I’m pleased to announce that my new VN/RPG “ToA: An Elven Marriage” is now officially out on my own site/itchio, and will be also out on Steam the 16th of current month. If you haven’t, you can wishlist it here.

I’m happy because the game didn’t end up in adult-only category, which means anyone will be able to buy and play it. There’ll be a separate free uncensor DLC for those who want to see the more spicy stuff.

What is ToA: An Elven Marriage?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, this is the first of four spin-offs based on my first fantasy RPG “Loren The Amazon Princess”. It features Saren/Elenor and some new and old characters.

The other three spin-offs will come out gradually, maybe one every two years or so. It depends on how my other projects go, so I can’t give you an exact date. This game has about 200,000 words of text, which is similar to the original Loren without the DLC. I think it’s a good deal for the price, because of that.

I wanted to give a satisfying ending to the existing romances with Myrth and Rei, and I also introduced two new love interests, Lydia and Nathir, who are very different and appealing (Lydia is one of the most powerful female characters I ever created in my games) and I also tried to make the main story engaging and thought-provoking, with many moral and ethical dilemmas that affect Aravorn.

For the gameplay, I brought back the front/back row system in battles, making them more strategic (but maybe less flashy since there is no first person view anymore) and I also used some ideas from Planet Stronghold 2 like the crafting/upgrading system. Moreover, many legendary items have unique skills/spells (this was an idea I already used in Cursed Lands, but here I expanded it a lot) that allow you to create many different builds.

In summary, I am very happy of the final result, and I hope if you give it a chance that you’ll acknowledge all the efforts behind it and that you’ll enjoy it!

Wishlists are really so important?

And now time for some discussion about this recent obsession in getting the highest amount of wishlist for a game before its launch. Of course, I’m not saying that they’re not important! They obviously are.

But they’re not everything! I recently started digging some numbers of my past RPGs to see what happened regarding wishlists and sales, and this graph is interesting:

They’re the wishlists at launch, and units sold first week (usually the biggest week of sales) of my last 4 RPGs. Bear in mind that Seasons of The Wolf launched back in 2015, and Queen of Thieves in 2017 and Steam was a completely different world vs now, but in positive (it was way easier to make money) so those numbers have even a higher impact.

Very interesting is the comparison between Cursed Lands and Planet Stronghold 2: there’s “only” 2 years of difference between the two releases, and Cursed Lands sold almost 3 times Planet Stronghold 2, despite having a third of wishlist at launch!

Of course that’s not enough data to draw clear conclusions, but I really hope that high wishlists before launch aren’t the only way to have a moderate success on Steam nowadays!

What’s Next?

I have two projects in progress: one is a Kickstarter campaign for a psychological horror game set in modern times. It will be a VN with some adventure elements and mini-games (yes you heard it well, will talk about it in details next month).

The other is the final game of the Tales From The Under-Realm series, which will have a half-demoness protagonist and Evelyn from After Midnight as one of the two love interests (I will reveal the other one later). I have already written an initial draft of 100,000 words for this game, so it will be much bigger than the first two!

That’s all for now. Please go buy ToA: An Elven Marriage so I can keep making more fantasy VN/RPG!