Keystone Library is an immersive RPG typing game combining captivating stories, intricate puzzles, and exciting gameplay. Explore a magical library and restore its glory while embarking on unique adventures across multiple genres.
Prospective launch date: Jul 2026
The core of the game lies in the BOOKS. The books are adventurous stories and mini-games. Each book is comprised of scenes which tell a story and present you with challenges.
Chapter by chapter, you can experience these types of scenes.
As a tiny indie dev, it's uncertain what can be achieved. These are some high hopes.
Around the end of 2022, I was feeling uninspired and wanted to do something interesting. I wanted to put my skills together and make something worth looking at. I've studied and worked in illustration and development most of my life, but usually separately. I work at the command line (terminal) most of the time and I prefer using a keyboard. So I came up with an idea to make a very basic typing game with my illustrations as the background. As I got into it I thought it would be a fun twist to add some RPG elements to the game to make it more engaging. Upgrade your skills, purchase supplies to help during quests, etc. And thus the foundation of the game was conceived. I loved the idea that I could keep building upon it and keep adding more books over the years. This would be my new passion project.
I hired a composer to help with the sound, and by Dec 2022 I had published an Early Access version of the game on Steam, hoping to make the holiday rush and make a few sales. It was a very basic but very functional typing game with my Greek Mythology illustrations as backgrounds, and a Greek Mythology based theme for everything. To this day I'm pround of the original version. It was a solid start. But it was still the tail end of the pandemic, the internet was at its heights of chaos at the time, and I had no luck marketing at all with my limited budget and such a noisey environment. Thus were the humble beginnings of Keystone Library.
But I didn't quit, mostly because that original vision stuck with me, and I had to see it through. I gave myself a bottom-line list of requirements:
Now I'm writing this in Apr 2025, what happened and why isn't it done yet? To simplify things, let's say the game released as Early Access 2023, although technically Dec 2022 on Steam, and it's still in Early Access now. It feels fair to say it's a little over 2 years of just development time and technically we haven't officially released. During that time I've spent an enormous amount of energy on this project and had multiple hiccups with art, management issues, money problems - all my responsibility of course - but it's been a difficult road and a learning experience.
Artists are essential to making Keystone Library work, because I could never make that much art myself in reasonable time. I've decided to give that opportunity to others and put myself in the role of programmer and designer. It's a big production and I've gone through the ropes. But I now have a streamlined, failproof system and a better team assisting me and I really think we're on the road to success now. Which is precisely why I wanted to write this history up. It's a bit cathartic for me. Happy to get some stuff off my chest :)
That's about it, and we are still working on that today. I wanted to write that out as we continue our journey. I am still plugging away at it and have multiple people helping me with art and sound now. It's getting better by the day!
Illustration for this project is rather taxing. Let's estimate about 40 illustrations per book, space it out for the sanity of the illustrators, as well as the sanity of our humble budget.
Our roadmap for 2025 includes:
Current Monthly Plan: