Looking Back and Forward: Introduction

My Very Own Lith is finally nearing completion! While it still needs a good deal of content and several more endings added before it’s ready to move into beta, and I expect to still have a lot of work to do on the game after that before it’s a finished project I can be happy with, I do think now is a good time to start talking about the future beyond MVOL. This project has been a huge part of my life for a long time now, so it’s a little strange and intimidating to even think about what will happen when development is over, but it’s also pretty exciting.

I’ve put a lot of thought into what will come next, but I expect I still need to do a lot to refine the wild batch of rough ideas I’ve been cooking up. My first priority as a creator has always been to create something that is good, as I see it, so I hold my work to my own standards alone.

However, I’ve been lucky enough to find many people out there that also like this game I’ve made, and are even willing to help pay to put food on my table so I can focus all my attention on making it the best game it can be. With that in mind, I have a responsibility to all of you, my fans and especially my supporters, to explain what I plan to do, why I plan to do it, and to get feedback from you all on how I can go about it in a way that works well both for my goals and for all of your desires.

This is a very kind community that’s accumulated around MVOL, and I imagine some people will say things like “just do what you believe is right and we’ll back you up!” And I deeply appreciate that, believe me. But the fact is, I need to make sure that what I’m doing will appeal to you guys– at the very least, I need to set up my fundamental premises in a way that will work well to give everyone what they want, and what they’re willing to pay for. As well-meaning as you guys may be, I wouldn’t want you to feel obligated to support something that you weren’t very happy with anyway. I don’t want to be one of those creators that gets a big head and starts making bizarre, inaccessible “art pieces” because they think they can do no wrong.

So this is an important step in the process. I want to hear feedback from all of you! I encourage everyone to share their thoughts and discuss in the comments in this and the posts to come. I’m going to explain the situation in its entirety over several posts as it’s kinda complicated, and I tend to be pretty long-winded about these things I’m passionate about.

And once I’ve said my piece, I intend to put a survey to my patrons to see what they think, and how they would like to see me proceed from here, hopefully with the things I’m going to discuss here in mind. In the end, as it has always been, I will make the final decision myself. But I want to hear from you, even those that are too shy to speak up, or those that are just here for what they enjoy and don’t want to bother writing up comments about it. I want to make things that you will enjoy.

Posts to Come

So! That’s the preamble of what the heck this, and the series of posts that will follow, are all about, and why they’re happening. Now, let me try and give a quick summary of what I’ll be going over.

By this point, I can see many, many flaws in MVOL, but I also feel like I’ve succeeded in several respects. People seem to like it, after all, and at least some of the game has satisfied my expectations as well. For my first post after this one, I’ll take a retrospective on what I think I did well in making MVOL– my demonstrated strengths, so far, in creating a game. This is an important thing to assess and discuss, because if I lose sight of the things that make my game special, the things that draw people in, then I may “lose that magic,” and disappoint a lot of my fans. I want to keep going strong, and build on that by refining my strengths and shoring up my weaknesses.

For self-improvement, though, those weaknesses are absolutely essential to focus on and figure out. I’ve never been one to shy away from picking apart my failures, and I have a great deal of those to study in MVOL. For the post after I talk about my strengths, I intend to discuss in detail how I think I can improve in designing games in the future. This will actually be something of a mixture of flaws specific to MVOL and shortcomings in the general design choices and strategy I followed in making the game in the first place. I started MVOL knowing almost nothing about the industry, and while I’m still pretty ignorant, I feel like I’ve learned a lot, and I want to review how I can and should do better from here.

Now, I expect that to be a very general set of goals and problems, so for my next post, I want to get more specific. I want to pick apart the mechanical details of what I’ve done poorly and how I’d like to improve. This is where you may start getting a more solid idea of what kind of games I’m hoping to work on in the future, but a lot of this is still very much in the air. I’ll be paying a lot of attention to feedback here, both to see what ideas spark interest, and what other, specific problems people have had with MVOL, if they’re willing to share.

And after all that, I’m going to get into some of my larger goals, not just in making a game, but in being a part of the adult game industry. This will be less about MVOL’s (and my) failings and more about what the games across the board look like right now, how I want to contribute to that, and how MVOL fits into that. This should help you get a big picture of what exactly Lithier and his work is about in this expanding array of creators, so you can figure out how much my values on the larger scale align with yours.

Once I’ve explored all that, I’ll wrap things up in a final conclusion, try to summarize everything as best I can for easy reference, and put up that survey to let all of my supporters make their voices heard. I may open up a survey to the public as well, but right now, I’ve got so many ideas going every which-a-way, I think it’s pretty important to stay grounded in “but seriously, will people be willing to pay me to do this?” I don’t mean to slight all my fans that can’t afford to contribute to the project, but as long as I’m doing this for a living, I do have to maintain a measure of pragmatism.

After that, hopefully we’ll all have a much stronger idea of what this project’s future will be. I’m intending to work these posts in when I have the time and energy, possibly over the next few weeks, maybe over a few months. MVOL still has a lot of content coming out before it’s near completion, and I don’t want to give that, or these explanations, any less than the full attention they deserve.

What’s Next

For now, though, I will clarify one important point about my future plans, as it lends a lot of context to the things I’ll be talking about from here. This may sound a little weird, but I hope that it’ll start making more sense as I go through my reasoning in future posts.

You may have noticed that when I talked about my future games, I was using the plural. Right now, the main concept I’m working on is that after MVOL, I will actually start working on prototypes for multiple different games in succession. While MVOL has turned into a pretty huge game with a huge development time, it started out as a very small concept– originally, the collars were literally the “final goal” of the game. But people really liked Lith and the game, so I expanded from there, and it’s turned into… a heck of a lot more than that.

A small, compact, simple game is a powerful thing. If you can get everything you want done in a small game, finished in a reasonable amount of time, I think that’s a beautiful thing. And it’s important that a game is able to stand on its own even when you’re just dealing with its core, the absolute basics.

I’ve spent years expanding this one game ad infinitum, and in that time I’ve accumulated endless ideas for games that I think could be really fun, or stimulating, or important, or all three. I have over a dozen concepts written out and plenty more percolating all the time, and I’ll never be able to get to all of them. To be honest, many of them probably shouldn’t have a full game’s worth of work poured into them, as they’ll have flaws or problems that fundamentally hold them back. Some of these I can work out by going through all the details in my head, but some only become obvious once you’re actually trying to play the game.

What I’d like to do is start building prototypes for many different game concepts, starting as just barebones demos of the very core of the game. If I can, maybe I can even wrap up and complete some of them as very small, compact games that are still satisfying to play. I’d be really happy with that, but a lot of these are pretty sprawling ideas that could absolutely flourish if given proper resources.

I’m still not sure how exactly I would tackle these. My rough draft is something along the lines of…

• Every other month, start a new prototype and work on it for a month. Put out an “ugly demo” to just give a super rough idea of the game’s core.
• In between those, go back to previous projects and work on them for a month, expanding them and fleshing them out while trying to keep it concise and playable just on its own.
• Once I have a few projects going, I’ll start alternating between choosing for myself and letting my supporters choose what projects I work on– both for what concepts to turn into prototypes, and what prototypes to expand on.

In this way, I’m hoping to share as many ideas as possible, see how they work, and let those that appeal most strongly to the most people naturally float to the top, while those that just don’t work can be discarded. At least they get a chance, like this.

Now, I don’t know how practical this will actually be in execution, especially on that kind of schedule. I’ve notoriously been a bit on the slow side. I’ll talk more on how that factors in when I get into the problems I’ve run into with MVOL. But if I’m lucky and the project’s funding has expanded by then, I might be able to hire on some help with turning these concepts into actual games. I’m a little leery of forming a team after the issues I’ve run into in the past, but at least some contractors here and there with the skills and experience to fill in where I’m lacking could be a huge boost.

Right now, this concept is probably my “dream plan,” where I get to be really creative and put all sorts of cool new games in you guys’ hands all the time and tackle all sorts of different, interesting challenges. But right now I’m still not sure how practical it is, or how much people would be willing to support something like this, as opposed to having a single, clear project to support. This idea raises a lot of practical problems, and I’m still wrestling with a lot of those. I’ll be keeping an eye on the comments to see what you guys think of this, both in terms of general impression on the idea and on what problems and solutions we can think of– how we can improve on it to find something that will work for all of us. Hopefully the future posts will help some with explaining why this might be worth taking a shot at, as well, if you’re feeling uneasy about it now.

For now, I think I’ve already gone overlong with this post for just an introduction. I hope you guys will be keeping an eye out for my coming posts about the future of this game, and that you’ll join in when you feel comfortable discussing what we should do from here!

For now, My Very Own Lith still has a lot of important content waiting to be added, so please look forward to that as well! After a long stretch of just adding content with the occasional new feature, we’re entering a pretty turbulent period of transition, with MVOL’s crucial moments coming up, as well as critical moments in planting the seeds of what comes after. I hope you’re even a fraction as excited as I am for everything that’s on the horizon!

Click Here to continue to the discussion of what I feel went well in MVOL!