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”

started 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.

Around 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 Remastered

I 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 morphing

That 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.

Computer 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)

The 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 game

Savina 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

On 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

A 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.

At 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

Back 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 games

Not 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.

What 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.

After 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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