Our game is finished and will be released on October 22, 2024. But, this isn’t a typical success story. Since my previous post gained some attention, I decided to share my experience with this game. Hopefully, it will be helpful to someone out there.

Backstory

There was a gap of several years between my first attempt at making a game and this second one. I was working as a web developer, but my thoughts always lingered on game development. At the beginning of 2023, my teammates and I decided to give it another shot. We thought we’d become a little wiser and opted for a simpler genre—Match3. We thought it would be easy...

We were inspired by Puzzle Quest 2, a Match3 game with RPG elements where the AI plays against you, and you build strategies with skills. We also looked at The Mirror, a simple Match3 game with lots of nude characters. Also it has unique mechanic of Harem (which we doesn't have). But seeing that the quality of NSFW games on Steam wasn’t very high, we thought we could try to compete by mixing Puzzle Quest 2 with The Mirror.

First Attempt at the Story

For two weeks, I worked on an MVP to test our concept. I used Unity, grabbed some assets online, and created one playable level with predefined skills. To our surprise, it worked, and it was fun! So, we pushed forward.

We brainstormed a story: Alex, our main character, is an inventor and time traveler from the 1970s, with a car-mobile home that resembles the DeLorean from Back to the Future. Alex would travel through different eras, fighting enemies and collecting items to decorate his mobile home.

And thus, the name of the game was born -- Chronobabes.

We hired a talented artist who designed our game’s characters. However, we quickly realized that the 70s-style UI clashed with the different time periods, and the mobile home mechanic wasn’t as fun as we thought. It also consumed a lot of development time, so we scrapped it.

Our first enemy, Ai'Nu, a matriarch from the Prehistoric Epoch, was well-designed, but the artist wasn’t satisfied. The character lacked the vibrancy he envisioned.

Second Story Iteration

After some brainstorming, we revamped Alex’s background—now he’s from the 1920s, traveling in a red telephone booth, a nod to Doctor Who. This new concept aligned well with all the epochs we had in mind: Prehistoric, Ancient Egypt, Hellenistic Greece, the Fairy East, and Ancient China.

Ai'Nu was redrawn, and this time she was both adorable and alluring. We loved the style and used it for all the other enemies. We also used Cubism2D for the animations—such a satisfying moment for the team!

New Mechanics

I initially stuck to the "develop within constraints" rule, but I couldn’t resist adding more features. After playing Slay the Spire, I thought it’d be fun to incorporate a deck-building system. So, we added it, along with tokens like poison and regeneration, and artifacts! This brought unique mechanics to the game but introduced balancing and testing nightmares. Also each mechanic is another brick to localization complexity.

The development process became more complex—each mechanic had to be tested, balanced, drawn, programmed, and animated. I was on the verge of falling into the trap of feature creep again, but luckily, I caught myself in time.

We also added puzzle-like battles where the player can’t use skills and has to defeat the enemy under special conditions. There are four of these battles in the game, and they’re worth trying!

Balancing

The game now has over 70 skills, with both players and enemies having their own. We also added special abilities to enemies, giving each battle a unique twist. Every skill had to be drawn, programmed, and animated. But that wasn’t the hard part—balancing was.

Each battle, skill, and enemy needed to be tested multiple times. Actually, many, many times. And still, you’ll never get it perfectly balanced. After dozens of iterations, we finally reached a point where we felt it was fun. We even added some difficult but solvable battles where the key is to exploit the enemy’s weaknesses.

Scenario Editor

As development progressed, we needed a way to manage the growing complexity of the story, dialogues, and events. Unity’s interface wasn’t cutting it, so I created a scenario editor—a custom tool that allowed us to easily build and connect story nodes. This made the process much smoother and faster.

Interested in how I made it? Let me know if you’d like a tutorial!

Steam is against us

When our first epoch was ready, we set up a Steam page—uploaded the video, screenshots, and description—and were promptly rejected. Steam required the entire game to be completed before allowing NSFW games to have a page. We were disappointed since the Steam page is crucial for marketing, but we pressed on.

It took nearly another year to finish the game, and after several back-and-forth rejections and fixes, we finally received approval. Our Steam page went live—what a moment!

Steam is for us

Although our Steam page wasn’t approved until September 2024, causing us to lose valuable marketing time, Steam’s marketing tools are excellent. We used curators, wishlists, discounts, and events, and finally started gaining some attention. Right now, we’re getting 10-15 wishlists per day, and we’re hoping for a boost during the October Steam Fest!

Conclusion

Here we are. The game is finished, but I’m not expecting it to be a huge success in terms of sales. I’d be happy to sell at least 2,000 copies, but more than anything, I want positive feedback. That’s what keeps me passionate about making games. Next time, though, I’m starting with marketing, not development. I hope my story helps someone. Here are a few key takeaways:

• Avoid NSFW games, especially for your first project.
• Keep your game’s scope narrow.
• Focus on gameplay first! If your game isn’t fun with basic elements, it won’t be fun with great graphics.
• Match3 games are more complex than they seem, especially when combined with RPG mechanics.