Happy New Year everyone! 2021 has finally passed and the start of 2022 has arrived. Let’s take a brief look at what we’ve done in 2021.
This past year, well, it was interesting! At the start of the year, I talked to Foleso and Violora, 2 of the directors for our NaNoRenO 2020 entry Enamored Risks, and told them this year would be the last year I’d host a big NaNoRenO collaborative project. We began concepting what would later become A Pinch of Magic, a dating sim where you play as a recent high school graduate who’s secretly a witch.
We made A Pinch of Magic in a month with a team of around 30. You can read more on the development process in our 8 devlogs for it.
March will be here before we know it, but right now we don’t have any plans for what I’ll be doing for this NaNoRenO. Just because I won’t be directing a large project doesn’t mean I’m down for the count!
In July we finally released Asterism, an absolute behemoth of a project that took 4 1/2 years to make. While I’m disappointed we couldn’t release it as an RPG VN (which you can read more about here), I’m glad it’s finally released.
Finally, to wrap up the year we released Crimson Waves on the Emerald Sea, a Victorian-esque vampire character drama. Like A Pinch of Magic, CWES is free to play.
CWES took around just 4 months to make and is a culmination of what I’ve wanted to do this year- a short, story told with a fair amount of animations and polish. I’d like to make more visual novels similar to this (less focus on a big word count, more focus on the visuals and overall polish), so please give CWES a try and let me know what you think!
Next year I hope to release Drops of Death and move towards making more projects like CWES. I am definitely not done developing dating sims or choice-driven games, though! I hope these future projects will interest you, and as I have more to announce, I’ll let you know. For now, I hope you’ll enjoy a short travel in the Victorian era with Cecil and Nemo.
I hope 2022 will be kinder to you than this year. I hope you’ll be able to spend it with loved ones and doing things you love. Thank you for choosing to spend some of your time with me today.
— Arimia
