Hello everyone! It’s been a few weeks, and it’ll likely be a few more before we properly talk again. I wanted to touch base now that Sin Spire has been out for around a month. I’ve always tried to stay transparent about what’s going on in my life when it comes to development. The biggest thing I’ve been dealing with recently isn’t the game itself, but admin.

What do I mean by admin? The boring stuff. Sin Spire has been a relative success, far more than I anticipated, and that brings a wave of legal and financial nonsense that needs to be dealt with. Most of it is sorted now, but there are still a few things to finalize. It’s been surprisingly stressful. No beach parties or martinis for me.

Sin Spire has now reached 55,000 sales. As expected, sales tapered off after the initial launch, but that’s still a great number, way more than I was expecting. Some people have speculated about the game’s general revenue, and it’s not quite accurate, so I’ll clarify: 55,000 copies does not mean every copy sold at full price. Steam handles regional pricing, VAT, and local duties. Then there’s Steam’s 30% cut on top of that. After this, we deal with taxes. Adjusting to all of this has meant a few weeks of ups and downs. The game sold surprisingly well, but gross vs net vs actual take-home are all very different things. On top of everything else, I haven’t actually received any payout yet due to how Steam’s payment system works, so hopefully there are no issues there either.

Of course, the game selling this well is amazing. I just wasn’t prepared for the scale of it. If my tone comes off as complaining, that’s not the intention. I’m very happy with how things are going. It means I can put more money towards development, as well as potentially getting people to help out with certain things. That said, this was mostly just an explanation as to why I haven’t pushed out another update yet and why there may not be one until the end of March.

I’ve been vague about this, but I’ll say it clearly now: I’m going to Japan at the beginning of March for a little over two weeks. After I return, it’ll be my birthday and I’ll be spending time with family. So, I’ll largely be offline for most of the month.

This trip was planned last year. Tickets were purchased long before Sin Spire released. Originally, Sin Spire’s release was going to be in 2025, but due to various reasons I had to delay it to January. I hadn’t expected to still be patching the game a month after launch, as I wanted to move on to the next project with this trip acting as a book-end of sorts.

My personal goal for this trip is to disconnect for a bit. I’ll still check in occasionally, but I need a refresher. After I return, I’ll release the last major update addressing several issues, and then shift focus toward the next project.

The next update really just focuses on minor fixes. The reason it’s taken so long is a mixture of the above and some experimentation I did that sadly didn’t go anywhere. The next update will include fixes for clipping issues and will also introduce a set of hotkeys to switch between weapon types, avoiding the need to scroll through the entire weapon bar.

After this next update, I will prepare a non-DRM version of the game to release on alternative platforms. As most platforms don’t offer an automated update system, I want to make sure that what I upload is as close to the “final” version of the game as possible.

On the note of alternative platforms, I have one in mind and it isn’t Itch. I may put the game on Itch eventually, but after initiating a payout last month that still hasn’t arrived, I’m hesitant to rely on it for releases right now. Waiting a month for payment is less than ideal.

Whatever alternative store I use, I will make sure it operates in Germany and the UK, as that’s where most people are having trouble buying the game on Steam.

The next project has been up in the air. I initially planned to start a new “big project” after my trip. I’ve been writing up GDDs, narrative documents, and even started drafting a script. But after finishing Sin Spire, I’m not sure I want to lock myself into another year-and-a-half (or potentially longer) development cycle right away.

So, I’ve started drafting alternative plans for a smaller game that, if I still feel is a good idea, I’ll begin working on in April. Something tightly scoped, achievable, and hopefully more polished than previous works.

Sin Spire was built on top of HotPW and inherited some foundational issues. Those issues became amplified the larger Sin Spire grew, which is why some bugs persist. The next project will be built entirely from the ground up, with optimization and modularity as priorities. I’ll also be exploring mod support in future projects, though I can’t say for certain how achievable it will be for the next “small game.”

The larger project will still happen, just not immediately. I want to experiment first.

I tried to keep this post short because, as I said, I’m mostly just touching base. Thank you for the support as always, and I apologize for being quieter this past week. I’ll try to get around to responding to messages and comments soon.

In case anyone is alarmed by what I mentioned at the beginning or worried about my being stressed, it’s all good. I’m doing well and I’m looking forward to the vacation. This coming week will mostly be preparing for the Japan trip and handling some additional admin. When I return, we’ll get back to business.

See you all later.

Hello everyone! I hope you’ve all had an interesting week. I know I have.

Sin Spire released a little over a week ago, and the reception has been… good. Surprisingly good. I expected more pushback around difficulty, and while that feedback definitely showed up in reviews and discussions, the game also seems to have clicked with a much larger audience than anticipated.

Before getting into anything else, I want to share one important announcement:

I won’t share revenue numbers, but just to clarify: due to refunds and regional pricing differences, it might not be as high as you’d expect. That said, it’s not low either.

To say the game broke containment would be an understatement. I was fully prepared to open this post with “We did it, 1,000 sales!” but despite fierce competition (which I wasn’t fully aware of at the time) and the game’s obtuse nature, it found an audience.

Whatever games I make next probably won’t be as difficult as Sin Spire. Despite some speculation, the difficulty here was a deliberate decision, though it looks like some people bounced off quite early. The one choice I genuinely regret, though, is setting the orb count to 4 for most dungeons. I’ll address that shortly, but first, let’s get the obvious out of the way.

I think it’s fair to call the game successful, relatively speaking. So, what does that mean going forward? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure yet.

I've already started planning for future projects and I had hoped that after release, Sin Spire wouldn’t demand too much attention. But I did say that if the game did well, I’d continue supporting it. 30,000 players later, here we are.

In the short term, updates will mostly focus on bug fixes and minor improvements, like yesterday’s patch. After that, I still plan to put the game to rest and shift focus to something new. I need both a general and creative break from Sin Spire, and the best way I've found to mentally reset is by working on something completely different.

That said, because of the overwhelming support, I do plan to add something more substantial in the future. So, to make a long story short, Sin Spire’s content update status has gone from “no” to “eventually.”

As a side note, one topic that keeps coming up is the orb count. As mentioned earlier, I actually agree that it’s too high and I don’t think there’s much reason to keep the requirement at 4 beyond not wanting to devalue existing playthroughs. Reducing it to 2 would still allow optional runs for players who want to get stronger, and make sure that players who don't want to deal with all that can move on at their own pace.

I’d genuinely like to hear what you think about this. It’d be a fairly big change and it's something I’ve been debating since the game’s alpha. In practice, it wouldn’t drastically alter the game beyond allowing some players to reach certain encounters a bit under-levelled.

This has come up several times since release, so I want to address it clearly.

First, an important clarification: The Supporter tier has always provided early development builds. It has never included Steam keys for the final release. I understand that this may be disappointing to some, but that was never promised.

The original plan was simple:

However, in mid-2025, Itch.io de-indexed paid adult games. Free adult games were later re-indexed, but paid releases were not. On top of that, Itch’s payout system has reportedly been inconsistent, which I’m currently testing to see if it’s reliable again.

If payouts do in fact work, I plan to use Itch.io as the non-Steam option for Sin Spire. It likely won’t be discoverable through the site's search, but I can directly link it via SubscribeStar, Discord, and other channels for people who can’t purchase the game on Steam.

That said, I strongly prefer Steam due to its automated updates. A non-Steam version requires manual updates, which makes releasing things like hotfixes difficult. Because of that, I plan to wait until Sin Spire is mostly stable and past major updates before releasing an Itch version.

I’ve also seen suggestions like “just hand out keys” or “give keys to anyone who paid more than the game costs.” Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple:

If I hand out keys to a few people, many more would understandably ask. From Valve’s perspective, widespread key distribution can look like bypassing the storefront entirely, and I don’t want to risk complications there. I’d rather explore a proper non-Steam option for people who are region-locked.

For now, I’ll continue testing Itch.io’s payout system. If it ends up working, I’ll prepare a build as soon as possible. Apologies for the delay. In the future, I’ll try to plan better for situations like this ahead of time.

This week wasn’t the rest I hoped it would be. Instead of Sin Spire slowly exiting my life, it’s consumed it. Reading reviews, watching videos, responding on Discord, handling partnerships, and dealing with endless key requests. Balancing friendly and firm responses is exhausting. My brain is fried.

I can’t promise a regular posting or update schedule for a bit. You’ll probably see less of me once I finally take a break. I still have a lot of non-game-dev admin to deal with before I can get back to doing what I actually love.

Thank you all, genuinely. This has been life-changing in ways that are both good and complicated.

See you later.

Hello everyone! I hope the holiday season is treating you all well. I figured I’d put out a post as a bit of a year’s retrospective. It’s been quite an interesting one, that’s for sure.

Starting off the year on a high note (sarcasm), I lost my “dream job” and had to figure out what to do next after being laid off from the games industry. My job loss was part of the mass gaming layoffs that are still affecting companies today. The game I spent years working on? Shelved indefinitely, with most of the work never to see the light of day.

Years of wading through bureaucracy, slowly having the fight in me drained by upper management... all for nothing. But hey, let’s not get too bitter about it. Thanks to some severance pay, I decided to be brave (read: stupid) and return to something I’d tried pursuing years ago: indie development.

This started off strong, with a solid idea and plenty of know-how. I wanted to create a horror game (SFW) using the story of Little Red Riding Hood as a general template... but it never happened. Like many projects I’ve worked on, scope creep and indecisiveness got the better of me. What seemed like a manageable bite turned out to be more than I could chew. After a few months, I abandoned the project and fell into a development slump.

That’s when I had an idea for a different kind of game for a different kind of audience. Years ago, I had dabbled in adult projects – something I was particularly interested in. I enjoy making sandboxes and had created a few fun experiments in the past, though the content wasn’t very “marketable.” I tried to reformulate some old ideas and began work on a project called Velero. However, after a month or so, I realized the scope was, again, too large. I needed some security and assurance that I wasn’t working on something no one would play. So, I took a break and shifted focus to a quicker project.

Halls of the Pale Widow (Originally called SexyGhostOneshot) was a game I made earlier this year to gauge interest in my gameplay style and to test how quickly I could make something. The low-poly aesthetic, initially planned for Velero, was repurposed as a soft tribute to older horror games. After about three weeks (not including breaks), I released the game and was genuinely surprised by the positive response.

Initially, I planned to return to Velero, but I decided to stick with horror-themed games for the time being. I wanted to follow up HotPW with something that expanded its mechanics, especially the procedural dungeons. Enter Sin Spire – a dungeon crawler with action gameplay in a horror setting. Originally, Sin Spire was meant to be a quick, storyless project that I could finish in a slightly longer timeframe than HotPW. However, the scope grew to include both a story and multiple characters.

Much of my original design document for Sin Spire has been scrapped, with features being added and removed regularly. I’ll likely dive deeper into that in a future retrospective once the game is finished. Despite trimming many elements to avoid spending years on it, the game has still become much larger than I initially planned.

What started as a 3-month project turned into 6 months... and now I’ve decided not to impose a deadline. All I know is that when it’s done, I want to work on something much smaller and simpler.

Throughout this challenging development cycle, one thing has kept me going: you guys. I know it sounds sappy, but without an audience, I might’ve given up by now. I tend to be very secretive, and in the past, my projects often fell apart because I felt isolated and got tunnel vision. Having your support – whether financial or simply cheering me on – has made a huge difference.

This year has been full of tough decisions, but surprisingly, things seem to be working out. This might date the post in either direction, but I recently reached a massive milestone over on Patreon that has me wanting to pop open the champagne and celebrate immediately. I know life happens, and pledges come and go, but having an audience at all is something I’m deeply grateful for. Whether you’re contributing financially or cheering from the sidelines, thank you. Truly, thank you.

Here’s to 2025 – may it bring a smooth release for Sin Spire and even more games to follow. Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

See you in 2025.