Announcing The Hidden Art of Innkeeping!

I'm excited to announce that I'm working on The Hidden Art of Innkeeping, the sequel to The Lost Art of Innkeeping!

Elinor is taking on the challenge of transforming a dilapidated farmhouse in a small seaside village into a luxurious inn. You'll see a few familiar faces from Lost Art (I'm so glad some of you gave feedback on your favorite guests!) but the new game will have a different setting and storyline, lots of new people, some new features, and can be played without knowing anything about the previous game.

After I released Lost Art, a few people asked for a sequel, which made me happy that they had enjoyed the game enough to want more but I felt that I had other ideas that I wanted to bring to fruition. I was able to work on a few different projects for game jams, including The Ghost Cage in 2020, Forest Star in 2021, and Mayor On The Run (currently available only on Itch.io) in 2022, so I kinda got that out of my system.

I settled on the basic plot for Hidden Art back in 2021 (I usually need an ending in mind before I can start working on a game), and it took me several months to plan out the characters, areas, and gameplay features on a spreadsheet. Having said that, I'm still constantly changing things as new ideas and characters come to mind!

I would say that at this stage, I'm a little more than halfway through the development of the game. I'm hoping to release it in either late 2023 or early 2024, but we'll see... I want to make sure that the game is as polished and bug-free as possible upon release, and playtesting always takes longer than I expect.

It's going to be a while before I create a Steam page for The Hidden Art of Innkeeping, mainly because a trailer's required for one. In the meantime, I'm planning to release updates about the game regularly on Itch.io and Twitter, and I hope you're all as excited as I am! :)