Lily's Corner

Beginning with Style

One of the biggest flaws in today gaming scene is clearly lack of style, with gamers often complaining how big releases have almost the same uninspired and sanitized look – while some easily point out how the “industry” mistakes realism/fidelity for quality. Trying to learn from the errors of others, I joined my great friend One Lazy Robot to go on the opposite direction: making games that focus on style and fun, putting realism/fidelity to the side for what makes games great.

The character above is the mascot of out game, Waifu-chan, planned and designed by both of us together. The reasons for this name will be revealed in the future - in the game, of course!

One of my core beliefs for game development is that developers should have experience as players of the game genres they develop, to know well how is to be in the shoes of their clients. Without this we get the catastrophic disconnect between game developers of the Triple Ass games industry and players, that is now more visible than the sun on a clear sky.

Which neatly brings us to my own experience with hidden object games: 28 hidden cats games platinum’d on Steam before the Hidden Waifus project started. You can check most of them in my “Perfect Games” page on Steam, but some are not listed for not having trading cards (prerequisite for achievements to appear in user profiles). My great friend Lazy Robot agrees with this “be your own costumer” principle, so he made sure to complete a game of this style when we were beginning the project, to make sure he would set his expectations for the project correctly.

Another very common problem in modern gaming has been title with a clear lack of testing, daring to release with the most annoying and game-breaking bugs imaginable. To counter this, the whole development of the game has been focused on make things as simple as they can be (less things to go wrong), with integrated solutions that makes testing easier. But the best part was having two good friends accepting to test the game and help us out as QA (quality assurance) for the project – both also with good experience on hidden objects games!

And this is how Hidden Waifus was born, as a first step to get us used to work together on a project and get experience in modern game development tools. Both me and Lazy were wanting to develop games for quite a while, most of my life in my case, but needed to start with something smaller before doing our dream projects – this is why we chose a Chibi style for characters. Both we and our QA friends are already very used to find unexpected problems and think out of the box for solutions, with everyone making significative contributions.

So with all that said, let’s have a look a the current state of the game!

The game today

For now, in the first demo, the game only has one implemented level (Bar) with some very distinct rooms – both in appearance and music. Even tough the scenarios might look like 3D at first glance, they are 2D artwork manually drawn with a perspective.

As you can see on the image above, on this initial version there are 10 waifus to be found, each very distinct from one another – with their own secrets to be discovered in-game. Also there are dozens of items, including some unusual easter-eggs. But this is just the most superficial layer of what Hidden Waifus is.

Inspector

A relatively common thing in hidden objects games are tooltips for what you find, but after an interesting feedback from QA we implemented a mechanic that goes one step further: an in-game inspector, where you can see anything you find in focus - and in a flat sprite for better readability in text.

To keep things simple, you just need to click again on whatever you found to see it in the inspector.

Gallery

Another new resource for our game, as an intentional differential, is the Gallery: where you can see all the Waifus, items and easter-eggs that you already found – with information exclusive to this screen. In future versions it will also give you some hints of where to find more content in the game.

Randomizer

Not a single Hidden Objects game that I ever played implemented the resource that me and Lazy were most interested for all games we create: a Randomizer. This extra menu allows you to randomly shuffle some contents of a level, according to either simple Presets or individual options.

A neat resource, created originally for testing, is to Import and Export randomization Data in external files anywhere you choose. This allows to replay the same randomized level over and over without having to generate a new randomization. We intend to also add Seed phrases in the future as another option for this purpose.

Settings and Progression

As with the Randomizer, we also allow players to import/export all the game Settings and all the Progression data – as well as resetting each to the game defaults.

Looking for the future

efore anything else, both me and Lazy decided to migrate the game away from the Godot engine. Why? Because a project of 25MB on the original files became a dump-truck of 250MB when exported to playable builds. It’s the “Western Game Dev Has Been Here” meme in an awful way, with some more insults to the injury:

• our 25MB of assets became 171MB when exported
• the assets were already on the most optimal settings recommended by the engine
• Godot’s executable alone is 60MB on Linux (90MB on Windows)
• the recommendation to reduce the executable size on the manual is to … RECOMPILE THE ENGINE!

We have not yet decided which engine to use next, but Ct.js and Defold are great options that we intend to test. One thing is certain: proprietary engines (like GameMaker or RPG Maker), non trust-worthy engines (like Unity) and the factory of Triple Slop (Unreal) are completely out of question for this project.

Update 2026: Both Defold and Ct.js did not meet our requirements in features and editor usage.
At this moment the only reasonable alternative (Fyrox) is so more complex that instead I optimized the game a lot and recompiled Godot, instead of switching engines.

Looking for future content, we intend to add more 4 levels and a special secret in future updates, but before that we gotta finish the Bar level that is incomplete! From internal character lists we created there are 16 more unique Waifus to come, background characters, as well as a lot more items and easter-eggs. We want each level to be very packed with things to find!

Our compromise is that the game will always remain open-source with downloads available for free in our repository for every major version - to serve as a didactic tool and give free access to those who have no money to spare. But on game stores it will have a price, a low price (following the standards of this genre) for the comfort of having Hidden Waifus available on your favorite game-store and integrations provided by it that make sense in this game.

Then … lets us find Waifus!

You can find Hidden Waifus at our Codeberg repository, with versions both for Linux and Windows:

https://codeberg.org/lilylinck/Hidden-Waifus

As said before, the game will always remain free on the repository, to make it a helpful tool for the community. And it's also the best anti-piracy measure, because there’s no point in pirating something free, right? :P

I invite you to check out the game and say freely what you think about it, all feedback is very welcome! So happy new year for everyone and have a good time with our cute Waifus!