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Krasue Games
Solo-dev creating adult games with a strong focus on gameplay intermingled with 18+ content. I've had years of industry experience and have a passion for horror and retro games, as evidenced by my first release "Halls of the Pale Widow".
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Merry Newyear! (2025)
Hello everyone! Merry Christmas/Happy New Year! As promised, this is the Christmas post that doubles as a bit of a yearly retrospective. This post marks my first full year working under the Krasue name, making games. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get to it.
Cutscenes, Animations, and “Finishing Up”
Ophelia from the intro cutscenestarted the year fairly strong by tackling the game’s introductory sequence. At the time, I didn’t have much experience with Unreal’s Sequencer, especially when it came to stitching together multiple scenes across different locations. Because of that, I ended up pre-rendering the entire intro. This came with some pretty clear upsides and downsides.
The biggest downside was file size. To avoid heavy gradient banding at 1920×1080 with dark lighting, I needed a very high bitrate, and even then, I wasn’t able to eliminate all the artifacts. The other issue was flexibility: because the cutscene was pre-rendered, going back to fix or tweak things later became extremely difficult. You’ll probably still notice some visual glitches, artifacts, and audio issues even now.
All that said, for a first real attempt at something like this, I don’t think it turned out that badly. I went through several iterations before I was comfortable bundling it into the release builds.
Angy SavinaAround the same time, I started breathing more life into Savina and Ophelia by giving them unique reactions to being hit, etc. I’ve always loved it in games when NPCs react to the player doing weird or unexpected things, and I really felt that adding this helped capture some additional personality from the characters.
By April, I had finished most of the bosses and dungeons and felt confident enough to start work on the game’s finale. My original target release was October, and at the time it felt achievable.
What I wasn’t fully aware of yet was how burned out I was slowly becoming.
Burnout, and the Oblivion Detour
The Female Locomotion Replacer mod for Oblivion RemasteredI got a lot done in the first half of the year, but I wasn’t firing on all cylinders like I was back in 2024. Some of the later enemy designs suffered, and for a long time many of the newer enemies were still using placeholder purification animations borrowed from the Witness.
The Girlfriend boss fight in particular didn’t suffer from a lack of ideas – it suffered from a lack of energy. I was simply burned out on Sin Spire at that point.
Then something completely unrelated happened: Oblivion Remastered released.
I’ve always loved Bethesda’s earlier open-world games, so I picked it up instantly. What I didn’t expect was a strange, unfriendly Frankenstein’s monster of Gamebryo and Unreal that was actively hostile to traditional modding (and my eyes). That, naturally, made me want to try my hand at fixing it.
I started by fixing what I personally found most egregious: the hunchback walk cycle – at least for female NPCs. From there I moved on to bodies, because the MetaHuman-based bodies, frankly, needed an overhaul. Having a body mod would also help with designing outfits and lay the foundation for certain kinds of future mods.
NBO female body mod with realtime body morphingThat became the NBO body mod, which ended up being surprisingly fun to work on. I met new people – such as the creator of Baking for Mara – and got to be creative without being responsible for every system in a game. I very much enjoyed the lower-pressure environment. NBO, to this day, is still on the front page of the most downloaded / endorsed mods on the Oblivion Remastered Nexus.
Unfortunately, updates to Oblivion Remastered repeatedly broke my mods – again and again. Female Locomotion broke with no easy fix. NBO’s real-time body morphing broke, was fixed, and then broke again. At a certain point it just wasn’t sustainable, and I took a step back (sorry NBO users).
I never accepted donations for those mods – they were done for fun – but Sin Spire is something people are supporting financially, and I needed to refocus. As enjoyable as the detour was, it had to end.
Posts after I stopped updating NBOComputer Problems
Somewhat overlapping with all of this, I started experiencing full system crashes when playing intensive games – not regular game crashes, but total PC lockups. Eventually this escalated into a full blue screen and a machine that simply refused to boot.
Long story short: I ended up replacing several components before everything was stable again. The silver lining is that I removed a major performance bottleneck in the process, and my system has been solid ever since. Another silver lining is that this happened before the recent RAM shortage that hit the market and sent prices through the roof.
Still – not ideal timing. I even saw one person who was sceptical that my PC had broken down at all and suggested I was using it as an excuse to avoid working. Other than rolling my eyes, I don’t really have a response to that. That said, me dragging my feet and not working to the same standard would be a valid criticism – if that was actually what they were saying instead.
Dev logs started to slow down, and I did miss some self-imposed deadlines. Anyway, after fixing my PC, it was time to get back to business.
Approaching the End (and Missing It)
One of Savina's relationship animationsThe second half of the year was meant to be focused almost entirely on finishing the game. October was still the intended release window and, on paper at least, I was more or less on track – or so I thought.
After finishing Savina’s relationship animations, I jumped straight into working on the pre-finale and finale sections of the game. In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have done that considering Ophelia’s relationship animations still weren’t finished, but at the time I was very much in “just get to the end” mode.
The pre-finale came together without too much trouble. The actual finale, however, was a different story.
Sin Spire’s script – including its endings – was written back in 2024. When I started properly implementing the first ending and saw it come together as an actual cutscene, I realized how much I liked it. The more work I did on it, the more excited I got, and for a while it felt like everything was finally clicking.
Then I started working on the “good ending”… and things fell apart.
Darkened Starting Hall from later in the gameSavina is voiced by my good friend XeraphinaVA, who I have a very easy time working with. Ophelia, on the other hand, is voiced by someone I don’t know particularly well. She’s good as Ophelia, but communication was slower, and recordings usually came as a single take.
When I finally sat down and listened to the full recordings for the good ending, a few problems became immediately obvious:
The good ending itself was badly written. It assumes you’ve already seen the neutral ending and leaves out a lot of crucial context.
The recordings didn’t really work. Ophelia’s delivery was bizarre in places, and Xeraphina’s lines were noticeably flatter than usual.
I wanted people to see the neutral ending. I didn’t like the idea of spending so much time animating, compositing, and scripting it, only for a large portion of players to potentially never see it – not the most flattering of reasons, but it did play a factor.
I could have asked Xeraphina to re-record her lines quite easily, but there was still the issue of Ophelia’s VA and the fact that I didn’t like the actual script for the good ending. Rewriting it would have meant:
new recordings
new animations
a reworked boss fight
and all of that discovered in late September
At that point, regardless of the state of the good ending, it became pretty obvious that an October release wasn’t happening. I set my sights on November and made the call to cut the good ending entirely so I could focus on polishing and actually finishing the rest of the game.
Beta Release
The Raven revealedOn October 1st, I released the beta build that allowed players to play Sin Spire from start to finish.
That was a massive milestone for me. After years of trying (and failing), I had finally completed a game with a full narrative, cutscenes, and endings – even if one of them had been cut.
With November as the new target, I shifted into bug fixing, finishing Ophelia’s animations, improving Steam integration, and generally trying to tighten everything up. That said, there was still a lot of missing content that needed my attention – content that I’m still actively adding to the game.
I polished a build for Steam review so that, if approved, I could finalize the release date, make a trailer, and wrap things up properly.
Once I felt the build was stable enough, I submitted the Steam review build in early November.
And then… I waited.
About Difficulty
The WraithA small diversion, but let’s talk about difficulty. Difficulty has been one of the most stressful topics throughout Sin Spire’s development.
The game was always meant to be challenging. I wanted players to experiment, to find strange solutions, to slowly unravel systems and make the game easier through understanding. Some of my favourite gaming memories (especially H-games) come from exactly that kind of experience.
Sin Spire was designed to drip-feed enemies, mechanics, and animations in a way that encouraged that mindset. That approach… hasn’t landed for everyone.
Some players have outright dropped the game because of the difficulty, and honestly, I don’t blame them. When I added difficulty settings, I hoped that would somewhat alleviate the issue – but in practice it kind of made things worse. “Easy” wasn’t easy enough for what some people wanted.
What many players were asking for seemingly wasn’t an easier version of Sin Spire – it was a version without struggle at all. And while I completely understand the appeal of that, it’s not the kind of game I set out to make.
The Mangler boss fightAt this point, I’m likely to leave the difficulty mostly as-is, with some tweaks to reduce grind (such as higher purification payouts). Whenever I consider bigger changes, I think about the players who have enjoyed the game as intended – the ones who found the challenge engaging and rewarding.
Sin Spire, for better or worse, committed to a specific design philosophy very early on.
That said, I’ve learned from this – and when I work on my next game, I’ll ease up on the bullshit a bit.
Steam Review Anxiety
Sin Spire in Steam LibraryBack to the Steam Review: in early November, I submitted the Steam review build and waited… and waited.
This happened during a pretty chaotic period where Steam was delisting adult games, Itch.io was removing huge portions of its catalogue, and misinformation about what was or wasn’t allowed was everywhere. The idea of submitting the game was nerve-wracking enough when I first put the page up in 2024 – now it was genuinely terrifying.
Sin Spire’s success matters a lot for my ability to move forward, and while alternative platforms exist, Steam is the PC platform, whether we like it or not.
Eventually, Steam got back to me – and the build was denied.
Headlines regarding the delisting of gamesNot for the reasons I was expecting, thankfully. The main issues were controller navigation (specifically social links on the menu) and some missing content warnings. Once those were fixed and resubmitted, the build was approved, which was a massive relief.
The waiting period was extremely anxiety-inducing, and to distract myself from said anxiety, I did what I apparently always do. I got distracted.
These distractions persisted even past the build approval – I was laying the foundation for my next project (good) and also got roped back in to an old project I used to work on with no financial incentive (bad).
But I’ve since managed to pull myself back on track. Most bugs are fixed, performance is mostly optimized, and there are only a handful of animations left to implement. I think the game is in a good state now and I’m happy to say that Sin Spire will release in late January 2026.
Steam page for Sin SpireWhat I’ve Learned
Working solo is hard.
I tend to work in intense bursts, burn out, and then drift toward other creative projects before returning. I’ve known this about myself for years but this was the first time I really felt how much it affects long-term development.
Going forward, I want to work within that tendency rather than fight it: one long-term project, alongside smaller side projects.
Scrappy unrelated doodleAfter release, I’ll be taking a short break before starting the next big thing. I’ll try to keep up general communication up, but I won’t be posting many progress reports while I’m still in the “tinkering” pre-production phase of my next project.
As for post-launch content for Sin Spire, that’s a definite maybe. If the game does well and some time is allowed to pass, I’d love to expand it. If not, I’ll need to reassess and move forward differently.
Obviously, a lot more happened this year, but this post is long enough already and this is the sixth draft I’ve written, with plenty cut out along the way.
Thank you, genuinely, for sticking with me through the year. Your support is what has made it possible to even attempt something like this in the first place. I know I’ve said it a few times now, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Here’s to finally crossing the finish line. I hope you’ve all had a Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year. See you all in January!
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Sin Spire – Dev Log 41
Hello everyone! Today’s post will be light on developments regarding the game as there’s not much to discuss, but I do have some big news to kick things off:
Sin Spire has officially been approved for release on Steam!
This is a huge deal and a massive milestone not just for Sin Spire but my game dev career in general. With this, I can now release the game at any time. It’s a huge relief – waiting to find out whether I’d be allowed to sell the game on Steam was extremely stressful. However, while this is fantastic news, there is an issue. The timing of everything has created a complication and that leads us to today’s main topic.
Delayed Release Date
My original goal was to release Sin Spire in December, so I could hit the 2025 release window. The game is in a good enough state to launch but I made a pretty big mistake on Steam’s backend.
I was able to change it before so had assumed I could keep doing so until the game came out, but I set the release date to October this year. As you can tell, it’s a bit past October. To change this now, I need to go through Valve. The problem is that the earliest date I can choose would be mid-December – not early December like I had hoped.
This would put the release of Sin Spire right in the middle of the Steam Winter Sale. Releasing during that window is something I absolutely want to avoid, as the game would get buried under the flood of discounted titles. The sale lasts quite a while, so instead of rushing to squeeze a release in beforehand, I’ve decided it’d be better to wait until after it’s over.
This also gives me extra time for marketing, showcasing and possibility preparing a demo for Itch or other platforms.
As for the new release window:
Sin Spire will be launching in early 2026 – either late January or early February.
I won’t announce the exact date here as I’m still determining which day works best. Once that’s decided, I will make a proper announcement.
What’s Next?
There are still things to polish before release. I’m planning on adjusting the game’s economy which is an area that hasn’t received much love. I’m not reducing the required number of dungeon runs (a lot of scripting depends on that), but I can certainly try to make the experience less painful, especially on Easy difficulty.
There are also additional animations and bits of other content to finish, though none of those should take too long. Outside of that, I’m planning to slow things down a little and avoid crunching if I can. With the holiday season approaching, it makes sense to take things at a slower pace as there will be numerous distractions.
I will still write up a Christmas post like I did last year. I feel that it was a good way of capping the year off and it’d give me the chance to reflect on this year’s developments.
What’s Been Cooking?
While waiting for Steam’s approval, I spent a lot of time experimenting with what comes next. I actually have two potential future projects lined up:
A larger, long-term project with no concrete end point (at least not yet).
A smaller, experimental game that will act a bit like a tech demo – similar in the vein of HotPW, meant to test new systems.
I don’t have many details to give for now as I’m still making key decisions. A lot of the prep involved has been foundational – making engine-level changes and so on. I’ll talk more about these projects once Sin Spire has been released.
Anyway, that’s all for today. Like I said, not a lot to talk about in regards to the game itself but Steam’s approval allows me to finally move forward without worrying. I do still need to think about the people who obviously can’t get the game through Steam and will be exploring options soon. I’m open to ideas.
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Sin Spire - Dev Log 40
In the library Hello everyone! Sorry for not posting anything last week. I had intended to get either a new Dev Log or even a new build out, but I ended up spending most of my time crunching to get the Steam Build Review version of the game ready.
As of writing this, the build is still under review. I submitted it on Monday, but I’m not sure when the process will be complete. I’ve heard mixed things – some developers say reviews can be quick, whilst others have reported waiting around a month. So right now, I’m kind of in limbo. I can’t say for sure when or even if the game will be approved for sale on Steam, so as you can imagine, this period is filled with trepidation.
Steam Review Build
To meet Steam’s requirements, I had to rush through and do a few things such as preparing a trailer and setting up Steam Achievements – essentially, anything listed on the Steam page as a feature had to be at least mostly functional.
That also included controller support. While controllers have technically worked since the first or second build, some menus like the extras menu or the in-game map screen never functioned properly. Those issues, however, are now fixed! There are still a few things that could be polished, but with controller implementation finally complete, that’s a very long-standing task I can finally tick off.
Now that everything is submitted, there’s not much left I can really do except wait. I was hoping to maybe release the game or start the marketing push fairly soon, but with the review ongoing, my hands are mostly tied.
Performance and OptimizationLight Complexity - Hurts my eyes While waiting, I decided to try and address something I’ve been neglecting for a while: performance.
On my main PC that I use to develop the game, Sin Spire runs buttery smooth – but that’s to be expected, as I’m running it on a 4090. Obviously, not everyone has that kind of hardware, and for a game with a retro style, it feels odd to have to recommend high-end PCs just to run it. So, I got to work on optimization.
I have an older laptop from about six years ago that runs a GTX 1650. I figured that’d be a good system to test with, as I imagine most people on mid-range systems are running hardware roughly in that range or higher (at least if statistics are anything to go by). I also ran the game on a Steam Deck, which is another good point of comparison for performance.
Prior to this, a community member had done some testing and shared their insights on lower-end systems. Essentially, the game ran pretty well on the equivalent to a 1050, but I wanted to deep-dive into a few commonly flagged areas when it came to performance issues.
Surprisingly, during testing, I noticed that the Tutorial Cave and Starting Hall dropped below 60 FPS. That was odd given how simple those areas are. After some digging, however, I realized that I was relying way too much on non-baked lighting.
The game mostly uses dynamic lights since the dungeons are procedural – as they’re built at runtime, I can’t really bake lighting information to improve performance. The dungeons themselves haven’t been too bad because I already did quite a lot of optimization on them early on. But I never optimized areas that were purely static and didn’t need dynamic lighting.
So, I baked the lighting for those few areas and made additional optimizations. The results were great – smoother performance across the board with similar, if not better, visuals. I did have to re-learn a lot about Unreal’s baked lighting systems as it’s been a long time, but it was definitely worth it.
The ForestThe Forest - Where performance goes to die The biggest culprit for optimization by far, however, has been The Forest.
The Forest is one of the few areas I’ve commonly seen complaints about regarding performance. I had naively assumed that because I was using World Partition (introduced in UE5) and foliage instancing, any performance hit would be negligible. I was wrong.
There were multiple issues, including but no limited to:
The moon casting shadows for every single object.
Trees using overly complicated materials with advanced shading models.
HLODs doing the opposite of their intended function by actually hurting performance.
I spent two full days optimizing the Forest alone – adding fixes, rebuilding binaries, and testing on my laptop. Thankfully, it was worth it, as the whole Forest has seen about a 40% increase in performance with almost no noticeable visual degradation (thanks to the fog and dark lighting).
Does that mean the area now hits 60 FPS on the 1650? No – it averages around 50 FPS now, which is much better than the 30 FPS I was getting before. I haven’t tested it on the Steam Deck yet, but that was also noticeably rough in previous builds.
Unreal 5’s landscape system combined with World Partition wasn’t quite the magic bullet I had hoped for. In some ways, UE4’s older system was simpler to understand and optimize. The upshot to all of this, though, is that for future projects I’ll be going in aware of these issues and their solutions, resulting in better-optimized games from the get-go (hopefully).
File Size and Next Build
Because of the new baked lighting, the game’s size has increased – still under 2GB, but well above the 1GB target I was initially aiming for. Realistically, though, 2GB isn’t bad at all for a 2025 release.
As for a new build, there will probably be at least one more build before release. It’ll include bug fixes and the performance improvements mentioned above. However, I won’t be adding in any new content beyond Ophelia’s sex scene. The remaining purification animations and anything else that could be considered “new content” will be saved for the final release as well as general polish.
Steam PricingCurrent Steam Page - Subject to Change Since this ties into the release, I figured I’d mention it. I’ve done my best to match the game’s price to similar indie titles, which is tricky considering there really aren’t really any games like Sin Spire. It’s both a blessing and a curse.
While there are first-person, multi-layered dungeon crawlers out there (some even procedural), Sin Spire’s adult content makes it a unique case – a niche within a niche. I think the price I’ve chosen is fair, but I understand that not everyone will agree.
Credits and Translations
A quick note on credits – I’ve now locked them in as of the beginning of the month. Anyone who has reached out regarding that, I’m afraid the window is closed. Apologies to everyone who messaged me in the past week or so, and thank you to everyone who responded.
Also, the translation documents that I’ve mentioned a few times have been completed! If you’d like to help translate Sin Spire into your language, feel free to reach out. At the moment, I have Chinese and Russian translators, but I’d love to expand further.
I can’t thank you all enough for the support you’ve given me – both financially and through your kind words. Sin Spire exists because of you, and as we near release, I’m able to comfortably and excitedly think about what project comes next.
But we’ll leave that for another time. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you all next time.
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Sin Spire - Dev Log 39
Hello everyone! I’ll open today’s Dev Log with an admission: I’ve been distracted. Not completely – it’s not like I’ve spent the whole month goofing off – but things that should be simple have been taking longer than they need to.
A few logs ago I mentioned that as we got closer to the finish line, things became strangely harder to work on. Now that the game is closer than ever to completion, I’ve found myself slowing down a bit again – unintentionally, but noticeably.
That said, plenty has still been done, and I’d like to share what’s been accomplished, what’s coming next, and what’s been distracting me (it’s still development-related, don’t worry).
What’s Been Done
I’ve been mostly working on bug fixes, content additions, and general polish. But there has been one pretty major change to the end of the game:
When the credits finish rolling, you’ll now return to the Starting Hall with Savina instead of the Main Menu. I still need to write a note explaining this “post-game,” but essentially, you’ll be able to re-run every dungeon you’ve cleared so far – including the final one – and continue upgrading your character and talking to Savina.
You can also technically complete Ophelia’s quest if you missed it, though she’ll still act as if the final boss hasn’t been beaten. On that note, Boss fights are disabled as you’ve already basically beaten them but there is still the Boss Rush available from the Main Menu.
A few players have also reported a nasty crash at the end of dungeons, right before the Boss fight. Thankfully, that issue has been fixed — the solution was staring me in the face for a while. There was a similar crash months ago that I fixed, but didn’t realize the fix also needed to be applied to the Boss Door.
On top of that:
I’ve fixed (as best as I can) all major cloth clipping.
Projectiles are now automatically removed when cutscenes start, preventing them from interrupting or damaging the player.
Ophelia’s quest now has its end sex sequence implemented – no more placeholder text. You’ll be able to see that scene in the next build.
Upcoming Builds
With the game nearing completion, there will likely only be a couple more builds before release. If the Steam review process goes smoothly, I’ll spend some time implementing API features like achievements, but otherwise, the public release build won’t be drastically different from the Patreon builds.
If things don’t go as planned and I have to release through other means, I’ll have to rethink a lot more than just the release of Sin Spire. But for now, the next test build will mainly focus on small bug fixes and micro tasks rather than new content.
Distractions
I mentioned being distracted earlier, but if it’s any consolation, those distractions have been productive ones.
Lately, I’ve been experimenting with ideas for my next project. It’s far too early to start pre-production, but I’ve been researching and doing some early in-engine tests for visual style and rendering workflows. The next game won’t share Sin Spire’s aesthetic, so I’m trying to make sure Unreal can manage what I want to do.
That said, I know it’s the wrong time to get side-tracked. I still have Sin Spire to finish, so I apologize for the delay – especially to the translators who’ve been waiting for updates. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Credits
As many of you know, I’ve been collecting names from my Supporter-tier – both past and present – for inclusion in the credits. I’ll be closing that window soon so I can format and time everything properly.
Thank you to everyone who responded! If you’ve supported me in the past few weeks, I’ll try and message you about your credit as soon as possible. Anyone joining today or tomorrow will also be included in that, but soon after, I’ll be finalizing the credits with the names I’ve collected up to that point.
What’s Next
I’ll likely prepare another small build soon. Not much has changed content-wise, but I’d like to keep testing updates until I’m ready to send the review build out.
It’s a bit of a shame that I missed the October release window, but in hindsight, it might be for the best – Steam Next Fest pushed a lot of games that would’ve drowned out visibility for Sin Spire since I don’t have a demo.
There are still plenty of bugs to squash and purification animations to finish, but progress is progress. See you all next time.
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