Cadence here.
Pronoun Palace released ten days ago. People love it and it sold really well. Yay!
Here’s a look at some fun player stats we gathered through Steam:
The rest of this article will be going over our plans for the game. TL;DR: Alternate bosses, challenges, and workshop support are (probably) on the horizon. I also ramble a bit at the end and show off a fraction of the incredible fan art we’ve received.
To anyone who missed it, the soundtrack for Pronoun Palace is available for purchase on Bandcamp, and also for listening on Youtube. Please show RENREN support for their amazing work! A reminder also that the album art was drawn by Jordy, and the Rubber Animal art used on Youtube was drawn by Vich Blen.
Roadmap
Content
The current plan is to design an alternate boss for each act (that is, for every boss except Nobody) and release them in a free update sometime this year. There is a very finite supply of workable mechanics for a game like this, so we need to make sure that the content we do add is good… but I’ve been vibrating with excitement at some of our ideas.
While it would be fun to add more enemies, there are vanishingly few good ideas left to explore. There’s a few visual concepts I would love to realize if I could, but unless we’re really struck by inspiration, it’s unlikely! At the moment, it’s better to preserve this kind of creative energy for bosses, anyway.
In terms of characters, I feel like we could reasonably squeeze one or two more out of the game, but it’s a challenge! They would need to feel sufficiently transformative without clashing against the myriad of bullshit that already exists (and also, be fun). No promises on this front either.
We’ve been entertaining the idea of adding “challenges” to the game in one form or another for a while now. I think we have enough ideas to justify it, but I would rather that the inclusion feels more peripheral and supplemental. This one is pretty likely to happen; it also doesn’t require much work. With that said, we want to see more people tackle Hazel Clearance first before we add even more optional challenge content to the game.
I’m also thinking it might be fun to go back and add a few more animations to the characters, like more flavorful death animations or weak/strong attack variants… I’m saying “might” a lot here because I really believe that the game is solid as-is and I’m afraid of putting myself in too much debt, especially for diminishing returns.
Modding Support
Workshop support is a pretty clear and obvious goal. We are former modders, after all… so we understand how important modding is to the longevity of a game (and what good modding support looks like).
Modding is our highest priority after adding new bosses, though most of the work that comes with adding new content is art (my end). Workshop support for custom enemies, characters, spells, etc. is significantly easier to handle than language modding support and is thus much more likely to happen.
Localizing a game such as Pronoun Palace requires a great deal of subjectivity. Certain spells and enemy mechanics would need to be outright redesigned or replaced, and the game has a lot under the hood. Furthermore, we do not have the financial or labor resources to handle official translations at this time, and while workshop support for other languages would be nice, we can’t make any promises.
However, we have no problem if anyone wants to decompile the game and distribute modded copies for other languages, they just won’t be compatible with other mods.
There is some rudimentary mod support that already exists, but it is very basic. Our friend Cynthia wrote up a handy guide on it, and as I was writing this, Xanderath made an incredible music player mod. Check it out on GitHub!
Also, Ruby made... this mod. Genuinely impressive stuff!
Trading Cards
We met the milestone required for Steam trading cards pretty soon after release. I don’t think anyone really gives a shit about Steam trading cards? And I’m pretty sure they don’t make any money. But it would be a fun excuse to have more cool art of the game, and it would let us add fun backgrounds and emotes or whatever. However, we would be pretty limited by the “all-ages appropriate” content requirements, so it’s hard to say how worthwhile it would be.
Ramble
Prior to Pronoun Palace’s release, I had some anxiety about the current state of “roguelikes” and was concerned that people might brush the game off by association. The term has always been subject to linguistic drift; Nuclear Throne and the other roguelikes of ten years ago bear little resemblance to Rogue, but in recent years “roguelike” seems to increasingly refer to a particularly unimaginitive and creatively incestuous type of skinner box.
Balatro is a great roguelike and it has undeniably shaped the current indie scene, but here’s the mistake: Balatro is not a “Poker roguelike,” it is a deckbuilder in its purest form, and one that Poker just so happens to be the perfect medium for. Many indie devs got a whiff of Balatro’s success and assumed there was a large, unfilled niche for “Balatro but X,” not realizing that Balatro was already the perfect version of the experience they set out to make (though certainly there is/was money in it).
Here is where I am heading with this. The reason that Pronoun Palace does not have passive items or a sprawling node-graph map or numbers that grow exponentially is because “deckbuilding” is about paring down options towards specific, consistent outcomes, and Boggle is about finding solutions from a myriad of unknown options. The two concepts are literally diametrically opposed! We even experimented with a number of these mechanics, but they were all essentially just pointless bloat. There are other word-spelling roguelikes of late that have succeeded at being deckbuilders—and they’re fun—but that fun definitely comes at the expense of their own core premise.
Anyway, the reason I am writing this long-winded rant about the design ethos behind Pronoun Palace is to explain my relief when so many people clearly understood what the game is going for. Pronoun Palace is an uncompromising game in a number of ways, and it is pretty great to see it pay off the way it has. I mean, it’s not Fear & Hunger; I think a lot of the credit people give to Pronoun Palace for being so “edgy” is largely because video games as a medium (and especially roguelikes) are so infantilized. The indie dev space has been overwhelmingly saturated by grifters peddling the idea that game development is paint-by-numbers, but the whole fun of making shit on your own is that you can do anything you want. If anything, I hope Pronoun Palace can inspire more people to take the next step and put nasty transgender sex/pee/vore in their 2D kaizo platformer.
Fan Art
There is far too much fan art for me to show all of it, but I’ve done my best to curate a selection of the amazing gifts we’ve received from so many people! Seriously, it is such an honor. Thank you so much to everyone who has ever drawn or written about our game!
It became infeasible to ask every single person for permission (and I was starting to get flagged for spam after sending too many DMs), so if I have misattributed you in some way or you would rather your art not be featured here, let me know!
By SadlyJustAL.
By Berrie.
By BlazerDog.
By BlorengeRhymes.
By Bookworm.
By CfBagel.
By chernabog.
By Cometz.
By Crabbl.
By DrendeJulian.
By Fyre.
By Sporks.
By Vignette.
By Em.
By gutsbug.
By Rosa D’Vorah.
By Incen.
By jigo.
By Jordy.
By minichibis.
By NEON.
By nightjardreaming.
By ploomutoo.
By SELECT-O-MATIC.
By sneckoil.
By Soƒti.
By Souls Stupidity.
By Cactus Companion.
By vanimatches.
Okay, that is a lot of art. Thank you so much again to everyone who has supported us this far! We’re very excited for what comes next.