Publishing Game Announcement

Hi everyone, Rem here with an announcement today! Also potentially a long post down below so get comfortable and drink some water!

At the beginning of the year, on here and on Steam, I talked about that we're going to localize and publish a new eroge this year, and this eroge is one of my favorite of 2021. Well, the localization work on the game is almost finished now, and I submitted for review and approval to Steam last week. And on Tuesday, I finally got a reply back and it was beyond devastating to me. Not only did Steam reject the game, but it's a firm and strong rejection in very strong and severe language. I barely got any sleep that night and woke up the next day with a headache the whole day.

However, the silver lining here is that since it's no longer possible to release the game on Steam, we're going to release the game earlier than the original plan of early September since there's no longer any need to go through the whole Steam review and waiting process. The plan now is release on non Steam online vendors around the last week of July or the first week of August, it will really depend on how talks with the vendors pan out from this point forward.

But without further ado, I would like to introduce to you all the game that we are going to publish next, which is......

Kiara -The Knight of Icicles-!!

Developed by Sensouya-san, localized in collaboration with Cursed Atelier

Go check out the homepage I made for Kiara for some quick details and screenshots!

https://remtairy.com/kiara/

Kiara will retail hopefully for $10 after I talk to some online vendors and again, hopefully we will be able to release it on the last week of July or the first week of August.

Have you checked out my website above yet? Because the rest of this post will be pretty long and assumes you've at least glanced the info above for a bit.

So Rem, why pick Kiara to localize and publish?

Well, the answer is extremely simple. Because I like the game, and I want to see the developer be more well known by having one of their eroge be localized and available on Steam.

Kiara, to put it very simply, is a CG hunter game. It's an RPG style eroge, made in RPGMaker MV, but there's no leveling, no grinding, very minimum gameplay all around. You control Kiara moving around in simple maps made with the default RPGMaker MV tilesets. The menus are also default and basic, and with the exception of the character sprite of a few characters like Kiara, everything is right out of the box of RPGMaker MV stuff.

However. The mapping might be simple and plain, there's no gameplay, so what is so good about the game Rem?

I've played, been playing, and still playing eroges, for over a decade, with hundreds and hundreds of titles under my belt from professional $100 eroges to indie and free eroges. And I plan on playing more because I love eroges. Astronauts is coming out with a $80 RPG drawn by M&M at the end of this month. You bet your ass I pre-ordered it and I'm gonna be playing it next weekend. All the top sellers on DLsite that came out, you bet I brought and played them. And even the non top sellers, I buy and play them. Just like Kiara here which at the time of this writing, has a very respectable 8K sales on DLsite. I think when I decided to publish Kiara around the start of this year, it had only around 4K sales, and when it was just released, I think it had about 2K sales on its first week. First week sales on DLsite usually is an indicator of the general consensus around a game, so 2K sales lands Kiara above a lot of other indie RPG eroges that only get sub 1K sales in their first week, but also means that it is firmly below the blockbusters that get 10K~30K on their first week with a lifetime earning potential of 10K~100K sales. A 2K game would be lucky to break 10K sales in its lifetime, so the fact that Kiara is currently at 8K is actually a big surprise, and it's most likely because of Sensouya-san's most recently released eroge about a pink hair elf that they just released at June of this year.

I'm throwing out a lot of numbers right now, but what I'm basically trying to say here, is that to me, Kiara should not be a 2K tier game. At the same time, especially as a veteran of eroges, I can easily surmise why it's a 2K tier game. You can see it in the screenshots, the UI is the default RPGMaker MV style, the tileset, map, everything feels very much like an indie RPGMaker MV. Basic and no frills. And in fact, it's a CG hunter type game, so there's not really any gameplay involved.

Yet, to me, Kiara is not a 2K tier game. Which is why I want to localize and publish it on Steam so more eyeballs can see the game. The screenshots, don't do it justice. At the same time, of course naturally, Kiara is not a game for everyone.

So who is Kiara for?

Kiara is female protagonist eroge. So a big deciding factor is if you find the protagonist attractive, because pretty much all the sex scenes will be about her. So this is the obvious thing. If you don't like Kiara's design at all, then Kiara isn't for you, simple enough.

If you pass the attractiveness test, next is the actual game contents. Kiara doesn't have any gameplay, and it doesn't really try to throw in any gameplay. And so what if it doesn't. Sometimes, a fella is just in a mood for a simple sex romp. I remember, in the infancy of the indie RPGMaker eroge community, where there is so many games padded with meaningless basic RPG gameplay when what you're really after, is the next sex scene. Of course the scene has long evolved since then. There are indies with better plots. Indies with gameplay. Battle fuck. Sex during combat. Oh the minds that were blown, among other body parts, at the open possibility of sex scenes not being an isolated event outside of combat, but something that can be part of the gameplay.

But does every eroge that you ever play need to re-invent the wheel? Maybe you do. But I personally, sometimes like to just play a simple short eroge that is hot and arousing as fuck. It's like a balanced diet. Play an epic 100+ hours eroge. Then play a few short indie eroges to cool down. For me, Kiara is that pallet cleanser. If I'm stuck on a desert island and I can only bring 5 eroges with me, I would pick Rance X and Ikusa Megami Zero for my #1 and #2 pick. These are the $100 eroges with epic stories, characters, gameplay, the full works with 200++ hours playtime. And then for my #3, #4, and #5 picks, it would depend on my mood but I would be perfectly fine if Kiara was one of those three so I have sometime when I just want to be purely horny and see an attractive female protagonist get fucked silly for hours.

Okay Rem, cool, you like Kiara, we get it.

Yup. Alright, so for the main selling point of Kiara, which is what I call, 'scene progression'. I'm going to use a few vague examples here. People with lots of eroge experience, will know what I'm about to poorly convey.

Let's take a popular indie eroge trope, which is the shared bathhouse sex. The female protagonist enters a bathhouse, and finds out that either there is a shared bath, or there is a separate male-only and female-only bath. The mind boggles here. Slutty protagonist and sex-on-the-mind player will try to enter the male-only bath section, if there is one, or 'accidentally' enter the shared bath. And oh no! There's penises in the shared bath!

Anyway, some sort of sex scene occurs. Now let's throw some vague examples of how a few eroges in history has handled this trope: Game A: Only one sex scene. The female protagonist has to be very slutty to enter, and she enters knowingly that she will have sex inside. (Spoiler: She does. With four different men.) Game B: At first, it wasn't a shared bath. However, the owner switches it up, and it turns into a shared bath. Outraged, the female protagonist leaves once men enter, no sex occurs. However, once her lewd has increased a bit, she can enter the bath again. No sex, but there is light groping. Once she's even more lewd, the next scene occurs and she has sex with two men at the bath. Game C: The female protagonist enters the shared bath, a man come to her and start chatting her up. She's embarrassed by his naked body and that's it. Once her lewdness is increased a bit, the next scene occurs where there's light touching and handjob involved. And then once her lewdness is further increased, the final scene occurs where she has sex with the guy at the bath.

In these examples, Game A had one stage for the bathhouse scene, Game B and Game C had three stages. This is what I mean by scene progression.

Now in Kiara, there is also a bathhouse event. And in Kiara, it has SIX stages of scene progression.

Veterans of indie eroges, especially RPGs. You know what I'm talking about when you see a scene in an RPG that you really, REALLY like, but then you're slightly disappointed that there is only one scene, or as is the standard for most of the popular top sellers RPGs, there is only three stages for that scene.

In Kiara, the major sex scenes all have about five to seven stages.

FIVE. I, Rem, I hope for the day that all the top tier blockbuster 10K++ sales RPGs, will go from three stages to at least five+ stages. Because it is, so, so, soooo, fucking hot when the situation escalates further then three stages. Shinachiku-castella is one of my favorite indie eroge developer. Anyone who has played their eroges know that their scenes have way more than three stages, and it's amazing. Shinachiku-castella found a publisher, so they don't need my help.

I'm not publishing Kiara for the money. In fact, since Steam has rejected the game, chances are that I won't make back the time and money I spent on getting Kiara localized and published. But I like Kiara, I like the eroges Sensouya-san makes, and I want to see them succeed, and I want more eroges with better scene progressions. Kiara is not going to be for everyone. I'm not selling a false product saying everyone will enjoy Kiara. Everyone has different sexual preferences after all. But if you like female protagonist RPGMaker games, and you don't mind playing a game with no gameplay, and you want to see a basic, simple, but extremely well done take at popular eroge sex scenes tropes found in indie RPGs,

You're gonna love Kiara during its few hours of staying time.

Thank you listening to my TED Talk, I'm Rem and I post on SubscribeStar every Monday.