Development Blog - July 2025

Hey everyone. I hope you’ve all been having as good a month as possible.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know it’s been a bit of a rough month in the AVN community, firstly with Steam showing its first signs of folding to the pressures of corporations that have absolutely no right to be deciding what perfectly legal content people can be allowed to enjoy.

Then, of course, came Itch’s shadow banning of all adult content and even going as far as completely delisting a bunch of games. Naturally, that one impacts me too, especially having just made the game no longer free on itch and seeing some financial benefit from that decision. I’m yet to realise the full extent of this, but I can certainly see sales have significantly dropped since this occurred.

There’s nothing I can say that hasn’t already been said by other developers and just anyone in the know, so all I will say is that two of those games that were delisted entirely were friends of Origin Story, Office Perks by Amomynous Games, and Dragon of Calon Valley by FireValleyGames. Neither of these games features any of the kind of content that others are being delisted for and don't break any of Itch's rules, nor the rules of their “payment processors”. And knowing Itch's garbage customer service, I know it's going to take probably months before those guys get any kind of answer as to why this has happened. That is fucked.

So, if possible, show some love to your other favourite developers because you never know when some corporate asshat or faux-feminist activist group could impact their livelihood on a whim with no rhyme or reason. It could even be Origin Story next. Hell, some of my content already teeters on the line of what they deem to be “against their values”. God forbid I ever include a depiction of menstruation… or you know, other completely normal bodily functions.

Whatever… moving on before I get angrier.

Chapter 8 progress is coming along, but unfortunately, not at the speed I would like. Many real life distractions are slowing me down right now and will throughout August too: a milestone birthday for my wife and all the celebrations and vacations that entails, school being out for the summer (meaning no free days to work on the game), some medical worries about numerous close family members that are keeping me from focusing and a new boss who’s less oblivious to me spending 70% of my day working on Origin Story instead of my actual job. But still, it’s coming… please bear with me.

I’m slowly but surely working through the audio, and regarding the music, I reached out to Storyblocks to obtain written confirmation of whether I can use their music going forward, as I had acquired it under their previous license. Their answer was frustratingly vague, but ultimately what I got from it was “there’s nothing in the old license that prohibits you from using our music in adult content, as long as it doesn’t involve minors… and we don’t even have the resource to monitor that anyway”.

So, I’m just going to roll with the music as it is and not worry about replacing it. So at least that’s one less monumental pain in the ass task off my plate. The worst-case scenario is they still come at me, and I take the music down, remove it, and replace it with something else—no big deal.

I’ve also only got about 200 more images to post-work… and the end of that can’t come sooner. I’m so done with it. Fortunately, those particular images are something special, so at least they’re keeping me entertained.

And still got a bunch of lewd scene writing to do. I’m currently alternating between audio/postwork/writing to keep me from going insane from overdoing one monotonous thing at at time. Whenever I feel like I’m creatively drained, I move on to something else, especially when it’s the writing being impacted.

Last night I had a playthrough of Chapter 8 so far, and it took me around 2 hours to complete.  I was hella surprised, especially bearing in mind that I still have a lot of lewd scene writing to do, and I was also doing a manipulated Lucia playthrough, which has significantly less content this update than the normal Lucia playthrough (image attached as promised in last dev update). Maybe I’m just a slow reader.

I’ll come at you with some preview images soon, but there’s a whole lot to spoil, so don’t expect that many because it’s going to be a pain in the ass choosing them.

I have also run the entire game so far through a grammar check, and holy fuck did it point out a lot of typos that neither I nor the testers spotted, nor did anyone who has played make me aware of. So, when you’re tab skipping through the game in the future, I’m afraid it’s going to come to a halt a whole heap of times whenever it reaches some minor grammar or typo I’ve fixed. Unless you’re skipping unread text, I guess.

I’ve also made some progress on the first scenes of Chapter 9, with 200 renders done already, but I dare say this is nowhere near what I usually like to have done by this point. That will more than likely mean the wait for Chapter 9 will be much longer than any release so far, but you know I will always try my best for the little time my solo dev ass has.

Anyway. Sorry for the somewhat dejected update. Appreciate you all. Laters.