Happy New Year 2025 and News

Happy new everyone!

I hope 2024 treated you well and that 2025 will treat you even better! I wished to thank you all for supporting this Patreon during the last year. It had a lot of ups and downs but seeing people like and comment on my stories never gets old. I hope my novels gave you something to look forward to.

Without further ado, I'd like to share some news and resolution for the year.

• Updates News: updates returning tomorrow, Dungeon Wreckers, publication plans 

As promised, updates will resume as normal starting tomorrow, with DW, B&C and Blood & Fur chapters returning as usual. The Christmas/New Year period has been extremely busy on my side (and will still be until January 3rd when I can finally return home) so I haven't advanced anywhere as much as I wished to on the chapter backlog, but I guess I'll just have to work extra hard this month.

I'm nearly done with the 30 chapters milestone I set for myself to publish Dungeon Wreckers on RR in particular, so I'll focus a bit more on building up the Board & Conquest backlog next since I would like to publish these two close to one another. Henceforth there'll probably be a few more B&C chapters coming than DW ones in the next few weeks.

I also intend to use that time to edit Dungeon Wreckers' chapters a bit before publication based on the feedback I received. Changes will be minor (softening Maggie's abrasive personality a bit to make her more tolerable, some early chapters rework etc...) and mostly focus on making sure the story stays tonally consistent.

Otherwise, Blood & Fur updates will stay the same. I would say we're past three and a half fifths of the story so I expect this novel to end somewhere during the late second half of 2025, though I wouldn't make any prediction yet.

• Some Retrospective on 2024

Part of these update decisions are the consequences of 2024. To put it bluntly, my newest stories haven't performed well on Amazon compared to older, more comedy-focused works like The Perfect Run, Vainqueur the Dragon, and Apocalypse Tamer. Gunsoul in particular has been a flop there (though that's partly because Amazon's algo somehow put it in a erotic western category; and yes, those are a thing). It's becoming very clear that most of my fans are more interested in longer comedy works or litRPGs than my darker, shorter and more experimental stuff. Even Blood & Fur, which is my main breadwinner on Patreon, hasn't been too successful at all on Amazon either, so I'll likely focus back on lighter works after I complete it this year.

I could afford to take some risks or write niche stuff earlier, but with The Perfect Run game's ongoing development requiring both more of my time and consistent cashflow until we secure our deal with a publisher (more on that later), I'll have to focus on more marketable stories in 2025. We'll see how it goes.

• Gunsoul Audiobook in the works

Otherwise, I'm happy to announce that a Gunsoul audiobook is currently being recorded in partnership with narrator Wayne Mitchell, who's doing a fantastic work from what I heard of early recordings (and his voice for Duckman WILL crack you up). I have no release date to offer you for now, but I'll be sure to send you samples and inform you as soon as I get a launch date ;) the picture above was made by artist Dinovoila, by the way.

• Perfect Run Game News

On The Perfect Run game front, I'm happy to announce a new demo will arrive soon. We're finished a first build and are currently testing it for bugs and other tweaks, since this demo focuses particularly on revamping the battle system and expanding the bunker (with a brand new obstacle course with lore and secrets to find there). We're also working on the actual start of the game (namely, Ryan's arrival in Rome and tutorial fight with Ghoul) plus a whole lot of characters. Here are some teasers of what we're up to:

Early concept art for Adam the Ogre; definitively not the final version.

Some Mechron tech with a secret...

Otherwise, we're in discussions with a very big publisher (whose name I can't mention yet for NDA reasons) for the game; we're currently developing a legal framework for a funding and development partnership (IPs, funding amounts etc...) so we'll still have a few months of work ahead, but I'm highly optimistic it'll let us expand the game's scoop a lot farther than I hoped for. I'm not gonna announce anything until the ink is dry, but crossing fingers I can tell you more soon.

And that's mostly everything for now. I hope you'll enjoy what I have in store for you this year, and I'll see you tomorrow for the newest updates!

Best regards,

Maxime/Voidy.