Today marks a momentous day for us, as after roughly a year’s work, we get to finally release the first two chapters of Queens of the Sea.

Even though this release is only the first big step in a long journey, it is still worth celebrating. In more ways than one, this project is one of passion and love, and we envision a bright future for it. 

I apologize in advance for what is going to be a rather long and possibly sentimental ramble, but there is a lot I want to get out. This development log is going to go into our background as developers, the origins of our game and the process of making Version 0.1. They will be split into sections that you can skip to at your leisure. 

Lastly, if you’re only interested in the future of the project, I will put out a separate post soon with a rough roadmap of what’s to come and how fast you can expect new updates, how to support development and so on. 

Who are the Wet Mermaid Crew?

With that out of the way, I should probably give a brief introduction of who we are. My co-developer Lady Quill and I are a couple with a passion for games and an interest in telling fun, engaging and sex positive stories. Both of us are still very new to gamedev, with roughly two years worth of experience, including a number of student projects as well as a couple of game jam games. We found that we thoroughly enjoy working on projects together and make for a good team with different but complimenting skill sets. 

I, ”Mister Ink”, am the designer, writer and programmer for this project. I have been writing as a hobby and even semi-professionally for as long as I can remember, both “serious” fiction as well as some erotic stuff or smut as you could probably call it. Additionally, I’ve always been interested in developing games, but it was not that long ago that the programming side of it still terrified me. In the last two years or so I have found that it is actually much less daunting than what I initially thought, and I became fairly adept in the basics of C# and Unity. Even more so I found Ren’Py (the engine this game is developed on) to be a very simple and fun tool for creating visual novels such as this. Now with Queens of the Sea, I am personally responsible for pretty much all of the writing, the technical execution and most of the character work.

Meanwhile, my partner and co-developer Lady Quill does all of the beautiful graphics for the game. She’s been drawing pretty much her whole life and is currently studying to become a 3D animator as well. I am incredibly lucky to have a talented visual artist like her helping me bring these characters to life, as my skills in visual art are quite lacking. This game literally would not be possible without her. 

Origins of the game

As mentioned above, among other things I have written many erotic short stories over the years, a lot of them inspired by the fantasy genre (a personal favorite of mine). However, a couple of years ago I came up with an idea for a proper smutty novel: a pirate adventure loosely inspired by real history as well as my favorite show Black Sails and the Pirates of the Caribbean films. It would have been told from the perspective of a British sailor who finds themselves in Nassau, surrounded by female pirates, many of them gender-swapped versions of real historical figures like Blackbeard, Charles Vane and “Calico” Jack Rackham. I was so passionate about the idea that I made a document detailing all of the main characters with their backstories, motivations, weaknesses and strengths and even photo references for their appearances. After writing first drafts of the early chapters, my time and attention shifted to my studies and eventually work, and the project got set aside for a better time. Still, it always lingered in the back of my head for some reason. 

Eventually I started to think about how much potential the concept had for a visual novel instead of a book. This was still before I had any real experience in making games, but I had been occasionally playing some adult VNs for a while. Even if the genre has its issues and is still quite niche because of the stigmas around both dating sims and adult games, the thought of making one myself was an intriguing one. Although English is not my first language, I’ve seen the kind of poor translations and writing even some very popular AVNs have, so the bar did not seem too high. 

There was only one big problem: While I could write the thing and probably learn how to even program it, a visual novel obviously needs… well, visuals. Again, I have very little talent if any when it comes to drawing 2D art. Also, the thought of trying to learn 3D modeling and rigging, not to mention spending all the time necessary posing and lighting pictures, much less animating anything, felt like an even bigger wall and time-sink than programming. And no, I was not going to use generative AI, for numerous reasons I won’t go into detail here and now. 

But then I met Quill. Suddenly I not only knew someone who was an amazing artist but also genuinely interested in developing games AND was excited to have a reason to draw spicy images of beautiful people. 

Our first foray into making visual novels specifically was a small dating sim as a game jam project. It turned out to be the most fun either of us had ever had making a game, and it convinced both of us that this could be something we could realistically pull off.

Shortly after I shared my ideas about Calypso’s Embrace, and together we started enthusiastically talking about what the game could be like and how we could do it. Not that long after, around the start of June of last year, we started finally working on it for real. The dream began to form into a reality.

Development of 0.1

All in all, it took us around 11 months to finish these first two chapters. This number is, however, perhaps a bit misleading. First of all, thanks to my book concept, a LOT of the groundwork necessary to figure out all the different characters, the world and even major narrative beats for the first chapter was in many ways already done before we really started development. Of course, some details did change, as often happens when you return to something you have worked on years prior with fresh eyes, especially when you switch the medium from a novel to a game. Even then many of my ideas for characters and story remained from the original concept relatively similar. 

We also did not work on this game as if it was our full-time job for all these months. In the end, even though we take the development of this game seriously, this is currently mostly a hobby project. While we did work on it over the summer of 2024, we also tried to enjoy the warm weather and spend time relaxing while we still could. Once fall came, Quill started her new studies and I’m still trying to find work gigs whenever I can to support myself, which obviously takes time away from the game. 

Still, whenever we had the time, we spent it gladly working on the game. First, I started working on the script, which eventually ended up being roughly 57 000 words in total. Meanwhile Lady Quill first started drawing our two lead characters, John and Sarah. I was very happy with the artstyle for our characters, and it felt incredible seeing them all come to life. There are still a handful of planned characters not included in this first release that I simply cannot wait to see be made real from concept to art.

As we are on the subject, let’s talk about the graphics. While text is fast and cheap to produce, making good 2D art from scratch is another matter. One major part of why this first release took so long was that there was a lot of groundwork needed to be done for all the necessary assets. In this first release, we introduce 7 characters with multiple unique facial expressions and different levels of clothing (also some characters, like Sarah, have multiple outfits as seen below), a bunch of background art for several locations and different times of day, in addition to UI graphics, and of course, some special CGs for the lewd scenes.

An example of our second protagonist Sarah’s different costumes. As you can tell, Quill chose a set of primary colors that she tried to keep consistent across them, which for Sarah is mostly warm orange and yellow tones to match her hair and optimistic outlook on life.

Lady Quill likes to take time with her drawing, often to the level of almost obsessive perfectionism, which of course produces amazing looking art but also is a fairly slow and long process. There was also a process of trial and error trying to find the right look for certain things, like the coloring/shading of the characters as well as the background art. However it was definitely worth it, as we’ve found a look we are happy with and is not too demanding to draw. Especially the background art is now much faster for Quill to produce as we chose a minimalistic look that is fast to color without the need to obsess over every little shadow and detail.

The background art was made with two main requirements in mind: It needed to be something that did not distract the player’s eye too much from the characters, and it had to be fast enough to produce while still looking good.

Now the good news is that the workload needed for future chapters is immediately a lot smaller, as almost all of the graphics assets made for this first release can and will be reused for future chapters. The only things that can’t be reused are the unique CGs for important scenes, but each bit of character, background and UI art are things that make it faster for us to develop future updates. 

One thing we struggled with initially was figuring out the scope of this first 0.1 release. Starting out, I had an outline for a longer version of Chapter 1 that had most of the content now in this 0.1 release, but during an early phase of development back in mid-2024 we decided to cut it in half to try to get the Chapter 1 out before the end of the year. We made good progress developing it and by early winter we did some playtests with some close, trusted friends who gave us valuable feedback. (Our pool of playtesters was very small, as the explicit adult content of the game makes it a bit more difficult to be too public about it.) 

However, as we prepared to release the first version of Chapter 1, we thought about how important first impressions are to a game’s success. While Chapter 1 did a decent enough job introducing the main characters, I feared it was not quite enough to give a proper idea of the rest of the cast or the main setting; the town of Nassau. There was also the fact that there were only two “H scenes” in Chapter 1, which is not necessarily a great selling point for an adult visual novel. (H scene is a common term used when discussing visual novels, referring to Hentai because of the genre’s Japanese roots and means any scene containing lewd/pornographic material.) So the question we had to ask ourselves was that did we want to rush out a smaller taste of the game faster or take our time for hopefully a better first impression? We figured the latter was the safer option, even if it meant we would have to push back the originally planned release by several months. 

The decision was then made to essentially go back to our original plan, re-introducing the cut half of Chapter 1 into the 0.1 release as Chapter 2. Most of the work that went into that was done during late 2024 and this spring of 2025. Some areas of Chapter 2 took a lot more work than 1, as its word count is much higher and it includes more locations. Now looking back at that decision, I definitely think it was the right call. I feel like this first taste of our game is now a pretty good slice to get a feel for it and hopefully hook players enough to come back once we release Chapter 3 later this year.

Once all the writing was done, my main job besides incorporating the graphics into the build was bringing the story and world alive with sounds and music. This was always the part I feared the most, as neither of us have much expertise in audio, much less any musical talent to compose songs. I have a background in the film and TV industry, which gave me a baseline understanding of audio editing and recording, but my current equipment for recording anything is incredibly limited and I don’t have proper experience in doing foley work. So, I ended up using a lot of stuff from Freesound (of course attributing the creators when necessary), editing them to fit my needs. I also had to resort to using royalty free stock music in the game, a lot of it from YouTube’s music library. 

Very late in development I did realize that for some small things I could use my decent quality desktop microphone to do very simple recordings. By far the strangest one was when I felt the need to include a… climax sound… for a couple of the scenes and could not think of how to get what I wanted with stuff from Freesound. So, the result was me making some very wet mouth sounds into my microphone and then layering in some heartbeats I found online for greater effect. 

My secret hope is that one day I will be able to afford to pay someone actually skilled in audio to make custom sounds or music tracks for the game, but that is currently not possible due to our non-existing budget. Perhaps one day…(If you’re interested in composing music or editing sounds for our game, don’t be afraid to join our Discord and dm me.) Voice acting would obviously also be an amazing addition, but again the problem with budget and finding decent voice actors that actually fit the characters and would be willing to do the work is just not something I see as realistic right now. Maybe one day…

Another challenge for me was learning how to do some of the more advanced Ren’Py functionality that required more coding. For this first release I had to build an interactable journal that includes character information, a glossary of key terms and a place to view unlocked collectibles. Complications with it came when I realized that the mobile version would require a separate version with different text sizes and so on, as the PC version simply broke when displayed on a phone screen. Other than that it was not a particularly difficult process but simply quite tedious. I’m still convinced the way I have my code setup is way less than ideal but it works for what it needs to do, and I’m fine with that. 

Such challenges aside, we are both now incredibly happy with the end result of our hard work, and hope many of you find it enjoyable as well. Please give us feedback by filling our feedback form https://forms.gle/9vYmLiASMNtDZwN68 and share the game on forums, social media, Reddit or wherever if you liked it, it would help us out a lot. Especially now starting out as currently our only audience is a few of our closest friends and self-promoting our game is not something either of us enjoy doing, so any visibility is a huge boon for us when competing for attention in a flooded market. 

Also, we have just made a fresh-out-of-the-oven Discord group! https://discord.gg/WNfvaYGq It’s completely free to join for the time being, as we want to get a nice, positive little community going around the game while it is still in its infancy. Come chat and hang out with us there, share your suggestions and tell us what you hope to see from the game in the future! The Discord group will also be the best place to stay up to date on our development. 

Anyways, we wish you all a great summer! 

Best regards,

Mister Ink