try my best to do it, though being a RPG, it won’t be easy. Also because, after finishing The Curse Of Mantras I won’t probably have the energy to do another complex game, so I might do a shorter/simpler one “as break”.

Indeed, I have plans for the next Tales Of The Under-Realm game. I won’t spoil too much but it will be set in the town of Lothark, and will see some cameos/references from my other games: Apolimesho, and Samael. Remember General Samael from Loren? He’ll be one of the main characters of the story, back when he was only the Captain of the guards.

It will be a dark fantasy murder mystery and you won’t be able to see everything / discover all that happened in a single playthrough. I have written a rough draft/idea and honestly I can’t wait to work on this, since I think the idea, mood, the character routes, the deaths (there’ll be many) are really interesting.

As said in previous post, being a smaller title will be yuri only, but even if you don’t care for the yuri part I think the story should be still worth playing, and if you like my fantasy world of Aravorn there’ll be many references, and many grey-characters. And also, many possible deaths, obviously!

Beside this, there are also a few other games that I’m working on during breaks, of some I’ve posted a few sketches/preview art on my Patreon but it’s still too early to talk about any of them, since now my policy is to talk publicly about something only when I’m 100% sure I’ll be able to release it.

Conclusions

So that’s the plan: Curse Of Mantras release, then crowdfunding for the next Tales From Under-Realm game, then ToA: An Elven Marriage and if there’s time, some other game. But I doubt it, since two of those three games are very big games with complex gameplay. You never know though, last year I never expected to be able to release 4 games!

Happy New Year!

Happy Holidays to everyone! As usual in this post I’m going to review what happened in the course of the year.

But first, of course, let’s talk about the hot stuff that is happening right now: The Curse Of Mantras Kickstarter went live about a week ago and it’s going well! Below, the game trailer:

To see more info about it and the latest development, please check the Kickstarter page!

Year Review

I started this year still feeling burned out from all the work on Planet Stronghold 2 in the previous year! Yes, seems crazy but it wasn’t until May/June that I’d feel like working on complex coding again. I promised to myself to never get burned out again, and I plan to keep this promise!

Anyway, in March I finally released TFTU: Hazel, which had a very good reception. I was very pleased with its sales, even if for some mysterious way the review amount on Steam was super low compared to my other games. Later after talking with other indies I found out that this appears to be the new norm. But anyway what matters is that it was a very profitable game and gave me a breath of air after the so-so 2020.

After Hazel release I revealed to the world the craziest idea I ever had (probably too crazy lol): At Your Feet. The KS was successful, albeit I raised way less of Hazel. Direct sales had a slow start: on the opposite, on Steam it did rather well, much better than I thought! It’s still to early to draw conclusions of course, but it definitely overperformed vs my expectations, also considering the particular kink.

In summary, that game definitely was in the “experiments” category, and considering the crazy idea, it did well!

Summer In Trigue on the other hand was much more like my “classic games”, funny writing/situations, with some more serious/deep moments etc but in general comedy setting (and without weird kinks lol). And I was very pleased by the results, even if because it was still one of the “old games”, in development since years, didn’t do any Kickstarter AND also because I decided to redo the art (was totally worth it though!), the game hasn’t yet recouped its cost (which instead with Hazel and At Your Feet happened within the launch week).

In autumn I also did the Kickstarter for Love Notes, and it went as expected: yes, it didn’t raise a lot, but I knew it beforehand. The main thing is that the game is very tame (this artist doesn’t draw naughty stuff) and nowadays to have success doing a dating sim you MUST have at least optional nudity.

About Curse Of Mantras, I’ve already talked about it. I have registered for the next Steam Fest, so my next goal is to have a playable demo by end of February (not with all content but with at least 10-20 battles).

Conclusions (aka what the market wants)

Like always, some things worked and some didn’t. The important I think is to have fun while you doing what you do. And I certanily had fun!

Which lessons I’ve learned this year? Well, first that I should trust more my data. If out of 3-4 games I made with sci-fi setting, they ALL underperformed vs the game quality/lenght etc, it means that setting doesn’t work. So from now on, no more sci-fi games from me (I might do more sci-fi stuff like Black Mirror though, just not sci-fi meaning space, aliens and so on).

I was also pleasantly surprised to see, that at least for plain visual novels, releasing them during the “cursed periods” of September to December (when most AAA titles come out) had no noticeable impact on sales. So in future I won’t hold anymore a game release if it’s ready during this period. Maybe not if it’s a RPG since those could be more in direct competition with other bigger titles.

Another thing I’ve learned, is that I need to adapt to the market/platforms. As I said, At Your Feet did very well on Steam, very close to Hazel results. This is probably not related to the game kink, but the yuri/adult stuff power. On Steam (and on Kickstarter too to be honest), anything yuri + adult seems to sell twice other genres. Once again it doesn’t matter my personal tastes, I need to survive and follow what sells on each platform.

I’ve plenty of games with all romance combos in the works, like all the Loren spin off games, Curse Of Mantras, etc. However I decided that for all other smaller titles, I’ll likely go with the yuri only formula, including the next Tales from The Under-Realm game which I hope to work on later next year.

Next year is going to be “fun” since I have some very complex games to finish… but we’ll talk about this on next blog post at the beginning of the year.

Wishing you Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!