Goodbye Angel Under?

Hello everyone!

Today it's time for a post I've been putting off for a long time. It's time to talk about my previous project, Angel Under. Long story short: as many of you have probably guessed, Angel Under is on indefinite hiatus. It's a somewhat sad post to write, both for me and for Angel Under fans, so today I'd like to take the opportunity to tell you a little about its history and explain why, for the time being, we won't be continuing development.

We released the first version of Angel Under in 2022 (almost five years ago!), but the truth is we'd already spent years thinking about the idea and making all sorts of prototypes. Back then, we'd only released visual novels and a few parody games like The Legend of Spirit Orbs. We felt like we wanted to make a "real" game, one with actual gameplay, original characters, and something we could pour 100% of ourselves into. A game that could become the best NSFW game ever made.

We set the bar incredibly high: a 2D shooter with a deep story, a satisfying moveset, and traditionally animated NSFW scenes, as if they came straight out of an anime. We spared no effort. The problem? We were rookie developers, so we had almost no experience with any of it. But our ambition was so huge that we refused to back down, and decided we'd learn whatever we needed to bring the project to fruition. "Worst-case scenario," we kept telling ourselves, "we'll come out of this project having learned a ton."

It took a lot of frustration, hard work, blood, sweat and tears, but little by little we managed to shape the project into something pretty close to what we'd originally envisioned. Those of you who played the very first version of Angel Under will know just how enormously the game evolved over that time. Even today, Angel Under remains the most impressive project we've ever made in terms of production. But despite everything, there was still one huge problem we hadn't properly accounted for: production time.

The truth is, Angel Under is simply too big of a game. It has so many moving parts: real-time combat, environments you can freely explore, dialogue, comic and animation systems, a quest system, tons of characters, and the list goes on and on. It's not the kind of game that just two people can make sustainably, no matter how skilled they are. As a result, every update took an absurd amount of time to produce, and it's not like they contained a huge amount of content, either. On one occasion, it took us around six months to release an update that added only about ten minutes of new content.

Of course, this also affected our personal finances. No matter how polished the game was, the pace of production was so glacial that it was difficult to maintain a consistent Patreon base. And we were getting older, too. We couldn't spend the rest of our lives barely making ends meet.

So we made a deal: we'd play one last card, and if it didn't work out, we'd call it quits with Babusgames. That last card was to make a small game that could support the development of Angel Under. It would have to concentrate everything we'd learned over all those years into one project, but it also had to be quick to produce. Where Angel Under was complex and deep, with long development cycles and slow-burn NSFW content, this new project had to be simple, easy to pick up, fun, and straight to the point. With a bit of luck, it would give us the boost we needed to keep Babusgames viable.

You already know the rest!

That little game turned out to be a massive success, far bigger than we'd ever imagined. Almost overnight, our Patreon community grew tenfold. The demand for Problematic Subjects was so overwhelming that we had no choice but to keep making updates.

"Once things calm down a little," we told ourselves, "we'll go back to Angel Under."

But the months went by, and things didn't calm down. Against all expectations, every new update was even more successful than the last. And so Angel Under never came back, quietly slipping into an indefinite hiatus.

Does this mean a final goodbye to Angel Under? Not necessarily.

Maybe someday, once Problematic Subjects is complete and released on Steam, we'll give it another shot. Or maybe we'll decide we'd rather start a brand-new project using everything we've learned since then. The truth is, we simply don't know.

But none of that changes the fact that we'll always have an incredible amount of love for Angel Under. It's the game we dedicated some of the best years of our lives to, and the game that turned us into the developers we are today. Nothing we've accomplished would have been possible without Erin and Milo.

In every new devlog, there's always one or two guys asking about Angel Under, and while reading those comments always gives me a bittersweet feeling, I also feel an enormous amount of respect for them. After all, these are the guys who's been there since the very beginning, no matter what. Thank you so, so much from the bottom of my heart.

And... who knows what the future holds!

A teary-eyed Babus