Ahaha, enigmatic title, isn’t it? I’ll explain it shortly. But first, an update on TFTU: Lilith! Things are going smoothly, and I’m confident that the game will be out this fall, maybe even October. Mostly depends on the artists’ speed (but I don’t want to rush their work).

Screw socials!

Back to the topic of this post: as you know, recently I reduced my time in socials, and focused more on my “true fans”. It’s too early to draw conclusions on the financial side, but for sure on the personal side, it was one of the best choices I’ve made in last years.

Socials are becoming really terrible. Full of AI bots, providing zero exposure, and just being an annoyance more than a plus. Of course I know well that you can’t do entirely without them, and I still keep posting. But no way I’m spending a lot of time on those. I know, I’m going against all common advice, but keep in mind I’ve been around since 20 years, I have already a following, I do niche games, etc. So what works for me might be entirely wrong for someone else and vice versa.

The wishlists madness

I also think that Steam itself is turning into a kind of “social platform” in a negative way. Marketing gurus say you need 7k wishlists to make it big with new games. But now that the information is public, then what? Now there are millions of developers all hustling to get those wishlists, maybe not even focusing on actually making the game better. It’s turned into a mad rush, everyone pushing against each other in a super crowded space, with the age-old question: how do you stand out when there’s so much competition? With 30+ games launching every day, and seemingly everyone with a computer thinking, “Hey, why not make an indie game?” – it’s just not enjoyable for me anymore.

You might be thinking, “Now that things are tougher, you get out.” And you’re partly right. It’s clear that when a platform is overflowing with competition, it’s tough, and all your efforts seem to have less impact. So, I believe it’s smarter to focus on promoting my own website, Patreon, Discord, building my own community. When you pay for ads to direct people to your Steam page, there are countless “exit points” – links, buttons, thumbnails – where potential customers can click and end up buying another game (usually from the same handful of AAA titles or indie darlings that dominate promotion 99% of the time). But with my own site, even if they click on another game page, they’re still buying my games.

The real reason why I went indie

However, the financial side is just one reason why I chose the indie path. Honestly, if it were just about money, I’d probably quit right now. But I’m older, and while I know how to code, I’m not a pro, and I don’t possess any extraordinary skills. I’ve seen plenty of other indie devs call it quits and move on to lucrative jobs in banks or other big corporations, making ten times the money they did before. Good for them! Just not my thing.

The other (and more important) reason why I chose the indie path is the direct connection with fans and customers. I genuinely enjoy interacting with them (whenever I have the time, of course!), hearing what they like or dislike about my games, and considering their suggestions and critiques. Even have them directly involved in development through crowdfunding rewards like drawing characters outfits or naming places in my fantasy world. These are things that will forever remain in my games, and I think they really appreciate that level of engagement. This aspect is priceless to me and helps maintain the human element in game development.

Otherwise, I might as well be a robot, endlessly churning out 500 social media posts a day in hopes of hitting the 7,000 wishlists mark for the Steam lottery. No thanks! As long as I can keep doing things the way I am now, I’ll stick with it. If there comes a time when even that’s not feasible anymore, I’ll just move on and do something else, maybe even something completely unrelated to computers!

Thank you for listening to my rant, and I hope you’re getting my games in the current Summer sales:

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/pub/winterwolves

itchio: https://winter-wolves.itch.io/

It’s that time of year again, where I pause to take a look at the situation, as we’ve reached the exact midpoint of the year.

Of course, the game I’m working on is TFTU: Lilith, and I plan to show some progress in the coming months. In case you missed it, I’m reducing my time spent in socials, just an update a week, and instead focusing on my Discord and my Patreon. Patreon in particular will be updated almost daily, with more free base content unlocked a few days after the members.

At the time of writing this post I haven’t received the funds yet, but if all goes well I’ll start commissioning artists to produce more work, since many stretch goals were reached. I can say without doubt that this will be the game of the series with the most content!

Because of all the content, the game might take longer than planned, just for the time needed to produce art. In this case, while I wait for it and have finished writing the whole story, I might start to work on the next big project, Thieves of Dingirra.

Thieves of Dingirra gameplay

I’m still doing tests with the gameplay part, since story-wise I have everything more or less planned, almost all the characters and scenes laid out (of course when I get to actually write it, I might get inspiration to write more scenes or do things slightly differently).

Haha, to paraphrase the famous saying “to gameplay or not to gameplay”? I must confess that it’s always been a dilemma for me to decide whether incorporating gameplay into my narrative-driven games was a good or a bad idea. For games where I could easily put a “visual novel mode”, like my RPG or card games, that wasn’t an issue, since players could always play the game like that. But for other kind of games, like Roommates (scheduler) or the recent House of Chavez (you could skip minigames but not the adventure part) this wasn’t possible.

In Thieves of Dingirra it would be a bit hard to offer a visual novel mode since the story would progress as you conquered the city step by step. I guess I could simulate that somehow. Or maybe, if there’ll be fights, I could add an auto-skip option.

As you see there’s still a lot of things to think about, and it’s what I’ll do in the coming months, while I wait for art for Lilith and/or take a break between writing a scene and another.

After this, what?

I believe Thieves of Dingirra crowdfunding might start this fall, and will surely take me several months to do that game (even if I decide to make it visual novel only, there’s a big cast). After that, the next big project will be the second Loren spin-off, Reign of War. Even if that game should take me less time than An Elven Marriage, due to the fact that I’ll reuse the battle system (without doing any changes this time! just different skills and items) and that I have already a draft done (this story is what Loren 2 originally was supposed to be), I am surely not going to do that game immediately after Thieves of Dingirra though, since I’ll need a break.

So, I have in mind a few small projects that I will do as I take a break after Thieves of Dingirra and the next big RPG. Also because so far all those “smaller projects” gave me very good ROI, even better than the big games, which is kind of hilarious – it’s starting to be better to make smaller games than bigger ones… what a weird market!

That’s all for now, see you next month with an update on Lilith development!

I’m happy to announce that the Kickstarter for the third and last game in the Tales From The Under-Realm series, Lilith, has launched!

For more info about the game, you can check the official campaign page here. And here’s the official trailer:

As I already mentioned before, this game will be very dark, probably more than the two previous titles of the series. I’ll put trigger warnings of course, but be warned!

For those into adult stuff, it will also have very hot stuff, things never seen before in any of my games (and if you think I’m exaggerating, just wait until you play certain scenes! haha).

Also, the game will be way bigger than the two previous titles, with a longer story, more character interactions, and of course different endings.

Speaking of the two love interests:

Evelyn needs no introductions if you played After Midnight, but for those who didn’t (what are you waiting for?! hehe) she’ll be the classic “can I fix her” romance plot. She’s not a monster, but because of what happened to her life, she seems unable to feel emphaty for others. Also, she starts the story as straight character, since this is a setup that a lot of players asked for in the past, so I think it will be interesting to interact with her also because of this.

With Odette instead, I wanted both a strong, determined character, who had a troubled past of sins and submission to the order (and a specific character, which I won’t spoil for now). She has a lot of regrets for what she did in the past, and her mind is still trying to get out of the manipulations she was victim in the past.

Differently from Evelyn, she’s openly lesbian although she thinks she can’t love (or be loved) anymore because of her past.

New social media strategy

After the Kickstarter ends, I’ll also change my social media strategy to… no social media haha. For real, I’ll probably post a sort of weekly update, but no more posting every day a different screenshot. I did that for my previous two games, House of Chavez and ToA: An Elven Marriage, and the results were bad (to use an euphemism!). I won’t go too much in details but basically posting every day, with a different screenshot, make videos, reddit posts, cross-posting on mastodon/bluesky, etc etc. I tried literally everything, and it produced MINIMUM results. Totally irrelevant!

My situation at home has changed so I have less free time, but even if it hadn’t, I don’t want to waste so much time to post in socials, only to feed the big tech with free content so they can make money with ads and I get nothing in exchange. In recent times I spoke with some indies who basically have minimum social presence and they’re all doing fine focusing on the games themselves and promoting their own site, Kickstarter, Patreon and so on.

Of course, I’ll reply to questions and I’ll be present in my Discord and forums, but apart that, I’ll focus on the games and not post stuff in socials! So, a weekly post update, some posts when there are sales, but that’s it, nothing else.

Time flies! Seems yesterday as I wrote this other post when I celebrated my 40th birthday: https://www.winterwolves.net/blog/2014/04/my-first-40-years-10-as-indie/

And here we’re again, 10 years later, but still going!

In retrospect, looking back at how the market was when I wrote that post, things were going rather well. My games finally were on Steam, Loren The Amazon Princess had a great reception. I had just released Roommates, my second most successful game after Loren. Mobile games were still very profitable, and I was still selling direct rather well!

For comparison, the gross revenues of that year (2014) of my direct sales (I was using BMT at the times) is higher than my past year Steam revenues!!! As I’m writing this, I can’t believe it myself, but it’s true.

So things changed a lot during those 10 years (for the worse, lol) business wise. I had my Google account banned by the “modern inquisition”. Of course, it’s not all negative! I had some more successes (like Cursed Lands, my second most popular RPG!) or the recent Tales From The Under-Realm series which albeit shorter games, have a very good ROI.

In summary I made several more games, some successful, others not. I started making some yuri games only (just recently though, first one was Volleyball Heaven in 2020!). I had my games ported on console. I did my first crowdfunding campaign. And so on.

As I’m writing this, I just got my next game, House of Chavez, approved by Steam, and I’m happy to announce that it will be out the 22nd of this month. You can wishlist the game here.

Mid-life crisis ?

Haha no, I’m not having a mid-life crisis! However, I must say that while going from 30 to 40 years wasn’t a big step, somehow I feel reaching 50 as something “different”. Even if I’m good health, I probably have lived more than half of my time on Earth. I am very grateful for my life so far. Being able to be my own boss, live with my wife far away from the polluted and chaotic cities in middle of nature has been a real blessing. I wouldn’t exchange this with all money and success in the world!

However, I’m also a competitive person (even if maybe it doesn’t look like from the outside). So I want to explore new opportunities in future. Which ones? I have no clue yet! For sure, trying new games genres or mix VN with new gameplay like the House of Chavez (point and click adventure). Perhaps also trying to do something different from games, like comics (of course with a crowdfunding campaign). Or still make story-based games but with more animation and interaction (I’m preparing an animated intro for Tales From The Under-Realm: Lilith game and it’s turning out well!). Or maybe, still do narrative games but with a different focus. I admit I really liked doing the scary part of House of Chavez, and I think I’d like to do a “real horror game”, Bloodborne-inspired. I have already a lot of ideas in mind.

But if I don’t manage to do all those things, it will be fine. I like the kind of games I do, enough people like them to let me survive, and sometimes you just need to be happy with what you have, without eternally chasing what you think will be more successful!

Conclusions

When you reach my age, you’ve seen things… ROFL OK, seriously. When you reach certain milestones, like being 50, you start to appreciate other things in life beside career and money. I have talked about my business, but right now I’m mainly thinking about how I want to live the rest of my life. I lost many pets, and several people, some were friends or other indies, and younger than me. So all those events really make you stop and think about life in general.

Indeed, I also want to start enjoying life a bit. Because of all the pets, I really didn’t take a break in 20 years, a proper holiday away from home. It was a personal choice, but I’m starting to feel the need to travel and explore the world, maybe to get inspiration for future projects.

If you’ve read until this, thanks for your patience. I hope your life is going well for you too. I hope you don’t have too many regrets (I really don’t have many!) and that the future will be full of positivity for you and your beloved ones.

As the saying goes, “The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.”

In this case, it was a sort of forced change. I won’t go in details (I posted on social media) but because of recent events, I’ll need to help my parents more than usual, and this of course will take away time. But it’s not just that, I feel also stressed because of it, and so embarking on a big journey like making a new gameplay (town sim) it’s really too much. Lastly, my dog Skipper passed away early past month, which didn’t help either to make me feel better.

I was hoping to announce the final release of House of Chavez, but it’s still in beta on itchio, albeit at very good point. You can already buy/play it if you want, the only thing left is a placeholder CG in Dolores’ path (there’s the WIP image below):

This of course also delayed/changed my plans for the next games. In short: Thieves of Dingirra Kickstarter, which was supposed to be my next game, will be postponed later this year. Meanwhile, I’ll do another Kickstarter for TFTU: Lilith, the third and last game in the series.

Tales From The Under-realm: Lilith is a simple visual novel, albeit much longer than previous two, but as you can imagine it’s much less stressful to make. I have also written a good amount of the draft, and done the base characters, choices, etc.

I think for me this is the best decision, this way I can keep doing experiments with ToD gameplay and when I do the KS later this year I’ll have a clearer idea of what I want to do.

Yes, because doing a game like that has two main elements:

• deciding the gameplay type, design, code and test it several times to make sure it works and it’s fun
• once that’s done, fill all the game content (which requires less mental efforts but more time)

For a game like ToA: An Elven Marriage, I had to do the second part, design the classes, skills, etc but the first part (the core game framework) was already 90% done – I added a few things here and there, but most of it was ready and well tested already.

With a completely new gameplay genre? A town sim, which I have never attempted before (and which I think no one has done before in Ren’Py, but I might be wrong)? And the plan is also to have a sort of simplified RPG combat as well… so as you can see this is definitely a BIG game, one I can’t tackle right now with my mind too busy and with so much stress.

TFTU: Lilith

I’ll probably make another post about the game later, but for those curious about this story, I can tell you a few things about it to pique your interest:

• it will take place a few years after the events of TFTU: Hazel. So, there’ll still be the witch hunt on
• Odette, the other love interest, is a fallen paladin, and she’s Hazel and romance adoptive daughter
• it will feature Evelyn as love interest, and so there’ll be references to that game as well. But you don’t need to have played the two previous games to enjoy the story
• it will assume two canon endings from both games. I won’t say which ones to not spoil things
• you’ll be finally able to see the evil wizards, also called “The Seven”. In particular, two of them will be some of the most bastard characters I wrote in my games!
• it will be very dark, with many deaths and horrible things happening. But of course, with romance and potential happy endings as well
• the first scene of the game will probably leave you with open mouth
• Evelyn’s personality will be … a bit of a psychopath, but one you can learn to love (sorry ahah) and maybe “fix her”!
• there’ll be a cameo of Amber from Amber’s Magic Shop, and Rowinda’s niece, who’s called Rowinda herself (but she’s not crazy as her mother)
• a planned scene involves a masked dance and maid costumes!!! /nosebleed mode on

If all those things aren’t enough to pique your interest, I don’t know what else to add to the game! haha. Ah wait, maybe a potential threesome ending… that could be a good stretch goal for the Kickstarter!

See you later this month, hopefully with House of Chavez full release !