Down the Rabbit-Hole

This has been a weird couple of weeks. Forget everything going on out in the real world—the landscape that includes games like mine has changed. Seriously changed.

Last week, Valve announced that they had modified their Steam developer guidelines. You can read the new guidelines here. TL;DR: Steam’s payment processors have exerted enough pressure on them to force developers to abide by the processors’ “rules and standards.” By “processors,” of course I mean MasterCard and Visa, although it’s mostly MasterCard. And since other services like Paypal use the same processors, they’re no longer an option either. Steam immediately banned a number of titles, although for the moment it appears only to have been games that blatantly advertise incest, sex with minors, and sexual assault.

And yesterday, itch.io followed suit, deindexing all NSFW titles from their search engine, meaning sites like mine can’t be found simply by going to their website and looking up titles or authors. Or content tags. Luckily, they haven’t removed the sites (yet) and have promised to provide a suitable publishing policy as soon as they review all of the affected titles.

This was all precipitated by complaints from a conservative advocacy group called Collective Shout, under the guise of “protecting children.” Although, it appears that they’re just advocating to remove any media with subject matters that they just don’t like. If you disagree with this turn of events, you can go to change.org and sign a petition started by the Steam community. As I write this, they’ve already collected over 70,000 signatures and the numbers seem to be steadily accelerating.

The Pool of Tears

Of course, if I can’t actually sell my work anywhere, then I’ve wasted the last three years of my life working towards this moment. While I am incredibly appreciative of the support I’ve received from my very generous (and incredibly intelligent!) patrons, it’s just not enough to live on. While there are some games (truly horrible “games”) on this site making much more than I do, it’s typically not the norm. Those devs are generally overtly catering to fetishes that I’m not willing to lower my standards to compete with.

We’ll see how things shake out over the next few months. Fingers crossed.

A Mad Tea-Party

So with all that said, I did finish work on the Steam version of Confusion and am knee-deep in the testing process, although I’ve slowed down a bit to get more clarity on the Steam situation before going ahead and publishing the game there.

In the meantime, I’ve done more work on both University Trans-fer and Forgotten. And I’m proud to share here the first two actual official renders for UT, just completed in the last couple of days. I’m still working through models and locations and obtaining/creating assets that I’ll need to realize the story, but it’s just the MC in the first bit so I thought I’d jump in and give it a go. Be warned though that with all of the other things I’m having to work through, renders won’t be coming on a regular basis for a while.

Warm greetings to all my new supporters who have joined us in the last two weeks! Your support means everything to me and encourages me to keep pushing ahead. Join us on Discord and become part of our community! There are still ongoing decisions being made about University Trans-fer and Forgotten—come by if you want to help shape its development direction. While you’re there, you can also find everything from lewd images, discussions about LGBTQI+ rights, reports on our daily progress, to programming tips for budding Ren’Py developers.

Come hither! Two images await, each a testament to hard work and dedication!