TL;DR

Some things I just needed to get off my chest.

I've spent a long time trying to figure out what I wanted to do after school. I thought that, maybe, just maybe, if I spent a couple years at university I could figure where I'd want to be afterwards. But the more I studied the more I realized there was no light at the end of that tunnel for me.

I ended up dropping out after my second year.

For a very long time after that I spent my life wandering from thing to thing. I spent my days working at McDonald's and my nights studying. Quite often, some new shiny thing would appear and I would gravitate to it, thinking maybe this was the hobby or career I could be passionate about. Livestreaming, music, art, vlogging - I would always get halfway decent at something, get frustrated, then give up shortly after.

At some point, I eventually settled on web development. It wasn't really something I did out of passion. It made decent money and I was decent at it. That was it.

And, before I knew it, almost 8 years of my life had passed: I made some great friends, worked on some cool things, and even felt happy once in a while. But I can honestly say that, throughout my career, I've never been truly proud of anything I've ever made.

So I quit.

I needed some time to find out what it was I truly wanted. So I took up freelance web dev work, just to make a little bit of money to support myself. But the rest of my time was spent doing the one thing that I always enjoyed: gaming. So through those cold autumn nights, I replayed every single game I ever enjoyed, front to back. When I finished those, I scanned through Steam's catalogue for more games to play. And when I finished those, I scoured the internet for indie games. You probably see where I'm going with this - at some point I discovered adult games.

It was fun. It was cozy. It was taboo.

For some reason, I had never considered game development as a possible career. I think I believed that it would suck out all the fun out of games if I had to do it as a job. But I was too fascinated by the genre to not give it a try.

It was really strange. It was early January 2025 when I came up the idea for this game. I had had a fever from the holidays and was bedridden that weekend. But even though I was sick I knew I had to get up and write the idea down before I forgot.

And I started building the game the next day.

I don't think I've ever worked on something for that long without any premise of reward. I invested every single waking hour I could into this game. I learned a multitude of skills that I needed on the fly: art, sound, writing, etc. If I wasn't happy, I would move on and come back to it later. Nothing was going to stop me from making this game. It was like I had unleashed some sort of inner demon I never knew I had.

I had a lot of opportunities to quit. I remember constantly telling myself to not think about the money and time that was gone because of this project. More specifically, it was that I didn't care. It wasn't important because I was passionate about something for the very first time in my life. I wanted to work on this project because I wanted to work on it. That was it.

But I knew at some point I couldn't keep it to myself any longer. And I was terrified: What if people didn't like this game? What if my belief in this game wasn't all that I thought it was? What if no one even cared? I sat there for a while pondering whether I should even hit the submit button on that thread. I told myself to keep my expectations low so I wouldn't be disappointed. I went to bed thinking I would be happy even if two people replied to the thread. And that I'd figure out what to do from there, just like I had for the last few months.

And that brings to now.

Here we are, barely a week later. Several thousand downloads. Pages upon pages of kind words and comments. Nearing almost a hundred interested members in the Discord channel. It's gone so much further than I would've ever imagined that I often need to tell myself to pause and remember how far we've come.

So I know you're probably tired of hearing this, but when I say I appreciate every single one of you, I truly, truly, mean it. You have validated every single excuse I uttered to myself during those long days and nights making this game, alone in my bedroom. You've given this project life that I couldn't, through your subscriptions and purchases. You've shown me that someone other than myself believes in this project. So to every one of you, I give thanks.

And thanks for coming to my TED talk.

**If you enjoy this project and want to see it grow as much as I do, please consider signing up on ⭐SubscribeStar. It gives me the opportunity to invest more time in this project instead of trying to rack up enough contract hours to pay rent. But I can't stress this enough - if you can't afford to, DON'T DO IT. I appreciate support in all it's forms, whether it's through your likes, shares, comments, reviews, and Discord chats. Don't think that I think of you any different. Please.

- moondev