#emberfate

Let's start with a quick recap of the highlights / achievements accomplished in 2023!

Okay, this one may be slightly cheating. While Emberfate only launched on Steam in Jan 2023 so the 92 positive reviews came in in the year of 2023, it was up on Itch.io since mid 2022, so not all 383 Itch.io ratings came in in 2023.

Still, I'm pretty proud of these stats! Perhaps the numbers are nothing compared to some other amazing games' out there, but it's still something I'm proud of. It makes me happy that my silly experimental nostalgic little game struck a chord in so many players — much more than I expected given how niche the topic was!

Now, unfortunately, I could not get Emberfate's DLC for Potato's route out by end of 2023 like I had hoped. Porting the game to mobile also ended up much more difficult than I expected because of just how much of the UI I'm going to have to redesign — and hence, programming to be redone — if I wanted to make the game fit a small mobile screen. So both plans are going to have to be postponed to 2024.

The other notable highlight of 2023 is that both Lyrissa's and Kierdan's routes for Reanimation Scheme were released for beta access! That put the game at 3/5 routes complete, with a total of 431,786 words for the script.

I recruited a handful of beta testers to test the three completed routes a few months ago, and so far, the feedback has been positive overall. That's been a huge relief and lifted a massive weight off my chest — due to the controversial reception of the demo, I've been extremely anxious that the game would be hated by the players, and I've done so many rounds of editing and honestly perhaps somewhat unnecessary and obsessive rewriting of the script, but none of it felt good enough 😂 So hearing the positive comments has been a huge motivation / morale booster. Perhaps I should have done beta testing sooner… LOL

There are two more achievements unrelated to a specific game project that I'd like to mention:

2023 is the year that I became more interested in and better at Ren'Py programming! Most of it is thanks to my amazing programmer friend and Ren'Py wizard, Feniks (whom you may know as the programmer for Our Life series), who sparked my interest in programming and helped teach me a LOT. While I'm by no means a professional now at coding, I feel much more comfortable navigating around Ren'Py code and setting up what I need to in the backend of the games I'm developing, which opens up new doors for me for future projects in terms of what kind of features (big or small) that I may be able to include! Though the side effect of that is I looked back at the code I did for Reanimation Scheme from previous years and was immediately horrified by how ugly and inefficient it was. 😂I did redo the backend code of the Gallery and Achievements system a bit, but the rest will just have to stay for now.

I made quite a few new connections within the indie VN dev sphere in 2023! I made a shocking discovery that there's enough number of indie VN developers from Hong Kong to fill half a minibus, and I was lucky enough to connect with them and share our experiences and learn from each other! Due to new project commissions I took on for $$$ (real life financial needs suck), as well as a couple of small game jam projects I joined as programmer to buff up my programming portfolio, I also made some new VN dev friends unexpectedly. It's been really nice, because honestly, solo dev can be a really lonely and isolating endeavor sometimes. I'm super grateful for the new connections I found myself making in 2023!

Looking Ahead: 2024

Okay, that was a lot of rambling for the recap. More than I thought I would write. Now let's move forward to what the future will look like for this studio in 2024 and what goals I'm setting for myself this year!

Priority #1: Finishing Reanimation Scheme

Of course it's Reanimation Scheme. As mentioned above, we're currently at 3 out of 5 routes completed (sans partial voice acting). So the biggest goal for 2024 will be to get the game done. and out. Finally.

I won't be giving a concrete release date until we're like, literally in beta phase for all 5 routes, just so I won't have to announce a delay and let people down. But given the current progress and pace of work, I'd say probably around mid-year — maybe Q3 latest.

I'll be keeping up with the episodic updates of Reanimation Scheme's beta build on Patreon (and Kickstarter) from this month onwards, beginning with Jori's route and then followed by Sebastien's.

The remaining Kickstarter rewards may take a little longer — but ideally, all of them (artbook / lorebook / short stories collections, etc.) will be done by end of the year as well.

Priority #2: Potato's Route DLC for Emberfate

Potato, poor Potato. His DLC had to be put on the sidelines until Reanimation Scheme is done.

Half of the art has already been commissioned and completed by the amazing Remnantation — we're just missing his selfie CG & his MMO character sprite! So the next step would be the script and then the voice acting for the calls part. I won't be able to start on the script until mid-2024 earliest, but given the fact that his route won't be that long if it's parallel in length compared to the existing three routes, it probably won't take too long to do. Perhaps 2-3 months for the development process of the DLC?

I'll likely be releasing his DLC early on Patreon, potentially also episodically as it's completed, like I did with Emberfate. So if you're interested, keep an eye out for it when the time comes!

Something Secretly Brewing in the Shadows?

If you're pledged to this Patreon on $10 tier or above, you'll probably already know what I'm alluding to.

I won't be announcing or talking much about this for now, since I don't know when I'll be able to start working on this project properly (i.e. I need to meet my above two goals first). For all I know, it might end up being not a 2024 thing but a 2025 thing. So I'll only tease it slightly for now here.

Bonus Goal: Market, for the Love of God

If you follow Wind Chimes Games on either Twitter or Tumblr, you'll probably have noticed the sorry state of my social media. I… really do not like marketing or posting on social media. I never know what to post or say. I'm too unfunny and uncreative to meme or write humorous captions that get engagement. 😂It kind of feels like I'm shouting into the void, and nobody really cares about what I have to say on my projects when there's so many cooler and more interesting things out there. So I always try for a brief period of time, and then I give up 😭

This year though, I really really need to take marketing more seriously. With two releases planned for 2024, marketing is going to be important if I want the games to sell more than like 20 copies LOL

So I guess, uh, hold me to it and call me out if I don't start posting regularly after all 🥹

Conclusion

If you've made it this far on this post, thank you so much for listening to me ramble. 🥹 2024 is going to be a very busy year, but hopefully, a productive one that will end with me meeting all of the above listed goals.

The in-game avatar is an homage to Many Things From My MMO Past;