Releasing the full (longer) version of Asphodelium was my main project for half of the year alongside further development of Crimson Waves on the Emerald Sea: Amaranthine Moon, my first commercial otome game in years, and releasing several games I was doing marketing for such as A Tithe in Blood, Upwards, Rain!, and more. A long time goal was to run my own Kickstarter, which I did in the later half of the year. It was both easier and more stressful than I imagined. I also went back to Offkai Expo in the middle of the year for Studio Élan, where I got to meet even more streamers and vtubers I’ve watched (some who’ve even played my games!)

2025 was also the year I began trying more new things and setting up new routines. In late 2024 I began attending an in-person bookclub and have since become a regular as well as going to the library to work on writing frequently. It’s nice to get out and have a different workspace—especially since it’s free to sit at a library as opposed to a cafe. 2025 was my first full year of doing full time game dev & freelancing after being laid off mid-2024, so I had to be more budget-conscious this year.

In April, after months of declining health, my baby boy Leroy passed away in my arms. He was a chubby (due to health problems) Chihuahua who was almost 15 years old and had been with me through high school, college, multiple moves, losing my father, and so much more.

Speaking of getting out of the house, I also started volunteering locally at a handful of places. Just small things every so often—but good work takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight.

Something else that certainly didn’t happen overnight was my first Steam festival, Otome Games Celebration! I had wanted to run my own developer festival on Steam for a while beforehand, but I finally took the leap in 2025. Twice. Later that year I ran the Fall in Love VN Festival with Élan, which was basically the same festival again but for every type of romance. I was able to run not 1 but 2 Steam festivals for romance visual novels, 1 of which got on the front page of Steam.

Projects

Lilacs in the Breeze

2025 started off very dour, given our recent change in leadership at the end of 2024 here in the US. I have lots of trans and fellow queer friends and wanted to bring a little joy in the world—so, with my friend Stella, we created the Trans Joy Jam, a jam focused on making games about trans characters getting happy endings. Participants were encouraged to write about any subject matter relating to trans narratives, so long as there was at least 1 hopeful ending.

To go with the jam, I made Lilacs in the Breeze, a short otome game about a trans woman leaving her old life behind—only for her childhood friend to show up out of nowhere. It has a lot of tropes I’ve written before and will write again. I’m also bringing it to Steam in 2026! No major updates and will still be free, but wishlists are appreciated~

A Clown Girl Teaches You How To Make Visual Novels

April 1st is a special day in visual novels. Aside from Valentine’s Day, it’s probably the day that gets the most visual novel releases (don’t quote me on that). In this March, I had a really funny idea… What if I made a visual novel that looks like a joke but is actually kind of educational?

I’ve actually had this idea for years, but I was talked out of it on at least one occasion because it’d be “quickly out of date” and “not worth the effort” and whatever other excuses were thrown at me. I threw this game together in around 30 hours to get it out by end of day on April 1st and had fun with it! Some parts will surely become outdated a few years from now but I think it’ll hold up decently and be educational. And I got an excuse to put Rimia in a clown dress and make everyone see it!

Asphodelium

As a complete departure from the prior games listed here, Asphodelium is by far my darkest game (yet) that focuses on cults, trauma, and identity. A lighter version of this game was made for Winter Jam 2023 but after getting incredibly encouraging responses I knew I wanted to expand the game even more. I set out to release the “director’s cut” of the game this year for Steam and did just that! …I also had 2 other game releases I was marketing that week and flew out to Offkai Expo that weekend, but that’s all in the past…

The finished version of Asphodelium is now a little under 70k words with a handful of CGs and 2 main storylines with the single love interest to go down and I think it’s my best writing so far. Despite the dark tones of the story, it was fun for me to make, and I hope to make more like it in the future. (it’s also my best selling game so far)

I also bundled it with my friend Nia’s game Fearbonding at launch which has done well for both of us! This was my first time bundling with another dev on Steam so I was able to learn how to make it work.

a fae’s whim

O2A2 is a popular visual novel jam you’ve probably heard of if you’re in Devtalk or know of ongoing VN jams. It’s a unique theme—you can only use 1 of every asset and only 1k words. Creating something bite-sized is a great practice activity and I was eager to join this time around.

I ended up making a fae’s whim, a micro visual novel where you’ve freed a fae king from his imprisonment—but what now? I’m not sure why I like using speech bubbles so much in short-form visual novels; I used them previously in both Witch You Want and Starlit Regrets. I doubt I’ll ever make a commercial game with speech bubbles in them any time soon, but they are a fun departure from ADV and my beloved NVL.

Mari’s Magical Deliveries

My final release of the year was finally finishing a thorn in my side. Over 2 years ago I was jumping from project to project and as a “treat” for myself I decided to join Ludum Dare once more for old time’s sake and make a game with all of my oldest OCs in it. That became the demo for Mari’s Magical Deliveries, a lite dating sim around my 3rd oldest OC, Mari (I don’t remember the 1st and 2nd anymore…). I originally wanted it to be similar to the mechanics of the old Tradewinds series, a point-and-click management game series I loved as a kid. The end result was…not exactly that, but eh.

The project ended up being pushed to the back of the backburner, mainly because I never had a clear idea of the scope of the project (I want 3 love interests and lots of side stories you see during deliveries! no I’m not going to calculate how many days it should be or how many side characters or) and it was just too fluffy for me to enjoy working on for long (I have a tendency to get bored of writing no/low conflict stories fast). I decided to finish it this year, but kept flip-flopping on exactly how to do it. Should it just be a free game I shove out there? Should I polish it up some more and make it cheap? As you can see, I ended up going with the later. I do wonder how well it’d be received if it were free, but we’ll never know… Sometime next year I’d like to push a small content update. Maybe some chibi epilogue art, maybe new deliveries…we’ll see.

Oh, and one more thing. I primarily wanted it out this year so that I’d be free to work on Mari’s actual main game, a timeloop action otome game, at some point in the future. Probably not 2026 given all the scripts I have half-started, but eventually.

Articles

I was sad to see I didn’t actually write that many articles this year—it was a busy year for me in other departments! I did get some fun articles in, though.

Once my first Steam festival, Otome Games Celebration, concluded, I wrote a lengthy postmortem about how I ran it and how things went. I had several people supporting me for the festival so I didn’t go in completely blind, but it was one of the most challenging things I’ve done. And as soon as Otome Games Celebration was over, I went straight into planning Fall in Love VN Festival…

Like last year, I was able to interview some of my fellow visual novel enjoyers! One interview fell through, but I was able to interview the amazing team at Nth Circle, who are currently releasing of the Devil. It was a fun (and long) discussion about their great art direction, how they work as a team, and why Morgan is just so cool.

Since both Asphodelium and A Tithe in Blood released on the same week and had almost the exact same word count, I thought I’d compare the 2 games in terms of scope, development schedule, and release efforts. A lot of people don’t quite understand what releasing a visual novel looks like, or have antiquated ideas of it from the Japanese side, so I wanted to give a look at my experience with it.

Media

This is my blog so I’ll add however many sections I want!

This year I really dived into reading novels (without visuals!) and seeing even more plays in person than I typically do, so I wanted to list out what I’ve read & watched along with the ones I really enjoyed. I already talk about visual novels enough, so I want to show I have a life outside of anime talk about something different for a change.

Italics means it was good, bold italics means I absolutely loved it. Red means don’t bother with it. No stylization means it was just okay / I don’t have strong feelings about it either way.

Books

Includes novels, novellas, anthologies, and light novels, but not manga or visual novels.

• Crooked House by Agatha Christe
• Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie
• Snatched by Karin Slaughter
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
• Third Girl by Agatha Christie
• Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters
• Closed Casket by Sophie Hannah
• The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry
• The Mummy Case by Elizabeth Peters
• A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Resurrectionist by A. Rae Dunlap
• The Nightingale Affair by Tim Mason
• The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
• Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Sasaki and Miyano: 1st Years by Kotoko Hachijo
• Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett
• The Lost Manuscript by Cathy Bonidan
• Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li
• Murder at Rough Point by Alyssa Maxwell
• Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie
• Murder takes a Vacation by Laura Lippman
• My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
• Murder, She Wrote: Madison Avenue Shoot by Donald Bain
• The Shining Sea by Koji Suzuki
• Night of the Living Queers (Anthology)
• Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett
• Fullmetal Alchemist: The Land of Sand by Makoto Inoue
• Harlequin on the Moon: Commedia dell’arte and the visual arts by Lynne Lawner
• Fullmetal Alchemist: The Abducted Alchemist by Makoto Inoue
• The Labours of Hercules by Agatha Christie
• Christmas Cookie Murder by Leslie Meier
• Mistletoe Murder by Leslie Meier
• Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests by KJ Whittle
• Death on the River Walk by Carolyn Hart
• Fullmetal Alchemist: The Valley of White Petals by Makoto Inoue

My hottest take of the year: My Cousin Rachel >>> Rebecca

Plays

Includes only in-person performances I saw regardless of where they were performed (touring, on Broadway, etc).

• Hamilton
• Some Like it Hot
• Hadestown (x2)
• The Wiz
• Austen’s Pride
• The Neil Diamond Musical A Beautiful Noise
• The Notebook
• & Juliet
• She Loves Me

My mother has gotten really into watching live performances of bands / plays / whatever, so we went to a lot more this year.

Art

As expected, this year was another year full of asset art. I didn’t do much fanart art all this year, but I did a few pieces here and there. I did several new key art illustrations (February, July, August, September), some of which took me 10+ hours to do.

Goals

2025 Goals:

• Release the extended version for Asphodelium: Accomplished!
• Release Crimson Waves on the Emerald Sea: Amaranthine Moon: …Not accomplished. The game is currently pretty far along with all but a handful of art assets finished. I’ll be busy scripting the game come January and hopefully releasing it in Q1 2026, but a 2025 release just didn’t happen.
• Fill an entire sketchbook: …This also didn’t happen. I made good strides to fill the sketchbook with studies, but only got about halfway through it. Maybe next year…?
• Get back to kanji studies: Yeah, kinda. I did study more kanji, but I need to set up a routine come 2026 in order to make good progress in my studies.
• Document more doujin games: Definitely! I restyled my neocities a bit to accommodate more games—as long as they’re indie / doujin and not have a popular Steam page they can go on the site. I added quite a few Touhou, Type-Moon, and Rozen Maiden fangames to the list.

I also had a few “shadow” goals for 2025, things I wanted to do in 2025 but didn’t want to hard commit to, like:

• Running a Steam festival (done!)
• Finishing the 1st draft of Lost Lune (done!)
• Write 80k words for scripts total (final count was over 90k across all scripts)

2026 Goals:

• Release Crimson Waves on the Emerald Sea: Amaranthine Moon and Lost Lune: This should be pretty achievable, as both games are over halfway completed. I hope to release CWES:AM in Q1 2026 and Lost Lune around Q2 or Q3.
• Announce my next big otome game: My next main otome game has already been started, except this time unlike with CWES:AM I’ll be writing it! It’s currently around 20k out of an estimated 60k, and might feature a few clowns…
• Run another Steam festival: Ideally I’d like to run 2 Steam festivals again in 2026, but we’ll see how the year goes. Once it’s midnight tonight, I’m no longer beholden to my self-imposed restriction of not planning any festivals until the new year~ I hope Otome Games Celebration will be even bigger and better than the 1st year!
• Start making videos: One thing I’ve wanted to do for a while is to try making my own YouTube videos. I’m unsure if I’d want them to be about visual novel development, marketing, or the doujin games I play, or all three, but I want to try making a handful in 2026.
• Become net positive: As 2025 was my 1st full year of doing full-time game dev and freelancing, I spent a lot of it finishing up older (long) projects that I started when game dev was a hobby and used my savings to fill in for months where I wasn’t net positive. In 2026 I want to be able to get to a position where I’m able to make a living from visual novel development & freelancing.

I want 2026 to be a year for me where I’m able to release some great visual novels I’m proud of while also helping bring visual novels to a greater spotlight through my game jams and Steam festivals. Gaming is bigger than ever with more and more visual novels popping off, and I hope to help share even more VNs with people than before.

2026 seems daunting, but I hope it’ll be a good year overall for all of us. However, it won’t be if we don’t support the people around us and the people who need it. Please look out for the people in your life and reach out to those in need of assistance—even if we don’t all see eye-to-eye, we’re all on this planet together.

— Arimia

The post 2025 Year in Review first appeared on arimia.

Today, I’ll be sitting down with part of the team at Nth Circle about their process for developing of the Devil!

Arimia: Thank you all for taking the time to talk about of the Devil! Can you each introduce yourselves and what you do at Nth Circle?

kyoni: Hey, I’m Brian “kyoni” Mulholland. I write, direct and develop visual novels at Nth Circle Studios.

aarenders: Hi! I’m aarenders, one of the environment artists and the 3D prop artist at Nth Circle.

Bug: I’m Bug, Art Director and character designer/illustrator at Nth.

Arimia: How did you each get into visual novels?

kyoni: My first VN was, appropriately enough, Apollo Justice for the DS. Other “formative” stuff that defined the medium for me early on include 999 and Super Danganronpa 2. I’d list Uchikoshi and Kodaka as inspirations first, but I’ve probably had the most total “exposure” to Nasu’s work over the years across his many works and adaptations. That might be why I enjoy writing long-winded encyclopedic lore and starting sentences with “…But.”
…But even so, I don’t regret that.

I created my first visual novel in Ren’Py in 2020. It was a modified form of a short story I had recently written about a lawyer showing up very late at night to an interrogation room and helping a young man prove his innocence when the police accuse him of being a serial killer. It had a twist ending that would be pretty familiar to anyone who’s played of the Devil.

I’d never done any creative writing prior to the COVID19 lockdowns- I was actually a theater kid. But I feel like that background in acting has, over time, proven itself to inform how I write; Characters have their “marks” in a scene that they need to hit for the story to progress, but the space in between each of those points is full of possibility for the character to develop themselves. Eventually I pitched that Ren’Py demo around to some friends of mine, hoping it would serve as proof that I had an idea worth working on. Fortunately for me, they saw something in it. As we started exploring how we’d go about creating of the Devil, we began working in Unity and Naninovel, from where we found the Devtalk server where we’d go on to participate in the Battle Action Fantasy VN Jam and then Spooktober VN Jam 2023 and 2024.

My favorite VN is Umineko, which is a choice I imagine many people who both read and create visual novels would echo. Umineko is a story about storytelling, and it holds special appeal for anyone who’s sat on both ends of the board in the mystery genre. There’s no bells and whistles in Umineko‘s original release- it’s a very “pure” visual novel, and you can finish it with just one finger on your space bar. It’s just sprites, backgrounds, a handful of sound effects playing double roles (locking a door and holstering a gun sounds eerily similar on Rokkenjima), a couple of dissolve effects and a great soundtrack, so it’s “carried” entirely by the execution, the craft.

Of the small sliver of this vast medium that I’ve been fortunate enough to read, for me, line-for-line, Umineko “says” the most. In the spirit of Umineko, here’s a twist you can put in red:
I didn’t finish reading it until after of the Devil Episode 1 released.
Thank you to the beta reader who compared Episode 1 to Umineko and encouraged me to finish it.

aarenders: My introduction to visual novels was back when I was back when I was a freshman in college, and a good friend of mine lent me their copy of 999. The game hooked me immediately with its puzzles, characters, and mystery- I just couldn’t put down the game and before I knew it, I could see the sun peeking through my dorm window. When I met up with my friend the next day, I was so excited to tell them that I got the true ending, as well as talk about the other endings I encountered. I probably should have saved some of that excitement for class, but hindsight is 20/20! Afterwards, I became more interested in other visual novels, which included Danganronpa, Hatoful Boyfriend and its sequel, Holiday Star, and the Ace Attorney series. Each of these games appeal to me for different reasons- Danganronpa‘s campy and bombastic premise, Hatoful Boyfriend‘s intense and gripping writing, and Ace Attorney‘s addictive and rewarding gameplay. While it’s been many years since I played it, Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star will always hold a very special place in my heart as my favorite visual novel.

I got into developing visual novels because of Brian, actually! A few years back, he pitched a shonen manga-type series to me and a group of mutual friends. I’ve been obsessed with shonen series since I was a kid, so this felt like the natural first step for me to start learning about how to make visual novels. I volunteered to work on it, making some character concept designs and prop modeling, and in the end, we released Kodokuhime! I was really happy to work with friends and create something that we were all proud of, and had fun making. A little after that, I joined Nth Circle formally as an environment artist and 3D prop artist, working on of the Devil and Märchen Line. It’s been so wonderful to work alongside such talented friends, and their skill and craftsmanship always drive me to improve my own work. We all work very hard to bring out the best in each other!

Bug: My introduction to VNs was reading the first Danganronpa, back in the fan translation days. While I was instantly hooked, I was actually not a believer in the medium at first—my thinking was something like “wouldn’t this be better if it were just a comic, or a book, or a “real” video game”? I took a single course on video game design in college, and had played with Twine a bit, but it just bounced off me for whatever reason. It wasn’t until later on that my partner introduced me to a few games on itch.io—more Twine games, and lots of Ren’Py VNs. Playing We Know the Devil, somehow, something clicked: visual novels are their own thing!! I had some epiphany, and from there, I played many more. So, in a way, I guess you could say I got into visual novels to impress a girl. The Danganronpa series is still probably my favorite. I especially love Danganronpa v3.

As for developing my own games, I was one of the lucky friends to read that Ren’Py demo Brian mentioned. I knew he needed an artist, so eventually I said to myself “this sounds fun” and pitched a few character design documents to him out of the blue. From there, I’ve been on every Nth Circle project so far except Kodokuhime.

Arimia: Umineko is definitely my favorite visual novel, but there’s many mystery VNs out there I’ve been inspired by like Ace Attorney as well. They all bring something unique to the table, different ways of viewing the mystery presented to you and how to work through it.
Nth Circle has done several game jam visual novels before, like the aforementioned Kodokuhime. What is the process the team goes through to decide to enter a game jam?

kyoni: Kodokuhime came about from a couple of things lining up:

• We had recently developed new tools for working in Unity that allowed us to move cameras in and around backgrounds whereas they had previously been limited to one shot per environment. I wanted to experiment with the new kinds of blocking this would allow for on a project with generally more limited scale.
• of the Devil was going through some re-tooling after its itch alpha as we created new visuals and gameplay, meaning there wasn’t much writing to be done.
• I was really into Bleach at the time.

So Kodokuhime was, relatively, spur of the moment: while Bug and mcf were working on of the Devil, I propositioned some friends with experience in doujins/artist alleys about working on the visual novel equivalent of a manga “one-shot.” Going into the project with that specific and restricted scope kept it from sounding too intimidating for people who were, at the time, completely new to game jams and game development in general.

Model Employee was a little more “targeted.” We knew that Spooktober VN Jam was the biggest competitively judged visual novel game jam around, and we wanted to use it to “re-introduce” Nth Circle to the English VN scene as we had formally founded the studio by that point. To that end, we added in little Easter eggs that established Model Employee as taking place in the same time and setting as of the Devil, hoping that folks who played it might then take notice when of the Devil Episode 0 debuted a few months afterwards.

Game jams have been great experiences for us at every stage: if you’re just starting out, it’s a structured but low-pressure format to help you form connections and get some completed titles onto your resume.
If you’re more experienced, it’s an exercise: forcing yourself to flex creative muscles in new and awkward ways. By working with restraints on time, resources, and thematic elements, you can come back to your long-term projects with renewed energy and a widened skillset.

aarenders: I would highly recommend entering game jams! From my experience with both Kodokuhime and Märchen Line, game jams allowed me to learn about new modeling techniques, understand the game development pipeline, and create a fully formed visual novel without feeling overwhelmed by feature creep or scope. There are times where having no deadline and limitless ideas can end up stalling a project indefinitely, so I think having that external deadline that everyone is racing towards is a big plus. It forces you to look at what you’re making with a more critical eye, cut out what isn’t necessary, and build upon what works. Both of the game jams I’ve been a part of have had a timeline of around 1 month, so once concepting is over, it’s really pedal to the metal.

[Game jams force] you to look at what you’re making with a more critical eye, cut out what isn’t necessary, and build upon what works.

Arimia: Game jams really have that unique combo of setting a deadline for you while also forcing you to be specific with what you make—they can also be really fun!
Each of the Nth Circle jam games are very distinct but still feel like they have a similar core. How do you approach designing these short games with such different concepts?

kyoni: Thematic similarities can more or less be blamed on me. Regardless of genre or medium, there are certain ideas that I find interesting that are going to keep cropping up in my writing whether I’m conscious of it or not because that’s just what I like to yap about: dehumanization, commercialism, isolation, censorship…lots of ellipses. I’m not ashamed of any of that, but I’m glad I can rely on my collaborators to bring their own ideas to the table and add variety to the flavor of the characters we develop and the worlds we explore.

When designing games for jams, we feel it’s important that we design the game for the jam. That means matching the theme and any requirements, of course, but it also means trimming story and scope early on. Jamming a bigger idea into a smaller suitcase is just setting yourself up for disappointment: you can’t possibly fit in everything you want and your audience be more troubled that you forgot the toiletries than that you gave them four winter coats to choose from. Of course it can be difficult to know a game’s scope or length while it’s mid-production. An outline can look pretty trim when it’s just bullet points, but sometimes characters like to talk.

To help with that, we try to structure of our jam games after existing models. For Kodokuhime, we looked to “one-shot” manga chapters. They’re about 40 pages, establish a protagonist, a setting, a conflict, and hint at bigger things to come, but are capable of standing on their own. Later, that one-shot might become the first chapter of an ongoing series. If a ton of things work out right, it could get adapted into the first episode of an anime. So with all that in mind, we knew that Kodokuhime should come in at around twenty to thirty minutes, with a burst of action around the five minute mark and a high-intensity finale that leaves room for about two minutes of denouement.

Model Employee, by comparison, was modeled after a slasher horror movie. There should be about five to six characters, each memorable, who start getting picked off at around the thirty minute mark.
You start lighter in tone, have a fakeout death around the point things start feeling formulaic, and save the heavy gut-punches for the end.

Märchen Line took inspiration for its setting and premise from sci-fi movies like Aliens or Starship Troopers, but was always intended to lean more heavily on the dating-sim and stat-raising subgenres, so it’s pacing had to incorporate the “structured time” elements of those games. But of course, there’s dozens upon dozens of existing visual novels who use early slice-of-life antics to punch up the horror of late-game twists, so we weren’t adrift at sea when planning out Märchen Line‘s arc.

Overall when taking part in visual novel jams, our guiding principle for selecting ideas, writing scripts, and designing experiences has been this: try to tell the kinds of stories that benefit from being in, rather than are limited by, the medium of visual novels.

Arimia: Working as part of a studio & on game jams requires a lot of collaboration and working together. Were there any growing pains or things you had to learn to work well with others on games?

kyoni: For jams it’s important to remember that everyone is essentially a volunteer- eager to help, but with varied levels of experience and availability. Before the jam starts, it’s best to make sure everyone’s clear what the time commitment will look like, and ideally, you should have a conversation with them about how much direction they’ll want or need. And while it may sound boring or stressful, we’ve seen how important it is to have weekly check-ins with as many team members as possible to discuss progress and set goals for the next seven days (and it should probably be done vocally as opposed to through text). Finding a day of the week and time of day that all team members can commit to for each week of the jam is very a clerical process, but you’ll be glad you got it sorted out before the jam begins.

Bug: Totally. Our jam entries pull in a lot of additional work from our friends–and we’re friends first, and business/creative/etc collaborators second, so there’s a lot of balancing the “having fun and developing our ideas and skills together” aspect with “for real we need to finish this thing.” Or, rather, it’s balancing the fun and friendship with the brass tacks. I’m lucky that I enjoy being a little bossy, so when it comes time to make those more manage-y, directorial-y calls (“We’re cutting X amount of the requested sprites” or “This workflow isn’t optimal for our deadline” or “This outfit isn’t working for this character, we need to change it”), I’ve learned to put my foot down sooner than later. Having at least one person comfortable with that kind of role, and hopefully a little experience (or willingness to learn) the more “boring” project management techniques necessary to get a project done in a timely fashion is key for managing stress levels and coming out of the project with your relationships intact.

aarenders: Like any project, there will always be things that went well, and things that could have gone better, and that’s OK! Like Bug said, our team and the vast majority people who volunteer with us for jams have been friends for many years, so we know what our skillsets and work style is like just through those friendships. That said, having a structure is quite necessary for developing these games, like having designated meeting times to check in on progress, and having an art director so we’re not spinning our wheels in pre-production. It’s always important to remember that, even while working with friends, you have a responsibility and people are relying on you to complete what you promised to work on.

Arimia: Let’s talk about art for a bit. of the Devil is one of the most stylistic visual novels I’ve ever seen, but each Nth Circle game feels really polished in the art direction department. How does the team go about designing the games?

Bug: It’s a lot of bouncing back and forth. We’ll review the script and plot out the nitty-gritty (how many characters are there? How many props, backgrounds, bespoke models will we need?) Then, Brian might give me a prompt like “character A needs to look similar to character B, their background is X and Y, here’s fun trivia Z” or a mood board and a few key points/layouts to the environment/background team. We’ll come back to that with a very roughed-out draft–maybe one “first pass” at a character for a vibe check, for example. If that stage passes, I’ll come back with maybe five disparate options–we narrow it down, find a direction we like, and then just polish and polish and polish it until it’s exactly right.

Happy Birthday to the most impartial judge a courtroom could ask for! "On a literal, technical, factual level, I'm not a Libra, but what you have to take into consideration is c'moooooooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnn 😭🥺😭"

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— of the Devil (@nthcircle.bsky.social) September 2, 2025 at 7:11 PM

Because we’re a tiny team, there’s a lot of gaps in “formal” knowledge–but between us, we have a really wide variety of interests, backgrounds, and visual lexicon, which helps a lot in bridging the gaps in our skillsets (and, critically, we aren’t shy to ask for some external help from friends that do have that knowledge). We’ve got a massive backlog of inspiration to pull from–and critically, a lot of that inspiration is from things that aren’t games (film, literature, anime, comics, fashion, architecture…) Wide horizons mean you can pluck inspiration from an unlikely source, which can make for surprising and memorable design.

aarenders: Our main starting point is looking at peers/trailblazers in our genre- for Märchen Line, we looked at Starship Troopers, Warhammer, Star Trek, etc. as environment inspiration, but we didn’t stop there. We looked at luxury cruise ships, the Paris catacombs, Basilica de la Sagrada Familia, to help us nail down the direction we wanted for the environments. What’s really important is to not just look at media, but to observe the outside world and engage with it- for of the Devil, I have a folder in my phone of pictures I’ve taken while walking around cities and towns. Cool electrical wires, HVAC systems, pipes on the side of the building, even something as mundane as a crack in a sidewalk. All of these help me think about what I could add to an environment to make it feel a little more real, a little more lived-in. This mindset can also help with interior backgrounds- what would a character leave lying around their room? Would they leave anything out in the first place? Where would they put their keys after coming home? All those little details help to create a story within the environment itself, and also help with telling the overall story of the game.

For 3D props, I like to think of the character that owns it and their relationship to it. Is the character a sentimental type who received this item from someone? Do they use this item every day? If it’s a common object, would they take the time to customize it? Once I nail down that relationship, I draft up some black and white sketches of what the prop could look like, present it to the team, then pick a direction based on those sketches, and start modeling!

Arimia: Episodic releases are usually a tough sell, but it looks like it’s worked out well for of the Devil. What made the team go for that model?

kyoni: In recent years, early-access games have become more broadly accepted and widely adopted, showing that players are willing to “take a bet” on certain games so long as the developers communicate their plans clearly.

…But the early release model succeeds or fails based on whether you can quickly gain and maintain confidence from your audience, and at the time we were planning of the Devil, none of us had ever put out a game before. With an episodic structure, players are never paying us for what the game could be- they’re only ever paying for what they’re getting. Combined with Episode 0 being free, we seem to have struck a nice balance where anyone who isn’t up for five more episodes of a serial killer protagonist can dip out before they’ve spent any money, discouraging them from feeling “burned” and leaving negative reviews. The episodic structure also reduces risk for us at Nth Circle- rather than spending a few years working part-time on a game that could either succeed or fail on a coin-toss, we can spend a few months on each episode, gauging audience reactions and iterating on feedback in between releases.

Thank you all for helping of the Devil reach over 1200(!!!) Steam reviews! 99% of players say: "you need to hop on peak NOW😈"

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— of the Devil (@nthcircle.bsky.social) August 15, 2025 at 3:04 PM

Bug: Episodic releases are a tough sell–maybe the biggest objection we get from players is the “I’ll just play it once it’s all out!” and “what’s the point if you guys might just abandon the project before you finish all the episodes?” While there will always be naysayers, we can take those objections on the nose. I really don’t see any other way we could have made of the Devil, let alone make it right, for similar reasons Brian’s outlined.

I do think our genre, as a mystery game drawing a lot of pacing and existing cultural zeitgeist from crime/court procedural, has helped with the “sell” as well. While of the Devil has overarching drama, it’s also a much simpler task for readers to stew on stand-alone mysteries chunked out in this way than it might be for other stories.

Arimia: While working towards the release of episode 0 and later episode 1, what were some of the marketing beats the team planned?

kyoni: of the Devil was first released on itch.io in a format that has, overtime, shown itself to be more of a “proof of concept” than a beta version. That game had the same story content as the Episode 0 anyone can play for free today, but it had no fail-states, no dynamic cameras, a much narrower soundtrack, and no gameplay to speak of. We were overjoyed by the reactions players had to the story and characters and world, but we could see the numbers and they weren’t lining up. After a few (brief) conversations with some potential publishers, we decided that while of the Devil was the story we wanted to tell, we needed to tell it better. So as we sat down to overhaul the gameplay, presentation, UI and every other aspect, we had time to review what did and didn’t work with our prior marketing.

Setting aside that changes to Twitter’s ownership at the time changed how engagement and advertising worked on that platform, we accepted that without a large marketing budget or some spark of incredible luck, the game wouldn’t reach many people. We couldn’t acquire a large marketing budget overnight, and we couldn’t plan for “getting lucky,” so we had to change our approach.

In the lead up to Episode 0 and especially Episode 1, we stopped playing coy about Morgan being a serial killer. We try to state plainly and as often as we can that this is a game where you play as a “killer lawyer” using her unique intellect to solve mysteries and engage in battles of wits- because even if it’s a spoiler, that is the appeal. Some of our oldest fans (playfully) disagree with this decision and urge others to play the game “without looking up anything about it.” But if you wanted to convince someone to read Death Note, well, they’ve probably already heard about it- but would you really hesitate to tell them what Light is like as a character? What he gets up to as Kira?

In an ideal world, people really would drop everything to take a chance on our game knowing nothing about it- and every day, some people do. But of the Devil isn’t on Netflix or Tiktok; You can’t download it onto your phone or bookmark it and play it in your browser later. No matter how good the game is, we need people to open Steam, find our page, download the game, and actually start playing for them to see that- and the reality is that that’s asking a lot when the vast majority of people have never heard of us.
So we aren’t shy about our “hook,” and we’re increasingly un-shy about our game’s inspirations. If of the Devil‘s artstyle looked exactly like Komatsuzaki Rui’s work, we wouldn’t have to tell people that our game is like Danganronpa, but it doesn’t, so we do. If the screenshots of Morgan in the courtroom were framed exactly like Phoenix Wright, we wouldn’t have to tell people that our game plays similarly, but they aren’t, so we do.

It’s not very “fun” to have to come out and state these things plainly, but little about marketing is- and it’s a price we pay gladly, because we’re convinced that more people need to be experiencing this story.

Arimia: Recently of the Devil was ranked in the top 50 games based on Steam user reviews on Steam for 2025. Has the reception been surprising?

"New card. Whaddya think?" Thank you to all our players for rating "of the Devil" in the top 50 of all games to come out on Steam in 2025! You got in on the ground floor.

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— of the Devil (@nthcircle.bsky.social) November 1, 2025 at 7:19 PM

kyoni: The reception has been incredibly flattering. We do ask for folks to leave reviews, of course, but the percentage of our players who choose to do so is really incredible- and that high level of enthusiasm and engagement has helped us place highly in player-review-based rankings. None of our games have “gone viral,” but that’s something that happens to a game, not something you can make happen. We haven’t been reviewed in many publications, but that industry is struggling, and everyone’s working hard to meet their audience where they’re at.

We can’t make anyone play our games- we can’t even make people read our tweets. But we can ask them to, and we’re grateful to every single person who obliges us. If they go on to leave a review or tell their friends, we really can’t ask for more.

Bug: For me, yes, absolutely. Knowing that we’ve made something great is one thing, our friends and family assuring us we’ve got something great is one thing, but for us to have achieved the reach we’ve managed to, at our size, is shocking. That initial itchio “beta”, “proof-of-concept”, whatever we want to call it, was an incredibly humble start for us, and being where we are now, with such passionate and excited fans, I have trouble finding words for how grateful I feel.

aarenders: I’m one of the newer members of the team, but I’ve watched of the Devil‘s development for many years. It’s been a long road for the founding members of Nth Circle, and I’m so happy that all of their hard work and dedication is paying off. All of the support and fanart, the streams and reviews, we take none of it for granted. It’s always exciting when someone tells us that they got their friend/spouse/family member to play one of our games. To see people engage, enjoy, resonate with, and share our work is a really wonderful and humbling feeling. Word-of-mouth is how we got to where we are now, and we’re eternally grateful for all of the support from our fans. Thank you so much to everyone who helped us get into the top 50 for Steam user reviews!

Arimia: There was the mention of revamping the original of the Devil demo to include gameplay segments, giving us the version we currently have. How did the team decide to pivot towards gameplay versus a more standard visual novel experience?

kyoni: I think we always knew we wanted to have some sort of gameplay, even if it was just choices and menus. That can be enough: Ace Attorney and Your Turn To Die have really thrilling arguments composed of just choices and menus! But when we first started we felt like we could limit “gameplay” to the courtroom entirely, just like Ace Attorney and Danganronpa do. Those games have investigations, of course, and other mini-games, but generally speaking, all their core gameplay is designed to take place in a specific location: on the witness stand, inside the class trials, etc., and all the UI and game systems are built specifically for that setting. We thought we shouldn’t bother trying to add that kind of gameplay to Episode 0 because it took place entirely at a police station.

We were wrong. You need to give people a taste- ideally, as fast as possible, but at the very least, before the end of what you’re calling your introduction. So we developed a theater-of-the-mind, card-based system of proposing and countering theories that, through stylistic presentation, could be used in any setting. From there, we emphasized Morgan’s risk-taking mentality and developed a variety of additional gameplay set pieces that emulated casino games in one way or another.

It can be tricky to sell those concepts to players. Murder mysteries only ever have one right answer- there’s no randomness, no chance. That’s the opposite of spinning the roulette, and if we ever introduced randomness, even once, the way that typical video games do hundreds of times a frame, readers would feel betrayed. So rather than using “random chance,” we try to encourage players to “take a chance”- make educated guesses with risks reflective of their own confidence levels and try not to play like a perfectionist, saving and loading before every decision in order to answer everything perfectly the first time.

Arimia: What was the thought process behind the character dynamics in of the Devil, namely between Morgan and Emma’s rivalry?

kyoni: of the Devil’s structure is most directly modeled after Ace Attorney; you have a recurring core cast of lawyers and cops going through a series of self-contained murder mysteries that introduce new suspects, victims, and killers. So there was always going to be a prosecutor character that the player would face multiple times, and that naturally lends itself to a rivalry.

Still, even if of the Devil was structured radically differently, I probably would’ve shoe-horned in a rivalry anyway. I love that stuff. Light and Kira, Suzaku and Lelouch, Hannibal and Will Graham… Two characters on the same side of a conflict that just butt heads because they’re stubborn doesn’t do much for me: I want to see two characters completely opposed to one another who clash because of their ideals and their personalities, despite the fact that they’d get along well under different circumstances. To me, it’s timeless the same way star-crossed lovers are timeless- you want the forces pitting them against one another to be as massive and immovable as fate itself, not as petty as shonen power-scaling discussions.

I especially love when rivals meet off the battlefield- bonus points if the don’t know each others identities. Many characters will “tell” each other that they could’ve been friends in a different life, but it’s so much cleaner to just “show” the audience exactly how well they’d mesh, and the kinds of slow-paced, low-stakes slice of life scenarios that some might derisively call “filler” are perfect for establishing that. Obviously this is present in Emma and Morgan’s relationship, with Emma not realizing that the killer she’s been hunting obsessively is the same defense attorney she’s been dismissive of in the past, but because the two of them are fairly realistic lawyer characters who don’t take the adversarial process personally, any time they meet outside the courtroom becomes another opportunity to show different sides of their personality.

Video games as a medium are uniquely positioned to sell their audience on a rivalry. Other media can show or tell, but video games can make your face feel hot when you lose to Vergil or Jetstream Sam: they give you a rival instead of showing you a rivalry. This is achieved through a variety of means and can be done any number of ways, but there are a few beats that I specifically wanted to hit for Emma and Morgan.

• The rivals should face off multiple times. This might sound obvious, but it is important for video games specifically. A player may die dozens of times to the same boss, feeling more frustrated each time and then overjoyed when they finally prevail- but they won’t see it as a rivalry. The boss is gone from the story once they’ve beaten them once. Rivals need to keep getting back up, and each time they do, the gap between them and the protagonist should shift. 

• The rival should win the first time. Players often vent frustration at any kind of forced loss, especially “losing in the cutscene,” and that’s valid- but it’s also exactly what the developers wanted them to feel. If you don’t get that initial frustration, you don’t feel like you have something to prove. This is actually done twice in of the Devil. In Episode 0 when Emma first appears, the player is given three possible responses to her argument, but regardless of which response they choose, they’ll get overrun by Emma’s reasoning. She literally buries your answer by slapping her own cards down on top of it, besting the player and Morgan in a way that Reyes, your opponent for most of the episode, was never able to. This establishes Emma as an intellectual threat and instills in the player the desire to best her. This is then reinforced in Episode 1, when at the start of the trial Morgan speaks out of turn and Emma objects, costing the player a small penalty. This acts as a tutorial on how Credit can be lost during trials, but it also builds up in them the anticipation to punch back at Emma with their own Objections. You can see the same thing happen in the very first case of Ace Attorney– the first character to make an Objection is actually the prosecutor in that case, and not Phoenix Wright. 

• The rival should be stronger “on paper.” Punching down gets old fast. Even if video games are designed to be beaten, and their story structure necessitates that the player “canonically” wins every challenge in order to get to the end, players want to feel like they’ve got something to prove. At the start of Ace Attorney, Edgeworth has never lost a case. By Episode 0, Morgan has lost against Emma on nine previous occasions. 

• The rival should have the same skillset. This is most obvious in character action games like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta where the rivals usually end up playable in one form or another, but it’s important for rivals to mirror the player’s own tool box. If the enemy you’re facing is ten times your size and swings a giant sword down on you, you’ll expect it to hurt. If the enemy you’re facing is the same size as you, swinging a sword the same size as yours, and when they hit you and half your health bar is gone, you’re taught in that moment exactly how wide the gap is between you and them, and you feel the urge to close it. This is fairly easy to accomplish in of the Devil since Morgan and Emma are just normal humans trading words, but it’s important to keep in mind when designing various visuals. In terms of what they make happen on-screen, Morgan can interject, cut-in, draw the camera in, change the lighting… so Emma needs to be able to do all of that as well. For a murder mystery specifically, this aligns fairly well with Knox’s rules for detective fiction- since Morgan and the player are acting as detectives, Emma should act as a detective as well- and neither she nor Morgan should have access to information that the player doesn’t just to provide a surprise. I missed the mark on this when Episode 1 was first released, as I considered the fact that salt water could be used to induce vomiting common knowledge and therefore did not feel the need to introduce that to the audience. Thank god for patches.

• The rival should have the opposite personality as the protagonist. This is probably the most obvious thing that comes to mind when people think of rivals in general, but the contrast is heightened by the previous criteria. When so many of the character’s abilities line up, differences in personality stand out even more.

Arimia: Speaking of the marketing, what was one aspect of promoting the game that went well? What was an aspect that felt the least effective?

kyoni: Touting our Steam review count or posting direct screenshots of user reviews seems to evoke a reaction. Because we aren’t an “established” studio and we don’t have the raw follower counts to tell a random visitor to our pages that we’re legitimate, the words of actual players or the sheer number of them that’ve taken the time to review us positively seem to go further with strangers than a screenshot or character reveal that they have no context for.

We do see people every day stating plainly that they won’t try of the Devil until all the episodes are out. That, of course, feels like a lost customer, but the reality is if we did wait to release of the Devil as one game, that individual still wouldn’t be trying of the Devil until it’s all out, so you could interpret it positively as someone who’s “teetering” on the edge of trying the game and looking for a push.

I don’t know if it counts as marketing per say, but the title… ugh. Searching “of the Devil” on a social media site will give you thousands of pages of people having episodes and being incredibly bigoted. #oftheDevil and #otDevil do better, but using hashtags seems to be generally falling out of favor if you aren’t already an extremely active fandom.

I hate SEO. I want to give games the names they deserve, not names that please algorithms that are literally afraid of The Devil from the Bible. But this is a cyberpunk story. Having to fight against some techno-corporate pushback is, at the very least, fitting.

Bug: When people say nice things about your game, leverage that word of mouth. When you get a good review shared on social media, or fanwork, there’s no need to be shy about encouraging that kind of sharing.

I absolutely do not think the vast majority of devs/studios/games need some kind of big Discord server with moderators and one million channels to foster word-of-mouth or fan communities, but having some kind of showing (on social media, for example) that there are other people out there saying the game is good, that there are other people enjoying it, that you should try it too–people like to see that. Especially when you’re a tiny team like us with a slim marketing budget–if people want to shout out and share their real positive experience with your work, amplify their voice.

Arimia: Here’s a curve-ball. Who’s your favorite character from any of the Nth Circle games?

kyoni: It’s hard for me to pick favorites with characters I’ve written. I feel like every character I develop is cultured from a biopsy of some part of myself, so I don’t love them the same way I would with characters from others’ stories. But some characters do stand out.

I think Caterpillar is the best designed, best looking character we’ve developed, in terms of the tech involved, the art, and the story payoff. Riley has the funniest sprites. Penny is probably the character who I wrote with the least filtering. Morgan is certainly the character I think about the most. That’s a given, since she’s the protagonist and narrator of the biggest story I’ve ever worked on and it’s still ongoing, but even so.

I’d say Aidey is the “surprising” one, in a lot of ways. She was developed and added to the story in between Episode 0 and Episode 1’s release, making her so far the only character we’ve added to the cast “mid-production.” In the original scripts for of the Devil I didn’t see much point in the judge being a real character at all; there was an Adjutant but they were a much more literal robot judge who didn’t interject or speak much outside of the beginning and ends of trials.

I think I was hesitant to add a dedicated “comic relief character” to a courtroom that was, in-world, such a deadly serious place. In my mind all the various Monokumas and Ace Attorney judges out there were regardly unfavorably by most fans, considered distractions or obnoxious. I’m glad I revisited those games before Episode 1 released because it made me re-evaluate them, and I came to appreciate the importance of those characters in balancing out the cast and moving discussions along. By thinking about Aidey not as an obstacle but instead as an audience-stand-in, writing her became effortless: “She’s literally watching the trial. What does she have to say?”

She also bravely takes on the responsibility of delivering jokes and references I can’t find anywhere else to put, so I owe her deeply for that.

aarenders: It’s gotta be Farah Reyes for me. I love the way she carries herself way too seriously, how she reacts so honestly and earnestly to any provocation, but also how that earnesty and honesty humanizes her as well. She’s strict on everyone, including herself and her ideals. I also really love how we get glimpses into some vulnerability with her, like when she comments about how people told her she had her dad’s eyes growing up. That line especially always stuck with me, giving away a “memento” (for lack of a better word) of her connection with her father in order to do her job better. It’s a haunting feeling, and her opening up about it in the smallest of ways with Morgan made me love her even more.

Bug: I spend a lot of time with Morgan on my screen, and she has a lot of my favorite qualities in a fictional lady. And she’s very cute at times.

I also really like Caterpillar, for similar reasons. I don’t get a lot of opportunities to draw animals or monsters in my Nth Circle projects, even though I do really enjoy it. And making something as crazy as Caterpillar’s rig, drawing all those legs and claws and barnacles…I feel like I know him very well! And he’s just my type of crazy twisted guy. Maybe I’m shallow for focusing on their looks so much, but it’s my job.

(I’m not spoiling the Caterpillar’s design here. Go play Märchen Line instead. — Arimia)

Arimia: As we’re nearing the end, what’s 1 piece of advice you’d give to other visual novel developers?

aarenders: Don’t wait for your skills to develop before you make your game- just get in there and do it. It’s much easier to make a bare bones product and iterate on it than wait until you know everything you need to in order to start. Sure, R&D is important, but don’t let it stifle you. Let the joy of creation flow through!

Bug: Put yourself out there! Even if you’re a solodev type or a really tiny team, having some kind of community of people whos opinions you trust is so clutch when you’re stuck or making a tough call. Sharing your work is also a great way to start forming connections with other people who you want to make stuff with.

kyoni: Writers probably know they should be reading, and VN devs probably know they should be playing VNs.

I’d add to that that anyone working in visual novels should watch a lot of movies, read a bunch of manga and watch a bunch of anime, too. Inspiration, of course, can come from anywhere, and it’s always great to have a diverse palette to draw from. But use of sound, changes in color, when to cut out the music, where to stage characters, how to make someone look threatening, how to convey passage of time, how to convey motion or speed… These techniques are acquired through demonstration, and I feel like the mechanics of the VN medium have more in common with those of movies, comics and animation than they do novels- and even a lot of videogames.

Novels have to convey everything with words alone, but none of us are making novels. We’re making Visual Novels. And it’s hard to make a great visual novel without taking full advantage of every tool in our kit.

Arimia: And finally, why is Morgan so cool?

Bug: Probably the smoking…

aarenders: It’s definitely the cigarettes (:

kyoni: I think it’s a combination of great art and the fact that she stops talking sometimes. It’s hard not to talk when you’re the protagonist and the narrator, but she still manages to find poignant moments of silence to soak in the audience’s attention.

Also, she looks like Shadow the Hedgehog, so there’s that.

And there you have it! Thank you so much to kyoni, Bug, and aarenders for sitting down with me despite being so busy with the release of Episode 2 of of the Devil. You can play of the Devil right now on Steam and I highly recommend it even though it’s not “finished”—every episode feels like a complete story in itself and is extremely enjoyable to experience.

You can follow Nth Circle at these places:

• Linktree
• Bluesky
• Tumblr
• YouTube

Meanwhile, I’ll be busy clearing out my schedule to play Episode 2…

— Arimia

The post Developer Interview – Crafting a Killer Lawyer in of the Devil first appeared on arimia.

The annual Spooktober Visual Novel Jam has wrapped, along with our judging period for the entries. This year we implemented a new system, a judge pass, which not only allows us to fund some of the event with the small fee for games wanting to be judged, but also significantly cuts down on the workload for us judges. In prior years, the number of entries we had to read kept going up almost exponentially and was ultimately unsustainable at the level we were operating with, as each judge had to read 80+ visual novels within 3-4 weeks (one year, it was closer to 110). Suffice to say, the judge pass has worked well at allowing us to keep the event judged with prizes as well as keep the event afloat.

But, today I don’t want to talk about the logistics of the event—I want to recap it, including some looks at my favorite entries and some trends I’ve noticed.

If you want to see my advice from previous years, you can read my wrap-up posts from 2023 and 2024.

MVPs are MVP

This year more than prior years, I noticed an uptick in games clearly made around an MVP, or Minimum Viable Product. Several entries that made it to the final round of judging, such as Dead Stock and Strange Tales from Longchun: Sacrifice, are games that incorporated alternative ways of digesting a story, which was clearly developed through an MVP. Dead Stock has even been updated since the jam ended to expand upon the base game.

Building out a solid MVP is extremely helpful when you don’t have a linear story, or have some kind of gameplay mechanics integrated into the story. The idea of an MVP is simply “what is the roughest workable version of this game, so we can test it out and improve on it from there?”. It’s a building block that you refine to make better. With gameplay mechanics especially, it gives you a chance to see if there’s anything clearly missing or something you could do better before moving on.

Sometimes, however, overambitious MVPs can lead to not enough time to refine the ending. Getting a solid core gameloop is important, but so is resolving it in a satisfying way. Ultimately, we’re making visual novels here—we’re telling stories, and a lot of stories can be deflated by an unsatisfying or rushed ending. Finding a good balance is hard and requires a good amount of planning ahead.

back to the start

A lot—okay, a handful, but it felt like a lot—of visual novels this year were timeloops or timeloop-esque, where they required you to play through one storyline, threw you back to the main menu, and then made you press start again. And again.

The idea behind this system is to force the player to simulate the looping rather than having it be just a story element. It makes it slightly more interactive this way. I don’t really have a complaint about this system—it works, as clearly several devs went for it and made it work.

However, I did notice some did it better than others. This system works best when it’s clear there is a looping mechanic at work. Having the main menu change is a big help to this, to let the player know that something has changed. However, once the story has fully concluded and the looping has ceased, there needs to be a clear end. Have a credits roll, fade to black, show a restored or “final” main menu, etc. Looping can be fun, as it’s an interesting way to show off a story from multiple angles, but when you require the player to “self loop” (by booting them to the main menu and making them press “start”), it needs to be clear.

Personally, I plan on working on a couple of clown-themed timeloop stories soon, so I’ve been considering the format of looping mechanics quite a bit. For one game I plan on it being a multi-route otome where a single loop is an entire route, meaning the loop resetting would be the player going to a different route. For the second game, a much shorter one, I plan on it being more on-rails where the looping is just part of the story rather than something the player has to initiate—their choices lead to different loops and outcomes, but the looping (and most notably, the restart of a loop) is done automatically rather than forcing the player to the main menu to initiate it.

I wonder how it’d be for a story where at any time the player could restart a loop? At that point, it’d be pretty much the same as quitting the game and restarting it… What kind of consequences and changes could be added for restarting a loop mid-game, however? Something to think about…

the power of polish

The polish of a game comes in many forms. Some go for a sleek & seamless GUI; some go for beautiful character designs; some go for a bug-free and well edited experience; etc. The idea of polish is to make a game more refined (and hopefully more cohesive).

However, some entries had varied levels of polish across the board. When some parts are more polished than others, it makes the less polished parts stand out more. Character designs that are well thought out but the artwork is unfinished; solid art direction but the GUI is default; well-paced mini games but lackluster story pacing; etc.

Pacing yourself and your development as well as cutting scope will help prevent these situations. Don’t be afraid to cut down on aspects of a game if there isn’t enough time—you can always come back to games.

directing the stage

Quite a few entries this year had very solid art direction as well as scene direction / cinematography. A solid art direction is one that is cohesive, where every screenshots shows off a well-thought out character designs, settings, GUI, etc. You take one look at it and go “this person had a clear idea for how this game should look and feel”.

Good scene direction is where certain scenes feel very intentional, where the lead handcrafted the scenes. You look at a screenshot and go “this person knew exactly how they wanted this scene to look and achieved it”.

For me, a good vision for a game can make or break games. If I can see that the developer was going for something—even if they fell short—then I can appreciate the game more. If the design feels muddled and doesn’t feel like they had a clear direction, then it can be harder to be immersed in the game.

My favorite entry by far this year was Dead Ringer. The art was stylish, the character designs were distinct, the GUI was easy to read and navigate, the pacing and writing was well-crafted, and the scene direction was the icing on top. I especially loved whenever the camera would zoom in and do a search spotlight to highlight a character. A lot of care was put into making it a well-rounded experience and it shows.

All in all, this was a fantastic year for Spooktober—we now have 200+ more Halloween & horror-themed visual novels in the world. You can see all of the entries on itch.io! The top winners are listed on the wiki.

This was a fun year to judge, especially since it was less stressful with fewer entries to play. The first day of judging, October 1st, was the final day of my latest Steam festival, the Fall in Love Visual Novel Festival. It went fantastic, with over 200+ visual novels from 100+ developers. We even had a showcase for the festival, where I convinced my friends Lirie and Ran to host it (somehow)!

I have begun planning my festival(s?) for next year, more tinkering than anything solid. I want to take a break from them for the rest of the year and leave that stuff for 2026. November is almost here and I want to write!!

Anyway, go check out all the Spooktober entries~

— Arimia

The post I played 40+ more visual novels for Halloween first appeared on arimia.

This is not just a worrying trend—it’s outright alarming. But rather than speculating on what the future may hold, what can we do right now?

1. Stand with eroge devs.

Regardless if you make ero content, we need to stand with ero developers. These are our fellow developers, our neighbors, who are expressing themselves artistically. Furthermore, NSFW content can be a safe outlet for those who have been abused, as a way to work through their emotions without bottling it up. Banning NSFW content will not stop it. It will only make it harder for victims to express themselves.

2. Realize it doesn’t stop at eroge.

These groups will never be happy with just getting the Daz 3D games removed from platforms. No, they want any content they deem problematic to be removed, including queer games. American school systems are already targeting wholesome boys love manga because no queer media should exist in a conservative’s world. And naturally, they won’t stop at queer media either. The Hays Code is an example of how far this line of thought could be used.

This isn’t something that will go away by simply waiting or moving to other platforms, as they will target more content and be more vicious.

What can we do to help devs?

There’s not a lot we can individually do, but that doesn’t mean we’re helpless.

1. Contact payment processors.

The groups responsible for pushing this wave of censorship are doing so by contacting payment processors—namely Visa and Mastercard—and pressuring them into pressuring platforms like Steam & itchio to remove the content they deem irresponsible. However, this can also possibly work in the opposite direction. Contact payment processors (credit card companies, PayPal, Stripe, etc.) and let them know your disdain for them pressuring online platforms to remove content. If you’re a credit card holder, let them know. If you’ve used their platform for years, let them know. You’re not a nameless voice—you’re a customer and you’re angry.

2. Help the ACLU fight censorship.

ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) is an organization fighting for American liberties, including one of their current projects to stop Mastercard’s discriminatory policies against NSFW creators and sex workers. They have a petition but they also have other ways to support them, including sharing their posts, ways to act on their website, and the option to donate directly to them.

3. Share eroge amidst the chaos.

We can support NSFW creators by sharing their posts, giving their games exposure on other websites that do allow their content, and sending them money. Lots of developers are sharing ways to support them and how to help—listen to them and share their stories.

4. Archive and back up media.

If it’s not backed up in at least 2 places, then media isn’t properly archived. Amidst these censorship waves, media can easily become swept away and lost. Get a cheap jump drive and download the media that you enjoy. Sites like itchio allow you to download DRM-free, which means its yours forever—as long as you actually download it.

What can devs do?

Aside from the steps above, what should developers do? What can developers do?

1. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Creators—especially NSFW ones—should not put all of their efforts into just one or two platforms. Platforms are ephemeral and nothing lasts forever. Even popular platforms like Vine vanish overnight. If you don’t own the website, then you don’t control how long the website stays alive.

I normally give this advice in response to social media platforms, as those are the most volatile, but it should be heeded for any type of platform. For a successful and long-lasting business strategy, you have to diversify. How are you doing risk mitigation if all of your income is coming in from one website? What happens if that website gets bought out and their policies change? What happens if they suddenly go under?

2. Look into other platforms.

As I mentioned before, this problem can follow us to other websites (as it followed devs from Steam to itchio), but having games and media on multiple platforms is still a good idea. There are several other platforms that allow NSFW media and general visual novels, such as…

• JAST – they’re a visual novel publisher and very friendly to NSFW games. They’re currently looking for more visual novels to publish to their platform, as per their Twitter. (you may also hear more about them on my blog soon… )
• DLsite – they’re one of the biggest Japanese online platforms for media and games and allow for self-published games in a variety of languages, including English.
• Newgrounds – easily one of the oldest and most well-known online indie sites that’s still around, Newgrounds has been very open about their NSFW policies. The exception, though, is that they don’t have ways to monetize directly on the platform.
• Baiyu, a fellow visual novel developer, has a thread where he looks through to find NSFW site alternatives.

3. Don’t harass itchio.

Their delayed response and general handling of the situation wasn’t great and frankly unprofessional in most aspects, but we need to realize that they’re a small team being pressured into possibly being shuttered if they didn’t act fast. Itchio is most likely in a very precarious situation right now. At the end of the day, this wasn’t their decision—they were forced into it. Let’s focus our frustrations on resolving this rather than blaming them for everything.

These are troubling times and most likely will continue to be for a while longer. We can get through them, though, by supporting each other and sticking together. Continually showing up for each other is how we can help everyone survive. I hope these policies will change, but if they do it won’t be an overnight thing—it’ll be the result of a long campaign of showing up and letting our voices be heard. Don’t doomscroll, don’t fall into the belief this is how things will always be. A better future is only there if you first imagine it.

— Arimia

The post Digital Book Burning – How Visual Novel Devs can Mitigate Harm first appeared on arimia.

Visual novels, sound novels, and adventure games have been around for a handful of decades now, with their presence in America & other Western countries being around 3 decades long. A lot has changed in the gaming and doujin industries respectively in that time frame—nowadays, anyone can make visual novels on their own and small groups can even make a living from them.

But what does it look like to actually release a commercial visual novel in the mid 2020s? Today I’m going to compare the releases for two visual novels I worked on, A Tithe in Blood and Asphodelium.

As a quick disclaimer: how I release games is not indicative of how every single visual novel developer releases their games.

Overview

Both of the projects I’m talking about today, A Tithe in Blood and Asphodelium, had Steam page launches in summer of 2024 with their full Steam releases during the week of June 16th 2025.

A Tithe in Blood

A Tithe in Blood is a yuri visual novel developed by Studio Élan over the course of a few years.

• 65k~ words long
• several developers (artists, programmers, etc)
• dark fantasy yuri romance
• 1 love interest
• 1 ending / no choices
• 3 languages (English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese)
• Japanese voice acting

The Steam page was published in June 2024. The full release was on June 16, 2025.

Asphodelium

Asphodelium is a boys love visual novel I made by myself in 2024 and decided to extend into a commercial director’s cut for its Steam release. I spent around 5-6 months making the entire game.

• 64k~ words long
• 1 developer (me)
• dark fantasy boys love romance
• 1 love interest
• multiple endings
• 1 language (English)
• no voice acting

The Steam page was published in August 2024. The full release was on June 18, 2025.

As you can tell, these two games have very different budgets. Asphodelium had a very small budget and was building on top of a game jam build, whereas A Tithe in Blood had a lot of hands on deck as well as a focus on multiple translations, high quality art, and more.

The releases also came from different backgrounds. I’ve only recently come back to releasing full visual novels on Steam, so I don’t have an established audience for my works yet. On the other hand, at Studio Élan we’ve released lots of high quality yuri visual novels and have a dedicated fanbase.

So what does it look like to release a visual novel, with both of our reference points being on different ends of the scales?

A Year Out

A Tithe in Blood was announced with a playable demo and Steam page in early June, so we hit the ground sprinting. This announcement was at a panel at OffKai Expo 2024, an annual vtuber convention we always booth at, where we announced it alongside a 2nd game as well. I had sent out a press release a few days prior that was embargoed until the panel ended, which was sent out to people who had signed up on our press list and to a few other gaming journalism sites with open emails.

Asphodelium’s Steam page launched with a “demo” a short time later in August, though the demo was the original build of the game (40k words). It was a much more lowkey launch, as the game was already “released” and I wasn’t entirely sure at the time if I wanted the full game to be commercial or not. (Losing my fulltime job and deciding to do VNs fulltime for a while was the deciding factor)

Both visual novels had Steam pages up a year out (Asphodelium’s was around late August, but regardless), giving them that much time to accrue wishlists. Steam wishlists are something you’ll hear often in indie game dev—essentially, when someone has a game on their wishlist and it releases, they receive an email on release day. That means if you have 3,000 wishlists, then 3,000 people have been emailed that the game has released. Not only that but wishlists and page follows are some of the metrics Steam most likely uses when ranking games in its algorithm—not the only metrics, but still important ones nonetheless, especially if aiming for Popular Upcoming. Asphodelium never had a real chance at hitting Popular Upcoming due to the 10k~ wishlists needed to hit it, but A Tithe in Blood was always aiming for that.

Both games had been in development for some time before their Steam page launches. For A Tithe in Blood, it was in development for a handful of years (I believe 2 or 3?) before we announced it with the Steam page demo launch. For Asphodelium, it had already been released as a game jam game a few months prior.

Most players on Steam won’t play your demo before wishlisting which becomes apparent when you enter any modern Steam Next Fest, but having a demo up months before release brings more eyes to your game. Demos are featured in more places as they can appear on search results and streamers can play demos which will share the game with their audiences. Even if it’s not a proper “demo”, it can help a lot.

I’m talking a lot about Steam, but what about social media? In reality, social media is only one aspect out of many for marketing & releasing games (or any product). Tweets and posts can help get the word out, but you still need a solid foundation–what are you making? How easy is it to understand the story? Why should I play it?

At this time, we were still active on Twitter with 14k+ followers, so our announcement posts looked like this.

announcing…

A Tithe in Blood is a dark, atmospheric yuri visual novel. A university student escapes from her everyday life by using blood magic to travel to another world. However, what is the true nature of this other reality…?

Play the demo: https://t.co/40PGC1dmWE pic.twitter.com/7FtuBuQktR

— Studio Élan ⚢ @ Upwards Rain July 1st (@vnstudioelan) June 2, 2024

For the most part, social media posts are for “gliding”. You shouldn’t expect to “soar” (i.e. get popular) off of social media posts–rather, use them to continue the work you’re already doing and glide along. Even JVN publishers that don’t want to market their VNs realize social media isn’t end all be all. So what does the bulk of marketing look like?

Several Months Out

Once you have a solid Steam page set up and a good demo, the majority of modern game marketing is 2 parts: consistency and showcases.

Consistency is showing up regularly and reminding people you exist. This is where social media comes in, where streamers come in, where monthly devlogs come in.

Showcasing is getting in front of fresh eyes with like-minded games. This is participating in festivals, showcases, events, and conventions.

These two categories have some overlap, as streamers can also be part of showcasing, but in general they serve different purposes. Consistency is for people who already know you and showcases are for people who don’t.

Consistency

Consistency is the “gliding” part I was mentioning earlier, though some of it is more active than passive. For my games, this means:

• posting on social media at least a few times a week (I post daily on the Élan accounts and a few times a week on my own)
  • new screenshots
  • concept art
  • WIP artworks
  • in game videos
  • snippets of the trailer
  • quick text updates
• making videos showing off new art, in-game previews, etc.
• keeping our Discord engaged by sharing updates, having community channels, etc.
• giving Patreon members updates at least once a month / writing monthly devlogs with progress
• reaching out to streamers to play the demo

Just like how a game is developed over time, little by little, marketing is something you do consistently, little by little.

Venture into an alternate world with the use of blood magic and befriend the locals…. but is this idyllic town more than it seems?

The demo for our next dark yuri visual novel is playable now! https://t.co/40PGC1dmWE pic.twitter.com/gGV4MvCGrD

— Studio Élan ⚢ @ Upwards Rain July 1st (@vnstudioelan) July 2, 2024

One thing I like to do for my own games is make quick videos for YouTube—these can be in-game previews showing off a scene or animation, art timelapses, mini trailers, and more—and using those in my monthly devlogs and on social media. Be efficient and reuse what you have.

When you’re in this stage, you need to figure out the voice of your project. What is the purpose of it? Why are you making it? How do you convey that to a stranger?

I call Asphodelium a game about cults, killing, and killing cults. And being in love. (sometimes, “And being gay”). The majority of the story is a melancholic slice-of-life romance, but the inciting incident is death. This is a game about cults and murder. I later also made the pitch “You killed him once before. Will you make the same mistake again?” with some variations (such as “Don’t make the same mistake again”).

Yesterday was a scripting day for Asphodelium! The extended version contains lots of new endings & ways to interact with your love interest Aster. You killed him before. Will you keep him on the right path away from his cult, or will you make the same mistakes again? Wishlist it: s.team/a/3139260

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— Crystal Game Works (@crystalgameworks.com) March 25, 2025 at 12:52 PM

Due to focusing on streamer outreach for other projects and the lack of streamers playing SFW boys love games, I didn’t reach out to streamers for the demo for Asphodelium (instead waiting for the full release), but it did get some people interested.

For A Tithe in Blood, we began building a streamer list months out. The list was mostly created by mado who used tools like SullyGnome to find active streamers who would be a good fit for the title. As it’s a linear yuri visual novel with darker themes, we wanted streamers who matched some of these qualities:

• plays visual novels
• likes yuri, or is at least LGBT+ positive
• is okay with games that don’t have choices or gameplay
• is okay with darker themes

For example, we came across a lot of streamers who were streaming Hundred Line when it released, but we found a lot of these streamers most likely weren’t good fits for A Tithe in Blood as several of them were sponsored streams (i.e. paid to play it) or they normally stream gameplay heavy games instead of visual novels. It doesn’t hurt to send streamers an email asking to play your game, but at the same time you want to focus on people who seem most likely to enjoy it.

Here’s an example of one of the emails I sent out to a batch of streamers for the demo. I keep mine short and to the point, with a clear pitch, reasons they might be interested, an eye-catching image or two, and easy to see links. Streamers want a press kit that contains a logo for the game and any artwork they can use, links to the store page(s), your social media handles, and a clear “you have permission to stream this”. For our visual novels, we allow streamers to stream them in their entirety, which is explained further on our Streaming Policy page. This transparency gives streamers some peace of mind.

Showcases

Showcases, festivals, and events are how you “reliably” get your game in front of new people. It’s reliable when you can get in, but the competition can be fierce.

Steam festivals are events where games that have some similar connection (a collection of short games, of romance visual novels, of wholesome games, etc) and are given a custom landing page on Steam with every game in the festival having a banner on the top of the pages to promote said festival. Some are ran by Valve and can be signed up for on the Steamworks dashboard while others are developer-ran and have to be sought out.

A large part of modern Steam marketing is entering festivals and leveraging exclusivity with these festivals. Some festivals are just a Steam landing page while others also include a livestreamed showcase showing off games. The ones with video showcases are typically the bigger events which want exclusivity, such as a brand new trailer to show off or a developer interview.

With the short turnaround time of a year (yes, that’s short), our options for festivals were already limited. I submitted A Tithe in Blood to multiple festivals & showcases such as LudoNarraCon and several of the women-led showcases but to no avail—just because your game fits the themes doesn’t mean you’ll get in! Both games were able to get into the 2025 Storyteller’s Festival, though, which is ran by the lovely people at Two and a Half Studios.

Visual novels tend to be a hard sell for some festivals, especially the bigger ones that aren’t aimed at story-driven games, so you get used to rejections. Still, a good festival can be an easy 500+ wishlists in a week.

Showcases can also be in-person. At Élan, we attended a handful of conventions while A Tithe in Blood was in development. We announced it at OffKai Expo 2024, later went to Otakon and a few others, and then went back to OffKai the weekend it released. Conventions give you a unique ability to talk to players and explain your game to them, giving them fliers or brochures and even possibly letting them try the demo at your booth. At ours we focus more on selling physical games with merch and handing out fliers, but other convention booths can be more focused on playtests. It all depends on what you want out of a convention and what the convention focuses on.

A Few Months Out

A few months out saw a greater increase on reaching out to streamers for A Tithe in Blood as well as solidifying dates for both releases. …So I suppose now I should explain how I ended up with both releases on the same week.

We were originally planning May for both, but June was decided on so that they could both be in the June Steam Next Fest (I discussed this with the A Tithe in Blood devs and then realized I should do the same with Asphodelium). Next Fest is the festival Valve hosts multiple times a year for showcasing only upcoming games, putting a heavier emphasis on trying out demos and wishlisting these upcoming titles. You’re practically guaranteed a few hundred wishlists from it.

With A Tithe in Blood set to be done in May to meet our physical copies deadline, we decided on June 16th for it—the last day of the Next Fest and the first day we could release it (as you cannot release a game in Next Fest during Next Fest, so we waited for a few hours after it ended). We attend OffKai Expo every year which was happening that weekend, which was another deadline we had to make. A Tithe in Blood needed to come out before the convention.

I was then going to release Asphodelium once I got home, but something else came up—Citrus Con. It’s an online boys love convention held annually, and lo-and-behold, I was accepted to the artist alley almost as soon as we decided on June 16th for A Tithe in Blood. And guess what weekend Citrus Con was held this year…

Realizing I couldn’t release a game while on a plane (as a Steam release is still a manual process) but also knowing I needed the game out before Citrus Con and that it couldn’t release during Next Fest, I resigned myself to releasing it that Wednesday. And thus, the beginning of a hell week formed…

You killed him once before. Will you make the same mistake again? Our dark fantasy boys love visual novel, Asphodelium, will release on June 18th! This is a story about cults, killing, and killing cults. And being gay. Wishlist it: store.steampowered.com/app/3139260/… #boyslove #bl

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— Crystal Game Works (@crystalgameworks.com) May 13, 2025 at 12:21 PM

Once you’re a few months out (3~ months) from release, your path is set. There aren’t any more festivals you can enter in such a tight turn around that will happen before release and there’s very little you can do to drastically alter wishlist rates. We announced a few months out that A Tithe in Blood would get a simplified Chinese translation on release which did bump our daily wishlist rate to around 25/day, but outside of big announcements like this (that happen to catch the intended audience), you’re not going to affect the daily stats much. That’s not to say you should give up—rather, you should realize from the time you announce a game that you’re in it for the long haul.

One of the pain points that came up around this time was actually the translations—or rather, my ignorance of languages. I’m monolingual. I speak English and can read kana, but I can’t speak Japanese and definitely don’t understand conjugation and such. Translations are a great way to get your game in front of more players but pose new challenges. How do you properly test a game you can’t read? How do you market a game to people who don’t speak your language?

For prior releases, I usually have been on my own for posts, in the sense that I set my own schedule and post on my own volition. Sometimes I’ll be reminded or told to post something (“hey, here’s a new Patreon post I set to live”) but in general I manage the social media accounts without getting feedback on every single post. When trying to share posts about a translation though, we had to change this. We ended up in a flow where I would draft posts, get them reviewed by the devs, and then they would be translated. This wasn’t hard but it is something to be aware of if you want to translate your own games.

【お知らせ】
We're excited to announce that our upcoming yuri visual novel "A Tithe in Blood" will launch with Japanese language support and full Japanese voice acting!
Studio Élanの新作百合ADVゲーム『A Tithe in Blood 〜血の契り〜』が、日本語対応と日本語フルボイスでリリース決定！ pic.twitter.com/unQPCD9Ig0

— Studio Élan ⚢ @ Upwards Rain July 1st (@vnstudioelan) March 8, 2025

For Asphodelium, I tried seeing if the Tiktok audience would be interested as quite a few yandere and dark romance visual novels are popular there, but I couldn’t get a foothold. Asphodelium is commercial, displayed in NVL mode with not a lot of cutscene artwork, and is low on the yandere scales (despite 2 dead endings), so it’s not as eye-catching as some of the free romance visual novels on itchio. Most players on Tiktok seem to want customizable protagonists in their romance games as well, which made it harder to get a strong response.

@crystalgameworks this is Asphodelium, my dark boys love romance visual novel that ive been making by myself it follows a group of adventurers after their journey is over and living with the guilt of their previous guild leader who betrayed them. the main character hasn't recovered since this event, but one day he meets a man that looks just like their old guild leader. he agrees to help him, though doubt and mistrust finds its way in….. why is this man here? how much does he know about his previous life? what will he do when he finds out? I'm making this romance visual novel by myself and it's currently playable on Steam and itch.io, so check it out if you like boys love romance or dark visual novels! #visualnovel #visualnovelgame #yaoi #bl #boyslove #visualnovels ♬ Cute heartwarming BGM(1490583) – sanusagi

Final Weeks

Development wraps up. Visual novels are more complex than they seem, and the more components that you add to it (accessibility features, voice acting, translations, animation effects, etc.) the more that has to be tested and potentially patched. So while the bulk of development should be wrapping up in the weeks leading up to release, it’s not uncommon for even “simple” visual novels to need last minute bug fixes.

While the development team was putting the final touches on A Tithe in Blood, I was busy ramping up my streamer emails and finishing Asphodelium’s development. Development-wise was pretty simple—Asphodelium is an NVL-mode visual novel with only 6 on-screen characters and isn’t as animation heavy as some of my previous games like Canvas Menagerie. I was able to wrap up the game fully before release week, which meant the entire story was scripted into Ren’Py with audio, transitions, Steam achievements, and an in-game art gallery. Testing each of the endings (as there’s 6 main endings and several side endings, including 2 dead ends) took some time but was still done in a day or so.

Streamers, however, were a much lengthier process. In the end, I emailed over 110 people to play A Tithe in Blood, with an additional 50 or so contacted for the launch press release.

In the couple of weeks leading up to the launches, I did a few things like:

• Sent out a press release to journalists on our press list at Élan and other notable sites
• Posted cutscene artwork to art share subs on Reddit
• Posted countdown guest artworks counting down to release

As I was traveling very soon after the release of both games, I began drafting release materials weeks in advance. So what did I plan for the launch day for A Tithe in Blood?

• Steam announcement post on the A Tithe in Blood page
• Steam announcement posts on our previous yuri games linking to A Tithe in Blood
• itchio announcement post on the A Tithe in Blood page
• newsletter email
• Patreon post
• Discord ping in our community server
• Bsky post
• Tweet
• Instagram post
• Tumblr post
• Reddit post

Most of the blog posts and social media posts were the same, just being slightly edited to fit the individual websites and content. Getting ready weeks in advance helps fix any mistakes and avoid crunching last minute.

Our dark fantasy yuri visual novel A Tithe in Blood releases in just 5 days! It has an English script with a Japanese translation & Japanese voice acting. Can love bloom in the depths of grief? : @00myuto.bsky.social Play the demo: store.steampowered.com/app/2989270/…

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— Studio Élan @ Upwards Rain July 1st (@vnstudioelan.com) June 11, 2025 at 4:05 PM

Once you hit 2 weeks out from the release date set on Steam, there’s no going back. You can’t change it without a plea to Valve (and a strongly worded email back from them). Be sure your release date and time is exactly what you want it to be before this…!

Release

A Tithe in Blood released just a few hours after Next Fest wrapped with little competition also releasing that day. We hit 12k wishlists right before release, landing us on the top of Popular Upcoming for a couple of hours.

We already had several streamers lined up, so it was a thoroughly busy day! After posting all of the announcements and posts, I monitor our notifications to see what people are saying and anything I’d want to repost such as stream announcements, fan art, staff member posts, etc.

A Tithe in Blood is out NOW! In the depths of grief, Honoka discovers blood magic, but her meddling may have consequences… a dark yuri visual novel around 70k words long English script with JP & CN translations full JP voice acting Play now: store.steampowered.com/app/2989270/…

[image or embed]

— Studio Élan @ Upwards Rain July 1st (@vnstudioelan.com) June 16, 2025 at 4:01 PM

With A Tithe in Blood I had other people helping out with some of the Steam back end details and more, whereas for Asphodelium (since it was just myself) I also had to…

• set Steam release to live (a manual process)
• upload final builds to itchio and set it to live
• make sure bundles are all live (and have proper graphics for each)

Before launch I was able to make a collab bundle with my friend Nia for her game Fearbonding, where we created a toxic boys love bundle together. It took a bit of set up (and most of the time was spent on the graphics), but now we can cross promote our similar games easily!

After release, you sit back, fix any bugs, wait for reviews, and try to relax….

…and then do it all over again for the next game.

Final Thoughts

Although some postmortems go into steps for releasing games, I hadn’t really seen any go into detail on how a visual novel—namely, a modern one—is released. This definitely isn’t the only way to release a visual novel, as every release is different for each game and studio, but I hope it sheds some light and demystifies the process a bit.

Both games also got physical releases, with A Tithe in Blood’s being a beautiful DVD case with a pamphlet inside and mine being handmade CDs. I’ll always love physical media, you can’t take it away from me!!

My next projects are to release Upwards, Rain! The Post Office of Farewells at Élan which releases tomorrow, July 1st (and I’m procrastinating writing the release drafts by writing this) and the Kickstarter for my Victorian vampire otome game, Crimson Waves on the Emerald Sea: Amaranthine Moon. I’ve marketed several Kickstarters over the years but never actually ran one of my own. So, time for me to learn!

I’m also already working on my next Steam festival, which is a general romance-themed visual novel festival. It’s open to any kind of romance, from otome to boys love and more, but only for visual novels. Submissions close July 15th with the festival slated for late September.

Until next time!

— Arimia

The post What does a modern visual novel release look like? first appeared on arimia.

We believe that when they’re well run and well implemented, third-party sales events can accomplish several important goals at once. They make the Store a livelier and more-engaging place for players, they help developers find new audiences for their games, and they help event organizers connect with the Steam-portion of their online communities.

All in all, we’re happy to see third-party sales events gaining popularity on Steam. Since the sales event tools were first introduced to partners in 2020, almost 3,000 sales events have been released on Steam, with the total number in 2024 on pace to grow 20% relative to 2023.

Steamworks Development News

Having been in quite a few developer & Valve-ran festivals, I realized it was time for me to try my hand at it. I’ve hosted game jams for years such as Otome Jam, so I’m no stranger to running developer events. So how hard would running a Steam festival be?

That was December. I started planning my first festival, Otome Games Celebration (which I sometimes called otome fest, or otofest) that month by coming up with guidelines for it. I decided to go with otome for a few reasons – I already host Otome Jam; I’m making otome games; and it was broad enough to be reliably accepted by Valve but also specific enough so I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by submissions. Later that month, right after I released my 3 year project Canvas Menagerie, I publicly posted the interest form for the event.

When pitching a festival to Valve, you have to have games already signed on to the event when you pitch it – they want to see there’s already interest in the idea. I ended up receiving about 45 games in this, which was much more than I probably needed to show there was merit to the idea. I filled out the festival pitch form and submitted it. On January 10th, about 2 weeks after I pitched it, it was accepted by Valve. That was just the beginning of a long journey.

To give a brief overview of how it happened…

• Early December: Begin tinkering with an interest form
• December 20th: Release interest form
• Late December: Pitch the festival with interested games list to Valve
• January 10th: Valve accepted the festival
• January 22nd: Open call for otome games, announcing the festival is actually happening
• March 8th: Open signup form closed
• March 10th: Accepted games were contacted
• March: Streamer & Press form was made public, allowing reviewers to sign up to receive demos & keys
• May 19: Otome Games Celebration began
• May 26: Otome Games Celebration ended

…this doesn’t include a lot of the finer details, like the amount of emails and support tickets back and forth, but does give a rough idea of how many months it took to assemble it all. On the documentation, Valve recommends a minimum of 3 months of planning from concept to festival.

what is a Steam festival?

A Steam festival is an event held on Steam that has its own storepage and features a variety of games around a central topic. Sometimes the theme is visual novels, sometimes its zombies vs vampires. The page showcases a selection of a handful or a few hundred games around this theme, which each game in turn promoting the festival with an automatic banner on their pages. The purpose is to promote similar games, hopefully leading to an increase in sales and wishlists.

In fact, here’s the full page for Otome Games Celebration! …Minus the Trailers section, which refused to be in my full screenshot.

Steam festivals have widgets that further categorize games based on tags, features, and more, depending on how the organizer set it up. Some festivals even have broadcasts, announcements, and more!

The trailers widget is a favorite of mine – it showcases random trailers of games from the festival, rotating through them while the user is on the page.

why should I care about festivals?

Valve has now made it abundantly clear that festivals are their answer to Steam’s lack of niche curation – and even moreso that developer-ran festivals are their solution. Valve has ran festivals starting back in lockdown, with their Steam Next Fest being the most prolific of them, but their category-specific ones like Visual Novel Fest and such are…lackluster, to say the least.

Making festivals rely on developer curation is a good and bad thing. It’s bad because it takes a lot of time to set up and plan for, which means developers have less time to work on their games. But, it’s also good because developers know our niches best, so we can weed out the 3d platforming games that claim to be visual novel just because they moved the tag to the front of their page. Steam festivals allow us the ability to curate the store page for a week, and I’m sure Valve will continue increasing the scope and visibility of festivals.

To put it in simpler terms, if you’re a developer then you should care about festivals because it puts your game in front of people who want things just like your game which means easy visibility and wishlists. If you’re a player then you should care about festivals because they make it easier to find games that you might like. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

how do you run a Steam festival?

If you’re seriously interested in hosting one, read up on the documentation first, and then come back here to see my thoughts on it. TL;DR I do recommend it, especially if you’re developing games in an under-served niche.

1. the idea

What do you want to hold a festival for? Do you want to hold one for every single hentai game out there, or do you want it to be much more defined? Be specific, as most of the larger categories are already taken. For example, there’s several cozy & wholesome-themed Steam festivals, so go more niche – what about cozy management sims or wholesome story-driven games?

Don’t be so specific that you can only find 5~ other games that match your topic, but don’t go so broad that you’ll have 2,000+ games eligible to enter.

2. the pitch (to devs)

Now, you have to pitch it to your fellow devs. Be sure to outline things as well as you can.

• What games are eligible? What games aren’t eligible?
• What is the time frame for the festival? It’s okay to not have a specific week just yet, but you should have a month in mind.
• How will you keep in contact with developers? Will you contact developers not accepted, or only accepted developers?
• What categories will the games fall under on your page? (what widgets will you create to help players find the right types of games?)

You don’t need information like their legal name or phone number (PLEASE stop asking for these…!!!) but you will need their email, Steam game, and Steam AppID.

For Otome Games Celebration, our final eligibility rules looked like this:

We’re looking for games that meet all of this criteria:

• be able to play as a female protagonist (chooseable gender is OK)
• must be focused on romance / have a heavy emphasis on romance
• at least 1 male love interest
• must be a story-driven visual novel or a visual novel hybrid
• must call itself an otome somewhere (long description, social media marketing, tags, etc.)
• not explicitly porn (some sexual content OK)
• no AI generations, including any games using assets that are AI generated

Games will be accepted to the festival at our discretion. Rejected games will not be informed due to the volume of submissions. Both released games and upcoming games are accepted.

Only submit games where you are the developer or publisher.

Otome Games Celebration Steam Festival Sign Up

A loose definition of an otome game is where the player can play as a woman and romance men, which is what we expanded on here. Romance is a central aspect of otome games, so several of the bullets are about that. Since this was my first festival, I didn’t want to send out rejection emails which would’ve overwhelmed my workload. And lastly, I specified to only submit games you own because I had a couple of otome fans submit random otome games they definitely didn’t work on.

(older otome fans may notice that we asked games to be visual novels, whereas the origins of otome were more strategy game than visual novel – modern otome games are almost entirely visual novels, but we accept hybrid games and would accept classic strategy games if they’re meant to be otome. the visual novel stipulation is mostly in response to modern otome being VNs and to weed out some of the games on Steam that call themselves “dating sims” just because they have heart points and such)

3. the pitch (to Valve)

After you’ve assembled 20-40 games that have agreed to be in the festival, you should be ready to pitch it to Valve. Be sure to go back over the documentation for festivals and have an idea of what you want out of the festival.

Will you have a livestream with the festival, making it a showcase, or will you just have the Steam page? How do you pitch your festival? Is it mostly for showcasing the niche, or is it focused on sales for the niche? When exactly will you hold the festival?

4. the announcement

Hopefully a week or two after your pitch, Valve accepted it and gave you a store page to play with. If they did, then great!

The work begins here.

Duplicate your interest form and retool it to be an official submissions form. Change the info to the exact date you submitted to Valve as well as any other fine-tuning. I waited about 2 weeks to do my official announcement until we had our lovely logo, done by notafish.

For the full announcement, I shared it in the various visual novel & otome development Discords I’m in as well as on my social media, which got shared around quite a bit. I’m already well connected in the visual novel sphere, but for people that aren’t you’d have to do some serious hustling to connect with your fellow devs. The official sign ups were also added to the Worthy festivals for Indie games spreadsheet and later shared in the HTMAG’s newsletter which has a section for up upcoming festivals.

I kept the form open for almost 2 months until March 8th, which is longer than you probably need it to be. I made notes while the games came in on which games I’d accept and which games definitely didn’t follow the guidelines, so that when the signups closed I had already made some progress.

5. the purge

Now is probably the most time-consuming part of it all – going through the submissions one by one and deciding their fate. Some games like “[Noun] VR Simulator” were clearly just submitting to every festival and were easy to weed out, meanwhile others were harder to determine.

Come up with your “tie-breaker” guidelines.

Based on the eligibility guidelines you made for submissions, you need to come up with ways to deal with games that are kind of eligible, games that aren’t clear-cut acceptances. For me, that was determining what to do with games that didn’t clearly state they were otome games. I had several submissions that were clearly romance visual novels, but didn’t clarify what kind of romance they were nor who you play as. I determined these were against the rules I set for the festival and declined them.

I ended up with 120~ final games & DLC from 85~ developers, which was a solid amount for a first-time festival. The more games you have in a festival, the less visibility each game gets, but the fewer games you have in a festival, the less visibility the overall festival gets. It’s a tricky balance!

6. the emails

After leaving spreadsheet hell (for now), you get to email everyone who’s games you accepted! This can just be a quick email saying they’re accepted with more information to follow. Given how early I did submissions, I had 2 months before the festival to prepare for it with the finished games.

I used Kit (formerly ConvertKit) to manage my emails, which was…..eh. I’ve used a variety of platforms over the years but theirs has a bit too many options for me while not having enough options for other things (why can’t I see who didn’t open my emails?). I also later received some complaints about emails being sent to spam, but there’s not really anything I can do about that other than swap platforms.

7. the preparation

You’ve now got a lot of accepted games and a WIP storefront page. Time to prepare!

I started by creating a Notion doc for all of the participants, as a place to have centralized information and links. I put all the information in one place and updated it as needed, which was very helpful. (however, I’m not sure I’ll use Notion in the future, given their insistence on forcing AI “tools” onto users)

With notafish doing the graphic design, I tackled the character artwork. Most festivals (most, but not all) have a mascot or key visual which gives players an idea of the vibes for the event. I ended up drawing my own mascot Rimia for the event, giving her balloons to show the celebration aspect.

8. the page

Setting up the Steam page was both much easier and much harder than I expected. Valve updated the festival platform at least twice while I was working on the festival page, making the system more robust each time. The system is basically the Steam events system, but with a lot of added features – I can’t go much in detail on it here, other than they really put a lot of functionality into it.

If you tinker with it, you can add a lot of customization to the page, like you can see in my low-res screenshot at the beginning of this post. The widgets allow you to show games based on backend Steam data like tags, demos, availability, and more. You can even add Steam tags and custom tags to games, which is how I created our All Male LI and Non-Male LI categories. Truly, the world is your oyster if you try!

While it didn’t take me too long to figure out the festival building system, it did take me quite a while to set it up. I sunk several hours into getting the page exactly how I wanted it to because I was being nitpicky and fiddling with all the options.

9. the streamers

Marketing a Steam festival requires a decently large strategy, so to accomplish this I wanted to collaborate with streamers – or at least, let them aware of the festival. The festival at this point was already taking more time than I had expected to set up, so I needed whatever streamer event to not take up much of my time.

I created a Streamer & Press form for reviewers to sign up and receive updates on the festival, as well as give their consent to send their contact info to the developers in the festival. This put the effort of reaching out to streamers onto the developers, but also gave them easy contacts to people who expressly wished to be contacted. At least 1 developer told me this helped them get over the awkwardness of contacting reviewers, as they knew these people had given consent.

According to my exit survey for the developers, about 25% of them reached out to reviewers on the list, with all of those people saying their games were covered. It’s a slightly low turnout for people using it, but it was also low effort on my end and did help the people who did use it. It was very fun seeing all the streams go live during the event and getting streamers involved in it!

Some festivals do showcases like Wholesome Games, where they work with streamers to do a livestreamed event showcasing various trailers and developer interviews. These take a lot of work to set up, but I wanted to try doing one for Otome Games Celebration. My idea was to do a simple showcase where I hand-picked 20~ games from the festival, ask them for a trailer and a short game blurb, and have a streamer show these on their stream. It wouldn’t need to be rendered as each of the trailers are already existing and would simply need to be played, and also wouldn’t be too much work for any party involved. For time reasons we weren’t able to do this this year, but I’d love to do this in the future. (also, feel free to take this low effort idea for your own events!)

10. the festival

I submitted the page for review about a week and a half before the start date and it was accepted within a day, so everything was ready. I scheduled the event to go public right as the event started, which meant I was done with the festival page itself. There was still a lot of emails to be answered, though!

The festival went live at 12PM CST on May 19th and lasted a week until May 26th. We weren’t able to keep our Daily Deal slot, which is front page featuring from Valve, but every festival still gets some visibility – namely, being listed on the Special Events Page and each of the games involved having a big banner at the top.

what could’ve gone better?

Nothing went bad, but there were some parts I was unaware of or things I wish I did differently.

• I didn’t realize the time is set by me, not Valve. I submitted the page assuming the start time would be 12PM PST, as that’s the normal time for Valve events, but didn’t realize I can set the time – and that it’s auto set to noon my timezone (CST). So some of our graphics displayed the incorrect timezone because I didn’t set the time.
• The streamer event could’ve been bigger, had I reached out to more streamers and worked harder on doing a showcase. Next year, I hope to email more streamers ahead of time to inform more people about the event.
• Our mixture of released:upcoming games wasn’t bad, but I didn’t realize until after I’d accepted games that I needed to be more aware of the release state of the games. We ended up with about half and half, but in the future I need to focus on more released games, preferably a 60:40 split. Festivals bring in visibility to upcoming games, but released games are the ones that bring in visibility to the festival.
• Likewise, a lot of the developers in the festival were newer to Steam and festivals – 30% of participants had never been in a developer-ran Steam festival before – so I wasn’t aware that I needed to give more resources & information to the developers. I want to help more devs get comfortable with Steam, but I wasn’t aware how many weren’t used to Steam before the event.

what went well?

Overall, I think the festival went great! I do wish it got more visibility, though the average wishlist count per game was 423~ wishlists. We were able to get a fair amount of streamer interaction and give views to a lot of indie developers from all around the world. While I’m in the English development sphere, we had some participants with games in other languages, which was great and something I’d like expanded on next year.

Thanks to notafish, we were able to have a variety of assets for the festival that all looked wonderful, with multiple social media asset templates and even a streamer overlay.

Final festival stats:

• 160~ submitted games
• 126 accepted games & DLC
• 85~ developers
• 423~ mean wishlists earned per game
• 22~ reviewers signed up
• 56k+ visits to the festival page

should I run a Steam festival?

YES!!

If you’re a Steam developer and you’ve ever ran gaming events like game jams, then take a shot at running a Steam festival. Festivals are Valve giving us the tools to curate Steam, so it’s up to us to take the keys and go for it.

I’d love to see festivals like:

• Mystery Visual Novels
• Queer Visual Novels
• Casual Games Fest

And more! Bring visual novels to the forefront of Steam!! Make everyone play visual novels!!! Visual novels or nothing!!!!

what should I know?

Some things I wish I’d have known beforehand…

• This is time consuming. It’s not hard, but it’s going to take a fair amount of your time, at least 15+ hours.
• If you want front page featuring, you need heavy hitters – games that have sold well and will continue to sell well.
• There are a lot of assets needed for it – from the store page assets to the social media assets and more.
• You need to set the time of the festival on the festival page, not Valve (whoops).
• You need to set the festival page to live, not Valve (same way you would a regular Steam event).
• To have a good festival, you have to have good curation and a good marketing plan. You won’t be able to accept every game.
• There’s so many emails to answer and send. So many.

Don’t be afraid to ask for advice from others while building out your festival or ask your Valve rep on the Steam tickets. My Valve rep was a big help for me and always got back to me quickly – they want you to succeed!

Lastly… Go for a niche you’re passionate about! Visual novels are my bread and butter and I want to continue supporting the medium in any way I can. Pick something you’re passionate about and go with that.

To wrap things up, I have a few words of thanks I want to give. Thank you to all my friends and acquaintances who listened to my inane rambles about the festival, even as I repeated myself multiple times over the months, and supported me regardless. Thank you notafish for doing the beautiful graphic design for the event, giving it such a festive look worthy of a celebration. Thank you Gabby for answering my silly questions and being so supportive of the event. Thank you to all of the streamers who signed up on the streamer form and covered the event, and thank you to all of the other streamers who found the event and felt it was cool enough to cover. And thank you to all of the developers and players for believing in the event! I hope to bring Otome Games Celebration back next year. …And maybe something else before then.

May is practically done now with pride month very close on the horizon. I’ve got a very busy pride ahead of me – 3 game releases, including my own dark boys love visual novel Asphodelium and Studio Élan’s dark fantasy yuri A Tithe in Blood, and 2 conventions, in-person at Offkai Expo with Studio Élan and online at Citrus Con for my own works. Give me the strength to make it through June…!!

— Arimia

The post Otome Games Celebration Postmortem (or, I held a Steam festival) first appeared on arimia.

While both groups are making visual novels, there are some very important differences between making commercial visual novels and making free visual novels as a hobby. If you know how to make visual novels and want to take this hobby as a side gig, then this is for you.

I’m a hobby dev turned commercial dev, so today we’re looking at things to consider if you want to move from free visual novel development to commercial development!

money

Let’s get the scariest part out of the way – money. It costs a lot to make a commercial game if you pay yourself for your time spent on it (which you should at least try to do).

everything costs money

There’s a lot of extra fees associated with game development when you decide to make commercial games. Here’s some examples…

• Equipment & software to actually make games
• Rights to use assets commercially
• Steam & other platform fees
• Dev kits for consoles
• Festivals and event fees
• And more….

Let’s assume you already have a great working computer, maybe an extra monitor and anything else you need (drawing tablet, audio software, video editor, etc.). There’s still quite a few other costly things on the list, the most notable being the right to use assets commercially.

right to use assets commercially

It’s not enough to just commission artists or to buy asset packs. Once you’re making commercial visual novels, you have to double check that you can use the assets in a commercial game.

If you’re commissioning an artist, that typically means a 3x rate for the commission. While you might’ve paid $100 for the artwork for personal commissions, you might be paying anywhere from $300-500 for that same artwork now that it’s for a commercial project. It’s not uncommon to see this multiplier go up to 5x, where the artist charges 5 times the amount for a commission if it’s for commercial use.

This is because you will be making money off of their artwork, so they are entitled to a higher pay (obviously, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll make money off of their art, but that’s the thought process).

Similarly, some stock asset sites have different tiers for cost associated depending on the use case. While a font might be free for personal use & free projects, it might cost $20 to license for commercial use. You’ll also want to be sure you’re getting assets from websites that have the right to sell these assets – look up the original creator of the asset to see if this is a place they uploaded the work to.

Get into the habit (if you weren’t already) of checking out the licenses to the assets you use!

Steam & other platform fees

Some platforms, like Steam and Google Play, charge you upfront as a developer to publish games to their platforms. These are fees you can’t avoid as an indie developer.

Steam – $100 per game
Google Play – $25 account setup fee
Apple – $100 yearly fee

Some of these platforms also have added hidden “costs”, such as the amount of time it takes you to accomplish all of their checklists and do all of their requirements. Mobile app stores require frequent updates to games, almost every few months. Can you “pay” for all of that additional time spent?

dev kits for consoles

If you want to port your visual novels to consoles and not go through a publisher, you’re going to have to get into the developer programs for each console maker (which can be very hard) and also pay for the dev kits to publish a game to their consoles. Some dev kits range anywhere from $500-2,000.

Trying to get into these exclusive developer programs and porting your visual novels to consoles is a lot of work – can you justify that amount of time spent on it if you pay yourself?

festivals and event fees

Steam festivals and gaming events are here to stay and are sometimes the best ways to get exposure for your visual novels. Steam festivals are events ran on Steam itself, highlighting a variety of games with some core theme (local co-op, visual novels, horror, etc.). General gaming events are a variety of things, such as in-person events like Tokyo Games Show and online only trailer showcases like Wholesome Games.

While there’s plenty of great, free gaming events & festivals to enter (like the annual Storyteller’s Festival), there are some events with fees attached. Some have a fee if your game is accepted or even a fee to enter your game. Depending on how the event is ran and how well your game matches their audience, you may or may not get a return on your investment.

budget & taxes

Now that you’re a commercial dev, you’ve got to make a budget and stick to it. How much are you going to spend to make this game? Even if you make it all by yourself and don’t have to buy any assets, how much will you pay yourself hourly? And once your decide on that – are you accounting for taxes? Do you know how to file for yourself and as a company?

When I was in college right before covid, they were already amending the old saying of “it takes 2 years before a business is profitable” to “it takes 3-5 years before a business is profitable”. With the lengthy time of development that games can take, I imagine most people will be looking at the 5 year aspect. How do you keep yourself afloat for that?

Some people do it by keeping commercial development as a part-time job, where they use their full-time job to fund development. Some reach out to investors to offer royalties in exchange for funding. Some apply for grants where they can secure funding without having to pay it back. Some host crowdfunding campaigns where they raise the money in a public fashion by offering rewards to backers.

There’s plenty of ways to go about funding and budgeting, but you need to keep 2 things in mind:

1. You have to keep yourself afloat while developing the game.
2. Your first game may not make back it’s budget, much less fund your next game.

audiences

Once you decide to charge money for a game, you’re no longer making it just for yourself – you’re making it for others as well. Whether you want to take the cynical approach that this makes it lesser than a game and becomes a “product” or if you want to take the optimistic approach that this makes it a collaboration between you and the player, the end result is the same – audiences have expectations when they pay for something.

When you buy a ticket to a movie (or rent one, nowadays), you expect that the movie will fulfill some kind of expectation you mentally created based on the title, the poster, the trailer, the genres, etc. The same can be said of games (including free ones, to a lesser extent). Maintaining audience expectations and learning from them is an important part to being a commercial developer.

audience expectations – researched

While you’re still early in development, you should do market research. This can be as simple as browsing through tags on Steam and itch.io for similar games and get as granular as noting down features, key artworks, and more. Market research can inform you on what other similar games exist and what people like (and don’t like) about them.

Here’s some quick examples of market research you can do:

• Browse Steam & itchio tags that you’re considering using
• Browse the top categories & newly released categories for visual novels on Steam & itchio
• Find 3 games similar to yours in terms of length, polish, and aesthetics – see what people are saying about it in reviews and social media
• Gather a collection of screenshots of visual novels
• Gather a collection of key arts & thumbnails for visual novels in your category – do they have any similar branding methods?

Looking at reviews of similar games can be especially enlightening. What parts did players like? What parts did they not like? Were they satisfied with the length of the story, or did they feel it needed work? Were there any features they enjoyed that made the experience even better? Was the price point for the game a “reasonable” cost, or did they feel it was overpriced? (side note: if the game feels overpriced to players, oftentimes that’s a symptom of other issues such as them feeling it’s not long enough, not polished enough, etc.)

audience expectations – response

Art is a collaboration between the creator and the viewer, putting yourself out into the world and being interpreted by strangers. Game development gives artists the opportunity to tweak our art, to refine it and make it better by getting feedback from others via playtesting.

Demos can be a great way to not only see which parts are lacking but it can also help you see how players interpret the story. A good demo should show players a good example of what the full game will be like and leave players wanting more.

Getting player feedback from the demo or during playtesting sessions (such as open betatesting events) via surveys or interviews can be a great way at pinpointing any issues that might exist. When we’re developing a game, we tend to get tunnel vision—we’ve spent so much time with the characters, the world, that we aren’t able to see it from the eyes of someone who’s never experienced it and we become blind to issues. A character’s backstory and motivation may make sense to you, the creator, but you may have forgotten to explain parts of it to the players. You’ve solved this puzzle a hundred times while playtesting it for bugs, but to a new player it may seem obtuse to solve…

audience expectations – realized

Some people will like your game. Some people won’t like your game. Hopefully, more people will like your game than dislike it, but once enough people play it there will always be someone—several someones—who don’t like it and will tell you that and will tell their friends that. That’s normal.

It’s hard to look at our games objectively. They’re our babies that we spend months, years raising before releasing them out into the world. But when you release a commercial game, people expect certain things. They expect it to work. They expect to be able to save their game. They expect it to match the screenshots and marketing copy they’ve seen.

When you buy a meal at a restaurant, you expect it to match what’s on the menu. You expect it to match the ingredients listed, to be cooked the way it said it would be, and for it to be edible. Think of commercial games like that—you’re making a promise to someone in exchange for their hard-earned money. If you don’t want to make that promise to them, then stick to donations only on itchio or kofi.

Sadly, though, sometimes people will be rude no matter what. Look up any visual novel on Steam with more than 50 reviews and you’ll see at least 1 negative review that says “it’s just reading”. There’s not much you can do about things like this.

However, sometimes you’ll get critiques that are harsh but ultimately trying to help. Sometimes the person is rude, but sometimes they’re just thorough. Accepting and understanding critiques is an important part of commercial game dev. Here’s how you can go through critiques:

• Take a deep breath. Good critiques are not critiques of you but rather of pieces of the game you can improve. This isn’t an attack on you.
• What are they really saying? Are they saying “the CGs need more shading”, or are they more vague like “the CGs feel off”? If you can, ask them to be specific with their feelings.
• What parts are actionable and what parts are impossible? A comment like “the music stops and starts randomly” can be fixed with some programming or music edits, but a comment like “the art style is bad” is something you can’t fix easily.
• Are they your audience and how relevant is their advice? Getting feedback is great, but it’s not all going to be relevant. Someone who doesn’t like the fact you have romance in an otome game is probably not your audience and that feedback isn’t relevant.

marketing

And now I get on my soap box.

If you want to sell visual novels, then you have to market your visual novels. “Marketing” is not a dirty word—maybe “advertising” is, depending on your view—as it simply means communicating with others. As defined by the American Marketing Association,

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

American Marketing Association

What does this mean? Simply put, it means if you want to sell a visual novel, you have to first tell people it exists. That’s what it boils down to, really. People can’t—and won’t—buy a game they don’t know exists.

social media =/= marketing

Social media is one aspect of marketing but it is certainly not the entire picture. Don’t jump to creating social media accounts on every site just to call yourself doing something “productive”.

Sit down and create a plan, first off. How are you going to tackle social media? How do you want to tackle it?

A big part of marketing is the research part—it’s figuring out how to communicate your game to others. See what other visual novels are doing! You can learn a lot from your fellow devs.

you’re already marketing

Yeah, hate to break it to you, but you’re kinda already marketing if you’ve decided on the story and art style, even if it’s yet to be announced…

so what do I actually do then?

First, read my guide on how to market visual novels. After that, check out my marketing visual novels FAQ. I’ve also written a guide on fundamentals to marketing indie games and several similar articles on my blog. I’ve written extensively about it.

…After that, though, you should answer these questions.

• What are you making? Really, what is the core of the game?
• How much of the game—artwork, screenshots, concepts, etc.—do you have to show off? How much do you want to show off?
• What is the best way to describe your game? How can you easily tell a stranger what it’s about?
• If you were scrolling through your social media of choice, what kind of post would make you want to share it?
• What kind of timeline are you looking at for the demo? For the full game?
• Do you have any outside funding or need outside funding (such as investors, grants, crowdfunding)?

You’ll need to keep an eye out for Steam festivals to enter. You should befriend fellow developers to learn from (and just make some friends). You’ll need to get good at trying out what sticks and figuring out why it didn’t work—and why other things do work. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to start playing other indie visual novels.

And most of all, you’ll have to realize that this is hard. All of this. There’s an old saying that there’s no money in visual novels. It’s not entirely true—there’s definitely some people out there making money from selling and making VNs—but it is partially true. There’s not much money to be made in VNs, so if you’re going to do this, you need to really love them and understand that you have to stick around for the long haul.

Wow, two months have already gone by in the year! I’ve been busy with release after release this month as well as an impromptu brand new jam—Trans Joy Jam, which just concluded. I’m also busy getting ready for the annual Visual Novel Festival on Steam (as The Storyteller’s Festival just concluded) and my own Otome Games Celebration, the first otome-oriented Steam fest that I’m hosting. This will be the largest scale event I’ve ever ran, but I’m excited!

If you have games on Steam (which you should be doing, if you read this article) then Steam festivals are a must-do. They’re relatively easy ways to earn a lot of wishlists and visibility for your games. You can find a lot of festivals here.

Speaking of game jams, the annual Otome Jam and Josei Jam are coming up in May. I recently created a landing page for both for easier access of previous years, a brief overview of the events, etc.

— Arimia

The post Free VS Commercial Visual Novel Development first appeared on arimia.

Canvas Menagerie was entering its 2nd year of development, I was in the midst of finishing Asphodelium—which was supposed to be a Winter Jam 2023 project—and a separate Winter Jam 2022 project, Lost Lune, that only had a partial amount of progress made on it. Suffice to say, I was somewhat in over my head with unfinished games.

I’m the type that is self motivated while working, but I can get overwhelmed when I have several projects in progress (including game dev, marketing, IRL, etc). So, clearly I needed to actually finish some things, even though my games were just hobby projects.

…But, I also had to start some new projects. An idea I’ve had for a while was an otome sequel to Crimson Waves on the Emerald Sea, something I told myself I wouldn’t make unless I could get a writer and artist to help me with it. Well, guess what my Otome Jam 2024 project was…

In February I set up a new side website—Arimia’s Doujin Den! It’s a little blog for me to share the doujin fan games I’ve collected over the years, many of which no longer have any internet presence at all. It takes a lot of passion and dedication to make an indie game but maybe even a touch more for a fan game, and I don’t want that passion to go to waste. I’ve only catalogued a few so far, but I want to do even more in the future.

However, about halfway through 2024 I was laid off from my software development job very suddenly. I was partially expecting for months to be laid off at any point as the company has lay offs every single month, but it was still incredibly sudden. I had hoped to at least make it through to the end of the year, not only half the year!

I also began doing social media work for Studio Everium, an indie otome studio. I’ve only ever worked at Studio Élan for marketing (and this marks my 5th year there!) so it’s been a fun change of pace to help share even more visual novels to the world. Speaking of Élan, I spent a few weekends this year traveling and attending conventions! We had booths at Offkai Expo and Otakon, where we sold our yuri games and met a lot of fans & fellow developers. It was my first time going to a convention outside of Memphis and was so fun to finally meet so many friends (and make new ones).

At the tail end of the year, I finished rereading Umineko in October (on the 5th, of course), which I hadn’t read since….middle school. It was such a refreshing reread, to not only read something made with so much love for the world but also to confirm that it was just as good—even better, with fresh eyes on the queer narrative—than I remembered. Anyway, that’s what led me to get back into reading novels. I wanted to see some of r07’s inspiration for it, so I picked up And Then There Were None and dived into several other of Christie’s tales, which led me to joining an in-person book club (where all of the members could be my parents/grandparents…!) to force myself to get out more.

Projects

Canvas Menagerie

My main goal for 2024 was to finish writing Canvas Menagerie, but my secret internal goal was to finish the entire game—and I did! Just a couple of weeks ago I managed to release it to the world after 3 years of solo development. It’s not exactly what I envisioned it being when I started outlining it (and I definitely chunked and rewrote my outlines several times), but I’m still happy with how it came out.

I’m also happy to finally have a commercial game out that doesn’t have my writings & art from early college (that’s practically high school…!!). It’s something I’ve been somewhat self conscious about for a few years—to be honest, I don’t like my prior commercial works. I can only look at them and cringe somewhat, knowing how old the writing and art is. Now I finally have a commercial project I’m (mostly) proud of.

The final game ended up being 138k words with 15+ CGs and 10+ character sprites. I did all of the work on the project, outside of the backgrounds, music, and GUI design. I’m thankful for all of the people who supported the project to the end!

I was also able to do a lifelong goal—have a physical release for one of my games!

These were handmade by myself. I think they came out pretty cute~

Asphodelium

My other main goal for 2024 was to finish and release Asphodelium. Well, about that….

I did end up finishing it, releasing it in January. That version was right at 40k words long with 1 story line and 2 slightly different endings. But, well… I wanted to do more with it!

I got several extremely positive comments after releasing it and I loved writing Aster & Hazel’s push-and-pull relationship, so I started secretly working on an expansion afterwards. The main story already covers a lot of ideas regarding cults, but I wanted to expand upon it even more. There’s plenty more aspects I want to touch on such as the depersonalization cult members experience and the idea of self identity after leaving a cult. It’s a completely different vibe from the comfyness of Canvas Menagerie, to say the least!

I’m currently aiming to make it a full commercial release sometime in the first half of 2025 by adding a new story path (with at least a couple of new endings), at least 25k more words, and several new CGs. I’ve already written 14k words and drawn 2 new CGs, so it’s progressing smoothly. This will be the main project I’m working on going into 2025.

Crimson Waves on the Emerald Sea: Amaranthine Moon

As mentioned before, I couldn’t go the entire year without starting a new long-term project of course. I began preparing as soon as Asphodelium was out the door to attempt a sequel to my 2021 fantasy mystery visual novel Crimson Waves on the Emerald Sea. I say “attempt” as I went into the planning phase sure that I would only make it if I was able to find solid partners to make the projects with—after all, I had enough projects to work on solo! It’s been years since I directed a project without my writing and art, so I wanted to give it a shot again.

I was lucky to find Runa Winters to helm the writing based off of my terribly shoddy outline & character notes, Iron to edit it into a cohesive narrative, and Dule to bring the colorful cast to life. Together, we were able to get a demo out and also later get featured on the IGN YouTube as part of the Dames 4 Games Fall Showcase!

Witch You Want

Over at Élan, in September we wanted to try something new—a game jam! Several of us had already entered game jams in the past (and I had just finished a game jam—more on that later), so we thought it’d be a good way to rejuvenate ourselves and our creative juices.

I lead a team with Natasha Luna providing her wonderful writing and Dani creating our own magic with their lovely illustrations. The premise is simple—a local witch desperately needs help making enough potions for the festival that weekend. She’s just, like, only slightly incompetent and ditzy. Slightly.

We made the game in under a month alongside 3 other yuri visual novels from the game jam. I did all of the programming, with some outside assistance from Feniks. I think it turned out pretty cute!

Dahlia

Around April I got the itch to join a game jam (we hadn’t decided to do an internal jam at Élan quite yet) and became interested in the Velox series of jams. They’re Ludum Dare-inspired visual novel game jams which is absolutely perfect for me. I got my start making games with Ludum Dare, as a bunch of my first visual novels were Ludum Dare entries. They taught me how to actually make a game from start to finish and set deadlines for myself.

I entered Velox Formido, which was by far the strictest game jam I’ve ever entered. You have 36 hours to make a visual novel. Still, somehow I was able to make a story with 2 character sprites and multiple endings in the time frame. I think it came out rather nice, as the art direction came out exactly as I imagined.

Starlit Regrets

After entering Velox Formido, I found I really liked the format and was eager to enter the next in the series. In August they held Velox Fabula 2, a 10 day long version of the jam. This gave me a lot more room to work with my idea—maybe a bit too much!

Starlit Regrets is a melancholic story focused on reminiscing and letting the player guide the narrative, both the past and present. It has quite a few different scenes in it depending on choices and 5 endings over 15k words long (I don’t know how I was able to churn out that much in such a short time)! Most of my long visual novels are very linear, so it’s fun to try branching narratives for my shorter games.

Articles

Continuing from last year, I interviewed other visual novel developers! I was lucky to have Katelyn from GB Patch Games, Gabby from Two and a Half Studios, and Tony & Abby from Black Tabby Games all sit down with me in 2024 to talk about their visual novels and how they approach the medium.

Interviewing other developers is still a bit nerve-wracking for me, but it always turns out to be a fun and informative experience.

After getting home from Offkai Expo, I wrote up an overview of our (wonderful) experiences as well as some takeaways from it. We had a great time selling there, but it’s not something that can easily be replicated…!

And continuing from last year’s article looking over Mahoyo’s very questionable marketing campaign, I took a look at both Mahoyo and Tsukihime remake‘s approach to visual direction. So no badmouthing Aniplex this time, but instead praising Type-Moon’s art direction.

My last blog post for the year was also partially a postmortem for Canvas Menagerie. I’ve been on a lot of projects in varying states of being finished, so it was a big relief to finally finish my 3 year long project. I hope it’ll help other developers push themselves across the finish line…!

Art

This year I did a lot of art assets! 4 of the images here are in-game assets and 4 are promotional artworks for the games.

I also participated in Umitober this year, an Inktober-inspired month-long art event where you draw Umineko arts based on different themes each day. Most of my submissions were sketches as I wanted to just try a bunch of different poses and focus on quantity over quality—the best way to get better is to draw a lot, so I used it as pose practice.

Goals

2024 Goals:

• Fully write Act 3 of Canvas Menagerie: This was the lite version of this goal. I actually wanted to fully finish the visual novel but didn’t want to overshoot, as I was still working a full time job. Suffice to say I cleared this goal with flying colors.
• Release the full version & an artbook for Asphodelium: I actually forgot I was going to release an artbook with the original release… Well, I hope I’ll release one with the extended cut next year. I made an artbook for Canvas Menagerie which was a lot of fun, so I want to do it again.
• Go to an out-of-town convention: I’ve never been to an anime convention outside of Memphis…until now! I was able to travel to Offkai Expo and Otakon this year which was so amazing.
• Share more VNs I like: I was able to do this as well! I’ve started sharing my favorites from Spooktober after the event as well as cataloguing some of the doujin games I own on Neocities. It’s fun to be able to share some of the visual novel gems I’ve played.

2025 Goals:

• Release the extended version for Asphodelium: In January I released the “full” version of Asphodelium, but as mentioned I want to extend it even more. This edition isn’t too far from being done, so I hope to release it in the first half of 2025.
• Release Crimson Waves on the Emerald Sea: Amaranthine Moon: CWES: AM has had a lot of progress on the writing front, so I need to get back to scripting it…! We were originally thinking of releasing it Q1 2025 but want to give it more time in the oven. It’s only been in development for half a year as of now, so a later 2025 release would be great.
• Fill an entire sketchbook: I have a sketchbook from 2 years ago I started for doing pose practice and this year I want to finally fully use the sketchbook with practices. Not full arts—just practicing everything.
• Get back to kanji studies: I feel like this is a goal for a lot of people, hah. Given how often I try to navigate JP websites and play JP games, I need to get back to learning JP!
• Document more doujin games: One of the hobbies I started in 2024 was archiving doujin games I have, as many don’t have any documentation online anymore. This is still a side project of mine, but I want to continue blogging about doujin games (namely fangames) and sharing these gems.

2024 certainly had a lot of ups and downs and changes and curveballs. Looking back on it, it was a better year for me than I thought it would be (and remember it being). I was able to finally travel on my own, meet so many friends, try new things, and find new joys.

I’m very nervous going into 2025 as my first year being a fulltime freelancer. I’ve got some cushions set in place, but it’s still a bit nerve-wracking. Now that I’m no longer in my early 20s, things are changing—but in a way, I’ve been finding myself through it. I want to be in visual novels for many more years to come. I love making visual novels, playing visual novels, talking about visual novels. I want to spend time with my friends, flying out to see them and going to conventions where I’m able to meet even more amazing people.

I hope this year will be kind to us all. Cultivate the space you want to live in and help the people you care about.

— Arimia

The post 2024 Year in Review first appeared on arimia.

As I procrastinate finishing Canvas Menagerie—which releases in 4 days as I write this—I wanted to talk about the incredible miracle of actually finishing and shipping indie games.

starting is hard…

Taking the first step to start a new game is a tough one. Do you start with concept art? Outlining? Character bios? Mood boards? There’s really no bad way to start making a game other than not starting. However you want to go about it- as long as you make that first jump – is up to you.

…but finishing is harder.

They say the last 10%—well, really the last 5%—of development is the hardest, and it definitely feels true when you’re in the thick of it. Play testing, bug fixing, small edits you pushed off to later—it all adds up.

What’s worse is that you start running off of fumes rather than fixation and can lose steam—and love for the project—the longer it drags on. How can we avoid burning yourself out before the project is released?

know your project

Really, truly, know your project. What are you making? Why are you making it? What is your goal with it? Knowing your project in and out is the first step to being able to actually finish it.

outline

Is your outline up to date and accurate? An old outline can throw you off course it you use it as a guide, but an up to date outline can highlight parts you missed.

When I’m getting ready for a demo or a full game release, I make a list of all the assets the release will need. This can include:

• Character outfits
• Backgrounds
• Scenes left to be edited

But it can (and should) be as granular as:

• Niko needs an angry eyebrow expression and a pouting mouth
• Sunset variation of the cafe background
• Choice hover image
• Sword strike sound effect
• Chapter 5 scene 2 proofreading

An asset list of what is left is great but its entirely useless if its not detailed enough to actually tell you what is left. “Music” is not helpful but “2 romantic tracks, one slower and one faster, both around 2 minutes long” is. “Formal wear for all characters” is somewhat helpful but “suits for Niko, Ren, and Rose” is much better. The more specific you can get, the better.

If you don’t know what is actually left in the game, then how will you actually finish it?

play your game

This was a piece of advice provided by my friend Vimi when I asked him how he’d advise someone on this. Basically, he said you should play your game. A lot.

Get in the habit of frequently playing your game – don’t be afraid to launch it. Go through it and take notes on things. How does it feel to play it? Does it feel stiff? Fluid? What actually needs changing versus what you want to change? Do you really need to update the character art or are there more pressing matters to finish? How will players feel while playing it?

Looking at your game objectively can be hard, but at the end of the day if you stay in a spiral of constantly trying to update parts of it, you’ll never finish it. A game that’s released can later be updated and expanded upon, but the important part is that it’s released.

know yourself

set realistic expectations

Being able to set and meet dead lines is an important part of being a team lead and actually finishing things. It’s okay to overestimate and not always hit your deadline, but you have to take that experience and adjust accordingly. How long does it take you / your artist to finish a character sprite and how many are left? How long does it take for a scene to be scripted?

If you don’t know how long it takes for a part of the game to be done (for instance, how long it takes for 1 CG to go from concept -> fully drawn), then time yourself / your team. If you look back at your messages, did it take the artist 1 week to go from a sketch to fully finished or 1 month? Those are big differences, especially when you multiply that time with the amount of work left to do.

What happens if there are set backs? What if someone gets sick, or their computer gets corrupted, or they’re without power? Do you have backups for the project in place, such as version control (like GitHub) and alternate plans for how things can get finished? There is rarely ever a timeline that goes perfectly.

At the end of the day, it’s up to you, the lead, if the game gets released or not.

don’t leave everything for “later”

Later will always come sooner than…later. If you want to actually publish a game, then you have to tackle that “later” eventually.

Don’t put off everything for later, because chances are you’ll either run out of time for it or completely forget about it in the first place. If you see something is off about the way the GUI transitions from a set of screens, then note it down to look at or ask someone on the team to tackle it.

There are some parts of game dev, like setting up the Steam page, that you absolutely cannot push off for later (did you know Valve recommends a minimum of 6 months for your page to be up before release?), so be honest with yourself when you push something off. Is this something you can actually leave for later or is it something you need to sit down and get done now?

scope knife now

You’ve left some things for later, but what are things you shouldn’t focus on at all? Does your game need 10+ different types of customization for the protagonist, or can you do it with just a few varieties? Should each love interest get a different background for every single one of their dates, or is it okay to reuse some backgrounds & locations across routes?

The scope of the project is the entirety of it. All of the art, the writing, the programming, every single capsule artwork Steam asks you to remake in 3429573290 different sizes—every aspect of the game is part of its overall scope. A visual novel with 4 love interests with 100k+ words is a much bigger scoped game than something you can feasibly make in a month by yourself, while a visual novel with 3 short endings and only 5k words is a very small scoped game.

Managing your scope goes hand in hand with setting an asset outline and not adding to it. If you’re constantly adding things to be finished, then the game will never be finished. At some point you have to draw the line in the sand and say that this is all you’re going to work on.

At the same time, sometimes you need to realize when a feature or a part of the game isn’t necessary for the entire project to be finished. Not every project needs a glossary of terms. Not every project needs a new CG for every chapter. Cutting down on scope is a life-saving measure—if the scope is never trimmed back to a manageable size, the game will never be done.

The great thing about this though is that it doesn’t have to be permanent. Games aren’t like books where they’re rarely updated past the first release. Visual novels can be patched just like any other kind of game, and with that means you can always go back and add additional features, art, story lines, and more to your game. If there was a feature you really loved but couldn’t get it down to a manageable size before release, you can always tackle it later after you see how people respond to the first release. Visual novels don’t have to be a one and done—you can always come back to them later.

learn to prioritize

What is truly important for the project to get done? Do the backgrounds all need to be replaced, or are they fine as-is because most players won’t be looking at the game with a magnifying glass for months like you are? Do you really need to adjust the CG for this scene or is it fine like it is?

If you don’t prioritize some parts over others, the game won’t come out. You’ll be stuck in a cycle of working on different parts—or worse, not finishing any parts—forever.

One thing I prioritized while making Canvas Menagerie was having a wide variety of outfits for the cast, as they’re all professional actors. Very few characters have multiple arm poses, but the main cast has 5+ outfits each, with some having 10+ outfits. Some of these outfits are simple recoloring with slight modifications like jewelry, but I knew having a variety of outfits would make things more interesting and be easier on me to draw than a few arm poses, as the characters would need multiple outfits regardless.

Your characters may not need multiple outfits depending on the situations they’re in and scope of the project. It all depends on what you want to prioritize.

how do you do it?

Now that we’ve reached the ending, it’s the 22nd as I write this—I released Canvas Menagerie a few days ago. It took me 3 years to make it on and off by myself as a labor of love (until I got laid off earlier this year). I’ve outlined most of the ways of how I was able to finish it, but here’s a few extra points to cap things off:

• I knew my project.
  • From the beginning, I envisioned it as a 3 Act set-up, where each Act would have it’s own mini story and partial resolution but tying into the overall narrative. I wanted each Act to be around 50k words with a heavy focus on romance, though the 2nd & 3rd Acts would focus on a growing relationship while dating rather than the meet-cute in Act 1.
  • I knew the cast would be a medium size, but most of the attention would be on the main couple, Niko & Ren. Everyone else was a supporting character for both the show and their relationship. However, I limited the cast and only added characters as I went on if they would be able to provide a push & pull for them, such as adding parents into the mix.
  • As I was doing everything, I prioritized drawing things that would best illustrate what I wanted out of each scene while also making the programming easier. A bar CG helps illustrate a break from the norm better than just having character sprites and also is a lot quicker to script than character expressions changing and such.
• I knew myself.
  • Canvas Menagerie was not the 1st visual novel I’ve made solo nor the 10th. I know my approximate work speed when it comes to art, writing, etc. and can estimate deadlines around that. However, even then I’m still prone to overestimating my speed. Be patient with yourself but also be honest with yourself.
  • When it wasn’t my fulltime job, I tried to do a little bit of work every week on it. Sometimes that was drawing character outfits, sometimes that was writing a scene, sometimes that was fixing the GUI. There’s a lot that needs to be worked on to finish a visual novel, but the important thing is that you make yourself work on it. Sometimes you have to push yourself to open the files. Find something that you feel like working on that day and stick to it.

At the end of the day, you’re the only one who can see the project to the finish line. How will you do it?

I felt like this would be a good article to cap the year off with—an article summing up what I’ve been doing the past few months while also hopefully being of aid to others. Finishing games is hard! It never ends up being what you thought it would look like, but that’s okay. The fact that it’s done is what counts.

This was the “capstone” of finishing my 3 year long project, Canvas Menagerie. It still feels weird to call it “done”—I jumped around to various other projects during its development, so in a way it still feels like I’m doing that. But the game is done. I was able to release an artbook with it at launch and have no plans on additional stories or content—maybe a free side story in the future, but nothing right now. I even made physical copies for it by hand!

2025 will be my first year being a fulltime visual novel developer and freelance marketer. It’s a bit scary thinking about it. I’m still figuring out my plans for next year and will share them in my yearly wrap up post next week.

Happy holidays and merry Christmas!

— Arimia

The post How to Finish your Indie Visual Novel first appeared on arimia.

Today I’ll be talking to Tony Howard-Arias and Abby Howard, the developer duo at Black Tabby Games about their work on Slay the Princess and Scarlet Hollow!

Arimia: Hi Tony and Abby, thank you for sitting down with me to talk about Slay the Princess! It’s not your first visual novel, so I’m wondering what got you two into visual novels, and if you have any favorite VNs?

Tony: A lot of my influences come more from the point and click and adventure game genre than full-on visual novels. So things like Telltale’s The Walking Dead and Life is Strange were big initial inspiration points of what people can do with interactive narratives. As well as a lot of Bioware RPGs from back in the day — Knights of the Old Republic was a formative experience for me, as was Dragon Age: Origins and the Mass Effect Series. In terms of more contemporary influences there, Disco Elysium is huge huge huge for me, and I really enjoyed The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide when they first released.

That’s not to say that I haven’t read many VNs though! I want to say Hatoful Boyfriend was my first one, and I’ve also really enjoyed South Scrimshaw, Eliza, If Found, and Song of Saya and Long Live the Queen are standouts for me personally.

Working in visual novels felt like a good medium to use to bridge my interest in interactive narratives and Abby’s already formidable skillset as a graphic novelist. There’s a huge overlap, IMO between comics and VNs as mediums that really take advantage of the intersection of art and writing.

Abby: So I first got into working on visual novels because of their similarity to the work I was already doing in comics. It’s certainly different in a lot of ways, but it felt like something I would be able to branch out into with the skills I’d built in my time in the comics mines.

As for my favorites…. honestly the one that stuck with me the most was Saya no Uta. The ability of visual novels and games in general to place the player in the shoes of a protagonist means that even games where there are only one or two major branching points still feel highly impactful, which is really interesting and beautiful to me!

We first got talking about working together on something like this when chatting with a friend at NYC Comic-Con about a demon dating simulator. It reminded me of a horror visual novel I’d wanted to make years and years earlier, and Tony and I both kind of turned to each other and said “Why don’t we….?” And in a few hours we’d outlined the start of Scarlet Hollow!

Arimia: I can definitely see the inspiration from some of these in your works, with the meshing of psychological horror and extremely branching narratives.

Your first visual novel, Scarlet Hollow, is an episodic early access release while your most recent game, Slay the Princess, is a self-contained story, albeit with a lot of branching paths. What made you want to try something so branching? Is there a release style you prefer?

Tony: So much of Slay the Princess came out of the constraints we put on ourselves so it would minimally slow down Scarlet Hollow’s development. Art is a real bottleneck for us, since Abby personally hand-draws EVERYTHING in our games, so when we started playing around with the ideas that eventually would become StP, we knew we wanted to limit the scale of the environment as well as how many characters Abby would have to draw.

This has a really fun side effect where because things were minimized so much, we could very thoroughly explore a broad and complete set of possible choices. Scarlet Hollow already has a ton of branching in it, but it’s much harder there to, say, have the player reject the call to adventure in episode one of seven, while in Slay the Princess, we’re able to give players that choice and run with it! Very fun from a writing perspective, even if it’s also very challenging.

Abby: As for which release style we prefer, I definitely prefer being able to give people everything at once, as it’s just a cleaner experience and there’s less waiting involved for the players—however, I do think both have their merits!

Scarlet Hollow is a particular kind of mystery game where it benefits from an audience that has time between episodes to speculate. I know this is something Tony enjoyed about episodic mystery games in the past, being able to speculate with other fans and explore a story as it unfolded, and was part of why we decided to go with an episodic release schedule in the first place. It also helped a lot with initial funding, as a release would give us a bit of a boost so we could keep our studio going until the next episode was done.

I, on the other hand, am someone who likes to be able to read/play something in one big obsessive burst, so we differ in that way!

Arimia: Yeah, there’s definitely pros and cons to episodic releases from even just a community aspect – getting that feedback and player insight in stages is valuable, but you’re also essentially rereleasing the game with every episode.

In a similar vein, is there any marketing lessons you learned during Scarlet Hollow that better prepared you for Slay the Princess?

Tony: Oh, so many! A lot of early work we did on Slay the Princess was specifically taking away lessons from what did (and mostly didn’t) work for Scarlet Hollow.

The biggest lesson we learned was that we really needed a tight pitch. Something we noticed with Scarlet Hollow was that once they started playing it, people tended to like it a lot — Episode 4 has a 60% completion rate according to Steam achievements. And that meant we had a ton of good word of mouth. But at the same time, getting people into the door was hard, and a lot of that came down to the pitch.

Scarlet Hollow needs time to describe to someone — the shortest pitch we have (other than “made by the devs of Slay the Princess”) is still a few sentences long, and even then, you still don’t have a super good idea what the game is about. Players have very short attention span when they browse markets like Steam, and that’s by necessity. Some 14,000 games have already released this year! So of course players only have a few seconds to decide if they’re interested in something.

Slay the Princess has a much quicker pitch — just the capsule art/title/one sentence description on Steam is enough for most people to get at least a little interested.

The other unfortunate lesson we learned from Scarlet Hollow is that early access is hard. It’s a turnoff for a lot of people, or, if we want to use softer language, a TON of people would rather wait until a game is finished before they pick it up. Which is totally fair and understandable! But you need to be able to keep the lights on until your full release. We initially imagined Slay the Princess to be quite a bit shorter than Scarlet Hollow so we could skip early access. Originally it was scoped at around 60,000 words (vs the first 4 episodes of SH coming in at 580,000.) On release that had crept up to 140k, and now it’s at 194k with the Pristine Cut, but once we got into the meat of development we knew we already had a hit on our hands so we were able to put those extra resources into the game.

The last lesson we learned was that visual novels are just… hard to market on social media. They’re very static, which makes their trailers feel bad compared to other games, especially with how important video has become for promoting things. This is part of the reason we added more dynamic effects and animations to Slay the Princess, and this combined with the smaller scope of the game is why we decided to add voice acting, which was absolutely huge both in terms of the game picking up on platforms like Twitter and Tiktok, and for the overall quality of the full release.

Arimia: The smaller you can get your pitch down, the easier it becomes to market, but on the flip-side, you end up losing a lot of nuance and the essence of a story when you boil it down so much—it’s a tricky slope! And like you said, most visual novels are not really social media darlings, as they’re static and require you to read the dialogue/narration on screen (which can be very tiny depending on the resolution), so it’s great that you found a way around that.

Were there any parts of marketing Slay the Princess that made you realize you had to change course?

Tony: There wasn’t anything like that from the marketing side, but knowing when something isn’t working and not being precious with it is, I’d like to say, one of our strengths as a studio. There were quite a few story structures and routes in the demo that weren’t working for us for a variety of reasons once we switched to working on the full game, so we were quick to drop them and move on to new ideas.

Our general rule of thumb there is that if it isn’t fun or interesting for us to write, it won’t be fun or interesting to read/play!

Abby: I feel like it was a tight pitch from the start, and that pitch has been effective for us throughout the course of the game’s development! The first couple sentences of the game itself kind of do the work for us. It just intrigues people, I think!

Arimia: That makes sense – it feels like a very tight pitch from the beginning. Having such a clear vision of what you’re making makes marketing so much easier. I see a lot of people struggle with that because they’re trying to sell something they don’t full understand themselves.

Were there any games you took inspiration from?

Tony: For marketing, not really, and I think that’s a better way to operate. Every game is this unique thing, and the best marketing will always be bespoke for a given title. You have to figure out what’s special about yours that you want to communicate, and to figure out the best way to get that message across. I guess we took some inspiration from Scarlet Hollow, our other game, in terms of really drilling out what our points of friction were, and also understanding what about our work people connect with.

You have to figure out what’s special about yours that you want to communicate, and to figure out the best way to get that message across.

Tony Howard-Arias

Ultimately, you need to be your authentic self when you’re sharing something, and your work has to be an authentic extension of yourself as well. The further you get away from that, the harder it’s going to be to get things to pick up steam.

You see this a lot with game publishers, who, at least on social, often wind up floundering and not gaining a lot of traction, because they talk about their games stiffly. You can always tell when marketing language isn’t coming from the developer.

Arimia: Definitely. I see a lot of developers looking to hire marketing firms / people hoping it’ll be an easy solution, but the reality of it is that marketing is a much more complex, unique thing that needs to be tailored to the individual game – you wouldn’t just hire “an artist” for a game, as you’d want a specific art style that fits what you’re aiming for.

We discussed a bit about how visual novels can be hard to market on social media due to the nature of the medium, but what do you think was the least effective thing marketing-wise for Slay the Princess?

Tony: It’s hard to point to a single “least effective” marketing angle for Slay the Princess. I think one of the greatest challenges for both of our games is just how spoiler-heavy their most interesting imagery is. And because of this, there’s a LOT about Slay the Princess (and Scarlet Hollow) that we just can’t share on social.

With all games, there’s also just a baseline question of what platforms are going to work best for them — it’s important to try multiple different avenues when you try to reach fans, because it’s never one-size-fits all. A lot of people see marketing success on Instagram, while that’s never worked for us. Likewise, I know a lot of devs struggle to connect with fans (as opposed to devs) on Twitter, but Twitter has always had particularly strong returns.

Arimia: We talked previously about how Scarlet Hollow is bolstered by word of mouth. When I look at your social media, I see a lot of fan interaction, fan art, and more. For developers who are more introverted and shy, what advice would you give them about possibly interacting with fans?

Tony: An unfortunate aspect of being a small developer is that you can’t be shy. If you don’t advocate for your work, it’s going to drown in the 200+ games that release on Steam every week. But ideally you’re doing more than just posting into the void about your work.

I always like to make sure that everything we do pushes people somewhere. That is, if they find our Steam page, maybe they play our demo. If they finish our demo, maybe the demo sends them to our discord or mailing list or social platforms. The more fans you’re able to collect in one place, the easier it is to get traction with each new announcement. And once you’re in a place where announcements start to gain more organic traction, it feels less bad to post!

Arimia: I think a lot of devs see marketing more as a means to an end rather than a pipeline or process—thinking of it in terms of a funnel (where did someone find my game? where will they go after that? how can I keep them interested in learning more?) helps shape a broader scope around release.

Since a lot of the game’s discoverability came from word of mouth, do you think press and streamers significantly helped share the game, or do you think it led to potential players getting spoiled about the narrative?

Tony: For both of our games, streamers have had an outsized impact in growing our audience. Gab Smolders did wonders for Scarlet Hollow’s early longevity, and ManlyBadassHero wound up really amplifying Slay the Princess’ first demo. And then a ton of other streamers helped at, and post launch.

There’s a very real concern that streamers picking up narrative games has a negative impact, and I do think that in most cases, that’s true. We’ve managed to sidestep this issue by having an absolutely huge amount of variation in our games, to the point where, unless you’re intentionally making the same decisions as someone you just watched, odds are your experience in Scarlet Hollow or Slay the Princess is going to be different than whatever experience you saw someone else have.

And the structure of our games make it obvious that this is the case, too! So if anything, seeing a streamer make different decisions than a given player might make pushes them to play on their own.

This also brings us to a very important question I ask a lot of VN devs who come to us for advice, which is “why are you making a VN?” (As opposed to a comic, a book, a movie, etc.) When you set out to tell a story, it’s important to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the medium you work in. I think VNs—and video games as a whole—are a fantastic medium if player agency or involvement is a vital part of your story. This doesn’t mean you have to make a choice-driven VN, but if you’re not, I immediately want to know the why of a project. Why is a VN the best way to tell your story?

When you set out to tell a story, it’s important to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the medium you work in. I think VNs—and video games as a whole—are a fantastic medium if player agency or involvement is a vital part of your story.

Tony Howard-Arias

On the press side of things… they can be helpful, but I think one of the most important things for you to do as a developer is to find a way to not be reliant on them. They’re so strapped for funds and employees that at this point, they’re all backwards looking. They might jump on a trend once it’s proving to be successful, but it’s very rare for them to stick their necks out for something new.

And if they do show up, the sales impact will probably be underwhelming. Scarlet Hollow being Game of the Year for an editor at Kotaku moved maybe 100 copies. Meanwhile, Markiplier playing Slay the Princess moved about 50,000 more copies than usual in a month. (Do not expect a streamer or YouTuber to do this for you, even if a big one plays your game. This is an outsized conversion rate.) To give a more reasonable metric, prior to Slay the Princess being announced, we could trace about 15% of Scarlet Hollow’s total playerbase to Gab Smolders.

Back to the press, I think a good way to look at the them is that if they show up for you, it’s a sign you’re doing something right, but if they don’t show up for you, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done anything wrong. Especially as the media landscape’s drought gets worse, and especially when it comes to VNs.

Slay the Princess has performed exceptionally well for an indie game, and it took us nearly three weeks following The Pristine Cut’s release to get enough reviews on a single platform to get a metacritic score. It’s hard and getting coverage won’t necessarily change your trajectory.

Arimia: Definitely, streamers can help games more than hurt them in my opinion. A lot of our most vocal fans are streamers and their audiences come to love the characters in the stories by experiencing it together with the streamers – it’s a connection for both parties.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give to fellow VN devs?

Tony: I think the main piece of advice I’d have is just re-iterating something from my previous answer: ask yourself why you’re making a VN. If you don’t have a strong answer, then you’re going to struggle to market your game to people.

Likewise, you need to ask yourself “why would someone read my VN?” As opposed to reading a different VN, or playing a different game, or watching TV or going on a walk. So much of marketing is just finding a way to connect with people who are going to connect with your work, and you need to find a succinct way to explain what you’re offering them. Time is finite, and there are so many ways to spend it these days. Convincing people to give that time to you is the toughest ask you’re going to make — it’s even tougher than getting people to give you money.

Arimia: Finally, my most important question—which princess do people like the most / are most vocal for?

Tony: Even after the new release, it’s gotta be the Thorn. There’s just something about her that speaks to people. Witch and Razor are a close second a third, though!

And there you go, an insight into the development process for Slay the Princess and how they approach marketing at Black Tabby Games! Be sure to check out Slay the Princess — The Pristine Cut now that it’s released on Steam and itchio.

Bluesky – YouTube

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