2024 Year in Review

I could have done this next week, but I felt like writing it today so here's a retrospective of all the stuff that happened in Apollo Seven Games land in 2024. Hopefully my commentary on all of it is interesting.

On January 1st, the very first thing that was posted this year on the Patreon was a poll about what should be in a Netoria Tactics sequel. This makes it sound like I've been working on and planning Netoria Tactics 2 this entire year, but that really isn't the case. At this point, the concept of a sequel was a very vague one. One of my most prominent ideas was to make it an NTR version of Advance Wars, as Netoria Tactics was an NTR version of Fire Emblem. That could have been cool.

The next big thing was Futa Oasis 1.0 came out. I wasn't really happy with how Futa Oasis ended up panning out. A lot of mistakes with that one. But this update technically finished it. I still would like to overhaul some things in that game and make an improved version. But will that be soon? Probably not.

At this point in February I was still in full At the Mountains of Friendship production. Signs of trouble were definitely here, but I was powering through. Working on Sk8er was probably the low point of the whole thing. She had some fun mechanics and scenes, but I could feel the audience starting to slip away.

But on March 15th the big success of this year happened, Netoria Tactics on Steam! When I was hiring artists for the bonus content, I was estimating selling maybe 500 copies of this version. It was a tip jar for a game that already had a tip jar. But man did it over-perform what I projected. It even outdid The Monster Within in the same time period, which was a much "bigger" game with in theory a bigger audience. This is what really killed AtMoF. That whole game's design had the idea of removing all the sexy stuff for a conversion like TF Card Battle to The Monster Within. Well, what's the point of that if just throwing the existing NSFW game on Steam was just as successful?

My entire business model I had planning since 2022 went up in smoke here. Lots of the problems with AtMoF came from the SFW conversion plan, so why bake that kind of thing in at all? No to more conversions, yes to integration of sexual content into the gameplay. This was what really cemented Netoria Tactics 2 as the next big thing I would work on.

In April the April Fool's game came out. I thought it was pretty funny, but it didn't get all that much attention. Not a big deal, but I might not do more of them. It was a lot of fun to make, but not an insignificant amount of work. The character art that was made for it turned out great though. It's been in the back of my mind for a while to do more with that artist.

May was the vacation month. I really needed it but man did that month start the decline of my Patron numbers. The Subscribestar hasn't been taking up its slack either. If it wasn't for Steam numbers propping up the development budget things could have started to get dicey. But was the vacation really to blame here? I'm not sure.

By June, things had already become all about Netoria Tactics. The Carwyn Triumphant update was happening and Netoria 2 was in production. At this point, I realized that the other expansion content for Netoria Tactics was going to have to be shelved. The themes that were in it, like lesbian content and femboy stuff would be better served in Netoria Tactics 2. The structure of the first game wasn't very conducive to stuff like that.

And that leads us to now. Wait, what happened to the other six months of this year? Development happened! Those months would just be me saying "worked on Netoria Tactics 2" over and over. Besides, that stuff is recent enough that if you're reading all this you probably remember it from my other status updates.

So this year had 3 games wrap up, Futa Osais, At the Mountains of Friendship, and Netoria Tactics: Revolution. Hopefully next year we can add one more to that list in naked Ambition. Is Netoria Tactics 2 strong enough to carry Apollo Seven Games by itself? We'll see, I've been doing my best to make it as good as I can. I really like it and if it resonates with people, I'd like to spend the next few years adding as much and as high quality content to the game as I can manage. And lastly, a preview picture.

We all saw this coming, there's no way I was going to not give Vashti a dick for some scenes. I made an entire game about futanari.

That's all for this week, and almost this year. As always, thank you for your continued support.