Posted August 22, 2025 by Carrot
It's been 3 weeks now and OW is still deindexed... :(
To say this has put a damper on my motivation and mental health is an understatement. If you'd like to see what being deindexed does to the traffic of your game:
The only traffic I get now is from outside of itch. It really makes so much of what I've done feel pointless. And I'm honestly scared that it could end up getting banned from the site altogether. I'm 99% certain it was deindexed because of the content warnings. As you know, it wasn't deindexed in the initial big wave, rather, when I made an edit to the game page and resaved it. This ran the page contents through some kind of scan that picked up on the content warnings for sexual assault/violence and deindexed it immediately (I saw this happen to another dev, as well, and itch confirmed to them that it was the mention of sexual noncon on their page that created the restriction). That's why no matter what I do now to edit the page, it won't undo the shadowban (I already don't allow for payments on any of my games), and I have to wait for itch itself to undo the restriction individually. I have reached out to them, but so far haven't heard anything, and it will probably be some time yet, given how swamped itch is with people sending emails, requesting payouts, etc. I'm also very scared that itch will come back and tell me that they can't allow this type of content on the site anymore and it will simply get banned...
So I am still just... waiting... and hoping the worst doesn't happen...
Not even the Queer Games Bundle helped. Every other year, it's helped bring in some views and traffic to the game. But this year because the game was deindexed, it's at the literal bottom of the list of 600 games. The incoming traffic from the bundle is so low it's not even in the list of referrers in my analytics... I feel so hopeless...
Ahhhh... I apologize... I don't want to just be whiny and wallow, even if so many aspects of my life right now are hitting me repeatedly in the head with a proverbial crowbar.
I do have some better news though. Though my creativity and motivation were just about nill for a while after everything with my dad and the itch stuff, I randomly started thinking one night about an older story of mine that I'd always wanted to turn into a game. And after doing some initial concept sketches for the chars, I got hit with sudden massive waves of inspiration. Maybe it's because it's something new and removed from everything going on, so my brain just latched onto it, I don't know. But it's been a wonderful new distraction and something for me to focus on to get through all this and keep from sinking lower and lower into my head. And I've actually started having a lot of fun creating again, which hasn't happened in a while, I'll be honest.
So yes! I am working on something new for once! As in like brand-new, not even a side game type of new. Yay, Carrot!
I've been sharing a lot of stuff about it already on my socials and Patreon, but figured I'd do kind of a summary about it here and give some more details about how I kinda envision everything.
The game will be called Where the Day Springs Red and it will be two main parts, with the first acting as kind of a "question" arc and the latter continuing the story while also acting as a sort of "answer" arc for lack of better terminology. Basically the first part will set up a lot of stuff and leave a lot of questions and the second part will (hopefully) answer those questions and complete the story.
It will be a horror kinetic visual novel. I see this as being much more of a classic-style horror game than OW. Though of course because this is me, it will still be wrought with convoluted character dynamics and relationships and some tragic romantic stuff lol. And yes, it will be kinetic this time, as in there won't be any choices or routes. I have gone back and forth on this a bit as I've been living with the story and chars in my head the past weeks, but there just really aren't any kind of clear possible routes in this like there were in OW, even on the side (this isn't the type of story where the MC can possibly get with different LIs like OW was). And I don't really want to add flavor choices or game overs that won't do much besides change small bits of text here and there, as that wouldn't add much to the experience. I'd rather focus more on the immersion and cinematics than on thinking up possible choices that won't really have any actual story impact.
It's not going to be nearly as long as OW, I'll say that right now hahahaha. But I hope it'll still be a fun and immersive story and experience when it's done.
I already have a good chunk of work done on the foundation, including the designs, sprites, main UI, music, and have even been having a lot of fun experimenting with how to do my comedic cutscenes (because you know I can't do horror without some ridiculous shenanigans in there, too).
Ofc, a story is built upon its characters. So let's go into those first. You all know how much I love to write groups of childhood friends... it's basically my schtick at this point haha. I just love all the interwoven dynamics you can set up and all the history you can play with ahhh... anyway... As you can see, I've already determined their Colors™, because this would not be a Carrot game without Colors™ and Leitmotifs™ for each character (you can hear their songs on my socials if you want to).
Our intrepid protagonist this time is a sweet bean called Gum. I really love how their design turned out. I keep cute-ing myself out every time I draw them lol. The game will be from their "POV" even though it will be written in third-person, which is different from OW. I did this as I liked the degree of separation better for this specific story. Also it will allow me to do POV shifts when necessary.
And here is the rest of the friend group:
What a bunch.
They are already turning out even more chaotic and insane than the OW characters, which is saying something. Or maybe it's just that I'm allowing myself to be even more ridiculous in my writing as an outlet from My Life™. Who can say. I have to keep reminding myself though that all these characters have done things people will likely hate because that's how my stories work. Whoops. Also this is a horror game so there's going to be death I apologize in advance. Anyways, I hope that people will enjoy these deeply flawed chaotic individuals and give them a chance as they did with my OW chars.
And here are some litol screenies of the UI and some initial shots:
As you can see, it's all a little bit chaotic LOL I'm having a lot of fun with the scenes and setting up all the character dynamics. I've also been learning a ton of new tricks in Ren'Py when it comes to layers and masks. You can see a vid of the first cutscene with all the movement and everything if you check out my socials (and I also wrote up a tutorial for working with layers and masks on my Patreon that also shows off some of the different bits and pieces of what I'm doing).
What is the story, you ask? Lol that's a good question...
Here's a better-written version of what I wrote originally on Tumblr lol:
Five childhood friends reunite at the old ranch they spent summers at as kids for a final hurrah now that Marshall's grandparents are retiring and want to lease out the land. But when darkness falls, things take a turn, as it seems something is out there... hunting them down one by one...
ooooOOooOOoOOOOOooOOoooOOOOoooooOOO...
That's for the first part at least. But I can't really give any sort of summary for the second part without giving away the first part. So you'll have to wait for that hahaha.
As I mentioned earlier, a lot of this will be built on the foundation of my original story. Though big swaths of it will need to be rewritten and reworked and new parts written and added. Still, I do think that the foundation will make the writing go faster than it would otherwise. We'll see. Right now I'm working on the opening chunk, which is all brand-new from scratch. It's been a lot of fun finding the characters' voices and dynamics.
I've also been using this time to look for music, as music is such an integral part of stories for me and I really want to set the vibes right. My strategy usually involves first checking out my "saved" folder on Audiostock because I have a ton of saved pieces in there that I liked but never got a chance to use, then scrolling endlessly through different keywords and tags and adding anything new to my saved folder that catches my interest. After this, I download the whole lot of them and start living with them, slowly updating their names either to helpful descriptions or potential scene names if I already have an idea where one would fit:
It's literally like... thousands of songs... slowly pared down to hundreds of songs... slowly pared down to specific songs...
IT'S A LONG PROCESS.
But I already have a lot of great pieces that fit really well and are already helping to shape and inspire bits of the story and scenes in my head, which is wonderful. It was the same with OW, where I found so much inspiration in the music that I found, some of it really influencing and inspiring parts of the story or the direction of certain scenes.
Because this is more of a classic horror vibes game than OW I've found it a little bit harder to find fitting music... so many people will label their pieces as "horror" and "scary" and such and then you listen and while the piece itself might be fine it sounds like something out of an RPG, not a horror movie... like it's intense but not "scary." Also there's TONS of ambient horror music but not a lot of like... active chase / killing happening type of music. There's still a few scenes I'm having trouble finding the exact vibe I want and I still have to live with stuff a bit longer, but I'm slowly getting a feel for some really great stuff that I think will set some great vibes. I also found a few pieces on another site that are really great and just what I'm looking for for a few specific scenes.
At any rate, I think that's about the jist of everything right now. As always, I have zero timeline for any of this. When I first got started, I didn't even know if I'd turn it into an official project yet, as I was just kinda faffing around, but now that I've got this much done, it does seem to be shaping up to be at least something official, hence my making this post about it. But I have no idea when I'll have anything done. Especially since, while the iron seems to be extremely hot right now, that doesn't mean in future weeks I won't hit slumps again or lose momentum if my mental health plummets. I still struggle a lot most days with everything going on and dealing with my grief and such. And right now, working on this new project has been my one outlet and way to kinda disassociate from all that. But that doesn't mean it will always be like that. So I could see production work being kinda up and down for a while.
I do think I might end up making a demo for the project first. I might release the "opening chunk" that introduces the characters and setup and everything once I finish that as a demo, as I'd love for people to already be able to learn more about the characters. Then after that, I would release part 1 when it's finished. Following by part 2 later obviously.
Anyway, those are just thoughts for now. We'll see what happens.
And that's about it. I think I've covered everything and can't think of anything else to talk about. So we'll call this a day. I do hope that people will give the new project a chance! Even though I'm already incredibly anxious that it will get compared to OW and won't be as good and people will hate me or something hahahaaaa... trying not to think about that right now.
Have this silly doodle as a sendoff: