Where I've been, what's changed, and the first of many decisions I'm handing to you.
This is a long one, so buckle up! The gist, if you'd rather just skip to the bottom, is: the ground moved under this game, Corrupted Kingdoms has to move with it, and you're going to help decide the direction it moves in. You know, if you want to.
It's been months. No build, no devlog, barely a word anywhere.
A "my bad" just isn't going to cut it. At first I went quiet because I didn't know what to tell you - I wanted to provide a solution and not just a scream of terror and rage - and then every week of silence made the next week harder to break. What I should have done was say "I don't know yet" out loud, and kept on saying it until I'd figured things out.
So... I'm sorry. Genuinely. A lot of you pay for this and got an empty page for months instead. Everything below is what I should have been telling you the whole time.
Payment processors have been throwing their weight around and leaning more and more on adult crowdfunding platforms about content categories they consider a "liability". SubscribeStar resisted as long as they could, but have been forced to cave, with the result that all depictions of mind control are now on the banned list. Straight up "not allowed or we'll throw you out", banned.
You can find the whole thing right here: subscribestar.adult/prohibited_content.
I could write something appropriately vitriolic here and it would feel really good for about a day. But being angry at SubscribeStar means aiming at the wrong target. Processors sit above every adult platform on the internet, and when they decide a category is "risky", a platform can either comply or lose the ability to take money at all, which for a crowdfunding site amounts to shutting down. There's no appeals process. No higher authority. Nobody who will even read my complaint.
This isn't one platform with one policy, and this is the part that actually forces my hand. Mind control is banned everywhere.
Patreon: banned. Ko-Fi: banned. Fanbox: banned. Even Itch.io delists games with this content now. The page survives if you have the direct link, but the game stops turning up in on-site search, in browse, in its own tags, in recommendations. What's left is a game findable only by people who already knew it existed, which for discovery purposes may as well be gone.
Which means that Corrupted Kingdoms, in its current form, has basically nowhere to be posted, promoted or sold. And I don't mean it got harder. I mean there's nowhere left.
A lot. Mind control was never a flavour sitting on top of Corrupted Kingdoms; a good deal of the design underneath assumed it existed. This includes a lot of new systems I'd spent the past year designing: powers usage, the way influence built up over time, half the progression gates, and most of what I had sketched out for the late game. All of it resting on something I can't use any more.
Cue more screaming into the void.
So it's being rebuilt. I argued that the new design was a rework instead of a remake, but this puts it very firmly into remake territory. There cannot be even a whiff of mind control left in the project or else Corrupted Kingdoms will be dead and buried within a week of its next update. That being said, I am doing absolutely everything in my power to ensure that I change only what I absolutely have to. And I think I have some good ideas on where to go from here that keeps everything as close to the source as possible.
That's where the last months went, and it's where the next stretch is going too.
The cast. Pixie is Pixie. Kana is Kana. Gwen is Gwen. Lyx, unfortunately for the surrounding wildlife, is Lyx.
The town, the people in it, the events you liked, the threads you've been pulling on: that is the part of this game I care about most, and the part I'm working hardest to protect. My job right now is making sure what you feel is a change in how things happen, not in who they happen to or what happens between them.
I won't promise nothing changes. Some scenes lean on the old mechanic hard enough that they'll need rewriting, and a few routes will reach the same place by a different road. But rewriting is the worst case here. Nobody is getting cut.
From Friday 28 August, there's a devlog on this site every Friday.
EVERY Friday, whether or not I have anything impressive to show. If the week was slow, the devlog will say the week was slow. You should be able to see how this is going without having to ask, and I owe you all a lot more transparency than you've been getting.
The posts will live here rather than on a crowdfunding platform for a reason: This is the one address nobody can delist and nobody can ban me from.
If I'm having to dig up the foundations anyway then I'm not doing it alone. Many of you have been with me from the start of this crazy journey, some only just picked it up, but regardless of how long you've been here, this game is as much yours as it is mine.
So here's the commitment, and it's the main reason this post exists: you get a say at every stage. Not a suggestion box I read and quietly ignore. Real decisions, put to you, wherever the right answer isn't already obvious. Art, systems, structure, tone. This is the first one. The rest will turn up in the Friday devlogs.
Might as well start with the biggest one. The art style.
Each style below gets two shots. The first is the same moment in all three, same framing and same line and same Gwen, so you're comparing style and nothing else. The second is a different scene in each, showing the particular strengths of each style (which doesn't mean Style A can't have Style C's backgrounds, of course. This is just to show each style at its best).
The current style in all its nasally goodness.
Yes, I'm calling it that. The noses are the most argued-about thing in this game's history (after Ami's death) and I'm leaning into it.
Familiar, friendly, and entirely nose-free.
Same pipeline as Nosey with the controversy surgically removed. Nobody has ever sent me a death threat about this style, which is good for my blood pressure. It's the safe option.
Modelled in Koikatsu, then traced and coloured by hand.
Scenes still get blocked out in Koikatsu, so posing and staging work the way they do now. Everything after that is drawn over by hand and/or passed through a filter.
One vote each. Whatever wins, ships. No argument from me.
If you're torn: Comfy if you like the traditional anime aesthetic. Steamy if you like hand-drawn and/or want to possibly see Corrupted Kingdoms on Steam one day. Nosey is the one you already know you like or despise.
Seriously. That was a lot and you got to the end of it (assuming you didn't skip, you naughty devil, you).
I've been nervous about writing this post, which is part of the reason it took months. Having finally written it, the whole thing reads far less frightening than the silence made it feel. The game isn't cancelled. The cast isn't going anywhere. And the same thing that killed the old plan has handed me one chance to fix a pile of decisions I'd otherwise have been stuck with for years. Most importantly of all, perhaps, it lets me put control in YOUR hands for the first time since the project began.
And honestly? I'm excited to see where we all go next.
Next devlog is Friday 28 August, then every Friday after that. Now please go and vote!
