#women of xal

[plottwiststudios]

Women of Xal - %15 off

It’s time for some gay alien politics. 

[steam] [itch.io]

Seen this CG yet? No? You should! That’s right, year two of the game being out means it’s time for our second Steam Summer Sale, let’s gooooooo! 

Guide Xjena up the political ladder to the coveted position of Matriarch. Or guide her into a knife repeatedly! That’s fine too! In an alien society where lying is impossible, make sure you utilize your powers to rewind time as you choose the best path forward.

A visual novel with many significant choices and four major endings: two bad, one neutral, and one good. Plus a bunch of ways to accidentally end things early.

12 character arcs with options for romance and/or friend routes! 7 women and 8 men. 

Aro/Ace and Poly runs! One player in our Discord mapped out the maximum number of dates they could go on in one run. 10/10 speed dating strats.  (How do you get the Discord link? Well, that happens to be in game.

Plus!!

Many, many bugs have been either squashed or gently relocated outside since launch. Some still haunt us, but we’re working on it.

Steam Achievements very soon??? We figured out how, we just gotta... do it. lol

Want to get to the gay faster? You’re in luck! We’ve added a whole new mode to the game: Steamer Mode. If you want to skip the exposition at the start and get right to the interesting stuff, this mode offers you a streamlined early game - at the cost of missing a few clues along the way, of course. 

Curious what our team has been up to since Women of Xal’s release? Well.... mostly recovering from moving, if I’m honest. We’ve keeping our heads down and working at our boring day jobs while tossing around ideas for future games and stories in the background. We plan to have the script for Women of Xal’s sequel completely written before launching the Kickstarter, but we’re also looking at things like art books, novels, a 15 minute horror game, Patreon.... maybe even a silly little mobile game for collecting ploofs. Or snakes. One of our founders really likes danger noodles. 

Until then we’ll just wait.

[steam] [itch.io]

(I had a big work meeting today and I’m loopy lmao ~Shald)  

#Women of Xal #Steam Summer Sale #Visual Novel #Otome #PlotTwist Studios #WoX

[vncdraws]

Every time I remember these characters exits, my neurons just flare up.

#women of xal #plottwiststudios #fan art #stickers #xal #xjena #culiver #naxia #axay #artimis #xuna #dr. joy #xobi #proxis #xaris #velvet #clanice #valimer #merixa

[maeljade]

I present to you: Blorboposting about my niche interest game maybe a few hundred people know.

#women of xal #asking me to elaborate might cause you to get stuck in an unskippable cutscene for several minutes #WoX #okay only if asked about Xuna and Velvet #who both happen to be on the far right of the graph #Valimer is simply Gender (TM) #and Joy is there cause I needed someone for the other side and he is great

[shaldreth]

Women of Xal is 15% off in the Steam Summer Sale!

Hey, did you know that Steam doesn’t let you talk about summer sale stuff before the sale actually begins? If you didn’t know, then now we both know! Anyway, the visual novel Women of Xal (WoX) is on sale now. If you’re new to this, don’t worry: so are we. WoX is our company’s first game.

[steam][itch.io]

You’ll follow Xjena as she begins her climb up the dangerous political ladder against other women eying the same powerful position of Matriarch in an alien society where lying is impossible. Utilize your powers to rewind time as you choose whether to help and support those around you directly, focus on the future, or take advantage of your position to exploit others!

10 to 20 hour story, depending on how much you use the aforementioned rewind function, with countless branching paths.

Four major endings: two bad, one neutral, and one good. Plus a bunch of ways to accidentally end things early by getting Xjena killed.

12 full character arcs with most having options for either romance OR friend routes! 7 women and 8 men. They’re not mutually exclusive, either; you can do multiple arcs in one run. That means…

That’s right, polyamory is available. As is an aro/ace playthrough! You won’t be forced into smooches you don’t want.

Over 100 individual unlockable CGs and selfies. Is that too many? I mean, maybe.

140 minute soundtrack with familiar Jazzy vibes, niche ambiance and synth-heavy tracks, and genres I’m pretty sure the composer (see: me) made up.

If you’re worried about a POC, queer cast being written by an unknown staff, then fear not; you’re not the only one who is asking that question. Our head writer/composer/founder is a Black man, and our co-writer/co-founder is a bi woman. You can see more about our staff on our official website, or just drop by our tumblr and shoot us an ask.

Jump into the lore today! The water is fine. Solve mysteries, make your new friends smile, and go on a journey that will stick with you for a long, long time. Go to Steam for more information and to purchase the game!

(Or, if you’re wary of the Valve overlords, we do also have the game on itch.io. u-u)

[steam][bundle link][itch.io][our tumblr]

#Women of Xal #WoX #visual novel #otome #otome visual novel #YES THIS IS A REPOST #INFORMATION ON WHY COMING SOON

[nekojirou]

Women of Xal - Lady Xuna sketch

#lady xuna #xuna #sketch #women of xal

[cocolacola]

thinking about xal'atath like lol. girl where are you

#XAL WE MISS YOUUU #she was like ''big things coming...🤫🤫🤫'' then dipped #big fan of women who are Weapons and have a complicated relationship w that #also the trope of 'cynical narrator' we've literally never had that before her #she had soooo many thoughts and she just went poof after BFA. for shame #warcraft #xal'atath

[interact-if]

can you recommend f/f IFs?

[ID: An anonymous ask that reads: “Hello! Do you have a list of WLW/Sapphic recs? I tried using the tumblr search function and didn't see any results” /end ID]

Hi Anons,

You can find the list below!

Completed:

Alice (VN) by Sasha

A New Life (VN) by @zephyo

A Summer’s End: Hong Kong 1986 (VN) by @oracleandbone

A Player’s Heart by Melissa Scott

Bad End Theater (VN) by NomnomNami

Bite Me, Please (VN) by Existential Crisis Studio

Birdland by @brendanpatrickhennessy

Boat Prom (VN) by @brendanpatrickhennessy

Butterfly Soup (VN) by @brianna-lei

Contract Demon (VN) by NomnomNami

Dungeons and Lesbians (VN) by @noeybodys

Graveyard Girls (VN) by Delphinium Interactive

If It Please The Court by D. E. Chaudron

I Woke Up Next To You Again (VN) by @zephyo

Known Unknowns (VN) by @brendanpatrickhennessy

Love on the Peacock Express (VN) by trainmilfsgame

Missed Messages (VN) by @zephyo

Moonrise by Natalie Cannon

NYE2019 by @cyberpunklesbian 

Pageant by @cyberpunklesbian 

Perseids, or, All This Will Go On Forever by communistsister 

Salting the Earth (VN) by BitterBerries

So, About Last Night by Elissa Black

Without a Voice (VN) by L³

Women of Xal (VN) by @plottwiststudios 

Demos:

A Life Supreme by @lifesupreme-if 

#if: rec list #f/f #wlw #sapphic #interactive fiction #lgbtq+

[beautiful-boy-bracket]

WELCOME TO THE BEAUTIFUL BOY BRACKET

lets start with the minor character section (both sections are in this post), where we have 32 characters handpicked from your submissions by me personally. they are as follows:

Shinjiro Nozomi from Entropic Float: This World Will Decay And Disappear

Xiao Yin from Dislyte

Cherry (Kaoru Sakurayashiki) from Sk8 The Infinity

Kashima Yuu from Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun

Argalia from Library Of Ruina

Haku from Spirited Away

Mytho from Princess Tutu

Emrys from The Hero's Journey

Magnus Chase from Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard series

Kusuriuri from Mononoke, Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales

Kai Satou from Your Turn To Die

Santa from Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

Abi from Akatsuki no Yona

Ramuda from Hypnosis Microphone

Ronald from Jackson's Diary

Ryuji Ayukawa from Blue Period

Yuuya Sakazaki from Hatoful Boyfriend

Cure Infini from HUGtto Precure

Richard from Tales of Graces

Gero Akoya from Cute High Earth Defense Club Love!

Elpizo from Mega Man Zero 2

YiGuang from My Vow To My Liege

Raikou Shimizu from Nabari No Ou

Lio Fotia from Promare

Aurelius from Royal Alchemist

Yuliy Jirov from Sirius the Jaeger

Mochizuki Yukimitsu from Skate Leading Star

Yuri Lowell from Tales Of Vesperia

Lord Golden, aka The Fool, from The Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb

Jim Hawkins from Treasure Planet

Epel Fermier from Twisted Wonderland

Valimer from Women of Xal

some of these names may be misspelled, which i will find out when googling them again to save their images; fault lies with their submitters /lh

as almost 3/4 of these characters have only gotten one submission each, the minor bracket is not seeded, and the matchups will be randomized

now for the major bracket! as this one is possible to seed, i present you with...

the round one matchups in the major bracket will be:

Howl Jenkins Pendragon from Howl's Moving Castle vs Artemis Fowl from the Artemis Fowl series

Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender vs Izaya Orihara from Durarara!!

Yoshiya "Joshua" Kiryu from The World Ends With You vs Gerry Keay from The Magnus Archives

Kurapika from Hunter X Hunter vs Lan Wangji from Mo Dao Zu Shi | The Untamed

Alucard from Castlevania vs Aaravos from The Dragon Prince

Legolas Greenleaf from Lord Of The Rings vs Vash The Stampede from Trigun Stampede

Taako from The Adventure Zone vs Albedo from Genshin Impact

Leonardo Hamato from Rise Of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vs Andromeda Shun from Saint Seya

Dorian Gray from The Picture Of Dorian Gray vs Yuri Plisetsky from Yuri!!! On Ice

Gunpowder Tim from The Mechanisms vs Affogato Cookie from Cookie Run

Klavier Gavin from Ace Attorney vs Marluxia from Kingdom Hearts

Mettaton EX from Undertale vs Chuuya Nakahara from Bungou Stray Dogs

Link from The Legend Of Zelda vs Essek Thelyss from Critical Role

Angel Devil from Chainsaw Man vs Kian Stone from Just Roll With It

Tamaki Suoh from Ouran High School Host Club vs Yuri Leclerc from Fire Emblem

Wallace from Pokemon vs Sesshomaru from InuYasha

#beautiful boy bracket #swag competition #tumblr polls #poll society

[plottwiststudios]

Women of Xal II Kickstarter: Delayed?

Hey, have you heard of the overly ambitious visual novel titled "Women of Xal" for Steam and Itch.io? (PC/Mac/Linux) Because that plays into why we might need to shelf the series for a few years. Full breakdown under the cut. (No spoilers)

For those who have gotten the True Ending, you should be fully aware that the story is about to vastly expand outside of Xuna's castle. It's a narrative must where everything that happens, happens well outside the scope of the original game in so many ways. And let's talk about scope! Especially if you have no idea what's so staggering about the original Women of Xal visual novel:

600+ optional choices we painstakingly programmed

Branching paths that people are still asking for guides on

A dozen romance options

Poly and gay options that interact with one another

Voice acting from now VERY popular voice actors

A 15 hour story full of mystery, lore, and tense politics

110 track soundtrack

4 Endings

Animations

Thousands of art assets (Bless Cat)

Years of hard work and long nights

No AI Art

100% positive reviews as of this post

Recouped $6000+, or roughly a fraction of the cost of development. After 2+ years of being released

Note that very last bullet point. Doing things for the art and passion is amazing and all, but I can't be investing literal thousands of hours into creating a game for a subset of a subset of a subset of people. I have bigger projects I want to finally get to work on. Ones I really hoped Women of Xal I would help a bit with funding. But it's not. And because of certain facts about the game, it may never be able to do so. To no fault of any of the players.

When I made Women of Xal I, my time was more readily available and I was quite a bit younger. The cost of running a company and creating a game like WoX as the first product hadn't quite hit me. I was also silly enough to believe "if you make it, they will come" to a degree. That part makes me grin in a not fun way.

But these days I have a job that takes me away from creating, but does pay the bills and debts. Debts I don't want to get into again in order to create the sequel that will undoubtedly come with far higher costs due to the game's scope. I have a better understanding of the costs of hiring returning and appropriate talent necessary to create a game better than the last. (I don't personally believe in being satisfied with an intentional steep downgrade.)

Yes there is the Kickstarter option for Women of Xal II, but there are plenty of costs and time investment that makes it an unviable avenue to explore during this point in time. After all, who but the people who sat down and explored everything the first game had to offer would understand how we came up with a $50,000 Kickstarter price tag for a visual novel's sequel? Especially since too many will look at the first Kickstarter and believe we made the first game with only $14,000.

I have thought about giving Women of Xal I a modernized facelift with a smaller Kickstarter, complete with a ton of new features and fun ways to streamline and highlight the narration's strong points, but there's a LOT of baggage that comes with that, including not wanting to go backwards when I still want to create my "pipe dream" projects.

So I'm thinking we'll give it a bit more thought these next few days, and if we can't think of a solution that we haven't already tried, we'll officially announce the delay (and before you suggest your own ideas, know that there's a 99% chance we've already tried it).

A long, long post just to say I do sincerely apologize for having people wait longer, but I am literally still a few thousand dollars away from paying off all my debt that came from funding the first game. It's a micro-trauma I do not feel inclined to repeating again. When the franchise is in a better place, or I am emotionally/physically, I will return back to Women of Xal to finish the story. If I cannot, I will release a summary of events that transpire after the first game's true ending.

But for now, I'm going to focus on financial and emotional healing, and creating projects that I feel will be more appreciated by both myself and people who are turned off by what "Women of Xal" offers.

Thank you all for supporting our small company these past several years. <3

-John

#Women of Xal #Visual Novel #dating sim #indie game #gaming

[vncdraws]

Throne Games

All Hail the Queen.

#Xjena #Women of Xal #Xal #plottwiststudios #projecttrinity #fan art #videogame #visual novel

[maeljade]

Mx Hilde had a lecture on human organs.

#Women of Xal #WoX #Plottwist Studios #Velvet Kuriox #Mx Hilde

[shaldreth]

Women of Xal's Production Costs

Questions about production costs, the profit WoX has made, and the effectiveness of advertising are becoming quite common. So we came up with this overview! Hope this is entertaining to some of you. And hey, if you're considering an indie VN of your own, you can probably take some lessons from this on how to save money! 

This post will use very broad, rough monetary estimates. If you're interested in the more detailed cost breakdowns, let us know! I might make that our first official post on our website or something.  ~ Shald

Starting Money: 

This was essentially our first project as a studio, so we didn't have any income to begin with. We had to rely on both Kickstarter and our own full-time jobs for funding. 

Our Kickstarter campaign raised $13,360. After Kickstarter fees, our actual seed money for this project was roughly $12k to start! Anything past that 12k was paid for by the team out-of-pocket. 

Production Costs (Part 1):

Let's start with the good news! We were able to save a ton of money on certain aspects of the project by either doing them ourselves or trading assets for music commissions. The money we saved could then be redistributed to other areas. 

Music: $0  That's right, the soundtrack was free! John's a composer and did it all himself. Typically a soundtrack of this size and quality would be at LEAST a few thousand dollars. 

Beta Testing: $200 Our beta testers were friends from our Discord server who wanted to play the game early, but we still paid them what we could! And what they’d accept. u_u 

Writing: $300   90% of the game was written by John, and was therefore free. We paid a small fee to a couple writers for their assistance near the end of the project.

Graphic Design: $300   One of John's old friends was happy to do the graphic design for relatively cheap. 

CGs: $1,000 That’s right, we somehow got about 100 CGs for just around a thousand dollars. We traded music for art here as well. 

Programming: $2,000  We paid two staff for programming,, but saved extra money by having John and his girlfriend jump in themselves for the second half of development. 

Production Costs (Part 2):

These next items all cost about as much as we expected. 

Registration and Licensing: $99 Steam stuff. 

Vocalists: $1,500 Singers are rightfully expensive, yo. 

Equipment/Software Costs: $2,600  HitFilm was used for animating the backgrounds, creating trailer videos, adding subtitles to ingame cutscenes, modifying animation, etc. John also bought a few more digital instruments which he ended up using for the… unique music genres in this game.

Voice Acting: $5,000 VA’s are rightfully expensive, yo. Especially when two VAs later went on to hold pretty high-profile roles. I really hope they want to reprise their roles, but it’ll probably be the majority of next game’s budget.... lol  Anyway, we commissioned most of our VAs ages ago, so the prices weren’t actually as high as you might fear if you took a look at the cast list.

Production Costs (Part 3):

These items all cost more than expected for various reasons. 

Character Art: $8,000 Listen, we have hundreds of sprites in this game ok. If I’m counting right, we have ~50 unique character sprites and probably ~300 different expressions like happy, sad, etc. for various characters. Sure, minor expression changes are way cheaper than full sprites, but they ain’t free! We expected it to cost a lot; extra costs came in when we actually had to hire a second artist to cover for our main artist, who got *understandably* burned out from doing so much art for WoX over the development years.

Animation: $5,000 This was our second-biggest cost and paid off the least, honestly. We went through multiple animators who never delivered the animations we commissioned. Obviously we didn't pay for animations we never received, but the cost here is from test animations we did receive. See, we'd have each animator do a short test animation as part of their interview - to make sure they were comfortable with the characters and outfits. Even though it was part of their interview process, we obviously paid them for that work. 

Background Artists: $2,000 And this is another case where we had to hire multiple artists due to either not receiving the commissions we sent out or artist burnout. u_u

Total:

So that's a total cost of approximately $28k to produce WoX, $12k of which was paid for by the Kickstarter. Yeah, we underestimated how much the project was going to cost, but what else is new on Kickstarter? lol 

Post-production costs: 

We've spent the following amounts on advertising. 

- tumblr Blaze: $104.20 - Facebook: $100 - Twitter: $100

We do want to spend more on advertising, obviously, but we need to have money to put into it. Which is when we get to the final section...

Revenue:

Forgive my rough math here for a minute….

WoX sells for $20 on both Steam and itch.io. Steam takes a 30% cut, so every Steam sale makes approx. $14. itch.io takes a 10% cut, and people on there can choose to tip extra, but we'll still say that every itch.io sale makes ~$18. 

...Steam's backend is confusing me a lot right now because it's giving me three different numbers for how many units we've sold, but... I'll just, uh, guess which one is right.

As of May 15th, 2022, and since WoX's original beta launch in August 2021, we had sold:

206 Steam copies (-8 returns) 30 itch.io copies

For a rough total of $3,312, pre-tax. Steam also mentions we're averaging about $13 a day.

Now, you may see a lot more copies than that on the "market", and that's because we gave copies of the game to Kickstarter backers who pledged $10 or more. So far 331 Kickstarter backers have activated their copies of the game on Steam, I believe 7 did so through itch.io. So more than half of the copies currently in "circulation" were given out to people who originally helped fund the game.

In Conclusion:

So yeah, bottom line is that the game cost about $30,000 to make, we've spent $304.20 on advertising, and we've made about $3,000 back. So if we seem somewhat broke on the company tumblr sometimes, that's why! \o/ 

As a quick aside, we actually just ran a test sale of 15% off on Steam with absolutely NO advertising whatsoever, to see what sort of baseline numbers we might be able to expect from sales with no ads. Y’know, as an experiment! It went pretty well, but those numbers are not included in the above analysis.  If you read that entire thing, I am in awe of you.

#Women of Xal #WoX #listen I have an odd fascination with math sometimes #I hope one (1) person finds this interesting #other than me lmao #fun fact I wrote this while listening to Ifuudoudou on repeat

[wine-dark-soup]

this doesnt include the games i need to START (disco elysium women of xal pentiment)

[elfyourmother]

Seeing the post about poly relationships in Baldurs Gate 3 and how disappointed you are with it I know a game that probably won't disappoint with its poly options! It's called "Women of Xal", is a visual novel and has one of the biggest black casts in any game I know.

this is exactly what I’m tired of. this shit right here. this is why I’m so irritated w bg3 romance. Months and months of folk telling me things like this, hyping it up and then the game comes out and it’s the same ol shit as usual.

I don’t trust anyone hyping anything to me anymore and I wish y’all would stop. Just stop!!!!. All it does it upset me even more when I actually see the thing and it’s the same old fuckery I have always gotten. I am middle aged I have been doing this same exact song and dance more than half my life at this point I am TIRED. I am tired of “this has black ppl in it” and it’s the worst most offensive portrayals possible. I’m tired of “you’ll love this it has poly” and it’s “you get to sometimes fuck other people and they make jokes abt threesomes and they’ll call you a selfish whore and make you choose”

leave me alone

#i literally just said on the bird app this shit reminds me of white ppl hyping up things to me bc “’black ppl!’ and it turns out to be trash

[catgirlforeskin]

what sort of games are u into? If you like visual novels i reccomend Women of Xal i heard its very good and gay (tho i havent played it myself)

God I’ve got a stack of yuri visual novels I need to play, I just end up playing shooters or modded minecraft with my wife when I get on my pc. I’ll get around to all the indie games I’ve never launched one day I swear

#asks

[solitarelee]

I am deeply curious about an Enlightened piece of media with a Department of Sexual Agency

So I was thinking about the visual novel Women of Xal (available thru Steam) specifically, it's a sci-fi VN with a lot of world building (massive tw for serious discussion and depiction of sexual violence if u decide to check it out), part of which is that consent/sexual adulthood in the alien world of Xal works via government-organized test. If you pass the test, you are then legally cleared for Having Sex! Congrats, no-longer-kid!

The catch there that kept me from ever considering it as potentially dystopian is that said alien race is biologically incapable of out-and-out lying. The "test" could be as straightforward as just asking them a series of questions about their emotional state, which they wouldn't be able to lie about. This is the part that I think moves it into plausible territory from what that absolutely deranged tweeter was talking abt, but I had honestly never considered it from any other light beyond "yeah, that does seem like it would work better" within the game.

So, yeah, Department of Sexual Agency, which is absolutely what I'll be calling it from now on, is entirely a thing in that setting lol! Kind of a bg detail but interesting (there are a lot of interesting bg worldbuilding details in that game).

#solitaretalk