We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lida Xu. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lida below.

Lida, appreciate you joining us today. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?

Petting Lover started less like a business plan and more like a question I couldn’t stop thinking about: what would it look like to make a romance game that centered women’s desires, softness, curiosity, and emotional autonomy without treating them as an afterthought?

My background is in visual storytelling and animation, so my first instinct was to design characters and scenes. But very quickly, I realized that making a game is different from making a single illustration or short film. A game has to function. It needs a pipeline, a structure, a playable build, a store page, a community, and a reason for people to come back.

The first real step was choosing a scope I could actually execute as an independent creator. I built Petting Lover in Ren’Py because it allowed me to combine writing, character art, GUI design, and interactive systems in a way that fit the project. I started with a demo, then kept expanding it piece by piece: the prologue, character routes, sprite animation, blinking and talking effects, item interactions, mini-games, a CG gallery, and bilingual support in English and Simplified Chinese.

After that, execution became less romantic and much more practical. I had to learn how to prepare a Steam page, publish and update a demo on itch.io, write development logs, test different ways of presenting the game, and communicate with players across different communities. I joined OtomeJam 2025, submitted the game to Steam events, shared updates on Reddit and Chinese social platforms, and slowly learned that building a game also means building trust with an audience.

The biggest shift was realizing that I was no longer just “making art.” I was making decisions as a founder. I had to think about production timelines, marketing, contracts, voice acting, localization, budgeting, and how to protect the long-term identity of the IP. That was also why I founded SpicyTea LLC. I wanted a studio identity that could hold the values behind the work, especially stories made with women as the core audience rather than as a secondary market.

The Kickstarter campaign was the point where the idea became publicly tested. It was no longer just me believing in the project in private. Other people saw the game, understood what I was trying to build, and chose to support it. Having Petting Lover successfully funded was a huge milestone, but it also felt like the beginning of a new stage rather than the finish line.

For me, going from idea to execution meant learning that creativity is only one part of the process. Vision matters, but systems are what allow a vision to survive. Petting Lover became real because I kept turning vague ideas into playable scenes, playable scenes into public demos, public demos into community feedback, and community feedback into a campaign that people could actually support.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I’m Lida Xu, the founder and creative director of SpicyTea LLC, an independent game studio focused on women-centered interactive storytelling.

My background is in visual storytelling and animation. I earned my MFA in Animation from the Savannah College of Art and Design, where I built a strong foundation in character-driven storytelling, visual communication, emotional pacing, and how images and movement can shape the way an audience feels. That training still shapes everything I make. I don’t see games as just software, and I don’t see art as just decoration. For me, a game is a space where story, visual design, player choice, and emotional rhythm all have to work together.

SpicyTea was created as a home for original IPs that center women as the core audience. I’m especially interested in stories that treat softness, desire, curiosity, humor, and autonomy as serious creative subjects. A lot of entertainment still treats female audiences as secondary or niche, even when women are deeply engaged players, readers, fans, and community builders. I wanted to build work that starts from that audience instead of adding them later as an afterthought.

My current flagship project is Petting Lover, a cozy kemonomimi otome visual novel set in a campus world where humans and animal-eared characters coexist. The game is about romance, emotional connection, and learning to understand characters who are both familiar and a little fantastical. It combines character-driven storytelling with interactive features such as item interactions, mini-games, animated sprites, a CG gallery, and bilingual support in English and Simplified Chinese. It is built in Ren’Py and has been released publicly through demos, community updates, Steam, itch.io, and most recently, a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign.

What sets my work apart is the combination of visual storytelling and production execution. I come from an art and animation background, so I care deeply about character design, mood, pacing, and emotional atmosphere. But building Petting Lover also forced me to think like a founder: production schedules, marketing, crowdfunding, contracts, localization, community feedback, and long-term IP strategy. I’ve learned that a creative vision only becomes real when it can survive contact with deadlines, players, budgets, and the market.

I’m proud that Petting Lover has grown from a personal idea into something people outside of my own circle chose to support. Seeing players respond to the characters, wishlist the game, play the demo, and back the Kickstarter campaign made the project feel real in a completely different way. I’m also proud of the larger creative path that brought me here. My animation work has been selected by four international film festivals, and Petting Lover recently became my first successfully funded Kickstarter campaign. Those milestones matter to me because they show two sides of the same journey: the artist learning how to move an audience, and the founder learning how to bring a creative project into the world.

The main thing I want readers to know is that SpicyTea is not just about making one game. It is about building a creative brand around women-centered stories, emotional interactivity, and original IPs that can grow over time. Petting Lover is the first major step, but the larger mission is to create stories that feel intimate, playful, strange, and emotionally specific. The kind of stories that make players feel like they were made with them in mind from the beginning.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

For me, funding the business started with personal discipline before it became a public campaign.

Before Petting Lover had outside support, I funded the early stage with my own savings. That meant being very intentional about how I used money. I had taken finance-related classes in school, including financial analysis, so I already had a basic understanding of budgeting, risk, and long-term planning. I also built personal habits around saving, avoiding emotional spending, and putting money into relatively low-risk index funds instead of spending impulsively. I knew that if I wanted to build my own creative business, I needed to treat my personal finances as part of the foundation.

The earliest capital for SpicyTea and Petting Lover was not glamorous. It went into practical things: software, production tools, business setup, art assets, voice acting preparation, marketing materials, Steam setup, and the time needed to build a playable demo. Because I was still working at an independent scale, every expense had to be weighed carefully. I had to ask myself: does this make the game more real, more playable, or more likely to reach its audience?

The Kickstarter campaign became the next major step. I see it not only as funding, but also as a market passport. A successfully funded campaign tells me that the project is no longer just something I believe in privately. It means real players looked at the game, understood the concept, and chose to support it. That kind of validation matters because it gives the business both capital and credibility.

The campaign funding allows me to move from “proving the idea” toward building the game more professionally. It helps support production costs, voice acting, localization, marketing, and further development. But the mindset behind it is the same as the beginning: be careful with resources, spend where it strengthens the project, and make sure the money serves the long-term vision rather than short-term excitement.

How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.

In my case, the product is digital rather than physical, so my version of ecommerce is closer to selling through digital storefronts and game platforms. For Petting Lover, the most important platform is Steam, with itch.io also playing an important role for demos, community discovery, and early audience building.

I chose Steam because it is still one of the most important storefronts for PC games. If I want Petting Lover to reach paying players beyond my existing social media audience, Steam is almost necessary. It gives the game a public store page, wishlists, discovery tools, seasonal events, player reviews, and access to a much larger market than I could reach through my own website alone.

The advantage of using a platform like Steam is visibility and trust. Players already know how to browse, wishlist, buy, and play games there. For an independent developer, that existing infrastructure matters a lot. I don’t have to build my own payment system, download system, or customer-facing storefront from scratch. Steam also gives useful data, such as wishlist numbers, traffic sources, and performance during events, which helps me understand how players are discovering the game.

The tradeoff is that the platform has its own rules, approval process, algorithm, revenue share, and timing. Getting the game ready for Steam meant learning how to prepare store assets, pass review, adjust builds, fix issues, and present the game clearly within Steam’s format. I also had to start thinking backward from platform events and seasonal opportunities. Sometimes development milestones are not only about what I want to make next, but also about what timing makes sense for a festival, a demo update, a trailer, or a campaign.

This process forced me to learn much more about marketing and data analysis than I expected. I had to pay attention to Steam wishlists, itch.io analytics, Reddit rules, Chinese social media behavior, Kickstarter conversion, and how different communities respond to different kinds of posts. Each platform has its own culture. A post that works on one site may not work on another.

So the main benefit of selling through platforms is access. The main challenge is adaptation. Steam can help bring the game to players, but I also have to understand Steam’s ecosystem well enough to make that access meaningful. For an indie developer, the platform is not just a place to upload a product. It becomes part of the production strategy, marketing strategy, and business model.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lidaxu.com/petting-lover-press
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lida-xu-1680b1162/
• Other: Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3970480/