From bored IT specialist to full-time indie success: Chyos shares the story behind “A Struggle with Sin” — one man’s solo journey creating a deep, choice-driven Adult Visual Novel RPG.
Chyos single-handedly created “A Struggle with Sin,” a full-fledged role-playing game packed with meaningful decisions, romance, and dark twists. In this candid interview, he explains why he left a safe IT job to pursue his childhood passion, how he turned adult content into a viable business, and what it really takes to succeed as a solo game creator.
- What made you decide to make an adult visual novel with “ A Struggle with Sin“?
I’ve been passionate about role-playing games (RPGs) on GameBoy, SNES, PC and Playstation since I was a teenager. The desire to develop my own RPG goes back to my high school days. Back then, I used RPG Maker 2000 to program my first games for my friends. Later I continued with RPG Maker XP and made another game (also just for friends).
In general, I’ve always been fascinated by making up my own stories and coming up with storylines. For me, the difference to a book or movie was always that the player becomes part of the action and makes decisions that affect the outcome. In my second game, I implemented this for the first time, and there were several possible endings. (And no, I won’t publish it because it had personal and private content).
Anyway, that was the end of game development for the time being, my education and professional life followed, and I had little drive to work on other games on the side. My job as an IT specialist in a small company wasn’t really fulfilling either and was full of repetitive Q&A work. It wasn’t fulfilling at all and I became increasingly dissatisfied.
The end of the story was that I quit and wanted to find a new direction. Actually with the plan to change companies. While looking for a new job, my old passion returned and I decided to work on a roleplaying game again. At first I thought I would do it as a hobby.
But then I enjoyed it so much that I thought about making a living out of it (there are completely different possibilities now than there were in 2004). So I came up with the idea of funding the whole thing through Patreon. However, I still had a lot of doubts as to whether what I would earn would even come close to being enough.
Then I did a little research to see if others were having success with something like this and came across the adult gaming industry. At first I was amazed. Especially that the games made with RPGmaker were for the most part (with a few exceptions) really badly made.
Huge maps, dull running around with endless backtracking to stretch out the playing time. Nevertheless, the authors were successful with it. That’s when I decided to try and do better in this area too. Especially after titles like The Witcher 3, I found it difficult to play games without a certain romantic element, and I very quickly saw the appeal of taking this one step further.
But I also didn’t want to simply program a short story. I wanted it to be a real adventure with lots of twists, turns and decisions. But I never thought back then that it would take on the dimensions it has now. I’ve learned a lot since the beginning and hope to make the game even better in the future.
- What were your sources of inspiration (books, movies, games)?
It’s a bit difficult for me to narrow this down. As already mentioned, I’ve played countless RPGs (until I started working on the game, after which it became significantly less, as I simply don’t have the time or prefer to spend it working). Perhaps the Gothic series https://www.worldofgothic.com/gothic/?go=g1charaktere stands out a little, whose game principle of an open but also brutal world I’ve always really appreciated. Likewise Suikoden 1&2 https://www.konami.com/games/genso/rem/1_2/us/en-us/ (especially the 2nd part).
Of course I’m also a big fan of fantasy novels, I’ve read some (e.g. the Drizzt series), but I’ve listened to many more as audiobooks. There are now so many that I can no longer say exactly where each inspiration comes from. To name a book series: All Markus Heitz https://www.mahet.de/mahet/EN/?page_id=930 books (The Dwarves, Ulldart: The Dark Times…) King’s Dark Tidings, Art of the Adept, Ravenblade, The Stormlight Archive….
- Did you have any programming experience and what tools did you use?
As I mentioned before, I had it through my education, but developing a game with RPG Maker is a bit different from what I had to deal with in my job. But I was a complete beginner when it came to the graphical implementation. I taught myself image editing and rendering with the help of tutorials, and I’m still improving in some areas.
At the moment I use GIMP for image editing (which takes up most of my time), Daz3d for the scene environments and Klub17 for the animations. If I could do it all over again, I would probably use Daz3d for all game graphics. This would allow me to make a lot of more detailed things, and I would have to spend less time post-processing the images.
- You have created a game that is far better in depth and scope than many commercial offerings. Did you ever think you would get this far?
No, as I said, I had a lot of doubts at the beginning. I also had to listen to a lot of people in my private life. Especially in the beginning, there were a lot of hate messages from users just because the game had Netorare (NTR) content. Even though I always gave the player a choice from the beginning. I think that makes the vanilla content stand out a lot better and gives the game’s story a darker touch.
Even now, I sometimes wonder if the decision to put all my eggs in one basket was the right one. The burden of self-employment is something you can’t underestimate and something I never really thought about before. You never really have time off, there are no holidays and you can only earn holidays by working before and after work on the weekends. But on the other hand, I’m happy. I love my work. At the beginning of the week I’m usually happy to be back at work, and at the end I often wonder where the week went. In my previous job, I often had to sit through hours that just didn’t want to go by.
- Do you earn a decent income from your game and is it a full-time job for you?
For now, yes. Of course, you have to keep in mind that there’s a lot of income tax and business tax that has to be deducted from what’s on Patreon. But I’ve always been frugal, so it’s enough to cover maintenance costs, invest in new hardware, and put a little aside for the future. You don’t get a pension when you’re self-employed. We’ll see what the future brings, but I’ll always do everything I can to keep doing my dream job.
- What other plans do you have to develop your game?
Well, the goal is to finish the story, of course. How far I will go depends a bit on the interest in the game. If the fanbase and support is there, I might add a detail or two even after the main story is finished.
In the long run, I also have the desire to make another game. I’ve already created the first concept for it. But it’s too early to talk about it in detail. In general, it will take place in the same game world, a few decades after the current events. But with new heroes who have „almost“ no contact with the old ones. Of course, that doesn’t mean you won’t see anyone again.
However, since the plan is to work with different graphics, it will not be possible to reproduce the current characters 1:1.
We’ll see what the future brings. In any case, I am highly motivated and will do my best. The fan fiction „The story of Tia“ was also inspired by the game.
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Dr. Jakob Jung is Editor-in-Chief of Security Storage and Channel Germany. He has been working in IT journalism for more than 20 years. His career includes Computer Reseller News, Heise Resale, Informationweek, Techtarget (storage and data center) and ChannelBiz. He also freelances for numerous IT publications, including Computerwoche, Channelpartner, IT-Business, Storage-Insider and ZDnet. His main topics are channel, storage, security, data center, ERP and CRM.
Contact via Mail: jakob.jung@security-storage-und-channel-germany.de