From time to time I like to talk about being an indie developer in general, like this time. I’m hoping that at least some people find these posts interesting!

So what is the topic of this post? In practice, I try to explain what I consider the best approach to be an indie developer regarding development schedule, based on my past experiences. Let’s proceed in order.

The main goal of every indie is to first stay afloat (which is not so easy as it seems) and then hopefully make a profit. To do this, you need to release new games (DOH!).

Now comes the more interesting part: what is the best strategy? In my first indie years, I had no long term plans at all. I was just making whatever game I wanted, often deciding on impulse. Those were very different years (talking about years pre-2008) and I wouldn’t advise it unless you’re just doing it as hobby.

In more recent times I tried very different strategies: both taking my time to deliver the best game possible, like I did with SOTW, Planet Stronghold 2, and start several projects at once like I did for example back in 2016 when I released 5 games in a year!

Let’s see both approaches in detail.

Releasing a big polished game every few years

This is what most indies are doing to be honest. They take their time, polishing the game, doing a lot of testing, adding new features, getting feedback, etc etc.

I have tried doing it several times in my indie career. But every time, I can say it wasn’t worth it, from the commercial point of view.

Seasons Of The Wolf took me around 10 months fulltime (12 if we also include the DLC). It wasn’t a flop at all, however it definitely wasn’t worth all that extra time.

In more recent times, I did almost the same thing with Planet Stronghold 2. This time, once again it wasn’t a flop, but it performed way worse than SOTW (but that’s also due to the “sci-fi curse” and reason why I’ll never make a long sci-fi game again).

In summary: the longer the game takes to make, the higher it needs to sell. It’s that simple. It doesn’t even matter how much money you spend up to a certain point – because it’s your own time that matters. I have my own way to calculate ROI (Return Of Investment): I divide the game earnings by the months I worked on it and that is my “virtual salary”.

Example: let’s say a game earns me $10k and took me 5 months to make, my virtual salary is $2k.

So, if the time you work on a game increases, the revenues need to increase as well. As of today, I got better ROI from TFTU: Hazel than Planet Stronghold 2, despite the first being a much smaller game, plain VN, and yuri only. That says a lot I think…

Let’s make super quick games ASAP!

That’s what you might think after reading this post so far. Well, that’s not true either! The games need to have a certain quality, or in case of VNs, have a good base idea, and good writing/art/music. Then, they can be even short. But they still must be quality products.

There’s also another factor to consider: game price. If you make a game which is 50-60k words long, you can’t ask $15-20! My RPGs are usually $20-25, and even if I had a few complaints (users always complain about price) in general they sold way more than my cheaper games, which means that for the vast majority of people, the price was fine.

A good thing of small games is that you can test ideas quickly, see if a new game world works, get quick feedback, not lose enthusiasm because you don’t still need to work 8 months on it, etc etc.

Also, there’s a psychological aspect to take into account: some players when they see cheap games, they think they’re automatically bad, and maybe are reluctant to buy them at all.

The formula of success

As you see, it’s not so simple to pick what kind of game to do. My advice is to mix both small with long games. Because both the things below are true:

• releasing a game every X years is bad because people always want to play new games and they might forget about you and so on. Also a new game release is always a big marketing boost.
• releasing bad games (rushed, done quickly) can lead to a bad reputation and in future people might be wary of trying your new games, even if they might be better than what you did in the past

So the formula of success, in my opinion, is to release 1-2 short/medium games a year, and maybe a bigger game every 2-3 years. The short games still need to be of good quality (good idea, writing, art, etc) of course.

This probably applies only to VNs developers. For “regular games” already releasing 1 game a year is a sort of miracle (most indies doing any kind of game but VN take 2-3 years to make one!).

Sounds hard? Of course! Being a full time indie developer is VERY HARD (especially in today’s crowded market)!

First of all, my Kickstarter for “At Your Feet” ended. It didn’t go as well as Hazel but I knew it (risky/niche topic, non fantasy, etc). When I announced it, I told some indie friends privately that I’d have been happy if I did half of Hazel, and well it did slightly more than half!

I still hope that people that didn’t pledge will give it a try once is out, because I’ve already started doing the storyboards and there will be a lot of funny/sexy scenes and the cast is very diverse, it was since the Heileen times that I didn’t have such a varied cast! The chubby latina, the black athletic girl, the goth/alternative girl and a classic blonde “femme fatale”.

Apart for following the KS, in last month I also did some planning / work on the new upcoming games. Let’s see in detail:

ToA: An Elven Marriage

I’m still of course in the early stages of coding/design, but I added a new important feature to my RPG framework. In Planet Stronghold 2 I already added the possibility to compare and equip items from the loot (showing after a battle victory) but now I have added an even more important time-saving feature. You can see a screenshot of it below:

Yes, now you can instantly sell, from the loot screen, all the “regular” items – which you would probably sell anyway with a few exceptions. Maybe not realistic (how can the party sell instantly items if they’re not near a vendor?) but for sure time saving. I originally implemented this for my own testing but then I thought it was such a good idea that I’m going to leave it in the final game.

I’ll go in more details about this game in a future post.

The Curse Of Mantras

I’m at very good point with this game, I decided to add, beside the regular battles, 3 “final battles” against Mantras, if you unlock a special alternate ending (won’t spoil it more, already said too much!). For this, I needed a new “element”, which is the Cosmos with its associated cards. And they needed a special new card border as you see below:

Why I am doing this? Well because balancing this game is going to be tricky, since differently from PSCD is not linear at all, you can choose in which order fight each element battle, and while you might stumble into some more difficult fights, it’s mostly a matter of collecting “valiant souls” to upgrade your existing cards or maybe fight another elemental realm first.

And instead, fighting Mantras will always happen at end of the story, so I know exactly what kind of cards the player is going to have (all of them! lol). And I neded some powerful ones for the AI to be a real challenge.

Various unannounced games

I can’t talk about those but I made progress also with many other games. By progress I include planning, doing storyboards, commissioning preliminary art, etc. Maybe one day I’ll write a blog post about the “planning stage” that is very important. Even before announcing a game, I usually do some tests to see if it’s an idea worth pursuing or not. If it’s a new gameplay type, I do various tests, like I did for Loren and PSCD, and they can take months before deciding if to go on or not. So I am planning a lot of stuff but I won’t talk about it publicly until I know I’m going to finish what I started!

Conclusions

The plan in the next months is to finish At Your Feet, Summer In Trigue, and have a beta of Curse Of Mantras out. ToA An Elven Marriage won’t probably be out this year, but should be definitely out next ! Stay tuned.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterwolves/at-your-feet

Last year I mentioned I wanted to go back doing a comedy game. And not just comedy but also a “crazy” one. So I had this idea, of a yuri dating sim in which the main character, the latina Emma, has a foot fetish.

I’m serious, it’s not a late April’s fool. It is real (those following me in social networks already know it’s true). And before you ask: yes, women can have it too. I did research it before deciding to make this game!

The Kickstarter game page is: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterwolves/at-your-feet

The game has 3 love interests: Victoria, Lucy and Natalie. You can see a better introduction in the Kickstarter page.

I know that this is a very “risky” game, mostly because it’s completely different from anything I’ve done in the past – my games always had some humor, in some cases even extreme humor like Roommates, but such a crazy starting idea? lol

But in the end, I’m doing so many other “serious” games in the next years, like Curse Of Mantras that I’m working on now, or ToA: An Elven Marriage, that I really wanted to do a game with a light mood, something to relax and have a moment of escape from the reality (and I think we need it now!).

And now after such a crazy announcement, I suppose people could have some questions, so I made a sort of “Question & Answer”:

You’ve given up with otome or yaoi games?

For smaller games, it makes more sense to make them yuri or otome. If I look at my last 10 games, 7 out of 10 have otome, and both the bigger games mentioned above (Curse Of Mantras and ToA: An Elven Marriage) have all romances, so…

Also, my future new Kickstarters will have more romance options again.

What if I’m not into feet?

This kink is very particular, but for those not interested in feet and that are looking for sexy content, the game will of course show also other parts of the female body.

For those instead who’ll play it for the story/romance and not the sexy part (the game can be played in a censored way) I think with such a weird setup the story could turn out to be rather funny, with some embarrassing moments, but also with cute ones.

So in summary, I think it should still be worth playing even if you don’t like this fetish at all.

Why have you decided to do such an absurd game?

Simple: I wanted a break from insanely huge games, complex coding, serious epic stories, from a big cast of characters, especially considering that I’m working not on one, but on two such games at the moment (both huge and both with a more serious/epic plot and complex gameplay).

And so I wanted to do something silly and different. It would be easy to pick a “safe” genre like otomes, do romantic stories with cute art, and have a guarantee amount of sales. Nothing wrong with that strategy, I did that too in the past – BUT sometimes I want also to try doing something different!

That’s why everything considered, I was happy how Volleyball Heaven turned out (and judging by the reviews, people liked it). And why I liked C14 cast with all their disabilities, and so on. From time to time, I want to try new things. Remember that Loren was one of those “experiments” and it turned out it was a good idea.

So please forgive me if sometimes I come out with something silly/crazy as this game 🙂 But don’t worry, it will be the exception and not the rule! lol

Before talking about the topic of this post, an announcement: Hazel is now available on Steam as well: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1394550/Tales_From_The_UnderRealm_Hazel/

Also Steam keys have been added to itchio, so if you bought it there, you can grab your free Steam key now. And now, let’s get back on the topic of this post!

So in past months I began working “seriously” on this game. And I felt sick again lol! I thought that after 10 months of break from Planet Stronghold 2 complex coding, I was good, but as the first inevitable bugs/issues popped up, I started to feel bad.

I thought what to do with this game. Since I already have all that heroes/creatures cards art, I wanted to use them. But if I said I couldn’t do anymore games having both supercomplex gameplay AND long story, there was a reason!

While coding it, I was also unsure if people could like the setting or not. With my fantasy games, I am more or less sure that there’s a fanbase. But something totally new and also a bit “crazy” like this setting? I have no guarantees. So probably this was also influencing my mood as I was coding it.

Maybe I found a solution though!

The master plan

At first, I thought that worse case I could have done the gameplay part only, and sell it as pure gameplay game (with the romance CG as rewards). Many games on Steam do this now, in practice combining gameplay+sexy stuff. However for sure most of my fans wouldn’t like it, since are used to read a story.

So I had this idea: I’ll first work on the gameplay part. Implement and test all the cards and meta-gameplay like upgrading cards. And then have a beta. This way, any potential early bugs or issues will be solved. Ans so, once I’m done with the gameplay part I can focus on the story only, which is rather complex too.

During Planet Stronghold 2 development I had both to take care of bugs AND a complex branching plot, and it’s definitely an experience I don’t want to repeat (or better, I CAN’T repeat otherwise I need to go on theraphy lol).

Splitting the two things, coding first, and story later, will make everything easier. To be clear: the beta will be a sort of pre-order, since there’ll be a lot of gameplay. Not the whole game, but a good amount of it. Probably not the final 2-3 battles, but almost all cards should be there.

And after the base gameplay is well tested, I’ll likely do a KS to gauge potential interest in the story. I have already brainstormed all the storyboards but depending how the funding goes, I’ll make the game shorter/bigger accordingly.

Yes, because the story is going to be a bit particular, different from what I’ve done in the past, even from PSCD. How to put it, it’s more “risky”.

In short: each character died and the game takes place on a sort of after life/limbo. You’ll do battles and discover the past of each character thanks to some special device. So the vast majority of the story will be each character telling their backstories, and you (the protagonist) will interact with the narrator with the usual VN-style choices.

There will be a few scenes with the various character talking to each other of course, but the majority of the story will be about each character’s past.

I am going to do it like this, because this setting otherwise would be too hard to write. In a fantasy game you have existing lore, backgrounds, locations, etc. Here I’d need to start from scratch and also, taking place in a limbo, there isn’t so much that can be done.

I’m writing ToA: An Elven Marriage (the next Saren/Elenor game) in my “spare time”, and I feel it’s much easier for me because there’s already a lot of existing lore, characters, places, and so on. It’s MUCH easier to do! It almost comes naturally. Instead for CoM I’d have to spend hours just on planning each scene.

And since I don’t want Curse Of Mantras to become another super-huge game, I can’t even do too much world building! Just think that there are 12 backstories to write (10 love interests plus the two protagonists) and even assuming “only” 10k words each story, that’s already 120k just for the backstories part (even if it will be the bigger part for sure).

Anyway, this is the plan. We’ll see how it plays out!

I’m happy to announce that Tales From The Under-Realm: Hazel is now officially out! You can get it from here: https://winter-wolves.itch.io/hazel

As usual, you’ll be able to redeem Steam keys from itchio once the game is out on Steam, very likely early next month. And now some thoughts about my KS experience.

As you probably know, Hazel was my first Kickstarted game. Before I never did it for two simple reasons: until 2 years ago (I think?) it wasn’t available at all in Italy. So that was already a major issue. And second, because I was scared to not met the goal or fall in the trap of overpromising stuff.

Overall it went pretty well. Here are some thoughts/considerations that might be helpful for people thinking about doing one. Bear in mind that I’m no expert though!

About the goal / stretch goals

I had in mind almost all the stretch goals from the first drafts of my KS. We didn’t reach them all but I expected that, it’s always better to have more goals than you think you’ll need.

Regarding the goal / funding target, I kept mine really low, mainly because was my first time and I had no clue how it could go. I think in general the goal should match the kind of game. You can’t do a KS for a complex VN/RPG and aks $5000 since people are going to wonder how you can actually produce anything good with that amount!

In my case, I had already some stuff done so I didn’t need the full funding of the game. This is also another possibility, asking for funding to finish a game you have already started (like you could have a draft of the story, sketches, etc already done). I think I’ll do this again, I’d feel less anxious this way, but that’s just my personal view, nothing wrong with asking the full funding.

Regarding the project size, Hazel was intended from the start to be a smaller yuri-only visual novel set in my world of Aravorn. So it had a smaller market compared to my usual RPGs which have all kind of romances + gameplay (even if it really seems that yuri is the bigger part of my fans).

In the end, thanks to the stretch goals the game became bigger than originally planned, around 70k words and with 15 CGs, full OST+theme song so definitely can’t be considered small by everyone’s standard (maybe by my standard yes!).

However I think as first KS was a much better idea to pick a small project. If I did a KS for a bigger game, there was the risk of going into feature-creep, and also on missing deadlines. I am not sure if people really care a lot or not (I’ve seen KS late by YEARS!) but by how I am made, if I say a game is ready before a certain date, I want to keep my word. Not even one month later. This is subjective of course, but if possible I’ll always try to met every single KS deadline for all my future projects.

Marketing

This is always a major point. Prepare to get spammed by “services”, which will be completely useless. I spoke with many other devs who did KS before and they all confirmed that if you get a spam message from someone claiming “they can do KS marketing, increasing goals bla bla” have no doubts: it’s a bullshit 😀

At the end of the KS, you see a nice pie-chart and where the pledges comes from. It was particularly interesting for me to see that over 50% of pledges came from KS website itself, meaning that’s money I’d normally not see (not coming from my usual fans, but just by random people who stumble in my project while visiting KS).

I was also very surprised to see how little impact social media had. Think that Twitter only accounted for 5% of total pledges. Facebook was even worse, close to 1%. And I spammed Twitter and Facebook every day (Twitter in particular).

Now it might also be because I have very little followers, someone with 10-20k followers could have more luck. But still, for me was almost irrelevant, and definitely not matching the efforts I put. A good chunk of pledges came from my mailing list, but those were fans so I kind of expected it (thank you by the way!).

Conclusions

Would do it again? Yes, absolutely, I am already planning another one right now. Would I do a KS for a bigger game? I am not sure. Beside the issues listed above, and the fact that I’m still burned out, I don’t like to get a big amount of money upfront to make a game. This world is full of risks, and I definitely don’t want to get $25k (assuming it was possible) and then have a constant worry to finish this big epic RPG I got the money for. No thanks.

Once again are personal preferences: but for now I think I’ll stick to using KS for smaller projects, rather than big ones. Or for the big games, only after I have already developed a good part to finish them (like Curse Of Mantras, which will talk about in next month’s post).

Now excuse me, I’m going to finish planning this new slice of life / comedy yuri dating sim for the next KS!