Hi, everyone!
This weekend we'll be doing August's AMA, or "Ask the Minotaur Anything". Here's how it works: you have until Saturday to send your questions, addressed either to us as the developers or to the game's characters, and we'll answer them in-character. If you ever wanted to know more about the cast but the game never addressed your curiosity, this is your chance!
We have a channel set up on our Discord server where you can send your questions. We'd prefer if they were all sent there because we'll be using a Discord bot to manage things and make it cuter. But if you have any issues with joining the server you can comment to this post with your questions and we'll get to them.
We'll start answering the questions during the weekend, and if it's not too busy we'll still be accepting new questions and follow-up queries then.
I want to make this fun for everyone, but please do keep in mind that we are people and we have our limits, so be reasonable. We'll skip spoiler-sih, invasive and offensive questions — though I'm optimistic it won't get to this, since everyone's been so nice and polite so far.
Have fun!
2025-08-21 12:38:17 +0000 UTC
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The day after their arrival at the Minotaur Hotel, Oscar and Pedro enjoy a moment of peace and intimacy.
Build 0.5 of Minotaur Hotel took more than a year to develop. At the time it was our biggest release, containing extensive developments to Asterion's story and the cast of Hinterlands characters.
To celebrate the occasion, I commissioned Nemo0690 to write a short erotic story, and a little later I commissioned Bik to draw a Pedro and Oscar picture. Then it dawned on me that it wouldn't be too much trouble packaging it together, and that it could fill a niche I had become aware of during Build 0.5's development.
"Io and His Panoptes" was an experiment in a number of ways. For starters, it is shorter visual novels that strays from the lengthy narrative style we usually employed in this medium. By placing it as a standalone release, it allowed us to tell this story without having to worry about how it would fit the game's pacing and the delicate character arc we built for Oscar and Pedro. No less important, Io and His Panoptes enabled us to explore a moment we would have been unable to in the game.
I like approaching eroticism as essential parts of a narrative, wherein characters reveal and develop aspects of themselves. More often than not, this does imply a greater number of sex scenes in a work than it would be strictly necessary, but in the case of Pedro and Oscar it became the opposite. Their arcs, insofar as Build 0.5 was concerned, had been so fully explored that there was nothing to be gained with an explicit moment between the two of them. In fact, I thought it could only detract — either by cheapening a previous moment, breaking the pacing or by damaging the magic of the tantalizingly opaque period of time between their escape from the Hinterlands and their arrival at the Minotaur Hotel.
After experimenting a bit with NVL Mode for this project — and recording a very low quality version of Lina Palera's Seikilos Epitaph, which I tried to splice for each moment of the story — I felt the format was adequate as a means to tell a story, but ultimately insufficient in other regards.
The point Io and His Panoptes could prove was that it would be possible to push out a sufficiently satisfying character exploration on a short word count, but if we were to make more of those it would demand a budget and, with it, a price tag. At that point I stumbled on a larger matter of how much this game would be worth, and the logistics of gating a strong character moment behind a separate project. To put it simply: if this game contains a relevant piece of characterization, why is it not in the main game?
That creates an incentive to only deliver stories that are either irrelevant in the greater scope of things (pure fan service) or backstories (which would, arguably, have a better place in the main game anyway.)
It also would, I think, fragment Minotaur Hotel's storytelling. The game itself has an immense amount of variations and no single player is expected to see everything the game has to offer, but is still a single game. I did not like the idea of a future where Minotaur Hotel's narrative is split across half a dozen optional side projects.
Ultimately, I consider Io and His Panoptes a successful experiment. The lessons I learned through it were important for Sex Drive and for our ongoing development of Minotaur Hotel. That said, success as an experiment does not translate to success as a product.
In a funny twist of fate, circumstances have led us to this scenario where, I hope, Io and His Panoptes will appear as a worthwhile benefit to our patrons.
Script written by Nemo0690.
Art by Bik/oinker.
Composition by Lina Palera, through Creative Commons, but the poor lyre playing is mine. I would have replaced it with a better recording, with a measure of audio processing and volume reduction, had the project gone forward.
The prototype is presented as-is, with no modifications done for its release. This is the latest version ever made.
2025-08-19 15:28:55 +0000 UTC
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In life itself, in all that is complete and intact, the irrevocable evil was planted. This is the world that God created.
In Boeatia it's believed that children somehow born "incomplete" carry a great and heavy fate. This is the tale of two such boys; Myrmidon, destined to become a lord, and his bodyguard, Zanzibart. But best laid plans amount to little when the two fall in love and a natural disaster derails their so-called destinies.
King of Longing is a loving tribute to FromSoftware's post-Demon's Souls games and Kentaro Miura's Berserk, written in a fragmentary style reminiscent of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red. That is to say, it's a story about a terrible world where life comes to an end quickly and without ceremony. God is indifferent at best, malevolent at worst. And the gaps in the tale, what is not said, are just as important as what is stated.
At the same time, I could describe King of Longing in a number of other ways. It is a bit of a shitpost of FromSoft games, for instance. But perhaps the most honest is to say it is a COVID story strongly inspired by my experiences during the pandemic, when I worked in the clinical trials for vaccines.
It was a time and place where a day was measured not in time, but in the expected number of fatalities that would come from delays to the research — and, consequently, to the logistics of manufacture, shipping and vaccination. Every day began with the intrusive but realistic thought that this could be the day in which you slip up and get sick, and it would end with me sitting down late at night to write Minotaur Hotel — a fundamentally hopeful narrative about humankind. King of Longing, meanwhile, was my way to cope with the reality I saw everyday.
It was not all bad. There is a long and very global host of unsung heroes, normal people who went above and beyond in their own ways to make it happen. It was a time in world history when small business owners put themselves at immense financial risk to supply research facilities, truck drivers broke their own limits to deliver fragile substances just in time, printing shops worked 24/7 to handle gargantuan amounts of medical documents, and fresh-out-of-college men and women did small miracles to restore the human world to a semblance of its previous state. And we did it all, we woke up everyday, aware of our frail mortality.
For once, world history was not determined by powerful politicians, terrifying weapons of mass destruction or ambitions monuments to vanity. Just this one time, the scientific advancement that defined our time was a medical technology that truly saved lived.
As difficult as the path to it may have been, and as rife as it was with every kind of injustice, politicking and hoarding of resources by the wealthy, we came out of it. Whether we realize or remember it, we still live in a world defined by a series of vaccines.
King of Longing takes from my life experiences in this subject, and from much more. For instance, it is also built on my profound discomfort with the hypocrisy in how workers and neurodivergent people are instrumentalized, exploited and discarded in our current economic system. Despite its unassuming length, it is a dense work. That said, ultimately I decided against publishing it because I could not bring together some of its disparate elements.
There were economic concerns — the costs associated with such a project and whether or not people would be satisfied paying for such a short story — but mainly it came down to reader reactions. King of Longing is as much a story told in its silences as it told in its words. The more I add to it, the more I remove from its core. And reader reaction was very consistently pointing towards a need for an expanded narrative — and those suggestions were not without very good justifications.
Another issue is that I wanted readers to be actively critical of the two protagonists — the story, in my view, hinged on that. But, well, people liked them too much.
In the end, it seemed as though King of Longing was, as a story, stuck between a rock and a hard place. I could either address the criticism I received and improve the story, but destroy its identity, or persist with the sparse details and ultimately deliver an experience that did not quite meet my own standards of quality.
It also was that a very some readers did not grasp what I was trying to convey — which I realize is an inescapable consequence of a story that expects the reader to "fill in the blanks" to this extent. That was, however, much less frequent than the previous case I described; my beta readers were fantastic, and it was not their fault that my writing had reached a cursed position.
Ultimately I decided to put it on my backburner and get back to it someday. I still think about that; I'd like to write two or three short sequels to it, which would perhaps be enough to package it as a satisfying product. Maybe one day I'll get to it.
As a final point: the most recent version of the prototype is outdated in comparison to the writing. I am providing a PDF with the most recent version of the script, with the coding elements for the most part removed. The prototype will provide you with the clearest idea of how the game would have functioned on-screen, but the script has the most accurate version of what the story would be like.
Writing by MinoAnon
Art by Aleph
Character designs by Danero
Music by h*ck
2025-08-19 15:22:02 +0000 UTC
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