Before getting into this blog post topic, I want to thank everyone who supported my Kickstarter campaign for ToA: An Elven Marriage. If you haven’t and are just waiting for the game to come out on Steam, please wishlist it now!

I know this is a provoking title, but listen to my reasoning first! The term indie means independent. When first started doing this, was also called “Shareware games” back in 2003-04.

Back then, you’d make your own game for a few months, release it on some websites, and see if people liked it or not. You had full control over your creative vision.

But things have changed a lot in the last 20 years, from 2003 to 2023. I have many friends in this industry and I know some insider stories. Nowadays, most indie teams create prototypes or “vertical slices” of their games, showing different gameplay elements and stages, and then pitch them to publishers. If a publisher is interested, they fund the development, and there are different types of deals, from upfront payments to milestones and so on.

The details of the deals vary, but that’s not my main point. My main point is that without a publisher’s support, many of those indie teams wouldn’t make their games.

How is this different from being a hired developer? Sure, there is still some degree of independence, but not much. And it’s not just your idea anymore, but also the publisher’s money and influence. Sometimes, publishers even ask for changes in gameplay, characters, art-style, etc.

How is this “artistic”? It seems more like working for someone else to me, someone who can also stop funding you, cancel your project or interfere with your vision (I’ve heard many horror stories about that).

If you consider that, on average, 9 out of 10 indie games on Steam top10 ranking are published by a publisher, you realize how little “independence” is left. Not much, in my opinion.

I’m not saying this business model is bad, obviously it works. Many of those teams are making much more money than I do doing this. And in a way, I do something similar with my crowdfunding campaigns, where I present my idea for a new game to an audience and see if they think it’s worth making. But it’s mostly my fans who support me, and I still have a lot of freedom in making it (how else could I come up with a game like “At Your Feet”??? LOL).

In conclusion, I’m just wondering if you can still call yourself indie in this scenario, and if this was a real progress or a regression. In 2003-04 we got rid of the middle-men. Now, 20 years later, they are back. For now I’m still indie, and I hope to stay that way until I retire.

Sometimes when I’m about halfway through a year, like now, I make a sort of “point of the situation”. This is one of those times! I know it’s not the first Friday of the month, but I wanted to write this post now because there are only 48 hours left until the An Elven Marriage Kickstarter campaign ends! Unfortunately, I couldn’t make a fancy cinematic trailer, so I made a simple one where I explain some of the cool features of the game.

The most interesting surprise so far is the “fashion designer” reward (by which you can design your custom outfit for Elenor or Saren). At first, Elenor was leading with 4 against 2, but guess what? Saren is catching up and now it’s a close race with 6 against 5! We have 8 spots available for this reward (both for Elenor and Saren), so don’t miss out!

If you haven’t already you can take a look at the Kickstarter page now!

And now back to this blog topic, but first, a short reminder that all my games are on sale both on itchio: https://winter-wolves.itch.io/ and on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/pub/winterwolves , so if you want to complete the collection or you’re thinking about trying one, now it’s a good moment to do it!

This year’s goals

My goals this year were to finish The Beastmaster Princess (and I did, this Spring), then ToA: An Elven Marriage (Kickstarter is about to end and I’ll be working hard on this one from now on) and I also said that maybe if I had some free time, I’d also try releasing a shorter game, Black Mirror-style (and I did, that game was Save The World).

So you might think that I’m at good point. And well, I am! But in today’s competitive market, you must never rest for a moment. And in the little free time I have, I’m taking the opportunity to plan the next and last Tales From The Under-Realm, which I’ll likely call it “Lilith”, the name of the half-demoness protagonist.

The next Tales From The Under-Realm game

I don’t want to tease too much, also because right now I’m only brainstorming the story. I think it will be the most dark of all my games with… some really terrible stuff happening. But also with possible good endings. This time won’t be a murder mystery, but more like a journey together. Beside Lilith and Evelyn (one of the two love interests) there’ll also be another cute lady, a disciple of Irijo, sort of fallen paladin. There’ll be references to the first game, Hazel and of course to the second (Evelyn was one of the main characters of that game).

I am also planning it in a way that will be possible to have a very detailed threesome story (will probably be a stretch goal). So not something added later but one of the main plot arcs.

Anyway, it’s still very early stages but hope this answers the questions of some people who wondered if I was going to make another game in this series. The answer is yes, of course not this year, but it will happen.

ToA: An Elven Marriage plan

Back to my next big RPG in the works: I don’t have a fixed deadline in mind, but since the editor just sent me the first part of the story fully edited (about 20% of total script) I believe I could have a beta version already this Fall, and my goal would be to finish it this year.

I might delay the Steam release to early next year because you know, there’s the “cursed period” from November to December, in which 150 million games come out so I’d probably avoid that. But aside this, you should definitely be able to play the full game this year or max early next year!

Once this is out, I’ll need a bit of time to recharge but I plan to do the next one in a reasonable amount of time. My ideal goal would be to have the other three remaining spin-off games out every 2 years, which means: Reign of War 2025, Reign of Peace 2027 and Witches Of Unforgiving Swamp 2029… really far away I know, maybe if some of those games won’t be full RPG it could happen sooner, but I need to be careful to not get burned out!

That’s all for now, and thank you for your support!

My new sci-fi visual novel about aliens, “eating the rich”, and other social themes, Save the World, is now out both on itchio and Steam.

Itchio https://winter-wolves.itch.io/save-the-world

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2280370/Save_The_World/

Overall I’m happy how it was received all things considered. It has some very divisive themes (eat the rich, aliens, veganism, etc) and I was sure that it could have been a disaster. Well, it wasn’t, so yay!

If you’re looking for a story very different from anything I’ve done in the past, you should check it out.

Time to roleplay!

And now, back to ToA: An Elven Marriage! That will be the next Kickstarter, live shortly, just waiting to see if I can get a proper trailer video done in time. I’ve been working on it already, but that happens with all my games, that’s why I’m able to finish all the Kickstarted games way before the deadline.

Considering the general collapse of Steam sales, having some KS funds would help me greatly, and let me expand the game with more scenes, quests, items, etc. Make the RPG and story parts bigger.

I also have in mind some interesting stretch goals and reward tiers, including the possibility to design your custom outfit for either Elenor or Saren! So stay tuned!

The Kickstarter will be live in the next few days, meanwhile you can bookmark it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterwolves/tales-of-aravorn-an-elven-marriage

I’ll probably do another extra blog post later this month with some more info about this game even if I’ve already talked about it in several past blog posts.

Lately, I have noticed some signs of a potential crackdown on adult games in various online stores. The most recent example is itchio de-listing from search results adult games (or even developers) from their platform. As far as I understand, this means that you can still sell through itchio, but customers can only access your games from external sources (like your own website).

update: Speaking with some devs, seems like itchio delisted adult games from collections when their devs set to 0% the itchio’s cut, which is really understandable. Also, shame on those devs! Itchio desevers some money for their good service!

This is just the tip of the iceberg. In the last few months I’ve heard a lot of stories:

• the company porting my VN to consoles explicitly said that they don’t allow adult stuff anymore, but not just that. Even small nudity is not allowed, or (depending on the platform) even underwear or revealing outfits…!
• I know at least three devs (won’t name them but maybe you know them already since are mutual followers on Twitter) who had their games outright REJECTED by Steam. Not even launching! For different reasons, but all tied to the adult content present in them
• payment processors like Paypal or Stripe never liked adult stuff even before, but seems like they’re becoming even more strict. As you can imagine this has a big impact on selling online

You probably get the idea. Those who have been following me for a long time, since my first VN Heileen in 2008, know very well that adult stuff is not my main focus. I added it to my games in the last few years because many fans requested it, and because realistically games with adult content sell better.

The picture above is from Loren – my first game to have actual nudity. This is the “censored” version of Chambara’s romance scene. Even fully dressed I don’t think the scene loses appeal..

But I always made it optional in my games. I always offered a “clean” or better “mild / non explicit” version of my games, because I know that not everyone enjoys that kind of content.

To be fair, with the exception of a few games (At Your Feet, TFTU series, The Beastmaster Princess) my games never had very explicit stuff going on. But you know how it is, it’s easy to generalize and then someone just having sexy outfits and some tasteful erotica scenes is compared to people doing extreme porn stuff, even if it’s like comparing apple with oranges…

Personally, if I’ll be forced to stop doing adult games, it won’t affect me much because even in my most silly games like At Your Feet, I always put a lot of emphasis on story, character growth, intriguing themes. The sexual element was just an extra thing, not the main point of the story, or at least it could be completely cut out and the games wouldn’t lose all their charm.

I think for now I’m going to leave the already released games as they are and wait to see how things unfold. But for future games I believe I’ll have to say goodbye to erotic stuff. There will be sexy outfits and romance, flirting and sexual jokes (I hope our supreme rulers will still allow us to do that!!!) but I’ll steer clear of anything too risky.

Because in case you don’t remember, just 4-5 years ago Google decided to ban my entire developer account on Android, making me lose a small but decent income stream, because of this very reason. Of course I’m sorry for people who like that kind of content, but if the same thing happened again with itchio or Steam, it would be the end for me.

I am not sure how developers doing full porn stuff can keep doing it, seems so risky right now!

First of all I want to thank everyone who supported the “Save the World” Kickstarter. After Bionic Heart and Planet Stronghold 2 I wasn’t sure I’d ever do a sci-fi story again but thanks to people’s support I was able to.

Today I want to talk about something that often comes up either as form of players’ comments or just as general discussions. The game (story) length and amount of love interests in visual novels.

Of course, if you ask players, they’ll want every visual novel to be 300,000 words long and have 10 love interests, minimum. Or maybe not – indeed recently many of my followers expressed interests in some shorter stories, claiming they never had the time to finish my longer games (like Planet Stronghold 2 for example, 330,000 words long).

I personally believe that word count can’t be the only parameter to judge whether a visual novel is worth it or not. Writing and story quality matters a lot more than length. A super boring but very long story isn’t better than a shorter but better-written and more interesting one. But that’s not all: it also depends on whether the story has a lot of branching or not.

I’ve never made “kinetic novels” or visual novels with very little choices because I think it would be weird, but in practice the more choices, branching and different ending you have, the less likely a single playthrough will consist of the full story length.

For obvious reasons, while many players just play the game once, some players might want to replay the game until they have seen all endings or even all possible paths. That’s why in my recent titles, I’ve started showing the ‘total amount of script seen’ statistic in percentage in the options screen so that players can get an idea of how much potential story they’re still missing.

(note that it counts every single word, so like even a variant depending on your personality or other small things. So if you see 96% of script done, you’ll surely have seen all the main story scenes!)

Pricing games and content

My recent Kickstarter for the game “Save the World” had a base pledge price of 8 eur (it’s always hard to me to find the right conversion since USD and EUR currencies change very often). Even when it will be out on regular stores (itchio and Steam) its price will likely be 7.99 usd.

It’s cheap and yes it’s going to be a short game, because I think will be enough to develop my game idea – if I start adding scenes just to reach a higher wordcount it’s similar to what tv series do with “filler episodes” and I honestly I hate that. Also, I have a sort of rule in my pricing, tied to wordcount and romances amount.

My “regular” games (Nicole, Heirs & Graces, etc) had a story between 120-140,000 words and four love interests. That was a formula I used for a long time and I still keep it as sort of reference, even if clearly it’s not a fixed rule. Those games costs around $19.99 fullprice.

Of course it’s impossible to always standardize prices based on contents. Sometimes there can be “better” or “worse” deals but it also depends on the game story. And that’s is really hard for me to judge, because I can’t even be sure myself if a story will be popular or not.

I mean, all the recent games I wrote myself (Planet Stronghold 2, Hazel, After Midnight) all have very positive review ratings on Steam, but I’m not so cocky to think that every story I’ll write will be so well received. Still I have to price the games somehow, and so if games with 120k words + 4 romances were priced $19.99, I think a game about half the length and half love interests should cost around $9.99. In the case of Save the World which will have those numbers, the price will be even less.

Last but not least artwork is also a big factor in VNs. I know some of my fans buy VN from other devs, even with mediocre writing, just because are fan of a certain artist or art-style. And that’s fine – sometimes I watch tv series just because I know that actor/actress is in it, and even if the story isn’t particularly good, I love their acting so much that I still watch them. So that’s another thing to consider.

Conclusions

I just wanted to share this to explain how difficult is sometimes to find the “right price” for a game. For example I’ve seen some porn games with zero plot but a lot of CG scenes selling for $15, and getting many positive reviews. So it’s hard to know what people really want!

Also, considering how quickly games get discounted (even 20-30% after 1 year or so) all this talk about price doesn’t even make much sense, since you can always wait to buy a game when it’s discounted, if you’re not sure it’s worth its full price.

I plan to continue trying to make my best in doing the stories I want to tell and hope people will be happy with it.