Hello everyone, we are Parry Frames Team. Following a vote with over 500 participants last week, we have officially confirmed our new title, originally titled in‑Chinese 只狗：路边一条, with the official English name Stray Dog: nobody cares.
Back on April 30 this year, we released our first Sekiro‑inspired soulslike game, Crimson Oath. On Steam, it has earned 728 user reviews with an 82% positive rating.
Let us share how we landed on this new project. After launching Crimson Oath, we took a short break while also working on porting the game to multiple platforms, including Sony’s consoles.
Our original plan was to develop Slay the Cinder, the first concept shown in our earlier poll. We labored away for nearly a month, preparing art assets and drafting design documents. The design work gave me endless headaches. We wanted to make a soulslike while integrating mechanics and gameplay loops from Slay the Spire. After a full month of iteration, I was practically pulling my hair out. It turned out to be overwhelmingly difficult. Solving one problem would only give rise to another; whenever we got system A working, system B would break.
At two o’clock in the morning, burnt‑out from all the struggle, a thought struck me: why push so hard chasing our own vision alone? Why not simply ask what players actually want?
At that point, Stray Dog: nobody cares was not a serious project proposal — it was merely a tiny idea. Even the “Wheelchair Ashen” concept was originally meant to be only a segment within Slay the Cinder. So we opened up a community vote. To our surprise, the concept that had ranked lowest wound up securing 70 % of all player votes.
There was no more reason to hesitate. True success, I believe, comes when things fall naturally into place. You can pour endless effort into a certain direction, exhaust yourself, and still see little to show for it. We pivoted decisively and committed to Stray Dog: nobody cares.
That said, our earlier hard work has not gone entirely to waste. Parts of our existing framework can still be reused. That being noted, we are rewriting the underlying combat framework from scratch for this new game, which will offer better support for soulslike combat authoring and logic reuse. Some pre‑produced art assets will also carry over. We have put together a concept PV for you to watch:
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1SGbZ6HExm
Lastly, we would greatly appreciate your likes, Bilibili coins, and shares! If our work interests you, please add the game to your Steam Wishlist!
Crimson Oath was built by our tiny three‑person team, consisting only of designers and programmers. Its art drew widespread mockery, and international players even described it as Sekiro: budget cut twice. For this new title our team has grown to nine members. We now have dedicated artists for VFX, level environment assembly, animation, and level design. So please trust that we are genuinely putting our full effort into development. Game creation requires careful polishing, yet we will keep progress moving swiftly. We are under notable financial pressure, so adding the game to your wishlist means a great deal to us.