Our next game: Big news update + art shipment!

Hey all! We're currently waiting for Steam to approve everything with Project WAND: Land of Leng before we can finally make it live! The process unfortunately takes a lot of long back-and-forth - every new change we have to make takes 1-3 business days for Steam to check.

With that said though, we've been workshopping ideas for our next game! There's no title for it yet so for now I'll just call it "Mancer."

Mancer is set in the Mancer universe, which is a tabletop project covered in more detail in this Twitter post: it's a mixture of the different "magic-y" universes we've made, namely Project WAND, Deathless Lily & Our Spell Is Steel. All of these stories over the years have all been experiments with a kind of Hogwartsy "magic school/task force" world, and now I feel ready enough to combine them all into a single "canon" universe with proper lore and characters!

This means the Project WAND characters do exist in the Mancer universe (and Deathless Lily characters like Audrey) as pretty much the same people, but the more I flesh out this world the more cemented their place in the setting will be.

There's actually a lot of background lore built in this universe that's being built over the years, some of which you'd see in Land of Leng's glossary entries or the enemies like demons.

PLANS & DIRECTION

However, obviously WAND so far has been a hentai game, so there's not been a lot of opportunity to really dive into & flesh out the world. Obviously hentai can have good lore too, but since it's mainly just me & DMaster making the whole thing, all our effort mainly has to go into the hentai aspects.

Our plans after releasing Land of Leng is to make a more safe for work game (the aforementioned "Mancer" title). This is for two reasons: One is mainly just to see if we could! We have a good track record making 4 WAND games now (on itch.io  and Steam) and now want to see what other types of stories we're capable of while still using the same universe and magic aesthetic. The second is expanding our playerbase & community. We've been aiming to make our game dev stuff sustainable enough to be a good source of income, and making a new game, with a similar universe but different cast is something we discussed the pros & cons of in detail.

What does a Safe For Work game entail? Meaning no explicit sex, exposed nipples/genitalia, that kinda thing.

Regarding NSFW games, obviously sex sells, plus yuri + futanari is also a somewhat underexplored niche we wanted to go into. I'll be the first to say there's no shame at all in making NSFW games and we're proud of what we've made, but it does mean that by its very nature, they always fly under the radar.

What do I mean by this? Things like promotion, streamers and such. There's only so much buzz an NSFW game can make. Players don't discuss these games in detail in public forums or sites, especially not about lore or characters. These games obviously are risky to stream on YouTube or Twitch too, which is a huge way for indie developers to promote their games. And of course unfortunately most folks have a stigma against NSFW games in general as being lazy or lacking substance.

We wanna make stories that grow thriving communities - see people making fanart, discussing their favourite ships and so on. We've grown quite a bustling and loyal fanbase on our Discord and here on Patreon which we're definitely thankful for, but we wanna take a risk with this next title and see if it pays off! If not, there's always WAND to return to!

THE NEXT GAME

So more details about this next game. We knew it would be a big whiplash if we just took the WAND cast and just made a safe for work game with them - we felt it'd send the wrong message that we're "sanitising" the WAND girls just to make them more appealing to normal audiences. For that reason we figured it'd be better to start fresh with a new cast. The WAND fans will rest easy knowing the girls there aren't changed, plus who knows if they'll show up as cameos in the next game?

The drawings attached in this post have been some of the sketches and brainstorming I've been doing for the new cast, which I've been teasing on Twitter lately - but now you know what they're actually for. These aren't just random OCs, but me building a foundation for our next main cast.

This game will likely have a similar premise as WAND: a group of cute girls attending a magic academy training to be Mancers, aka mages. But this time I want to really dive into the stuff that makes magic school settings cool - magic systems, dragons, cool fights, all that stuff.

However make no mistake, just because the game is SFW doesn't mean it's not lewd, and this is something I wanted to make sure while designing these characters. (Admittedly the futanari part will be harder to implement, but we'll see what we can do about that, lol)

I didn't want to fall into the trap of making the story or characters too serious or opposite in tone from our previous games. We still want to have lots of hot girls, sexual tension, profanity & raunchy humour that we enjoyed in WAND. We don't want to pretend WAND and our existing audience doesn't exist in this game - just that now our fans might actually be able to recommend this new game to a friend, or stream it online! We hope rather than shrinking our audience, or changing to a new one, we can make a game that our audience can easily share with others & enjoy in deeper ways like lore & characters, while also enjoying cute girls and hot yuri action!

So that's our plan with this next game. This is still in its very early stages as no gameplay has been coded yet, or characters finalised. Basically right now, I'm just drawing girls, lots of them: girls I not only find hot, but also think would make interesting characters and interact with each other well. I'm gonna make a bunch of them, and then over time, the ones that stick with me most or feel the most interesting will become our main cast!

Think of it as narrowing down & figuring out the best girls & making them into the main characters, who will form the main romantic routes & source of banter/spicy interactions! The other girls can then appear as the rest of the classmates or allies within the magic academy.

I want to explore a lot of different designs: as you can see there's also multiple fantasy races I want to represent. There's elves so far, and the horned girls are fiendlings: basically half-demon girls. I also want to explore all sorts of body/personality types and make sure lots of different flavours make it into the main cast so there's something for everyone: flat chests, big boobs, tomboys, tsunderes, and so on.

So far you will notice 3 different girls appearing so far in the sketches: A human girl with short black+orange hair, a horned blonde fiendling girl, and a slender elf girl with wild hair. These may or may not end up as part of the main cast, but I've been enjoying drawing them so far which is a good sign! Now to draw them making out to make sure they have proper chemistry together...

With that said, this update has definitely gone on long enough, so stay tuned for more updates as we finalise more of this next game, from its characters to an actual title! Thank you so much for your continued support. - SYTO

P.S. Feel free to discuss or ask questions about this next project in the comments or on the Discord server! You can even discuss or suggest what sorts of girls, tropes or magic powers you might like to see.