Trying to get myself in the habit of doing weekly updates instead of monthly ones.
By the time I get to the end of the month I forget half the stuff I did during it.

Last week’s update was just a Patreon Post, but after going through all the trouble of making this dev blog site I should actually start using it to dev blog, eh?

Anyway, here’s what’s up:

1. The Little Black Bestiary: The Salted Cookies of Carthaginia sold about 200 copies in it’s launch week. My goal sales number to consider it “successful” is 1000 copies sold, so we’re about a fifth of the way there! I guess by some standards that’s not a great launch, but considering the low budget, scope and content of the game and the fact that we’ve done minimal marketing I’m not too worried about trying to fit the “explosive launch” paradigm games publishing tends to strive for. My plan is to try to keep interest alive by adding more scenes in an (early) August and (early) September content update; tying to keep a trickle of sales going, and then meet or exceed that sales goal on a wave of Haloween marketing in October.

2. On that note, been working on the script edit for that part 2 update; and got the first draft for the part 3 update back from Elizzyviolet as well.

3. Also been working on prototyping minigames for the next LBB mini-episode. Not much to screenshot yet and nothing in a state that can be shared publicly, but basically it’s a sort of rhythm-based “tap to the beat” sorta minigame. Something I’ve been playing around with the concept of is a rhythm game that *doesn’t* use a “note highway” like DDR or Guitar Hero do that relies as much on “pure audio” feedback as possible. A rhythm game seems like a real natural fit for an erotic game, except the part where you can’t actually look at the visuals because you need to laser focus on a UI. Unfortunately the beat-tapping game didn’t quite meet my hopes for being all that fun on it’s own, so I’m trying out a few other minigame ideas for my prototypes.

4. Job Hunting: On a personal note one of the things hampering game dev progress at this point is my day job. It’s the 1-2 punch of being low pay at high-ish hours, so it’s eating into dev time without really bolstering my budget enough. In order to go full time on game dev I’d need at least 10x our current sales/patreon revenue. (I need enough to survive *and* still pay artists and others. Hence the “at least”)  In the meantime, I’m hoping to find some higher paying work that’ll either be on a better schedule for getting game dev time in, or at least give me enough money to hire more regular help to get that game dev time in. I found a couple local openings that are a big step up from my current job on both those fronts, so here’s hoping.

5. Also the prototype for that action game is coming along nicely. Still not ready to reveal the details yet, but hoping to reveal it by the end of the month.

 

Side note:
I’m thinking maybe I should just disable the comment feature on here because literally the only comments I get are things like THIS lovely gem:

{twitter post}
Yeaaaaah. That’s some serious SEO right there.

A little late, but happy new year, everyone!

 

2020 hasn’t exactly gone as well as I would have liked. Well, that’s the general sentiment all around, but I’m specifically referring to how things have gone with CyberScherzo Studios as a game dev group and how we’ve stalled out on releasing content. Rather than pick a scapegoat or try to find excuses, I’ll say it’s become evident that I really need to step up my game in the areas of project management and producing.   I want to do better in 2021. I need to do better in 2021. To start with I’m currently taking some online classes and reading through some books to learn some proper project management skills. (also some writing and game dev books, because why not?)

The big change I want to make this year is to put out content much more regularly. However, I don’t want to start crunching and put pressure on my team to finish our current projects ASAP. Instead, I’m going to double down on even more unfinished projects  begin introducing what I’m currently referring to “mini-episodes” of the Little Black Bestiary. Amaryllis and Noire’s episodes got feature creeped a bit and have much longer scripts and bigger plans than our first couple episodes and they’re just taking way longer for a bunch of part-timers to make than I’d planned. (hence needing that project management class). I’m going to keep the ball rolling on those, but since the script is done on Noire’s episode, I had the writers whom were working on that spend January making scripts for really short (ie: 1-2 scenes long, less than 10k words) mini-Vns using some of the characters that haven’t gotten ‘screen time’ yet. I have first drafts for two of them, with two more being worked on. I’m planning to bring in a new artist or two to work on making CGs for those minis and hopefully establish a workflow where we can release them regularly while still keeping the ball rolling on the bigger, more ambitious games.

Also, when I started The Little Black Bestiary as a project, I was a little worried about having way more characters than I could actually use for anything and that the time and that resources spent on designing new characters and making profiles could be better spend towards making ‘full’ games, but the mini episode plan takes that fear away a bit. So expect us to be putting out more character profiles as well and expanding the website. I figure it wouldn’t altogether be a bad thing to take a similar approach to the Monstergirl Encyclopedia and introduce a lot of character profiles, and then start making more elaborate content using the characters that become the most popular.

Besides that, I should hopefully have a trailer and steam page for “A midsummer night’s barcrawl” (Amaryllis’s episode) up by the end of February.

Happy Halloween!

In the spirit of the holiday I have decided to resurrect the decrepit rotting corpse that is my blog and give it new life!

So let kick things off with a game recommendation post!

Sure, Halloween is more of a “kids” holiday, but plenty of us grownups are accustomed to dressing up and going to Halloween parties, and as such, Halloween falling on a Saturday this year would have been awesome if not for these pesky Covid-19 spikes. 

So, I’ve taken the liberty of rounding up some of the more interesting 18+ horror games you can play (or re-play!) to help you still have a Happy Halloween at home!

Anthophobia

https://www.sourjelly.com/anthophobia

The obligatory zombie-survival game on the list, but with a plant-themed twist. The game is a bit linear, but has several secrets to uncover in each level so it’ll actually probably take you a few playthroughs to discover everything.

 

Succubus Prison

http://tokinokogiri.sakura.ne.jp/sindex.html

https://www.dlsite.com/ecchi-eng/work/=/product_id/RE174492.html

Succubus Prison is an 2d exploration puzzle “escape room” style game in which the protagonist is trapped in a house with three murderous succubi and must figure out how to escape. After a lot of trial-and-error and getting drained to death many, many times via animated sex sceenes, you might eventually piece together the mystery of the house and finally figure out how to escape. 

Yami’s Mysterious Mansion/やみの不思議な館

https://www.dlsite.com/ecchi-eng/work/=/product_id/RE258095.html

Yami’s Mysterious Mansion is a first person exploration/puzzle game where you make your way through mostly linear puzzle stages while developing a relationship with the ghost girl that lives there. The erotic sceenes are in 3d and fully animated. The game lacks an English patch, but the puzzles are mainly environmental so it’s playable to those with minimal japanese skills. 

SHRIFT

https://www.dlsite.com/ecchi-eng/work/=/product_id/RE209839.html

Translation: https://ulmf.org/threads/shrift-translation-version-2-0-machine-and-manual-translation.13278/

SHIRFT is a 2d turn-based RPG where the protagonist Kazuya wakes up from a coma and finds himself trapped in a post-apocalyptic underground shelter swarming with demons. It’s often compared to Undertale; in that it also has a Mercy/Genocide Route and a few similar themes. There is a mostly complete fan-translation patch available, allowing you to play through the complete story on the normal/neutral route. (Post Game content, and Genocide/True Mercy exclusive content are currently playable but machine translated) The creator is even working on one more bonus EX chapter for the game, so I’ll probably go over this one in more detail later once both that and the translation patch are 100% complete.

SiNiSistar

https://www.dlsite.com/ecchi-eng/work/=/product_id/RE247641.html

SiNiSistar is a more straightforward action game, where you play as a battle-nun taking on some seriously grotesque monsters; made all the more so with an exremely well done pixel art style.

 

Bonus: The Itch.io Big Lewd Spooky Bundle!

And if that’s not enough, check out the Big Lewd Spooky Bundle on Itch.io:
https://itch.io/b/636/the-big-lewd-spooky-bundle

We’ve teamed up with 15 other devs to provide a pay-what-you-want bundle of (vaugely) Halloween themed games that contain monsters, horror elements, autumn themes or cosplays/costumes. 

Most of the free games (including ours) are also available for free individually, but part of the point of the bundle (even at the free tier) is to help boost visibility for each other and give you a second chance to find some cool new games that might have slipped your notice before. 

The dating site the series is about *is* in fact a real website you can visit.
Check it out at https://www.littleblackbestiary.com/

Sadly, you won’t be able to use the site to find a monstrous spouse of your very own, but you can check out the profiles and concept of the past and future characters to be featured in the series.