Our Projects

Tiny projects

About Arcanist

Arcanist is a tiny game development team started by ThaumX. Thanks to funding from our supporters, we've been able to go from being Thaum’s part time hobby project, to having 1-2 full time and 2-4 part time/commissioned employees. Arcanist remains mostly a labor of love for Thaum, who mostly supports his family with his day job in tech, and uses the majority of incoming funds on paying team members or directly on development. While we’re proud to pay generous salaries to team members, we’ve been able to afford it because most of our long-term employees come from countries such as Brazil, Georgia, and Russia. This has allowed us to maximize the value from the money our supporters generously give us, while still doing our best to be a good employer. We are extremely proud that despite having similar levels of financial support and sharing the same challenges as solo developers in the story-based adult game space, we’ve been able to build a long track record of rapid development while still maintaining a focus on reliability, quality, community, and transparency.

Arcanist’s Mission

We strive to create the best adult games that we can. We focus on more niche areas that are typically limited to games from solo indy developers. We do this because we believe that potential profit shouldn’t be the only thing determining whether a game is worthwhile, and that focusing on money leads to games that are bland and formulaic with a too-shallow approach to eroticism.

Arcanist’s Commitments

• Using new funding provided by our supporters wisely as a means to further our work in adult game development, rather than just increasing our salaries.
• Strive to remain open to the desires, suggestions, and criticisms of our supporters and audience. We should always try to prevent our ego from getting in the way of improving our work.
• Do our best to maintain a steady release of new builds that are on-time for the publicly-posted release dates.
• Be open about challenges, problems, and mistakes that we make when working on a project, focusing on how to improve rather than how to hide or avoid responsibility.

Thaum’s History With Adult Gaming

I started out working on adult mods (rather than vanilla ones) for video games back in 2006. I worked mostly with Bethesda games on Gamebryo and then Creation engines, starting with TES Oblivion. My biggest contribution in the area was the addition of breast physics and animation, which I’m happy to say was adopted by other modders into their mods, mostly a growing collection of character/body mods. If you’ve played a Bethesda game with with adult mods, it’s almost certain you’ve used a mod I had some small part in.

From there I moved away from modding and towards contributing to actual adult games. At the same time my hobby writing shifted to erotica. While I contributed to quite a few adult games in one way or another during this period, some notable examples are: Free Cities, Trials in Tainted Space, and Girl Life.

After that, I started looking into making the kind of game I personally really wanted to play. At the time there weren’t many options for games with life sim elements, and I wanted to make an experience that maintained the open world experience of a life sim, without the slow pace and elements I felt didn’t add to the experience. That’s when Accidental Woman was born.