Over the past several months I’ve been writing a series of posts explaining my thoughts about how MVOL has turned out and all my hopes and plans for the future. Today I’m going to try and sum up the very heart of what I’ve been trying to say with all that, and then I’m going to link a survey I’d like as many of my fans to respond to as possible. If you haven’t read the posts before this, I absolutely encourage you to check it out from the start so you can get all the details, but for those that can’t put in that much time reading, hopefully the wrap-up here will give you the gist of it, along with a few extra notes.
I feel that My Very Own Lith was a big success in several aspects: strength of character, quality of writing, engaging story, and attention to detail to smoothly integrate the player’s choices into the game– these are all things I’ve had lots of positive feedback on. I’m very proud of what I’ve accomplished with MVOL, but I also think there were a lot of things I could have done better. It’s rather narrow in its target audience, and it’s inhospitable to new players in a lot of ways, probably turning many folks away before they get to the real meat of the game. It took forever to make, updated slowly, and proved very draining toward the end with how I’d set myself up.
If I’m going to commit to making more games from here, I think it’s important that I learn both from what worked well and what didn’t, and make sure that I’m choosing projects that will perform better and that I’ll be more consistently engaged with. I need variety in the work I’m doing, I need to challenge myself, and I want to experiment with many ways to change how I make games and even how games are made in general.
That said, I don’t know that there’s any one project that could possibly do all of that right now. I have countless ideas for new games, I keep coming up with more all the time, and it’s hard to say without testing out the basic concepts which ones will hold up well as an actual product and which should be discarded or melded into another idea. I think I need to push myself to develop and diversify my skills as a game dev so I can make better games and be better prepared to choose projects in the future.
To that end, I want to enter a more experimental phase that’s less about endlessly producing content for one game and more about throwing a lot of different really rough ideas out there, partly to understand them better myself, and partly to see how players react to them. I’ve thought a lot about how to do this, and originally I proposed a system where I just cycle through development on different projects on each month, but the more I thought about it, the more I could see that this would be unfair to my supporters, and maybe be just a little too unpredictable besides.
My current idea for “the best path forward” is something of a hybrid: choose one project that I believe will be fairly popular with most players and work on that steadily half of the time for a period of six months to a year, while cycling through development on smaller, experimental projects on the side. This should make it easier to reliably put out one new release every month (another goal I picked up from fan requests) and it should give supporters something to look forward to regularly even if they might not be excited about the smaller project coming up this month.
And it’s true I’m worried about that: I want to experiment with a lot of different subjects, fetishes, themes, gameplay styles, and mechanics. I have a lot of different interests and theories I’ve been stifling all this time, and I’m excited to see if one of these concepts might strike a chord with some people where MVOL has been, in some senses, a little “safe and inoffensive.”
I’m still not sure how much I’ll actually be able to produce in a month on this new model. A big part of this is that I’m hoping having more diverse tasks with a lot of subjects I can get excited about will really help me get work done more reliably and increase my overall output to the maximum, where MVOL had left me struggling to get into just the right headspace toward the end to really give the game the ending it deserved. So this uncertainty, together with the unpredictable nature of what content I’ll be putting out, means that I’ll be testing your faith in me as a creator. I’ll be throwing the dice on a lot of things here, and I can’t guarantee it’ll all work out well. I don’t like asking people to support me under such conditions, and the hardest part of all of this has been worrying that I’m leaning too heavily on the goodwill of the people that have enjoyed my work to ask for such an indulgence. I’ve been dealing with a lot of anxiety the last several months as this moment crept closer, to be honest.
But I think this is a gamble worth taking. I think that I need to take these steps and experiment with possibilities so that I can learn from the experience, whether it succeeds or fails. And I want to make sure I’m listening closely to all of you throughout the process, to know if and when I’m going too far with this. So this is the big moment where I ask all of you: are you willing to take this risk with me? Are you as excited as I am to make new, weird games and see what they’re like? Or would you rather I found something simpler and more reliable to work on, to stick to the sort of thing that made you enjoy MVOL?
EDIT: It turns out I have a lot of stuff I want to ask you guys, so I’ve split up the survey into several questionnaires, originally spread out over several weeks. If you’re just finding this now, feel free to pace yourself and answer one at a time! But if you feel like you understand everything I’ve been going over and you’re ready to make your voice heard, then please, vote below!
The surveys
1. My Very Own Lith Survey
2. Design Priorities Survey
3. Sexual Content Survey
4. Production & Patronage Survey
Thank you so much for joining me on this strange adventure. This is an incredibly important moment for me, and it’s only possible because you gave my game a chance, and found something in it that was worth your time. I’m waiting right now to hear what you think.
4 thoughts on “Looking Back and Forward: Conclusion”