ViM Studios: 2023 Year in Review! (Patreon)

A MILLION DOWNLOADS

We are ending 2023 with a bang, surpassing a staggering 1 MILLION DOWNLOADS on Itch and Steam combined between our two games! We couldn't be more excited to ring in the New Year by celebrating with all of the players and fans who helped us reach this incredible milestone.

We'd like to extend a special, heartfelt thank you to everyone who reached out with positive comments and words of encouragement this year. Whether it be in game reviews, on social media, or in direct messages, your love and support of our hard work is what keeps us going! Money can't buy the satisfaction we get from hearing about the enjoyment we've brought to our many fans.

WANT TO KNOW WHAT WE WERE UP TO IN 2022?

Check out last year's 2022 Year in Review post to read more about what we accomplished that year.

Now, let's look back on all that we've accomplished together in 2023...

2023 AT A GLANCE

• 4 releases across all platforms (3 for Prince of Suburbia and 1 for A Shot in the Dark)
• 161 2D illustrations, 96 2D animations, and 250 voice acting files added to Prince of Suburbia
• 3,580 renders and over 100 animations created for A Shot in the Dark
• 170,000+ words written (and translated!) for both games
• 656 Git commits* made by TheOmega
• 20 episodes of our Seedy AF podcast released (listen to them all on our YouTube channel)
• 12 months of calendar wallpapers, 2 sets of special renders, and lots of themed holiday art for $3+ Patreon & SubscribeStar supporters: Wallpapers & Special Renders Collection

*An additional data point that demonstrates the difference in complexity of coding for our two games: A Shot in the Dark is currently sitting at 1,000 commits overall with just a little over of 1/3 of the planned game developed. Prince of Suburbia is sitting at just under 700 commits and is a completed game.

JANUARY 2023

We kicked off the year by releasing V0.9 of Prince of Suburbia, which was the first of our two ambitious beach updates in 2023. Going to the beach required all new backgrounds, sprites, and navigation, but we still managed to get V0.9 out just four months after V0.8 released.

We also spent a good portion of January stunned but ecstatic about the unexpected success of Prince of Suburbia - Part 2, which released on Steam in December 2022. By the end of January, we had sold more units of the Part 2 DLC than we had ever hoped to sell in a lifetime.

We could have never anticipated when we started Prince of Suburbia in 2017 that it would come to change our lives so fundamentally years down the road. January was our first glimpse into all the benefits, opportunities, and challenges that developing a highly visible game can bring.

FEBRUARY 2023

We had fun with Valentine's Day art for our Patreon and SubscribeStar supporters in February!

In February, we also released the V0.9 update of Prince of Suburbia on Steam. With that update, we took a huge step for our studio by adding BETA language support for more languages than ever before: Simplified Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Our first attempts at translation/localization of Prince in Suburbia in 2022 were clumsy and inefficient, but we had ideas about how to improve the process and in 2023 we had the resources to try some of those ideas out. We learned a lot from translating Prince of Suburbia that will help us immensely when translating A Shot in the Dark and future games.

Making our games accessible to the widest possible audience has been a core value of ours from the start, and the results of translation/localization speak for themselves. Only ~30% of our downloads on Steam come from players in English-speaking countries, with Chinese-speaking players alone making up ~40% of our player base for Prince of Suburbia.

While a lot of development time was "lost" in 2023 to iterating and improving our translation workflow for both games, it was a necessary loss. The increased audience for our games ensures the financial resources our studio needs to keep us both employed full-time for the foreseeable future.

MARCH 2023

We released St. Patrick's Day themed art for our Patrons and Subscribers in March!

We also announced the Interactive Walkthrough Features we were working on for A Shot in the Dark, that were added with the Chapter 3 update. These features had been in the works since late 2022, and we finally had something to show for our efforts.

Once again, with accessibility one of our core values, we had been going back and forth for a long time about how to make a complex game like A Shot in the Dark accessible and enjoyable for the widest audience of players. We ultimately came to the conclusion that the additional work required to add Interactive Walkthrough Features was worth it to achieve that goal.

In the end, player feedback has confirmed that the Interactive Walkthrough Features help both the players who are short on time and just want to "get to the good stuff" in one play through, as well as the "completionist" players who want to replay multiple times in order to see all the content.

We also are extremely grateful to our team member, Hondo, who created and continues to update the Official PDF Guide that helps players find every last bit of content as well as all of the Steam achievements. We know that Hondo's hard work and attention to detail have been deeply appreciated by many players!

APRIL 2023

In April, we celebrated 400K downloads! Little did we know we would be breaking the 1M download barrier by the end of 2023!

April was mostly focused on content creation as we wrapped up Chapter 3 of A Shot in the Dark and were hard at work putting together V0.95 of Prince of Suburbia. We had quite a few polls and also took suggestions from players for Chapter 4 of A Shot in the Dark and V1.0 of Prince of Suburbia as we looked toward planning for future content.

Another highlight in April was releasing the baby bump sprites for Heather and Naomi that would appear in the final two updates of Prince of Suburbia!

MAY 2023

At the end of May, we released Chapter 3 of A Shot in the Dark, which was our largest update up to that point with around 1,800 renders and almost 100 animations. Chapter 3 would end up being our only release for A Shot in the Dark in 2023, as we ultimately prioritized finishing Prince of Suburbia and releasing A Shot in the Dark on Steam at the expense of Chapter 4 development.

Letting development of A Shot in the Dark slow down in order to achieve our other goals for the year was not an easy decision for us, and we know that it's not the choice some of our players wanted us to make. We'd really hoped that having more financial resources this year would lead to faster development, but it did not (as we discussed in this podcast episode: Seedy AF Podcast [Ep18]: Why did development slow down this year?).

In the end, we have no regrets about how things turned out. The priorities we focused on in 2023 ensured the longterm viability of our studio and we learned some hard but important lessons in the process that will serve us going forward. Because of what we accomplished this year, we will have more time and energy to dedicate to A Shot in the Dark in 2024.

JUNE 2023

In June, we released the first episodes of our Seedy AF podcast! You can listen to all 20 episodes that we released this year on our YouTube channel.

Starting a podcast helped "scratch" multiple "itches" that we'd both had, so to speak. Both of us have long been interested in trying our hand at more "short form" types of creation content. Specifically, TheOmega was interested in making YouTube videos and Josselyn was curious about podcasting.

We both enjoy mentorship and geeking out about the unique and interesting industry that we have found ourselves in. We hoped that a podcast would be a new, fun way for us to engage with players, fans, and other devs (and that has definitely been the case). Overall, podcasting has been a fun and refreshing hobby project that breaks up the often repetitive work of game development.

As we've approached the end of the year, we've released less frequent but longer episodes where we delve deeper into topics than we could in our earlier, shorter episodes. Next year, we are definitely interested in trying new things with the podcast, including discussions or interviews with other adult game developers!

In June we also celebrated over 600K overall downloads for our studio, with Prince of Suburbia surpassing 500K downloads on its own!

JULY 2023

The second beach update (V0.95) of Prince of Suburbia was released in July 2023, six months after the V0.9 release. Development of V0.95 was delayed due to the Chapter 3 release of A Shot in the Dark (which was obviously a recurring theme throughout the year). However, that delay allowed us to get a head start on V1.0 which would release only three months later.

V0.95 was our most ambitious update yet with an insane amount of 2D animations (44 in total) and multiple group scenes including MFF, MFFF, and one very impressive MFFFFF illustration. :)

AUGUST 2023

A Shot in the Dark participated in the Visual Novel Fest on Steam in August. It was exciting to see the genre being elevated by a platform as large and influential as Steam, and we were honored to be invited and included.

We also released V0.95 of Prince of Suburbia - Part 2 with translations for all of the supported languages during this month, and offered Steam keys to our Patreon, SubscribeStar, and Itch players for the first time.

Planning for the future Prince of Suburbia - Pregnancy DLC began with us soliciting suggestions for scenes, and we released our most popular podcast episode of the year: Seedy AF Podcast [Ep9]: What's planned for Prince of Suburbia?

SEPTEMBER 2023

September was a month of upheaval and frustration as we dealt with censorship from YouTube, music licensing issues, and problems finding a CPA to help us with the process of becoming an S Corp. (Our application was finally approved by the IRS in late November!)

Like most of the gaming and game development community, we were captivated by the Unity fee debacle that happened in September. That scandal, along with other concerns we had about Unity's licensing terms, upended our developing plans to make our third game in Unity and caused us to look toward Unreal for our next game.

Also in September, m. of Tsundere Studio finished their revamp of the Prince of Suburbia GUI and absolutely blew our minds with how amazing it looked. They are already pretty far along with new GUI for A Shot in the Dark, and we can't wait to show you how great it looks!

OCTOBER 2023

After a delayed development cycle for V0.95 of Prince of Suburbia, we had a quick turnaround on the final update (V1.0) which released in October. Releasing a V1.0 of a game we'd been working on for over 6 years was a huge accomplishment and relief. While we hadn't officially crossed the finish line yet, there was definitely a light at the end of the development tunnel.

A Shot in the Dark participated in the Steam Next Fest in October, which features upcoming games and demos. We also started our series of weekly Character Spotlights on Steam, with all ten love interests ultimately receiving an individual spotlight post. You can see all of them in the Steam news feed for A Shot in the Dark.

Lastly, we had some spooky fun with Halloween art for our Patreon and SubscribeStar supporters!

NOVEMBER 2023

In November we announced that we were in the process of translating A Shot in the Dark and solicited help from our fans to improve the translations via Crowdin (more information can be found in this post: A Shot in the Dark: Help improve translations).

The reality is that this announcement was actually the culmination of many months of effort to get the code optimized for translation and get Crowdin set up. Our hope is that the time and effort we put in this year to set it up will pay off big time in the coming years by making our translation/localization workflow more efficient.

Speaking of translation, November is also when the translated versions of the V1.0 update of Prince of Suburbia - Part 2 were released on Steam and Itch, bringing us one giant step closer to taking the game out of Early Access on Steam.

DECEMBER 2023

We started off the month with a set of holiday themed calendars for our Patreon and SubscribeStar supporters!

Much like last year, December was one of our busiest months as we counted down the days (and a few sleepless nights) to December 14, the release date for A Shot in the Dark on Steam! In the end, all the hard work paid off and we had a very successful English-only launch. The next steps are preparing translated builds and finishing up Chapter 4!

This month we also had the added work of preparing Prince of Suburbia to leave Early Access, which we are happy to say we were able to accomplish before the Winter Sale began on December 21. We were also excited to bundle with Snow Daze on Steam.

WHAT'S IN STORE FOR 2024?

Our goals for the upcoming New Year include:

• translating A Shot in the Dark to multiple languages
• releasing Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 of A Shot in the Dark
• beginning development of a Pregnancy DLC for Prince of Suburbia
• more podcasts and special art for our supporters
• focusing less on scaling the business and more on content creation
• developing the skills we'll need for our third game (though we probably won't start development until 2025)

As we reflect on the past year, it’s incredible to think about how much we've accomplished and how far we've come. We're incredibly grateful for all our amazing team members whose hard work has made these accomplishments possible. We are also deeply appreciative of our community of fans and players whose enthusiasm for our work inspire us every day to keep making games.

Looking ahead to 2024, we're hopeful and excited about what we have planned and we can't wait to share it with all of you.

Happy New Year!

TheOmega & Josselyn Stark

ViM Studios