Looking Back and Forward: Strengths

This is the second 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!

Alright! Now, I have a lot of criticisms for myself and a lot of things I want to improve on, but before I get into that I figure it’s a good idea to discuss what I feel I did well in making MVOL, both to give a more well-rounded view and so you guys don’t think I’m being too hard on myself later on. I’m certainly proud of what I’ve accomplished so far, even if there are many, many ways that I might wish I had done better. Inversely, please don’t take this post as me bragging about my accomplishments, and certainly if you think I haven’t done so well as I describe, you should let me know, as well as if there is anything you admire about MVOL that I don’t cover here. I’m also trying to get a strong idea of what made up MVOL’s “appeal,” so I don’t lose sight of that too much in my future works.

Characters that Connect

Let’s start with what I consider one of my most significant strengths in MVOL: it seems to me that I have done a good job of creating and portraying characters that “feel” real and create a real, emotional connection with the reader. This is one of the most consistent themes in praise I hear from people, both new players discovering the game and seasoned players summarizing why they keep playing. And that’s great news to me– I’ve long said that the single highest priority of My Very Own Lith is, directly, to get to know Lith. Everything else revolves around this, and when I describe the game, “Lith Simulator” is my favorite term for it. And Lith has long been one of my most fleshed out characters, the center of many of my works, so it stands to reason he’d shine in such a close-up role, I think.

I also think this may be the main thing that really distinguishes MVOL from other games out there: it makes you care, and it makes you feel. It has a character that sticks with you and makes you want to come back and interact with him or her again. Often, there’s very little of that in erotic games, and that’s a tragedy. I know that this is a feature I want to try and work in whenever I can with future projects, even if the main focus of the design shifts elsewhere. I want to create characters that “feel real” and that you can connect with, whether you spend the whole game with them or only a scene or two. I think I can make it happen, and I think I can do a lot better than I’ve done with Lith, but I suppose we’ll have to see if I can follow through on that.

Story

Similar but distinct, story-building is an important part of building a game, especially in text. I think I did a pretty good job slowly enfolding the player in a story without thrusting too much on them in the beginning, letting them become invested bit by bit and turning it into something more interesting the deeper they delved. Storytelling has arguably been one of my greatest passions since… basically the moment I learned to talk, from what I’m told. I feel like even though MVOL started in a strange way, in which I hadn’t intended very much “story” to actually happen, it’s come together in something enjoyable.

One of the big challenges there was actually the ending, which I’m still struggling with as I write this. One of the Final Endings is out there, and folks seem to like it, which is a huge relief to me. I’ve been pretty nervous about the endings, and it’s one element of story-telling I’ve come to realize I don’t have as much experience with. I still feel like I’m learning a lot as I go, and I hope to improve on this a good deal with the experiences I’ve had with MVOL.

Sexual Prose

Another compliment I get on the game fairly often is that the sex scenes are stimulating. Which is good! I’ve tried a ton of different porn games and I’m still finding more all the time, and one thing I’ve found is that while some games can have strong sexual themes and be blatantly pornographic, they tend to be made in a way that doesn’t really… satisfy, so much as maybe just get you in the mood. I think that’s one area where story can be better than art on its own, and I want to make sure I keep following through on that. As long as I’m making sexual games, I want them to stimulate you in many different ways, and thoroughly. That said, it’s true I’ve felt fatigued at times writing about sex over and over, especially when it’s so often about the same characters in similar situations. I’m sincerely looking forward to moving on to new, interesting and varied subjects and topics, and moving a little of the workload away from “time to write another ten pages of sex!” being 90% of my job. I have a lot of ideas there, but I’ll get into that later.

Attention to Detail

I’ve long believed that one of the big strengths in Indie games vs. the big, corporate titles is the focus that a small team or a single creator brings to the project. With too many people handling different portions of something as complex as a game, it’s easy to have a lot of different ideas mixing together and confusing things, making things feel “generic.” But when you have one person with one goal creating as much of the experience as possible, you get a much more focused experience, more consistent and intentional in every feature.

But more than that, I tend to be an extremely detail-oriented person. Some people tend to focus more on “the big picture,” but to me, the big picture only exists because a thousand details came together to make it happen. I put a lot of effort into getting the details right to make this game a quality experience that rewards closer inspection and sticks with you. Every time I work with an artist, I annoy the hell out of them with just how much the details matter to me. I think that this care comes through in my game, and improves the experience in a subtle but very important way. If anything, I might try to convince myself to relax a little on this aspect in the future, but I know for a fact that any project I have total control over will inevitably have a strong emphasis on all the details feeding into the whole.

“Smooth” Variants

I’ve told the story a few times, with pride, that when I described the details of how I was writing MVOL to an experienced text game dev, he said something along the lines of “that’s completely impractical and will never work in the long run.” And that was after I’d already been writing out the game for several years. It’s always bugged me how many games try to accommodate your personal details, your decisions and your character attributes, by just plugging in generic words that it randomly pulls from when needed. It breaks the flow of the writing and can be flat wrong on many occasions.

As a writer, I couldn’t stand to take such an approach. I have my pride in my work, and rather than take such a shortcut, I write out every variant in full. Not just for whether or not your character has a dick, but for every passing mention of the details of your character. I try to keep things consistent to your past decisions and the unique “personalities” that your characters have developed over the course of the game. It’s not always perfect, but I think it feels much more rewarding and engaging to the player when it really feels like this is “your scene” rather than just “the scene you’re in.” I’ll be experimenting with other ways to handle this in the future, but I’ll always make it a point to keep the quality of the writing high even when things are switching out a lot to account for your particular playthrough. I have a lot of ideas there I’m looking forward to trying out in future games.

Quality Over Quantity

You could say this is the optimistic way of admitting that I’ve been slow. This hasn’t been an accident or for lack of trying, though– I’ve held my work in MVOL to a high standard, and if I can’t write anything good enough to meet that standard, then I don’t write. I’ve struggled with myself a lot over the course of this game’s development trying to push myself to consistently write the story that “needs” to be written and not slack off on a single scene, and I think it’s paid off in the long term, though I know it can be frustrating when two months pass and there’s only so much new content to read. This is my trade-off in writing MVOL.

But this is something that I’m hoping to adjust somewhat in the future. I still want to deliver good writing, but I feel like with MVOL, I was already “locked in” maintaining a certain level of expectations of myself that slowed things down to a crawl. I’ll talk about all this more later, but for now I’ll say that I think there’s got to be a better way, where if I relax a little more, I may be able to give people a good deal more writing (and general productivity) that they’ll still enjoy greatly. I hope this will mean a net gain of enjoyment! But we’ll have to see where I can strike a good balance.

Twists, Mystery and Discovery

This isn’t something I’d necessarily intended to be part of MVOL, especially when I first started writing it, but I’ve noticed over the years that one of the strongest pieces of feedback I tend to get is from people astonished by the strange places the game goes, and the way it twists around on your expectations and delivers things you hadn’t even considered. I’ve been a big believer in maintaining the enjoyment of “discovering” new content, but somewhere along the way, that became a very important part of the experience as a whole. There are many, many sections of the game that you could call “secret” and that are not remotely obvious will exist when you first open the game. The more you engage with the game, the more mysteries arise, and the more visceral the experience becomes when you finally stumble across some new, strange section of the game.

I say this wasn’t intentional, because I don’t see it as a deliberate design choice so much as a feature of life. Part of the design of this game means that you can’t really “close off” certain things that other games might shy away from, and I feel like doing so here would be dishonest. So I go all the way in creating the full experience that I think you’d have in this situation, even if things go very strangely and different from before, or even get very uncomfortable. That’s an important part of having a rich, varied experience where it feels like your decisions really matter. Life is full of strange moments, surprises, and uncertainty, and this all becomes a necessary part of joining “real” characters on their emotional journeys. I’m glad that it’s worked out like this, and I hope that some measure of that will persist into my other works, though right now I’m guessing it will at least be somewhat less so as I transition into games that are a little more tailored to actually be played as games. Again, something I intend to explain further down the road.

I think that this just about covers the important elements of why MVOL succeeded as a project that captured people’s attention, and their hearts. If you can think of any part of MVOL that charmed you, kept bringing you back to the game, or just stood out, then I’d be happy to hear about it, whether you want to comment below, email me, or leave your thoughts on the feedback channel on MVOL’s Discord. I think this section may be one of the shortest out of this series, just because one’s successes tend to require the least “processing.” It feels great that I’ve accomplished these things, but it’s the subjects to follow that will demand a lot more exploration into how they happened, why they’re a problem, and what steps I should take to do better in the future.

Still, it’s good to take a moment to pat yourself on the back. And to all my supporters, and all my players, I hope you do the same. I couldn’t have done this without all of you supporting me, whether by keeping me fed and sheltered or just with a kind word here and there. Thank you all so much for bringing me here. I hope that by the end of this series, you’ll have plenty of reason to want to stick with me through the strange new ventures to come.

Click here to continue to the discussion of what lessons I learned from making MVOL!