Hello everyone,
Three years already... Yes, today marks three years since this little adventure called Glowing Stones changed my life.
Am I being a little dramatic? Maybe, but that is genuinely how I feel.
Of course, the game itself is more than three years old. It is actually approaching its fourth anniversary, in one month, it will have been four years since I opened Daz for the very first time. But releasing the game on Steam transformed the project. It went from a time-consuming little passion project to something that allows me to make a living doing what I love.
And that is also thanks to all of you, so THANK YOU!
An anniversary is always a good opportunity to look back at how far you have come and take stock of where things currently stand.
When I look back, I realize just how much has already been accomplished. The English version now contains more than 120,000 words. That is almost twice the length of Harry Potter (and in a visual novel, the written text is mostly dialogue, while a book also contains visual descriptions that are represented through images in a VN).
According to Steam, players have spent an average of six and a half hours playing the game. That is pretty good, especially considering that many players have not launched it again since its original release, which is something I can see from the achievement statistics.
Did I expect any of this when I first started coding the game, or even when I released Chapter 3 on Steam? Absolutely not!
Chapter 3, for example, was around 10,000 words long. That was already substantial and represented roughly an hour of gameplay. But now, Chapter 7 is almost 30,000 words long!
That is also something I still need to learn how to manage: finding the right balance between my desire to develop certain aspects of the characters and the need to keep the main story moving forward.
And when I look at the quality of both the writing and the visuals, I also feel like the game has almost nothing in common with those early chapters anymore.
No, I am not planning to rework the first chapters. At least, not before the game is finished.
As for me, my health is still somewhat unstable, but I am able to keep working on the game, so I am doing okay.
And where does the game currently stand?
Chapter 7 is nearly finished. I only have two sections of the lewd scenes left to complete (I decided to improve them a little) as well as the final action scene. After that, there will still be all the post-production work, including translations, sound design, testing, and everything else. But the end is finally in sight.
I also want to reassure you, because I have heard that some players were concerned that I had abandoned the game, or was planning to abandon it.
That is not going to happen. Unless I die, because that is honestly the only possible reason!
I am far too excited to share the secrets of this universe I have created with you. I want to show you my vision of a superhero adventure, from the origin story all the way to its conclusion. I want you to discover all the little (and not-so-little) plotlines that have been set up since the very first images of the game.
And even if it ultimately takes three games to tell the entire story, I promise that this first game will have a proper and satisfying ending.
Think of it like a superhero movie. The end of this game will not be the end of everything, but it will not end on a cliffhanger, or, even worse, with no real conclusion at all.
I have also started looking for someone I could hire to help create the game's images and speed up development, since that is by far the most time-consuming part of the process.
However, it is not easy to find someone I can trust who also understands what this kind of work actually involves...