I just found of your game recently and I'm glad I stumbled into this devlog since this is a topic I'm also very interested in.
It really is true that there are barely any r18+ BL games or just BL games in general on steam ;o;.
It's not that I'm looking for anything that is a full on game with cg art and high production value or such in the games I enjoy either. By chance last year, I stumbled onto text-based RPG games and especially r18+ text-based RPG games that I really ended up enjoying but most of them just have M/M option as a very small percentage of the game's experience so I found myself going through the games stepping around a lot of scenes just to find crumbs of those kinds of content but nonetheless I enjoyed them so I ended up trying to look for more and I was happy to find that itch had so much more options.
That being said, there's still not that many here that are exactly what I'm looking for which did end up making me want to get into game development although I'm very much an amateur at the moment. Itch really does seem to be a more welcoming platform for a newbie developer to just upload a game and test stuff out and every time I come back here to play games, I get inspired by other people's creativity and storytelling that I want to keep trying to get better at writing and making games.
Anyways, one of my main goals for making games is to make a danmei(?)-inspired BL game one day. I always find that the setups of Chinese BL novels to be really unique for genres other that the cultivation ones like zombie apocalypse and interstellar settings. I think it'd be interesting to have a text-game that sort of worked like how the plot develops in danmei but like more sus content bc those are usually mostly (creatively) censored out in Chinese novels.
Getting into danmei has made me want to learn Chinese despite not being very interest despite having Chinese classes for nearly half of my life lol
I'm not too clear on the mechanics of Wuxia/Xianxia/Xuanhuan setting so I felt too insecure to finish the twine game I tried to make before since I always find myself getting confused by cultivation terms but Amazing Cultivation Simulator helped supply a lot of my lacking knowledge so maybe i will give it another shot bc I still want there to be more games in those kinds of settings haha.
Thanks for making this log. It was a very interesting read!
Now I shall go play your Wuxia/Xianxia/Xuanhuan games now that I found out about them ^^
Aha! Thanks for the interest!
Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear Steam doesn't have as many R-18 BL games. As for regular BL games, I don't really see too many anywhere else either. We do seem to have a slightly larger amount of it on Itch that has a BL main plot, fortunately!
I know what you mean. Sometimes it's not a bad idea to start developing our own stuff when we can't find the content that we're looking for. The best part is that you don't need to censor them here.
I don't think you need to adhere 100% to existing cultivation terms - a lot of novels have settings that differ from others, including world rulesets. So you probably don't need to worry about it. Just go with the flow and enjoy the process and I'm pretty sure you'll be fine. If you need a glossary, you can always add one to your game's page.
No problem! I like writing journals anyway. Let me know what you think of my cursed cultivation games, the more cursed you feel, the better hehehehe