Looking Back and Forward: Lessons

This is the third part in a series explaining my thoughts about MVOL and what I plan to do from here. If you haven’t already, please read the introduction first!

So I’ve discussed the things I think I did well with MVOL, most of which I’m hoping to carry forward into my future work as much as possible. But I also feel like working on MVOL has taught me a lot of important lessons about erotic games, and I really want to push in some new directions to “do a better job” in several metrics, including making the experience better for all of you guys, making this less stressful for me, making it more successful for me as a business, and getting more people to play my games. So let’s talk about flaws and mistakes, and how I want to do better next time.

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Breadth of Appeal

While MVOL has created a pretty strong reaction in the players that really dig into it, one of the big factors I noticed holding it back was that… a lot of people just aren’t interested in games that mainly consist of “sit down and read pages and pages of text.” For one reason or another, it’s not as immediately or directly appealing to people, and it asks a lot of patience from a new player poking around before they really get their reward. And I don’t begrudge people for not always giving MVOL the time it needs to charm you! This game definitely isn’t for everyone– but more importantly, it has immediate appeal to fewer people than might actually enjoy it once they know what’s really in there. In other words, the format and style of the game is less immediately appealing and stimulating than most games out there today, and that means I’ve probably lost thousands of people that might have loved the game, if they hadn’t given up after the first five minutes. This is a failure of design.

I’m a writer first and foremost, and I expect to pretty much always center my games around writing. But there are much better ways out there to present good writing to a player than huge, scrolling pages of it with nothing else. I want to experiment with gameplay styles that give the player a more complete experience, that present text in ways that don’t feel like you’re just reading a book, and that intrigue people with more than just “there’s probably a lot of written porn in here.” I’m a big consumer of games myself, and I’ve found I can be very discerning on a huge number of factors– and I’d be extremely skeptical of a game with a presentation like mine.

So I do want to make sure my future games are put together in a way that makes a better first impression, but also, I want it to be more engaging in general. My current format is dangerously close to “interactive book,” but I think there’s a lot of room for something that’s both engaging to all of you that love good writing, and to people that could use a break from pure text walls for a second here and there. I don’t intend to make my games “for everyone,” as that’s a one-way street into mediocrity, but I definitely feel like I can give my games a wider appeal by experimenting with more graphics, different methods of text delivery, and gameplay styles that promise a more interesting and stimulating experience right from the first glance.

Early Game Experience

Now, this is just a tiny step forward in the process of playing the game from the above point. If the above is “judging a book by its cover,” then this is “the first page,” or “the first chapter.” An absolutely essential part of any good book or game is that the first few moments you actually engage with the experience, it excites you and makes you want more. It should get you asking questions, emotionally involved in what’s going on and wanting to see what happens next. Some great pieces start with a very slow burn, but that’s generally best reserved for when you’re so well-known that people will engage with the full piece no matter how slow the start is, because they have faith in you as a creator. I’m still a relatively small name on the market, and I want to hook in every single person that tries my games.

With MVOL, I think it can be a very real problem that people will play for, say, between ten and sixty minutes, and decide that it’s just not that interesting. MVOL has a fairly slow start; there’s some charm to it, but things also start to slow down pretty quickly– especially if you’re not going for a straight Black Collar route. I think I probably lose a lot of people there, and they have no idea what the game is actually about. Of course, to some extent that’s by design since the later stuff is a bunch of crazy surprises and twists and turns, but it’s important to balance that, to give some good hints or maybe a small surprise for an appetizer, that sort of thing. MVOL’s slow start is a big weakness that I want to avoid with future titles. And this feeds right into…

Accessibility

The fact is, the first half of MVOL is pretty difficult. And where the second half is “difficult” in a very different way, usually because you’re very invested in what’s going on, the first half can be more the opposite– it’s hard to make any progress, and you can quickly lose investment in going any further. It becomes a race between “figuring it out” and your shrinking patience. Of course, there is a good reason for this: MVOL was not designed as a game. This is one of the most awkward features of this, well, game, but also one of its strengths. As I’ve mentioned, it’s a “Lith simulator,” and its first priority is to try and portray this character accurately. In some ways, I treat this game like it is Lith, and I ask others to do the same. And… trying to crack the ice with an introverted nerd that’s hiding an intensely conflicted series of desires can be hard. It can drag out, and it can make you lose hope that it’s ever going to work out. Some people might give up. In terms of meeting the primary goals of the game, this is a smashing success.

But… it’s kind of a failure as a game. If I want people to actually play and enjoy my work, I need to take these things into account and try to build an experience that is accessible first, even if it’s challenging, and meet the other goals after. Especially in an erotic game, you don’t want to brickwall your players or leave them frustrated and uncertain what to do. Arguably, these games should probably be easier than most games out there, though some measure of challenge can be important to help lend a sense of “importance” to your accomplishments. It’s a careful balance, and one that I completely ignored with MVOL. Actually, let’s talk more about that.

Gameplay

MVOL has virtually zero gameplay. It’s not linear (for the most part) and your decisions do matter (to an extent) but there’s very little that you can actually describe as a game in the classic sense. It’s part simulation, part story, part maze. I think it’s gonna be important for me to work in more “Actual Gameplay” in future games, so there’s something more for the players to engage with, something pushing it a little further away from just “page through the next chapter of content,” with maybe a few reasons to replay and try different options. One of the big reasons gaming is so popular, as a contrast to books or comics or movies, is that it is interactive and really lets you feel like you’re part of what’s going on. MVOL does that to some degree, in a story sense, but in some ways you really have very little control, and a lot of the immersion relies solely on making the player character kinda generic, nerdy, and relatable, and the whole thing being written in the second person. In other words… it’s immersive like a book.

Not only do I think that having more substantial gameplay would make future games more engaging and immersive, appeal to more people, and have more replayability, but I think it would just be more fun for me to work with. Designing gameplay has always been very interesting to me, and I think there are tons of ways to use it to better support the goals of the game that haven’t been explored very well so far. I’ll get into that toward the end of this series, though. For now, I strongly believe that mixing in more gameplay would be both more rewarding for the player, and more rewarding for me as the dev. For multiple reasons, including…

Variety of Work

Developing MVOL has been really weird for me. I keep saying that I’m a writer, but the truth is, there are a lot of things I’m interested in, and writing is kinda the one that’s worked well so far. But when the vast majority of the work the game needs done is writing, that does some weird things to me. My entire schedule becomes centered around writing as much as I can, which has led to some rather silly forms of “a packed schedule.” I’ve been doing this for years, and I’ve learned a lot about what helps me write better, or more consistently. I need a quiet place, with some music I’m familiar with, preferably headphones. I need to be comfortable, and a little something sweet can help. I keep hard candy at the ready as a business necessity. But there’s also getting myself “into the zone,” because it’s very easy for me to sort of… fall into a rut where I’m just not motivated or emotionally engaging with the work. The main cure, that I’ve found, is some really good anime. So… when the deadline is rearing up and I need to write absolutely as much as I can, as well as I can, as fast as I can… my days turn into a couple hours of relaxing and watching anime, then a couple hours of writing, pretty much all day, while telling everyone I’m too busy to do anything, because other stuff can distract me, frustrate me, make me fixate, and throw me off my writing. Very serious anime watching, as an important part of doing my job.

So yeah, it’s been weird. And I feel like if my work as a game dev was a little more diverse than “write and write and write some more,” this would give me a lot more options. If I don’t feel like writing for a week, there’d be other things that I could do that are equally important. Plus, I want to make sure that I have a larger variety of writing waiting to be done– writing about Lith, continuously, for years, has… worn on me. Writing similar sex scenes starts getting really hard, and sometimes I just kinda get sick of this cat, to be honest. I’ve aged more than ten years since I first made you up! Grow up already! That’s why writing these endings in particular has been pretty cathartic, to finally see a little resolution to some of these problems. But I’m definitely looking forward to writing about other things, to writing about a large variety of things, and to having work to do besides writing. And part of why “write forever” was so grating was…

Quality vs. Quantity

My philosophy with writing MVOL has been very specific: I only want you to see my best work. If that means I sit down and can’t do my best work, I don’t get anything done. Sometimes that can happen for days straight. This is a big part of why MVOL has gained new content very slowly: I keep trying to push myself to make every last part of it as good as I can, even if it takes much, much longer. And people seem to appreciate the final result! I’m pretty proud of how things have turned out in MVOL… but I’m not proud of how long it took me. I think it’s admirable to want to do your best, but especially over something as large as a video game, I believe it may be a good idea to be a little more practical. There’s definitely a spectrum, and I’ve pushed really far to one side of it, into what I’d say were diminishing returns.

There’s no such thing as perfection, but let’s say that I pushed myself with MVOL to only put maybe the top 2% of my work out there, or the top 5% when deadlines were creeping up and I had to hurry up and get things done. Well… if I aimed for publishing the top 10% of what I’m capable of, it would still be pretty good, right? And… there might be twice as much of it. Or more. But more than that, when I ease up on myself, I think the quantity of work produced could potentially increase exponentially, since part of the problem isn’t just when I go slow, but when I’m pushing so hard for quality that work just stops completely. With MVOL, that was one of my goals from the start, and it was a bar I set for myself, and it would reasonably develop an expectation from my players. I don’t feel like I could just drop my standards partway through, and I didn’t want to. But with new projects, I think I could go for a slightly more “casual” approach to my writing that lets me get a lot more done, with a lot less stress, and not necessarily a big drop in quality. I could be wrong, but I think it’s an experiment worth conducting. And even if some of the writing does turn out a little subpar, that’s just a good excuse for me to swallow my pride and… actually revise my work and write second drafts. I almost never do this, to tell the truth, though that’s partly because of my writing method. I might make an aside to explain more about that somewhere along the way. For now, the important thing is, I want to try taking a somewhat more “casual” approach to my writing in the future, in the hopes it’ll keep things rolling faster overall and get more of my work out there for you all to enjoy!

Release Schedule

Which, I think, is the only way I could possibly fulfill one of the big pieces of feedback I got from my recent survey on how I could improve the project: that I should release a new public build every month. Close behind that was the sentiment that I should just produce more content, faster, in general. Right now, my development rhythm usually works something like… Post the new public version! Spend two weeks trying to just get that all out of my head, relax, take care of the rest of my life, maybe get some auxiliary work obligations dealt with, and try to write about anything that has nothing to do with Lith. Then two weeks writing, trying to get as much content done as I can for the post-release Monthly Mini-Update. Then take a short break to deal with other stuff, then jump into writing the other half of the main content for the pre-release MMU. One week of writing all the extra bonus bits, like the voted in content from the Patreon for this release. Then I ship the advance release and send a copy to my proofers to get it all ironed out, and I take that week to decompress, take care of all the obligations that piled up in the last month I was primarily focused on writing(and for some reason, watching anime) before it all culminates in the big, stressful release day where I compile a million copies, write up all the explanations, upload everywhere, link everything, promote the release, and cross my fingers while sweating for two or three days straight, hoping no big bugs come up that mean I have to hurry and redo everything I just did while feeling like an idiot in front of the entire internet.

In other words, I spend about half the time writing as much as possible, and half of it going “phew! I am obligated to go do anything else with my time, or else I won’t be able to write again soon enough!” So this feeds a lot into the weird problems above that make me feel like I’m pushing just the writing, and the quality of the writing, too hard, probably– and that if I work on a game with a better blend of work involved and different sets of expectations, I’m hoping it’ll feel a little more realistic and less stressful shifting to a faster schedule.

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And that should give you a pretty well-rounded idea of where I feel I’ve made some questionable decisions with MVOL, and how I’m hoping to improve on that in the future! I spend a lot of time appraising myself and the things I do trying to find ways to improve, and I’ve tried to do what I could do to better with MVOL, but a lot of these feel more like the kind of thing that can only be adjusted properly going into a new project, with new parameters from the start. This is part of why I’m so excited for the big transition coming up, though I’m also worried that changing so many things at once means there’ll be a pretty big, difficult adjustment period, and that there’s a lot of potential for various parts to not work out so well, and make it hard to be sure what to fix where. I try to figure all this stuff out ahead of time as much as I can, but I hope you guys will have patience with me if things get a little weird as we start changing gears!

Aside: Where we are with MVOL

Also, to be clear: some of these issues I’ve described with MVOL are things that can still be fixed, or at least adjusted to maybe not be so bad. And I’m hoping to do so in future updates! This is actually a point that is a little unclear these days in terms of how game development usually “works,” so I’d like to provide a quick history lesson to give a better idea of what’s going to happen with MVOL from here.

Before companies bastardized the terms into “stop complaining that our product is buggy,” alpha and beta did have specific definitions. You probably shouldn’t quote me on this, but as I understand it: Alpha means the game’s basic features are still being built. It’s not even “a game” yet, it’s part of a game. Beta means the game is feature-complete, but needs to be adjusted and tuned for a better experience– this is a good time to get some test-players in to try it out and give feedback. Then you release the game as a complete, finished product that is fully ready to be played by the masses. This is the philosophy I’m taking with MVOL: we’ve been in Alpha this entire time, as I’m still writing the basic content of the game. Soon, the game will move into Beta, and I’ll focus more on adjusting the game to feel and play better, as far as I can while maintaining its primary goals. Once I’ve added all the last little bits and tuned it up, then we will finally hit v1.00. I hope you guys will be interested in seeing the final stages in the game’s development, because there’s still a lot to happen before our adventure with Lith is truly complete, even if you can now see the Final Endings!

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With that out of the way, I think all my thoughts on the broader scope of how MVOL could maybe have been done better are addressed. Next time, we’ll get into some of the finer details of how I would take these problems and intentions and actually turn them into new games. Time to talk specifics! I hope you guys look forward to it!

Click Here to continue to the discussion of the details I want to focus on in future designs!