Lustfall Retrospective

A little over three months ago, the deed was finally done. The epic five year journey to develop an epic RPG was finally complete! While there were some things I would have liked to include, such as more CGs for the bad ends and the handful of battle cards that went without their own unique art, I am happy with how things turned out. The game is so long, I’m not sure how many people actually finished the ending or what anyone thought of it, but I suppose that’s the least important part. I finished it mostly for my own sake, and to add another “completed game” to my gallery of debauchery.  

It started development in the summer of 2019. This was the period after leaving my last office job and trying (unsuccessfully) to start a career doing Youtube video production, then Twitch livestreaming. Those were both small creative hobbies of mine, but it was clear that my momentum was 0 and I didn’t really like the grind of it all, especially when getting nothing in return.  

For the better part of the year, I had been applying, one again unsuccessfully, for another office job. Many applications were sent out with mostly ghosting, some timewasting interviews and some companies jerking me around just to give me the middle finger at the last step of the process. As such, I had a lot of spare time to fill, and no money to fill it with. I was burning through my backlog of games quite quickly in between my mandatory hours of application submissions and looked for something to help me feel productive.  

I had on my PC a bunch of fake card game cards full of horny and kinky situations that appealed to me based on stuff that I found on places like DA and Pixiv (although, it was mostly Pixiv). On my weekends during the time I office work, I would go through and try to image ways to make sex/kink based card games using the art. None of these had any real rules, it was mostly just for fun and over the years I had several iterations.

One day it struck me. There’s no way I could get anyone to play this card game I made up with me, but I could dump it into RPG Maker and have the CPU play the cards against me that way. While I planned to do things in my ancient and trusty copy of RPG Maker XP, I took a look on Steam to see if there was anything better. Since all the adult RPGs used RPG Maker VX, I was planning on getting that too... But then I saw that RPG Maker MV was on sale and it advertised being built on a Javascript engine instead of the RGSS stuff. I knew JS, so I decided to go with that. Bonus points for it being the newest engine at the time.  

Turning RPG Maker into a card game was far out of my range of expertise at the time, but if the enemy attacks were the cards, it was kind of like them playing against you. Since I’m the type of person that likes to receive but not necessarily give, it worked out well for the enemy attacks to be “battle cards” while the player attacks were an RPG affair.  

I have a degree in Game Development, and learned the basics back in college (over 13 years ago now... holy crap T.T), but it was a looong time since I did any real work in a game engine. You see, I burnt out pretty hard when it came to senior and the big graduation project, so I forgot just how great it was to create games. I picked a beach to kick things off as a starting point, because I knew just as little about where I wanted to go with the game as Gwen knew what happened to her.  

Just making that Mysterious Shore in RPG Maker was such an enlightening experience. All of the passion that my alma mater squeezed out of me suddenly sprouted anew. It was a canvas to paint an illusion of my own choosing. Something that I had freedom over. It was, like kink, infinitely fascinating again! Like creating a stage show, actors waiting in the wings, it really changed my perspective on game development in a way schooling never could. It was at that point that it became a routine process and something that I took immense comfort in, in an otherwise difficult time in life.  

I had a bunch of these “cards” that I was inspired by, so I came up with many different levels that would focus on sets of them. Almost all of the non-Patreon supported dungeons were planned from the start, even if it was a single phrase on an index card. “Ancient Library” for example... which got flipped into the Cryscorp Cyber Archives.  

As I worked on the earlier bits, the different plot points just sort of came, and I took threads or set new ones as I worked on getting the plot from one dungeon/set of “cards” I wanted to work on to the next one. As someone who grew up on retro-RPGs like the old Final Fantasies, the idea of magical crystals came to mind as a higher level motivation to keep the gang together and to get them to travel, even if it wasn’t directly tied to their own personal motivation. It works out well from a story perspective. Each character has stakes that are small but important to them, and at the same time they have the high level, world ending stakes to amp up the tension and really push on their personalities.  

When it came to battle, I wanted each of the characters to feel different... and while that led to some wonky balancing, they do stand out. Not only with their base attributes, but with their unique skills and how they learn them, which each method reflecting their character. I would have loved to add a way to permanently learn magic from trinkets and just worked on that aspect of powering up some more, but that was out of the scope of my knowledge at the time.  

I’ve also dreamed of having a system that would show the heroines and the status effects on them, similar to what I had done much later in Lust Knight Lisa. At the time, I wasn’t sure how to make something like that happen, but as I learned RPG Maker and even became comfortable modifying engine and plug-in code, the budget and waning community was the blocker. Needless to say, with infinite resources, I know exactly how to do it today (I even have references to functions and line numbers in the engine code to work things).  

Another thing that I started to implement but never got around to finishing it were the strange portals. First hidden in the Jealousy Woods secret path, then in places like the Abandoned Factory, there are some special portals that you would be warned about entering. The idea is that entering them would bring you to an inverse zone that’s themed to one of the six major elements (Mundane, Occult, Liquid, etc...). It would be super powerful endgame boss that would have available to it every single attack of that element (and nothing else). You could stumble upon them at anytime, but you would get demolished if you weren’t end game levels of strength. Defeating all six of them would unlock a super final boss after the final boss... then probably a special or “true” ending.  

Anyways, as the job hunt was continuing to go poorly and winter approached, I was playing some eroge JRPGs when I had the idea to set up a Patreon of my own. If they could do it, why not me? It would be free so everyone could play it, then the cash would come pouring in! (lol) The only issue was that I didn’t have a lot of money, but I didn’t want to release it with art from artists that I don’t have permission to use, regardless of my intentions to replace it later. I know a lot of people don’t care, and that I probably could have gotten away with it... but god damn it someone needs to have some principles!!! I set aside a bit of cash and set up a tiny piece of what I had done as a “Demo.”  

I had never commissioned an artist before, especially not for something so naughty, so the entire thing was a big learning experience. Mambolina, the artist who did all of the title images for the game, was the first person I approached on F-List of all places. Thanks to a very good experience with her, I popped my commissioner cherry and had the confidence to seek out more artists! Eventually, I had what I needed to put out the first release on January 21^st, 2020.  

With a new discord channel, the itchio page and a Patreon up, I was good to go... and things went better than expected. This was back in the days that things were actually indexed, so people stumbled across it. Among the things I remember, I got a lot of compliments for the characters and the writing! It was very nice to hear that considering that it was the part of the game I was solely responsible for. There was more value than just the horny art! The discord would be boppin’ for a while with ideas and theories, but I think that was more to do with COVID hitting and keeping everyone locked up. Fun fact, when I released Demo 1, which was just through the RED sewers, I was working on the Studium Amare area... so I was working ahead quite a bit.  

There were some complaints, and people had a lot more trouble with the escape game in the RED Prison than I thought. Like, it required a bit of timing, but it was driving people bonkers. That was when I made the DA guide with the safe places to stand... and eventually made it so if you failed too much you could just skip to the end.  

Not too long before lockdown happened in my area, I went to sell of a large portion of my Magic the Gathering cards. I used to be crazy into collecting them and building decks to play with people, but since I didn’t have a group to play with anymore, I figured that the cash was more valuable. It was thanks to selling off most of the good stuff (still have my favorite decks, mostly Commander) that I could fund what was known as “Demo 2” and “Update 3.” I also wanted to change the name of what I called the releases at the time. Figured they weren’t demos, it was just a game in development at that point.  

I also started the guide to help people out, since a lot of people seemed to get lost or confused, and at the time it was find since I was just working on Lustfall while STILL applying for jobs... but as time went on I hated how time consuming it was. I also noticed that people were talking about it less, which I attributed to the guide (which I saw as a negative). That’s eventually why I stopped doing it. My friends floated the idea for making a version and charging for it, to recoup the massive amount of time it took, but I just can’t bring myself to put everything into it upfront and hoping that the money makes up for the time later. The more I work on that, the less time gets put into working on everything else.  

Around the Cleo’s Mansion release, I decided to push out Lustfall to more locations. My go-to and time proven GOAT for promoting my twisted brand of kink is TFGamesSite. Since the maid mansion had a lot of latex corruption and elements of transformation, I thought it was appropriate to share it there. At the same time I asked the Karryn’s Prison dev for some advice on where to promote, which led me to... that site. I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal since the game was free anyways but man... what a mistake. Assholes took down the link to itchio and re-uploaded the game to their mirrors so I wouldn’t even get traffic to my itchio page. Oh and you knew they were very charming and polite about everything too while I was just trying to figure out what the hell was happening. /s Needless to say, it was a very negative experience.  

Eventually (about a year from the first demo), thanks to the start of my commercial games and the risk I took with Victoria’s Body, Patreon support passed the humble $30/mo and since then I committed to developing games full time.  

I had a bunch of ideas for the higher tiers of support back when I initially created the Patreon for Lustfall, including stuff like cameos or even adding your own dungeon to the game. I was a starry-eyed youngster back then that learned a lesson to always be prepared for someone to take advantage of you. Now, I’m not saying that these things were purposely malicious (I mean, they could have been, but I doubt it.) nor am I accusing anyone, but it sure did feel like I set myself up to be taken advantage of...  

For just $100 USD a month YOU could have your own dungeon, complete with some new art and stuff added to Lustfall and I would work with you to make it happen. The idea is that people would stick with the tier for a few months to cover the cost of the extra art and a bit of the development time and effort... but the reality of it was that most people read it (and some of the  other tiers with rewards) as one time $100 payment then bounce. Again, I don’t think people were purposely doing it to be a dick. They just wanted their idea in the game and $100/mo is a lot to ask for so it’s likely all that they could afford.  

Back when I was ONLY working on Lustfall and still had savings, it made more sense in theory, but by the time people were excited about that stuff, I was already developing other games like Damsels of Vice and had to split my time between the two. These dungeons also replaced the time I was going to spend progressing the plot, so it slowed down the release of everything too.  

I really liked adding the extra dungeons and the cameos from the supporters that were reasonable about that they were asking for (which was most). Their ideas were super hot and I had a lot of fun chatting with them to really shape some fun new dungeon ideas... but I had no idea how much it would complicate things.  

In fall of 2023 I tried to push for a Kickstarter to finish the game back then. Not only would it have bought me the time to dedicate to Lustfall, but it would have covered all of the costs for the extra art to commission. I’m kind of surprised that it was even allowed to be posted considering the NSFW nature of things. Not a lot came from it, but it was a novel experience none the less.  

With all of the little written bad ends based on losing specific fights, there are a ton of CGs that I wanted to add to add some illustrations of them. These were like the battle cards on crack, since each one had 4 characters to account for and became super expensive. I tried to leverage this to the early access releases at some point, but the popularity of Lustfall started to drop. Once the Patreon hara-kiri happened, it was pretty much over.  

I was pushing hard with the itchio “FINAL CHAPTER Funding Goal” to get most of what I needed for the rest of the battle card art for a release, but then itchio shit its pants and killed that on the spot too. Like, we were steadily, if not slowly, making progress until it pretty much dropped to zero forward progress. Over 6 months of pay-what-you-want funding goal donations, Lustfall could only scrape together $1,205 out of $2,000 needed to finish all of the art. Fortunately, unlike the thieves at Patreon, I did get the money from it, but we were walking on egg shells for a bit because it was a sloooooooow pay out period (and still kind of is, but it’s gotten slightly better since).  

Eventually, I had to make a choice. I wanted it done! I wanted it out there!! Not out of any obligations. Not for the few that still had a passing interest in it (Lustfall fans are GOATED btw. You rule!). I wanted it out there, proof of completion, for my sake. Now I can look back and beam with pride that I finished an epic, 25+ hour game, to sit aside my collection of other projects. No game left unfinished... even if it was a financial sinkhole at the end.  

A quick and dirty look at my excel sheet has the grand total of Lustfall commissions at around 232 commission orders, some of these containing multiple pieces of art per order. That’s an insane amount for just one person and just one free project! This is where were are talking numbers, so if you’re weird about this stuff, skip ahead a few paragraphs.  

The total to commission all of the art that I did over the past 5 years at $15,327.37 and the “Pay what you want” donations from itch (at the time of release) totaled $3047.04... with 42% of that coming in the final year. If you love something, be very cautious of doing it for free because if you look at it all together, that’s an insane money sink (and I don’t really have that sort of cash to being with either...) Could I have started directly charging money to make up for it? Probably, but I mentioned long ago to the artists I commissioned that Lustfall would be free and I am sticking to my principles. As expensive as morals can be sometimes, someone has to stand proud and act as an example to others.  

For you number nerds out there, according to itchio analytics, Lustfall has been downloaded 82,500 times out of 430,000 page views. It has been added to 5,620 collections with a 3.99/5.0 rating across 108 reviews. People don’t seem to know of or mention Lustfall in other places despite its free and complete nature, but I don’t really mind. It’s already reached an audience that’s hard to imagine. It really did some numbers! And hey, maybe one day I will see people talking about it or recommending it in the wild.  

I appreciate everyone who has played Lustfall in the past, is playing it now, or will play it in the future! It’s been a labor of love that’s helped me grow as a game developer and as a person. It’s introduced me to a lot of amazing artists, several of whom I still commission and work with to this day. While I’m glad the Lustfall journey is over, I’m all the more grateful for it and the journey it was. Thank YOU!  

Lustfall, at the end of the day, is a game about “self.” I set out to explore different ideas and twists on what it might mean to be “yourself” and how you think about the idea of the “self.” Is there a “you” that is not the “you” that you are right now? Are you “you” no matter the “you” that others perceive you as? Your answer will not be the same as others, just like the sense of self is different between Gwen, Cleo, Syn, and Cherri. If I can be so self-indulgent for a moment, I hope that people who play Lustfall think on their identity as a whole, and that the game helps them find or forge the self that they truly want to be.

That about wraps things up for this retrospective. If you’re picking up what I’m putting down, you can still “Name your own Price” and drop a few bucks. You can also head on over to https://subscribestar.adult/lustfall to show some support for me and my next game.  

If you have any questions you’d like to ask about the development of the game, or want to know what I think about specific parts of Lustfall, this is the time to ask. Leave your questions below and I’ll get to them when I have a chance.  

Most importantly, thanks for playing Lustfall!