Was Icy successful (financially)? I liked it and would love to see more games like that. You could try different settings or themes just keep the format ( part VN and part RPG).
Without the Remastered, it wasn't. It costed us nearly 33k euros, 6k of which coming from the Indiegogo campaign, but it managed to get us only 25k euros so far (nearly 10k copies sold). And I and me partner worked completely for free, since they were already investing that budget. We did ICY with a low budget and low wages, its actual cost should've been at least two times higher.
So, it wasn't a complete failure, quite the opposite, in 2015 90% of games on Steam sold for less than 15k dollars in a year, we sold for nearly 60k dollars (but paying taxes, Steam and the publisher we only get 40% of the actual price). On the other side, we could've been way better.
I am working right now with a new programmer with 20 years of experience, investing in the company his free time, we had to work on ICY's Remastered from scratch and, despite the fact that I just applied myself to the world of programming and he only has 1-2 hours per day, since the beginning of January we did everything but the combat system, more stuff than it was in the original ICY. Having a precise direction allow us to focus on creating nearly definitive stuff, instead of prototyping stuff that will be changed ten times before being good enough for the game, but on the other side we realized the programmer we had before was probably lazy or incompetent.
When we'll be done with the Remastered, we'll see if it will manage to do more sales. We don't really believe it will bring us a lot of money, we did it because we all wanted to fix ICY and release the game that it should've been, but maybe we will earn enough to reach the break even point. The market is different right now, its full of indie games and selling enough copies is becoming harder with each passing year, but Valve is shutting down Greenlight and we also got some contacts for some good marketing.
After that, we have several solutions, doing another 2D visual novel isn't the smartest of all choices because Mirko, the artist behind ICY, is a friend of ours, but his rates are now three times higher: we can't affort to pay him enough and we don't want to force him into the job using the friendship bond. So, we will do a 3D game, since 3D assets can be used multiple times. We want to create a compelling RPG and use the experience we made with ICY and TDWL to work on something with a strong narrative, an interesting setting, but also a good gameplay. Sadly I can't tell much about it because its design needs to be polished and improved, but I will surely post here on RPGcodex as soon as the game will be something more than some doc documents on our dropbox.
The restaurant tycoon game won't affect the development of such RPG, because it won't need the same skills involved in the pre-production of a RPG, on the other side it will allow us to work on a project that will be on sale when we will have all the design foundations and writing documents we need to properly start working on that RPG.
The core concept is that, with a team full of RPG enthusiasts, we crave to work on RPGs and we will do something as soon as possible. And since the Codex has been a nice place for me to discuss and have good, solid feedbacks, this place will be the first in which I will share any detail.
