Changes Again - Spring Shuffle

Everyone! Mina-san! A todos! It has been a while since we have made any posts to our blog. We have took some time out to plan our next steps with Dream-Maidens and our other websites that we develop games and maintain for. I come to you all today to let you know that we have switched a few gears and the reasons why we decided to go into our new route.

We have realized that we are here to create games, period. All games, for all people, not just for a specific audience. I am sure that you can see from our library of games that we tend to throw in a variety. Although we started out with Dream-Maidens as an all girl dress up website, we decided that it was best to use our knowledge and skills for other types of games besides dress up. Since we are developing games, we will not focus too much attention on our website as far as dealing with game trades, additions and linking from other websites. It has made Key and I stressed out when dealing with things that seem very irrelevant to our goals. We create content, so there is really no need to work with others under their conditions which never quite fit, and hardly benefit us in the long run. Some may think that this method is not good considering the networking aspect of it, but as far as we are concerned, we like to do things opposite anyhow. It feels comfortable to know that everyone else is doing this, while we are not. Besides, look where it has gotten us before when trying to do things "right". I am tired of the sarcasm, I am tired of the fickleness, I am tired of the lame excuses, and I don't feel like I should do something I dislike, period.

So, in short our first decision is to make more of a variety of games, and to focus on developing games.

Another thing we have realized is that we have to generate our own audience. It does not look good for us in the online flash gaming world when we try to send our games to other websites to add. If you remember me stating in a few posts a couple months back, that it was frustrating, I've started to become a bit cranky over the subject about the silly process it takes from kissing feet and pretty much doing everything that we do not do. It started to change me and destroy my creativity because I thought that maybe we were not good enough to create games. People who have never coded a damn thing in their life become so critical of what should and should not be in a game and it sort of got to me. Of course they do not care about my sob stories or how hard it was for us when we first started back in 2007 after recovering from our community avatar site that we once had...Flash games have sort of became commercial. Companies pretending to be small and independent just split their company off into teams.. teams of 24, yes 24! Does that sound small and independent to you? Well Key and I are a mom and pop shop, true independent, we do everything, no paying anyone, no budget, no advertising, no loans, no VC funding etc. (We are like the family bodegas or the hair stores that Koreans own or even corner stores). But anyways, All of this hoo-hah we've been getting for our games, yeah, you know the ones I am talking about - I am tired of this. I've stated it before, and I'll say it again, but now I am doing something about it. I don't care anymore, because we have found a solution. We have to find those that will play our games, love, respect and expect to see updates on our games, look forward to seeing more from us. So, we are moving our games to another platform. I wish we would have thought of this before.

In short, we are going to get our own traffic.

We were stuck on creating a website with a bunch of flash games so that publishers can distribute everywhere and bring nice traffic back to us like it was when we started 3 years ago, booooy was I wrong. After all of this spam of Illustrator vectors and Roiworld inspired styles, we were pushed to the side as if we were garbage from our favorite places to submit games to. Heck, they even told us to stick to a certain genre and give them games without our logo, while they continue to partner with other sites and publish games with other site links inside the game, or they would add the game but make some sly comment about it so that their audience would come on our site to troll. I think that really broke the straw for me. Not only do I think it was really unprofessional to do that, but it was a bit insulting considering the intense work that I put into creating the game - heh, I don't criticize your method of practice in front of your face voluntarily, but when I am down you'd stomp me down like trash. So, thank you so much, my dear favorite websites, thank you for opening our eyes to see how stupid we were to rely our Mom and Pop Shop on you for traffic. We will go ahead and get our own, and we will put some revenue aside to advertise our own content. Just because we are developers does not mean that we cannot self publish and self produce - we are not stupid - as they say, "Content is King". We will start developing on quite a few mediums, so hopefully you will see us get our hands dirty with different avenues, such as, down loadable software, mobile gaming, and possibly the xbox live arcade. XNA has some great C# libraries that I have been playing around with from time to time. Even though we are two people, we both have some very good backgrounds in programming, art as well as music and a plethora of other things that we love to do in our spare time. Now that we have decided to build our games on other coding languages, this flash game setback has taught us a valuable lesson, that we create content. We are not here to market other people content, but to make our own, so it is fitting that we exercise our creative ability to venture all sorts of avenues. This does not mean that we will not make flash games anymore, it just means that we will create for all sorts of platforms to generate our very own fan base.

So in short, we are going to create games for multiple platforms. To show that we are quite serious about this, we have created an Android App in the Marketplace, and we are in the works of adding a few more of our games over as well within a week or two.

This may seem like a lot to take in, so I decided to turn this blog into more of a development blog and our website will be like a showcase of the games we have created online. So what does this mean for you? Well you can expect to see me blog a lot more for one, and secondly, more ways for my dream of having people all over the world to play our games without the fluff. 2011, I will make this happen. No more complaining, its time to start doing. ^_^

~ Chykara