It's time for the announcement I've been hinting! But to put it in context, a look at my overall workload, which will naturally lead into the decision I hope people will find exciting. This is how things look for me:
TLS: I continue to commission Annikath and integrate new art. Bug reports have declined significantly, so this isn't taking as much of my time. Small percentage of my workload.
DStP: If you've followed the Kickstarter updates, you know that things are going well. At this stage, my role is mostly project management, interfacing with various artists and conferring with the coder about final details. Relatively lightweight part of my schedule, and progress is rarely dependent on me.
Slave Rehabilitator: Getting closer, but a major portion of it involves waiting for Kali (who understandably wanted to take time with family over the holidays). There's stuff for me to do, from writing scenes to finishing the game mechanics, though I need to wait on coding help in some cases. Progress on this project is perhaps 50% on me.
As you can see, a lot of this involves working with others or waiting for assets to be complete. I don't mind this, but I really, really like making stuff. So, over the past couple months, I have increasingly wanted to just make something, to fill the empty parts of my schedule with something that is 100% dependent on me and can be scheduled as I like.
Normally novels fit into this sort of space very well, but as I said in late 2025 updates, the inspiration pendulum is swinging back and I am hungry for game development. So all of this means...
Omnipocalypse
I previously mentioned this in a future ideas post, but it's happening now! Looking over all the ideas in my head, I felt like this one is actually attainable with my current resources, and actually might be an interesting experiment at this stage in my career.
This is a time loop game, but unlike Ouroboros where the goal is to break a cycle in creative ways, this is about gaining mastery over events. Every loop is likely to be different due to the protagonist's experience of it, if nothing else. I also hope to lean into choice and consequences in a way that you often can't be seen in games: because the player is intended to replay, widely branching paths aren't a waste of resources.
Some basic info: I'm building it in RPG Maker MZ, and I hope to find a major partner in the form of a pixel artist. But that will come later, after the project is in a more mature state. For now, I'm just having a blast putting this together.
Because this is definitely happening, not just an announcement of an aspiration or side experimentation. I've been steadily working on this in the background for a while and hopefully we're getting closer to a decent-sized first build. It will appear very janky, but I hope that the actually gameplay will be fairly well-refined. My goal is for it to be a meal, not just a taste.
Please look forward to hearing more about this in the future! I'm working on various projects with different levels of time commitment, polish, and budget, but I hope the overall result is that I will have an interesting mix of things for you patrons throughout this year. ^-^ Thanks for your support!