I’m deep in the middle of writing the Infestation Tome. It’s taking a while. Here’s what I’m trying to achieve:

1. Players who are grossed out by this stuff aren’t penalised if they don’t pick it.
2. Players who like this stuff aren’t penalised by picking it.
3. You can do interesting stuff in encounters with it.
4. Mortals only get infested consensually, and it’s believable that they’d be cool with this.
5. After they get infested, there’s enough unpredictability and variation that it feels like the creatures have a life of their own.

I think I’ve got a design that’ll work, but there’s a fair bit of writing to go because it’s starting to look a lot like a second seduction track.

I posted the store page for Steam Fleshcult, so if you want to wishlist it, go here!

I did some sales estimates and thought some more about what it’ll take to make the game easily moddable, and I’m not sure I can get there on $1. I’m now looking at a price of $2. It seems to be a popular price point with several other small adult games.

I’ve sent a Windows test build out to testers. On my computers it’s stable and I can play through to the end, but I suspect there’s still many compatibility and polish issues to discover on other configurations.

I’m signed up to Steam as a dev. Signing up is a bit like buying a gun: you can’t release a game until 30 days have passed, to prevent crimes of passion. This puts the earliest possible release date in October. In any case I’ll need some time to dig out and finish off the Infestation Tome, and make allll the marketing assets. Did you know Steam requires 10 logo images, all in different sizes and subtly different aspect ratios? And screenshots – my mind goes blank when I try to think of an exciting Fleshcult screenshot. That’ll be tricky.

So far I’ve been using PyInstaller to produce an exe. I’m unsettled to read reports that Anti-virus programs really hate PyInstaller exes. I guess an interpreter running bytecode embedded inside the same executable looks like fancy footwork to evade detection heuristics. This is not helped by PyInstaller’s lead dev’s pig-headed insistence that it’s not his problem to offer a less suspicious-looking process. I might have to revisit this decision, but we’ll see how it goes.