New Year, New Games!

Happy New Year!

Also, for those of you that missed the Christmas Izzie: here's a belated present:

I've been pretty quiet these last 3 months so let me take the time to finally give ya'll a peek at what I've been cooking up.

I've been thinking a lot about my progress as a game developer, where I *want* to be and how to best get there. It's pretty clear I need a change in tactics. I took some time to look at what other game devs are doing, trying to figure out what some of the more successful devs have in common. I identified two key things I want to work on:

1. I've utterly failed to reliably and regularly deliver content updates. As I've mentioned before, it just takes me too long to finish a Little Black Bestiary Episode. The projects that do best on Patreon are able to provide new playable content every single month, so if I want to do well here I need to pivot to a game design strategy that will allow me to do that.

2. Very few devs are successful on visual novels alone. I need something a bit... flashier for lack of a better word, to really capture people's attention. I mean, I'd already been gunning to have more actual gameplay aspects in the Little Black Bestiary but I really need to pull out the stops to compete with things like Subverse for attention. 

So, I've designed two entirely new game projects, one to address each of those points.

Destination:Delirium is an fantasy sci-fi adventure game where you're invited to a luxury resort on a leisure planet. It is inspired by games like Corruption of Champions and Trials in Tainted Space by Fenoxo; Monster Girl Dreams by Threshold; Lust Doll by Individi; Tales of Androgyny  by Majalis, and dozens more, those are just some noteworthy current examples in the 18+ games space. *unlike* all the example games listed, the emphasis will not be on combat and the intent is to make a bit more of a chill "Animal Crossing" style experience. 

(Background for the hotel lobby)

The idea here was to design a game I could update every week. (For the record, monthly at first; but *potentially* weekly updates could be a thing) by building a game that's more of a sandbox style world you can explore it's a bit easier to just expand it one small update at a time by adding new character interactions, events and locations one at a time. I won't ramble too much about this one since it should hopefully all make more sense when I have the first playable demo as an example; aiming for late February but there's a lot of groundwork to be laid for those planned regular updates to keep coming smoothly after the first release. 

(Concept for staff uniforms)

This is a new setting/IP but it's intended to be a long-term ongoing project and doesn't replace the plans for LBB. That said it should have a similar style, tone and content, just in a  little bit of a different format. 

For the second game, I wanted to take a crack at something a bit more... well... videogamey.

Check out the attached video clip.

Drain in Hell is a 2.5d... action RPG I guess? Definitely need to pin down how I describe the genre once I actually start marketing it, but it's about a demon queen whom rules over her own little city state in hell, until one day a Succubus seduces her and literally succs out all her power (yup, good ol Level Drain trope) and steals her throne. Now she has to beat her usurper at her own game and drain power/mana/whatever-its-called from other demons and work her way back up the 'food chain' until she's strong enough to reclaim her power and her throne. 

This is planned to be a fully animated game with a "battlefuck" struggle system (Make the enemy cum first to drain their power/level up) 

When the protagonist gets drained at the start of the game she also get's shrunk down into a MIdna-like Imp form and one of the more ambitious parts of the game plan is for her to also literally grow as she grows in power. 

But that significantly increases the animation workload so we might have to tone that down a bit. The original concept art just had three size tiers: 

The animator I'm working with tends to get a little carried away though.

And on top of that, still working on The Little Black Bestary stuff. In addition to starting these two new game projects (Neither of which will be finished this year) I'm aiming to finish and release Amaryllis and Noire's LBB episodes. I'm planning to participate in the upcoming Steam Next Fest next month with a demo for A Midsummer Night's Barcrawl. I'm working on a new demo scene, but it needs a bunch of new art so I might not be able to finish that demo by Feb 10th; in which case I'll just send Valve the old car scene demo and the new demo will be a patron preview build.


To keep all this going; I'm going to need money. A lot more money. As in I need to push the Patreon above $1000 a month, preferably $2000+. Basically, 2022 is on do-or-die mode. So the hope is that Destination:Delirium will allow me to offer some more enticing rewards and start growing this Patreon again. While the animations we start release for Drain in Hell will start attracting some more attention. Since the patreon funds are going towards LBB and DD stuff, I'm considering launching a kickstarter for Drain in Hell to try to establish a budget for that project specifically and see how ambitious we can get with it.

So there is your much belated dev update for January.

I'm going to spend the rest of the month working my butt off to hopefully get you all a couple new demos to play next month! See you then!