This is the fourth 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!
Before I get started, I’d like to apologize. Part of the delay on this series was just that I got really low on time to work on writing all this and figuring things out between how intensive the last few updates have been and some stuff coming up in my personal life, but part of it was that, to be honest, this entire transitional period is giving me a lot of anxiety. I want to do the best I can, and I believe I can make some great things, but it’s hard not to worry about it falling apart, or people not liking my future work as much. But the point of this series is to thoroughly present what I believe would be the ideal and then ask for opinions from all of you before I figure out what I’ll actually be doing in the end. If I have to find a compromise, I will. But for now, I’m just making my case, and putting the doubts aside for later. Now, back to the explanation…
At this point, I’ve gone over the big lessons I’ve learned from MVOL, both from my successes and my failures. I’m hoping this gives you a pretty strong sense of context and helps you understand the mindset behind the changes I want to make from here, but I haven’t actually been very specific about what changes I want to make in how I make games from here. For this post, I’d like to get into the details of what ways, specifically, I want to push myself to improve in making adult games, and what I want to experiment with in the “small prototype” plan I mentioned before. This should give you a better idea of what, specifically, is coming– or rather, what’s being added to what I already do, in one project or another. Take a look, and if you have feedback, I’m always happy to hear about it.
More graphically oriented gameplay
Half of the lessons I took from MVOL involve it basically not being immediately appealing to the casual player, often because of its appearance. Such a text-heavy game with no graphics can be an immediate turn-off to a lot of people. This sounds petty, but these days especially, it’s a mark of quality and that you’re putting a lot of effort and money into a project that it’s visually appealing and has an all-around rich presentation, and a big part of that is being able to visually identify the gameplay from a quick poke through, or from screenshots. In several respects, MVOL’s appearance just doesn’t catch the eye, and the gameplay looks very slow and uninteresting from the outside.
This is always going to be a struggle for me, since I’m a writer first and foremost, but I’ve often felt there’s a lot of untapped potential in the space where art and writing intersects that we just don’t take advantage of. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get a strong enough artistic presence going in my work, but I definitely want to push that side of the design as a more integral part of the game. Now, this could be implemented in several ways. Sometimes, simple additions like an overmap or a strong UI presence for things like skills can add a good amount to at least break up the art. A classic approach is the “Visual Novel,” where you’ll have background art and character art featured front and center with text running along the bottom. I’m not sure if I’m ever going to go for that exactly, but I do think there’s a lot to be learned from the success of that form, and a lot of “riffs” I can make on it to create something more specific to my needs.
But beyond that, I have a lot of ideas for games that push into the territory I’d call “actual games” with things like moving characters around a map. That can add a ton of new design and programming challenges and require buttloads of art assets just to make things look half decent, which means spending a lot on art that isn’t directly pornographic or anything like that, but it can definitely create a more engaging and welcoming experience for the new player, and it can do a lot to help with immersion both in the sense of having a “feel” for the world and in the sense of feeling like you’re actually taking part in this story. I’m pretty nervous about going in deep on something like this, and I have an aversion for falling into the trap of being “another RPG maker game,” but I have some ideas for making text and more “action-oriented” graphical gameplay work together that I think could be really interesting to test and refine, if I can get the resources to make it happen.
There are a lot of ways I can and should incorporate graphics more thoroughly into my projects, and I’m hoping I can find a sustainable way to make that work. Art has always been expensive and intensely stressful for me to get done, so I’m really hoping I can find a better solution in the days to come. Different gameplay is one of the big ones, but there’s a lot to say there besides just on the art.
Alternative forms of gameplay
I’ve mentioned how MVOL’s gameplay was kind of… not there. A big part of that was because it very much wasn’t designed as a game in the classical sense so much as a “simulation,” and I want to make more “game-like” games from here, experiences that actually have the player experience more at the forefront of the design from the start. But there are still a lot of different ways to approach the design of gameplay, and I believe there’s a lot of room for powerful, “top-down” design that’s not being explored. In case that’s unclear, let me explain: “bottom-up” design means you start with the basics of what kind of game you want– say you want to make a game with tetris-style gameplay and some story elements on top of that. You come up with a story that will give you an excuse to do lots of tetris-like stuff in the way you want. But with top-down design, you come up with the story concept, the final experience you want to leave people with, and you figure out from there what the nitty-gritty of the gameplay mechanics will be to support that and make it happen.
I want to make games that are more “game-like,” but I don’t want them to feel like they’re “just games.” I want it to have soul, be unique, and accomplish something to push forward the idea of what a game can, and even should, be. I know that all sounds very lofty and smug of me, but that’s honestly not my intention. I love games, and it frustrates me that I can see all these things that “should” be happening, but don’t seem to be out there, that I’ve found. So I want to make it happen. I want to create a feel or an idea and craft a game around making that feeling happen. I want to make games that force you to break the bad habits other games have trained you to have, to follow their lazy design choices, and show that there can be something better.
In short, I have a lot of weird experiments I want to conduct on how gameplay works. MVOL was all about making you feel like this was a person, and not just a game, and that’s gonna be a strong, recurring theme. Sex is meaningless without a sense of emotional context, and I want you to be able to connect with these people and feel like they’re “really there.” But there are a lot of ways to accomplish that, centered around a lot of different purposes and goals, and I want to explore that, too. These future games will be less intensely involving with a single character than My Very Own Lith has been, but I want to see if I can still make that “magic” happen, but in small, compact doses.
Less Text
And a big part of that compaction is going to be reducing the sheer word count involved. I obviously tend to write some pretty big walls of narrative when I get into it, but I could argue that that’s a bad habit. If you can get the same understanding and emotional impact across in one page rather than two, then that’s a better experience– a more powerful one, and a more accessible one. So while I’m pushing to increase the graphical presence in the game, I also want to ease back on the overwhelming volume of writing and make it more concise all around. This can be harder, certainly– the popular axiom is “I would have written you a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” I’m going to try and go a little easier on myself in general, but the one way I want to push myself a little harder on my writing is to try and get more compact without losing effectiveness. At this point, the word count in MVOL is kinda mind-boggling, and while I’m happy so many people enjoy going through the whole thing, it’s certainly an intimidating thing to really look at when you step back.
Text Presentation
A big part of that intimidation, though –and through it, the poor initial impression– is just the walls of text all at once. One of the big lessons I took from VNs is that breaking your text down into smaller chunks makes it a lot more appealing to read. This can be annoying if you really want a long read, and I’ll be experimenting with different ways to approach this, but I want to see what I can do to create a strong narrative with fewer words in general, and in smaller chunks at a time, so the player never feels too overwhelmed. Whether I can still have the same impact and create the same sense of emotional connection in a format like this remains to be seen, but given how popular visual novels have been as almost pure-story experiences, I’m inclined to think I have good odds.
Character Flexibility
Now, one thing that might get easier with changes like these is, it could become a little less of a headache to include more variety and customization in characters. I definitely don’t expect to reach the levels of some of the other big text-based games out there, but I’ve gotten tons of requests over the years for ways to make your own character or Lith different in various ways, to make it a more personally rewarding experience for the player, and I can appreciate that. I believe in the strength of details, and if the details of what the characters are like detract from the experience, I want to look into fixing that. Getting that detail in there can feel very rewarding, and going too vague all the time tends to feel pretty bland.
I do have a lot of ideas there, as well, for how to work around the conflicts between customization and writing full prose. Some of it will take advantage of the formatting, but a lot of it is just a series of ideas for compromises and “special circumstances” that let the game stretch some ways and ask the player to stretch in others that I think could be really interesting and rewarding. It’s an interesting design problem, and that means it invites a lot of creative potential solutions.
More fetishes
In a very similar vein, I’m looking forward to writing a larger variety of sexual content. MVOL is pretty vanilla overall, but I have an almost alarmingly wide variety of interests in strange sexual content, and I’d be pretty happy to add more of those into my games. A lot of them don’t feel like a good fit for Lith and MVOL, but some of these concepts will work great with them, and many were built specifically to try a new way to make certain fetishes and sexual desires “work” with gameplay. I’m excited to start building and see how these work, though I’ll admit I’m nervous to put “niche” stuff out there, when my current game is pretty niche as it is.
One of the big challenges I didn’t have to work with too much here was segmenting out content so that people didn’t have to be exposed too much to stuff they really don’t like, and the more you get into fetishes, the more that becomes a problem. I’ve had a good number of ideas there as well, but I’m kinda expecting that to be a big, recurring headache. In some cases, I’ve worked over the design and I feel like trying to make it so people that don’t want this can still enjoy the game would cut out a lot of the game’s “point,” so it might be better to just accept that this game is “only for some people” and push all the way with that element. That tends to create a much higher quality experience that’s much more satisfying and takes a lot less time and work than making something that’s kinda mediocre or “held back” for everyone to play, but I also don’t like the idea of some of my projects being blatantly exclusionary to a big chunk of my playerbase. Going into this, I said I wanted to make my games appeal to as many people as possible, but it’s also true that trying to appeal to “literally everyone” only makes content bland and “inoffensive.” I often really enjoy making content that brings people to discover they can enjoy something they didn’t think they’d like in the first place– I love giving people that sense of discovery, and “broadening their horizons.” But for some of these themes, I am pretty convinced that just won’t be possible, and that makes me nervous.
I’d love to hear from you guys what you think I should do for this dilemma. I do intend to start rolling out a lot of polls and votes to see how my supporters and my general playerbase feel about the things I want to get into, so that should help ground me some and give me a better idea of what things I should maybe hold back on, but I want to make sure I can put my passion into these projects, and make the things I want to see in the world. So is it better to go “all the way” on weird things and make a strong game for a narrower slice of the audience, or push for a game that’s “accessible” and make sure people can still enjoy all the other parts of the game I’ve put so much work into without certain elements stopping them up short?
Smaller, experimental projects
Either way, I’m definitely feeling like this process experimenting with smaller projects would be a big help. This will let me dip into several things I want to try without “spoiling” other things that wouldn’t work well together, and it’ll help me get a better idea of what kinds of projects I should be working on in the long term, and what ideas it’d be better to let lie. I’m still working over how exactly I can balance this so that everyone feels like they’re supporting something they actually enjoy, and I’ll admit that that may be the weakest part of this plan I’m proposing: anyone that’s “only here for” some particular element may get frustrated with this setup.
What I’m betting on here is two things: that I can do a good enough job even on subjects and content people don’t usually enjoy that they’ll at least like a healthy portion of what I’m making, and that if I’m working on a healthy variety of subjects that I can really get passionate and excited about, my total productivity will be up enough to make up for it. Being stuck doing one thing over and over slows down the process a lot, but having the right measure of freedom and restrictions can really let the creative energy flourish. If you want to be part of that with me, I’m hoping you’ll be willing to look past the weird bits that come out along with the good.
These are the main details I’m trying to keep in mind as I develop concepts for new projects, to try and stay closer to the strengths and lessons I’ve described. The projects I have in mind are still pretty wildly different from each other, but this should give you a strong idea of some of the specifics that will be coming up in a lot of them, so you can get a better feel of what to expect from me in the months to come if we go forward with this plan.
There are a couple other important factors in how I want to design games from here on that I haven’t really expanded on just yet, though, so I’ll be posting again to explain those before I make a big final conclusion post and ask for everyone’s feedback. I actually have the next post almost finished already, so keep an eye out for it in a few days! Thanks for reading, and for your patience!
Honestly if art is gonna be a much bigger factor in future games (and not just one shot pics as player rewards but like… sprites and background and all that) it might be worth considering getting an in house artist to work on the project with you instead of trying to triple or quadruple the commissions you get for the game. I know you already have issues getting art for MVOL done in time so drastically increasing how many commissions you get might make that a lot worse.
something like Fenoxo have adjata no?
something cool to have in MVOL would be i dont know maybe voice? i mean like a narrator mostly and some music not just the piano sounds when you push buttons atleast from now tryng to be less boring some games like Fenoxo’s TITS does not have any sound and that makes the game a bit boring to play so MVOL would have a huge advantage on that im not meaning about a whole music set just something like magic sound… wind wather drips umm lightning some relaxing tunes and even y’know…moans and stuff