Blood & Sherry Demo, Patreon, Hiatus Over

So here's the new way devlogs will work. In depth behind the scenes stuff will be going on the Patreon in the form of shorter, more frequent updates. Spoiler-ish things I wouldn't normally put in devlogs at all will go there as well. But I'll still be doing a big summary of my progress here in my site devlogs once a month.

This takes some of the pressure off I was feeling before about every other week coming here to write a big chunky update and feeling bad if I didn't have enough I could actually share with people while also providing a little something for those who want to help fund more games.

Patreon & Devlogs

Vampires and Butlers and Maids

Just to summarize the concept of the new game, Blood & Sherry is something of a survival / escape horror visual novel in which you are kidnapped by a vampire and need to look for opportunities to escape. It features usual choice based forks but also relationship meter mechanics in which some scenes play out differently depending on your standing with the two antagonists, each having their own route where they are the primary threat to you.

Your player character is customizable in that you can name them, choose your manner of address, pronouns, body type, and whether you will be dressed as a butler or a maid for your vampire horror adventure.

The demo is rather short but hopefully gives people an idea of what to expect from the full game. Like Don't Toy With Me, it will be free to play and I hope to get it done within the next month.

So what about In Your Nature?

Don't worry! The vampires didn't eat the flower gang! In Your Nature is on hold until I finish this game since it will soon be legitimately an entire year since I released a game, which is the real horror here. Here's a little sketch from National Asexual Awareness Day featuring all the ace-spec characters from In Your Nature with our dear ace vampire, Nicolae.

But yes, I fully intend to resume work on the In Your Nature demo with some new design philosophies in mind.

Primarily, the ease of having pre-purchased backgrounds for Blood & Sherry has alerted me to just how much easier life is when I don't have to spend two whole days working on a background I'm not even happy with. So we will be switching to something other than hand drawn backgrounds for the game. Depending on how my funding efforts go, I may start commissioning some help in this regard. And if not, filtered photos and photo bashing will have to do. After all, I'm very fond of a couple of indie VNs that use that same technique so I should stop being so perfectionist about needing everything to perfectly match.

A flawed finished game is worth ten perfect games never realized!

So once Blood & Sherry is complete, I'm going all in on In Your Nature's production. I'm so determined, in fact, that I'm gonna slap a deadline on this puppy.

I want to release In Your Nature in October of this year. That consists only of Oleander and Lily's routes, as adding a third route was perhaps too ambitious of me, but it would be nice to still add Pickles' route in the future. But cutting things down a bit will make the whole project a little more doable for me.

Even in my unfinished projects, I've learned a lot more about making visual novels so every step brings me closer to being able to properly put together In Your Nature. After all, I believe very much in the philosophy of "make the games you want to play" (or "write the stories you want to read" depending on which circles you're in) and I want to play In Your Nature!

Anyway, you might hear something from me if there are any further developments but for now look forward to once monthly updates from this devlog.

Until next time!
Karma

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Karmic Punishment