Hello everyone, and happy January! I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday season, and I wish good health, success, and happiness for each and every one of you.

It's a new year again, so, as always, it's time to go over what I did last year, and what I plan to do in 2026! First I'll briefly run over the stuff that I did in 2025 that wasn't related to any project in particular, but was more "General Game Dev Stuff":

• Migrated from Godot to Ren'py (now I'm both a Unity and Godot dropout, someone give me my MEDAL 🏅)
• Complete overhaul of my game dev website
• Put together a mailing list
• Put together organized presskits for all of my current WIPs 
• Put together organized walkthroughs for all my games
• Updated my game developer logo 

Last devlog I think I promised a rundown of all of my current projects, and I am here to deliver! This is going to be a long one, so buckle in. In the past, I've tried to keep my game list pretty under wraps just because I can spend a long time developing them, and I didn't want to tease games that wouldn't come out for months. Unfortunately, this also made it really hard for me to talk about anything on my socials, since I was constantly working on stuff that hadn't been announced or even discussed 😅 and, long story short - I was sick and tired of not being able to talk about the things I was working on, so I'm just talking about them now! 

This is a comprehensive list of all of the projects (at least the projects I'm primarily developing solo) that I'm working on that have been developed enough that they will be released in some form. (I'm omitting the synopses for MHIAS and Karamu since they're out and have synopses publicly available, and I want to avoid making this devlog EVEN LONGER.) I've also included how much progress I made on each project in 2025! It ended up being kinda a lot... 

Title: My Husband is a Stranger

🐙 Genres: Romance, mystery/thriller, yandere, drama

💍 Gameplay tags: Customizable protagonist, multiple endings, one male LI 

🐟 If I had to describe the game in one sentence: The game where you basically handle your marriage problems in the worst way imaginable. 

🌊 Progress made in 2025:

• GUI coded 
• Demo CGs and mini CGs completed
• Demo coded
• Demo beta tested
• 100% backgrounds completed
• Miscellaneous work (store pages, promo art, etc etc.)
• 30k words written 

Title: Karamu Trilogy

🕸️ Genres: Romance, mystery/thriller, yandere, horror 

 🔪 Gameplay tags: Defined protagonist, multiple endings, one male LI, otome, three games in one! 

🩸 If I had to describe the game in one sentence: You really want to break up, but your yandere ex boyfriend really doesn't want to break up, and he is VERY clingy (and persuasive). 

☀️ Progress made in 2025:

• Character/costume designs revised
• GUI completed and coded 
• ~90% backgrounds completed (will be complete by the end of January)
• All voice lines finalized
• 70% sprites completed
• Art redo for Karamu (the first entry) 30% completed 

Title: Rohais

🌹 Genres: Romance, dark fantasy/fairytale, yandere, tragedy, mystery

❄️ Gameplay tags: Customizable protagonist, multiple endings, one female LI 

🥀 Synopsis:

Trapped in a tower, no one can hear you scream. You’ve been imprisoned, not by a dragon… but by your (former) loyal knight and bodyguard. You’re the king’s precious youngest child, and he will stop at nothing to get you back, but your captor is equally determined to keep you, no matter what it costs her. 

As she mercilessly slaughters anyone who comes to rescue you, your kingdom creeps closer to its ruin. You have seven days to escape… but do you want to?  

🗡️ If I had to describe the game in one sentence: The only thing better than a pretty lady in armor is a pretty lady in armor who will also commit copious amounts of murder for you.

🛡️ Progress made in 2025:

• GUI completed and coded
• ~75% backgrounds completed 
• 50% sprites completed
• 30k words written 

Title: The Soulkeeper's Servant

🍄 Genres: Mystery, romance, fantasy, comedy 

🪄 Gameplay tags: Defined female protagonist, one male LI, point and click mystery-solvin' gameplay

💀 Synopsis: 

You’re dead. You should be resting peacefully, but some necromancer brought you back to life to be his servant. 

You don’t remember anything about your past. The boy who brought you back to life insists that he didn’t know you either, but something tells you that he knows more than he’s letting on.

Try to adapt to your new “afterlife” while figuring out why you died… and who killed you. 

🐈‍⬛ If I had to describe the game in one sentence: A point and click style mystery game where you solve your own murder (and grow a spine and romance a cute boy in the process). 

🪦 Progress made in 2025:

• Character/costume designs completed for main duo
• Test backgrounds completed (2)
• Outline in progress
• Test sprites completed (4)

Title: Countdown to Midnight

🕙 Genres: Tragicomedy, drama, time travel, LGBTQ 

🎆 Gameplay tags: Defined male protagonist, non-linear gameplay with a bit of puzzle-solving but linear story, no romance gameplay (the male protag is gay af and the female deuteragonist is also gay af, you do have awkward run-ins with your ex-boyfriend though)

🎉 Synopsis: 

Your life sucks. You dropped out of college, you're working a dead-end job, and the last time you talked to your friends was months ago. You're depressed and you're trapped and you just want to end it all - so you decide to, on New Year's Eve. 

However, before you get the chance, a girl barrels into your life, saying that the world is going to end, and you're the only one who can save it. And so, on the day you were planning to die, you're dragged on one last adventure. 

🌟 If I had to describe the game in one sentence: Local Young Man goes on soul-saving adventure instead of going to therapy or taking his mom's calls. 

💓 Progress made in 2025: 

• Character/costume designs completed for the main trio
• ~60% backgrounds completed
• GUI completed
• Test sprites completed (2)

Title: Villainfall: I Died and All I Got Was a Boyfriend

🐦‍⬛ Genres: Romance, boy's love/LGBTQ, comedy, science fantasy, drama

🍎 Gameplay tags: Defined male protagonist, one male LI, boy's love/GAY, multiple routes and endings but only the true route is romantic, ENJOY YOUR FRIENDSHIP ROUTES 

🐤 Synopsis: 

You’re the villain. Well, you used to be a good guy, but “a lot of things happened” and you turned your back on your friends and joined the bad guys. But the betrayal weighed on your conscience, and so you tried to make amends… by heroically sacrificing your life for your former comrades.

That should have been the end of it. You could rest peacefully knowing that your conscience was clear and your sins were forgiven. 

Except your sacrifice didn’t go to plan. You woke up, and you’re still alive. And your sins were certainly not forgiven… and your former friends still hate your guts. Now you have to earn their forgiveness (and the forgiveness of the hero and your former best friend/rival who may or may not be extra mad because he may or may not have had a crush on you… maybe).

❤️‍🩹 If I had to describe the game in one sentence: A hero x villain, friends to enemies to lovers comedy where you're so obsessed with redeeming yourself that you completely miss the fact that the person you're begging forgiveness from really just wants to smooch you. 

🐦 Progress made in 2025:

• Initial concept completed, design document written
• Logo completed
• Outline completed
• Character/costume designs completed
• Test sprites completed (5)
• GUI in progress
• ~30% backgrounds completed
• 100k words written 

Title: LimerAlice

🩸 Genres: Romance, girl's love/LGBTQ, comedy, satire, yandere (but not played straight)

❤️‍🔥 Gameplay tags: Defined female protagonist, one male LI and one female LI, girl's love/LESBIANS, multiple routes and endings but you can only romance one of the girls, ENJOY YOUR MANDATORY FRIENDSHIP ROUTES, school simulation gameplay 

🔮 Synopsis: 

After two loveless decades, you’ve finally met the man of your dreams. Unfortunately, you’ve got competition: he’s got five beautiful girls all vying for his hand in marriage. 

You’ve decided that you’ll do anything to date your man (including getting a little blood on your hands). But as you get closer to these girls, you find yourself bonding with them… and your resolve to get rid of them wavers.  

Will you stay loyal to your love? Or maybe… there are some things that are worth more than romance? 

💀 If I had to describe the game in one sentence: A clumsy, insecure yandere girl tries to get rid of her romantic rivals but ends up girl-failing her way into friendship instead (and also might figure out that she's very, very bisexual). 

🪄 Progress made in 2025:

• Initial concept completed, design document written
• Logo completed
• Outline in progress
• Test sprites in progress (2)
• Test backgrounds completed (5)
• Character/costume designs 85% completed 

Title: Our Hollow Appetites (tentative) 

💀 Genres: Dark romance, LGBTQ, horror, fantasy 

🦌 Gameplay tags: Customizable protagonist (but canonically genderfluid and questionably allosexual(???), being an omnipotent god will do that to ya), multiple endings, one male LI 

🍴 Synopsis: 

The humans call you their god. They worship you, and in return you bless their harvests and protect their lands. 

You also love to eat humans. You love to tear their throats out; their screams of agony and despair as you steal away their hopes and joys are your only happiness in your dull immortal life. 

Every year, you receive a sacrifice. This year, you're looking forward to receiving your gift - only to receive a man who's so broken inside that he already smells like death. You make a decision: you'll fix him. You'll treat him well, make him happy, and right when he wants to live again - then you'll eat him. 

🍎 If I had to describe the game in one sentence: An arrogant, bloodthirsty god starts to have very complicated feelings towards the human sacrifice that they're supposed to eat, Extra Toxic Sewage Waste Edition. 

😋 Progress made in 2025:

• Initial concept completed, design document written
• Outline in progress
• 10k words written 

(And then there's obviously Actala: The Hero's Shadow and The Deepwater Witch - which I won't get into since those have demos and game pages out, I reviewed them in my retrospective last year, and I didn't make significant progress on them in 2025 😅 and this list is already ABSURD as is. And also MindMindMind... anyway here's what I did on those in 2025:)

• Actala - test backgrounds completed (2)
• Actala - 50% costume designs revised 
• The Deepwater Witch - Revised some backgrounds and commissioned additional ones
• MindMindMind - Spanish translation completed, implementation in progress
• MindMindMind - Updated GUI, Android/Web port in progress 

I'll go on a very SMALL tangent here. Last year, I included "Project Y" in my project roadmap (the official title was Karamu: Yogiri). It was an adult spinoff of Karamu set in a historical setting. Considering itch.io's smackdown on erotic content, this project has been put on hold indefinitely, since I'm not sure I would be able to release it - I'm waiting on a little more guidance regarding adult content before committing to any projects of that nature, and the adult content was so intertwined in the plot and character development of Karamu: Yogiri that I couldn't remove it and release a SFW and not SFW version. However, part of me does want to experiment with adult content at some point in my game dev endeavors, and I was really interested in it this year. Currently I'm considering an adult companion game to Villainfall, but I'm still thinking about it 😅 I think that might be a good compromise between not making a FULLY not SFW game but at the same time making it chunky enough that it's available separately rather than as a DLC and doesn't end up getting the base game censored or banned. If I decide to chicken out in making it a full game I'll probably make the scripts available somewhere (would you believe that the longest scene that I wrote this year was a 20k long raunchy light-BDSM smut scene... and 2025 was my first year writing smut apart from one scene I wrote in 2024... CRAZY...)

(That said, if I do end up branching out into adult content, I do want to make it clear that adult content will NOT be available for all of my games. It'll mostly be a "I'll write it if I feel like it fits" deal 🤣) 

(... Would people even want smut from me? So far I feel as if my brand is "stories that are absolute boner killers")

 

Okay - that was an absolute mouthful. Now you ask: Chattercap, you've given me an endless list of games - how will you finish any of them? The answer is: gradually! As you can probably tell, I do pretty steady work on all of my projects and like having my fingers in a few different pies. I don't intend to finish all of these in 2026, or even more than a couple - but these all have had significant amounts of work put into them already (at least enough that I'm willing to commit to them publicly) and have been budgeted/planned. This basically means that they have a 1. Complete outline, 2. A detailed game design document with scope and gameplay features, and 3. Collaborators/commissioned artists recruited for all necessary assets (apart from the assets that I'm handling myself, obviously). (Except for Our Hollow Appetites, but that one's fairly small scope and I can probably crank all the assets for it out myself if needed.)

The reason that I'm bringing up all of my projects now is that I actually started commissioning work out last year rather than doing everything myself (background art in particular), which means that there's quite a bit of work going on behind the scenes on projects that aren't "my current priority," and I'd love to just be able to ramble about them as I want.

Now the question: what AM I going to focus on working on in 2026? My primary focus will be to finish the games that I've already shown publicly - for the time being that's My Husband is a Stranger and the Karamu Trilogy. After that, I'll probably work on the games that are the next closest to completion, which would be Rohais and Villainfall. All of these have scripts/GUIs/backgrounds/sprite work done that are anywhere from 50%-100% complete. I might stick Our Hollow Appetites somewhere in there too, since that project is probably the smallest scope out of any of these games. The Soulkeeper's Servant, Countdown to Midnight, and LimerAlice will all take some time to cook, mostly because they have larger casts and scopes, and all three will incorporate some special gameplay elements beyond the standard VN stuff (e.g. point and click gameplay, puzzles, etc.)

I'm not sure if anyone will be interested in all of these projects since they're basically all over the place in terms of style, genre, and demographics. I guess that I should be listening to the Standard Game Dev Advice and should probably "hone in on my niche" and focus on making games that my audience expects 😅 (I don't think a lot of people are equally interested in playing otomes/BL/GL and angst/comedy/mystery) but dang it, I make visual novels, I do it for the passion anyway 🤣 I'm very excited for all of these games, and I hope that they'll find their home with the people who will like them when they're released 🤣 (I swear, game releases feel as if I'm sending puppies out for adoption...)

(Also, if you leave a comment mentioning a project you're interested in... I'd be very interested to know...)

If you got to the end of this - congratulations!!! You deserve a trophy for reading all of this word vomit. Thank you to everyone who likes what I do and the stuff I make, especially everyone who has supported/supports me on Ko-fi and Patreon, and everyone who's gone out of their way to leave me comments/send me fanworks/recommend my games to their friends. Being a developer has truly made me the happiest that I've ever been, even in a world that feels increasingly chaotic and uncertain. Your support means the world to me, and I hope you'll like what I've got in the kitchen 😋

(On a side note, I do think that 2026 is the year when I have to stop responding to all of my comments 😅 I LOVE THEM ALL and I SAVE AND REREAD THEM and THEY MAKE ME SO UNBELIEVABLY HAPPY and I LOVE THAT PEOPLE HAVE SO MANY THOUGHTS AND REACTIONS TO MY GAMES, but I've got too many games out now and answering all of my comments is an impossibility, I fear... Thank you to everyone who takes the time to write them, and REST ASSURED I read all of them and treasure them always.)

And as a final comment, I am legally obligated to drop my links so that you can keep track of What The Heck Chattercap is Doin'. You can find all of my socials and Other Various Things on my Carrd. In particular, I encourage you to sign up for my mailing list to get notifications right when I release new stuff!

Thank you for everything, and I'll be in your care in 2026 as well! 🙇‍♀️

Chattercap