I tackled the bulk of the big surveys I rolled out in the last few months covering MVOL and how I should build my future projects in the last post, and today it’s time to go over the results for the last survey, then talk about some of the write-in feedback I’ve gotten! I’ve learned a lot of important things from these surveys and I’m really happy with how they’ve turned out overall. It’s been a ton of work, but I do want to do more of these in the future to make sure I’m staying in touch with you guys!
Let’s get started!
Survey 4: Production & Patronage
The other surveys were about the content, but this survey was all about how I should go about making games as a living, how I should interact with all of you, and how I should set up my support platform. Some of these feel like really weird questions to right out ask, and I’m still going to have to apply a lot of my own judgment in the end I think, but it definitely helps to have a good idea of what you guys expect and want.
Development plans
I started with asking how you’d feel about me working on lots of different, smaller projects to prototype ideas vs. a more traditional “one big game” kind of approach.
I described the “month-by-month” plan as switching to a different project each month, either starting a new one or expanding on one I’ve started, picking both on my own and with supporter votes. I was actually fairly surprised with how popular this was after I’d started second-guessing myself a lot, and supporters in particular seemed pretty willing to go with it! The lowest score on the first three graphs are all “I’m not gonna support that.” while this one’s highest was “I’m excited to see how it goes!” Only about 20% of the full sample and around 25% of supporters would go that far, but it was still a positive response from more than half of voters.
The one I was betting on was the “hybrid,” where I pick a “safe” long-term project I think most folks will like to work on steadily half the time, while also working on smaller prototypes and concepts half the time. The top score on this was “This sounds like the perfect balance to me.” and while only a consistent 25-30% of voters would go that far, it was very popular overall, with almost nobody actually voting against it! If anything, the pronounced response and the agreement between supporters and the general public both really stood out to me on this one.
The last of the three choices was the “almost normal” plan, where I basically focus on one main game much like I have this whole time with MVOL, but still occasionally push out some odd prototypes on the side. The highest score on this was “This is the one I’d be most comfortable supporting,” which also came in around 25-30% from the public, but I was pretty shocked to see supporters only come in a little over 10% there! This was fascinating to me, as it showed a definite bend in the voters with supporters being slightly more supportive of the “max variety” plan and much less supportive of the most traditional one, even though it’s most similar to what they’ve been supporting so far! Still, going by sheer numbers of voters, this one definitely scored higher than the month-by-month– but not as highly as the hybrid.
The last one was related but a little tangential: the danger of a mixed roster of games I’m working on is that I may only interest you with some of my projects. The lowest score here was “I’d probably drop support for that month.” while the highest was “That’s fine, I want to support a big variety of ideas!” Almost 30% of the total went all the way on that, but supporters almost hit 40% by the end, which was pretty cool to see! It’s been a huge relief to see you guys are supportive of this crazy idea, but it looks like my supporters in particular want to see lots of variety!
Of course, I can’t ignore that all of these responses have a very strong middle vote, meaning lots of people weren’t ready to actually fully support these ideas, but weren’t quite ready to say no. And I can’t ignore the worries in my gut that I won’t be able to follow through on this. It’s going to be a lot of big challenges getting into rolling out new games and prototypes all the time, and I know that if I can’t make the new games interesting enough, or welcoming enough, or roll them out fast enough with all the backend work required, people’s attitudes will probably swing fairly quickly. These ideas will be testing me in a lot of ways, and maybe the biggest test will just be the pressure I put on myself for trying to “do my own thing” when I’ve already gotten pretty damn lucky getting to make a living off making porn games to begin with.
I deeply appreciate that you’ve all carried me to this point, and I don’t want to let you down. I want to make this work, but I’m probably going to keep being my harshest critic as well, and if this doesn’t work after all… then I guess I’ll be doing some more major re-evaluating in 6-12 months.
Anyway, there are still a lot of these to look over!
Communication
I’ve tended to be very cryptic in the past as a developer, and to an extent I felt that was necessary to “preserve the experience” with MVOL, but it’s something I want to work on as we transition to new projects. So for this section I asked how you guys want me to communicate!
I’ve always just dropped written journals/explanations, usually with the new releases, but I’ve had a few suggestions here and there to start doing a small podcast or even video journals, so I made a few questions just for that.
As it turns out, people are mildly positive toward the idea of audio or video journals (audio was almost the same, but actually rated 3.12 and 2.99), but regular text journals were the clear winner by a landslide. I think a 4.17 out of 5 is one of, if not THE strongest response this survey has seen. I wasn’t really opposed to the idea of doing voice or video, but I’ll admit these results were a bit of a relief.
After that, I asked about frequency of communication!
This one was a little silly, but I think the results pretty much speak for themselves. Of course, I noted that updating more often did mean they’d be much shorter, and maybe have more silly, random junk in them.
The “ideal” is to fall in the middle for this odd little format, and weekly was clearly the winner there, but twice a month was also very popular, and even once per release had a fairly positive reception. So I’d say the end result comes out to “every 1-2 weeks,” or in my case, probably something like “aim for weekly, but it’s okay if you forget sometimes.” This will be a big change of pace for me and take some getting used to, but I’ll do my best to keep you guys more in the loop as we transition into all the new stuff!
Rewards & Feedback
For the final big section, I had several different series of questions around certain themes. The first was:
Voting Power!
I asked you how you would like future voting to work, starting with what to vote on.
I was actually pretty surprised with the lack of enthusiasm I got on voting for what games I work on next! Both choosing concepts to turn into prototypes and choosing prototypes to develop into games scored well overall, but very few were actually truly excited about it, and these two scored lowest out of the four, albeit not by a large margin. I’d assumed this would be a big thing people would love to have control over, but between these and some of the write-in responses I’m once again finding myself embarrassed by your faith in me.
I’d originally planned to do something like alternate: one month I’d choose a game, next month you would choose, and so on. I wanted to maintain some control so I’d know I was working on things that interested me at the moment most of the time, but it seems like maybe you guys want to make sure I never feel too… “powerless” in choosing what I’m working on? Or maybe you guys just want to make sure I’m always putting as much work out there as I can, so don’t want me slowed down too much working on stuff that I’m not feeling at the moment. Looking at all this, I’m thinking maybe it’d be better to make voting for game concepts a more informal “sometimes” thing– something like when I just honestly can’t choose what to work on next, or want to see if you guys would bite on an idea I’m not very confident in. Almost nobody actually disliked the idea of voting for future games, so I do want to make sure I work some of that in to make sure you guys feel appreciated and like your voices are being heard! But the best balance may be a little more complicated than just “every other month.”
The most popular out of the lot did actually make sense to me: choosing out details for new characters. I know that “I like this character, but they should be X/have Y/like Z” is a very common piece of feedback, and sometimes all I can say is that that wouldn’t fit the character, as I built them around other features. Something like this would make it much easier for you guys to see more of the character archetypes you like in my work, and it’s much more practical for me to indulge that kind of thing when it’s early in the game’s development so I can work it into the character before I build them out and start writing a lot with them. It’s important to me that the details “make sense,” so even little changes can be messy after the fact. …Anyway, the point is, I think this should work if implemented right and it definitely looks popular! A little odd that supporters seemed slightly less passionate about it, but overall actually rated it higher than the public did!
…And they pretty much did the same with the option of voting for side features and quality of life stuff! This option wasn’t quite as popular for supporters nor for the public, but once again, supporters liked it more than average and were slightly less passionate about it. This is how I’d describe the voting feature I’ve had for a couple years with MVOL already, and I wasn’t sure if I should expect supporters to be tired of it at this point or to like it more since it’s familiar, but it looks like I got a little of both! This is also pretty doable, though there’s less room for “side content” early in development, so maybe this would turn more into “what basic features should I add in first?” at times.
And in the same block but on a different note, next I asked about who should be able to vote!
Of course, this was kind of a weird one. Logically it makes sense that, well, the majority votes for what gives the majority power, meaning the option that makes voting as cheap and accessible as possible, and that did win out here. I also might have predicted that that option would be less popular with supporters, as those that can afford to pay would prefer to not have their voices “drowned out,” and it certainly made a striking disparity here, maybe moreso than with any other question. Almost none of the supporters were excited for a low-tier poll system, and they scored more than half a point lower on average. That said, for both sides, this was the most popular of the three choices listed!
Along with these two I offered a “mid-tier power position” option, which made a graph very similar to the hybrid one above, but actually scored slightly lower from both sides. Hybrid was my idea for a “compromise” to both let the high-tier supporters feel like their voices were heard and to give everyone a chance to at least help shape things. It was much less popular with the public, but what surprised me was that it was also slightly less popular with current supporters. All three options did land on the positive side average, but in the end, supporters didn’t really come together on any one option, and the public, naturally, wants to be able to speak.
I’m not really sure how to move forward from these results. I’m surprised the hybrid didn’t get all that much support, but I guess a resounding “I’d be okay with that” is kinda how compromises work. At this point I’m thinking maybe the best answer would be to make voting either “low-tier but not bottom-tier,” or to go ahead with the hybrid and make the baseline vote a bottom-tier reward. I think that if I made it just bottom-tier, it might feel a little too much like your individual opinion doesn’t matter, which is a lot less rewarding– surveys with big sample sizes like the ones we’re doing here are great for getting the feel for the audience as a whole, but I doubt any of you feel like your voice in particular made a big difference today, even though it was each of you contributing that helped me get such valuable data. I’ll have to think on this one.
That’s it for that series! The next was:
Connecting and giving feedback
This section was focused on ways to connect with you guys that are a little more involved than just holding votes. It’s important to be getting feedback from my supporters, and to help you guys feel like you matter as a part of the project! Now, this is all aimed at higher level supporters pretty specifically, so I added a rather unusual option: “N/A. I couldn’t afford it either way.” So people didn’t feel like they needed to vote on stuff that they didn’t intend to get involved with anyway.
That said, I do have some regrets with how I formatted this series of questions otherwise: it was already weird to have another five-point after all these other ones, but with one option set to N/A. But on top of that, while I wanted it to function as a four-point scale with an extra option, I accidentally phrased the “slightly disagree” option to sound… moderate, or maybe even positive. I can see how others would read it that way now, but it does feel like it muddles these results some, to me. Ideally, the middle score would be a 2.5, with anything below that being negative, but now it looks like maybe that midpoint is at 2, or even lower, so it’s hard to gauge these responses as “positive” or “negative” so much as just weighed against each other.
I started off with asking about what kind of discussions or similar setups you guys would be interested in participating in.
I already expected that character details would be a popular choice in the vote and added an option for it here, so I was a little surprised to see it score… well. Middling? It’s hard to say it scored poorly, it’s true that very few people voted “Not Interested” compared to other options (and that category may have been inflated with people that just wouldn’t participate in any of this) but it also had a very low response on the max score. Instead, the strongest answer, especially from supporters, was the infernal “I might participate in that.” that I now regret writing so ambiguously. On top of that, I wonder now if maybe “names and details” was a little vague and people would have been more interested if I’d put “species and tastes” or something like that instead. Well. It scored slightly worse overall with patrons, but technically had the highest score from the voters in general out of this whole mucked-up section, so it’s hard to say I shouldn’t implement this idea.
The idea of a “sounding board” did have some more enthusiasm in the top end, especially with supporters, but it also had a stronger showing of people not interested… including supporters. Overall, it scored almost identically to “names and details,” but supporters were a deal more eager about this one. I guess that means fewer people will specifically want it, but those that do will be happier to be in on it?
And on the less constructive side I offered some more casual options, since I see a fair number of people wanting to just “befriend” me or get to know more about me, things like that. This scored comparably but very slightly lower than the others, notably with a spray of supporters on the hard yes and hard no side again. It’s hard to interpret much from these beyond… it would be popular with some people, at least?
And my informal offer at my top tier to “maybe game together” or something to that effect has turned more or less into a traditional weekly gathering of a treasured few friends and supporters, which has been pretty neat, and I put that on here to see how much others might be wanting to get in on it. The answer would appear to be… not a lot? It was outright rejected the most out of these four, and even the enthusiastic “Yes!” crowd in the supporters seems to be lacking, falling to around 12%. Well, I suppose it wouldn’t be very fun if I was struggling to find a way to game with a couple dozen people regularly anyway, so maybe it’s for the best I just keep this one to a few enthusiastic folks.
The next couple questions, like with the voting side, were awkward.
Again, it’s natural for the option open to more people to be popular with… well, more people. So I wasn’t surprised to see that the mid-tier option scored higher with the general public, though I was surprised to see the rock-bottom score on people actually being excited for the idea. Overall it scored poorly and worse with supporters…
…But the high-tier option scored even worse, with both. A tiny fraction of supporters were at least more enthusiastic about this one, but everyone else moved down the scale into not interested or couldn’t afford it. Even ignoring that last part, the slope is pretty damning, but… maybe that’s to be expected. If we could vote to give something to lots of people or just a few, we’d vote for more access every time, right? This was a weird survey on so many levels, but a lot of the questions I considered would run into similar problems. I’m not even sure what I could expect to see to indicate that yes, that would work better than the mid-tier. A strong spike from supporters and less support from them in mid-tier? Plenty of supporters are in low or mid tiers and can’t afford more anyway. In the end, this section feels like the least effective out of the whole series of surveys.
Well, there was one more bit to it that at least had the potential to be helpful.
Discord is pretty dang popular these days, but I know not everyone is on it, and some might be more comfortable just commenting on the Patreon or something like that, so I added these two options. Overall, the public was mildly supportive of the idea of a Discord channel, but supporters were a deal more enthusiastic… as well as being a little more enthusiastically opposed, it seems? Still, the average score for supporters was the highest in this whole section.
Running it through a Patreon post was also fairly well received by supporters, but both groups were less excited overall. It looks like either way, a quarter of my supporters aren’t interested in each option. Is that the same 25%? I tried fumbling with the data a little and found… a little over half the respondents not interested in Discord felt the same about Patreon, and the rest voted… similar to the graph. Mostly low. So there wasn’t some big divide between two groups so much as general disinterest, I guess. Overall it looks like Discord won, though maybe it’d also be a good idea to do a Patreon post occasionally for those that aren’t on there? Maybe if I come across a question that suits the format well. But then, if I do spread to other support platforms, that only gets more complicated…
Thankfully, that’s the end of that series of questions. Just one left!
Other rewards
I’ve held polls to gauge people’s interest in rewards before, and I feel like I’ve gotten a decent idea of what draws people in over the years finessing my current rewards, but I took some time to look around at other options and rewards other creators offer and tried throwing some new ideas out there that I haven’t tried yet. The numbers scale on this one is also just a little bit weird, as… there’s not really any reason for someone to vote against a reward as a bad idea. The worst you can say is that you’re completely uninterested in it. So that’s the 1 score, and the 5 is “That’d be great!” but… well, the 2 is “Wouldn’t make much difference to me,” which sounds very middly, and 3 is “That sounds decent.” I felt like this was a good spread of opinions to measure, but it’s hard to say where exactly is the middle point where above it is positive and below is negative. Certainly not as cut and dry as the 3 between “No!” and “Yes!”
So we’ll have to make a lot of comparative observations, but let’s take a look at what we’ve got.
The first set of ideas were all somewhat in competition as “extra little things I can write.” The first, of course, is the exact reward I’ve been offering for years now, which I’ve gotten some vocal appreciation for at times, though maybe not as much lately. I guess that carries over to the vote, as the response to this one was… profoundly middling. Supporters were a little more positive but a little less eager. But hey, the middle is “That sounds decent.”, so I guess you could say it’s… mild support! But comparatively, well…
It looks like folks would much rather start getting a peek into the head of somebody new. This would probably be a deal more challenging for me, since I kinda cheated with Lith’s diary and blended in a lot of my own rambling about media I enjoyed, but with future project characters, that would be… much less practical. Still, it could be fun, and maybe even helpful, for me to “get in their head” and free write some. It looks like people did like this option significantly more than just sticking to Lith’s diary and on both sides of the fence! It doesn’t look like any of these options elicited a fully enthusiastic “Great!” but this certainly was a warm response, especially with taking the question skew into account.
The “random bonuses” clearly won this one, though. Which probably makes sense, it’d be the most diverse, but also the most challenging for me! That’s kinda “open” enough that it can easily provoke that “blank page paralysis” where I can’t settle on one idea and just get started. Maybe I’ll have to get into the habit of keeping an eye out for good ideas for them so I can just pick an especially inspired favorite each time. And of course, I could still do something like a journal for random characters now and then for this reward!
And then there’s the exclusive reports one. This was an awkward question for two reasons– one, because it’s asking the public if they’d rather that fewer people had something, again, which is not gonna go over well. And two, any reward that involves holding something back rather than giving something extra is gonna be a hard sell. Technically if I held a vote for if people wanted me to do a delayed release as a reward, a lot of people would naturally vote no because they want to play the game sooner without paying! But with all that said, this option actually did surprisingly well, considering. The public didn’t like it as much, but patrons supported it pretty well, putting it well above continuing Lith’s Diary! And as I’ve been going through all this, I’ve been thinking I might need to do some of these anyway– voting on upcoming content means knowing about things that are still in the pipeline, right? So if I’m gonna have the one, I probably need the other. All the better that folks seem at least somewhat in support of it!
And now, we come to my greatest regret in this whole survey, besides the previous series of questions…
The one time I couldn’t break a block of results down into a clean, even number to keep space efficient! D: I felt like all three of these were worth looking at, so here we are. I wanted to offer something a little fresh and different and saw things like this offered by creators, so I figured I’d give it a try.
Maybe not too surprising, but putting your name in each build of a porn game wasn’t super popular. Should I have specified Patreon username, maybe? It was a very tight space to write in. Well, overall it’s rated quite low by the public (though with a spike in “meh” rather than complete disinterest) but still just barely positive for supporters, albeit flat across the board. Of course, it’s with stuff like this that it’s important to remember: if people are going to the trouble of filling out this particular survey, chances are fairly good they’d at least consider supporting, even if they don’t currently. I try to please my current supporters, but it’s also important to think about what might be more or less likely to lure new supporters in. In any case, this response was so unenthusiastic I’d probably only want to do it as a “voluntary” thing, which would itself probably make more work than just copying the current list of names over, so I’m not sure if this one would be worth it.
I was pretty vague with the “silly” one, but I’m happy to see it got a pretty warm reception. The public was somewhat positive, but supporters seemed pretty dang happy with the idea, giving it the highest rating in this series besides the “random bonus content” above. I guess you guys like your silly and random bonuses! Maybe it’s important to remember to keep things a little “fun” with rewards so it doesn’t feel like an obligation so much as a celebration. Something for me to think on. Anyway, I’m really not sure what these would be exactly, but I guess I’ll have to keep an eye out for possibilities in each game I build.
Adding names for random NPCs feels simultaneously much easier to pull off and much harder to pull off reliably from one game to the next. I’d have no idea how to implement that in MVOL, for example. This one didn’t get a very strong response, barely better than the other “name” one, though there’s a notable spike in “I’d like that.” among supporters, both early and late. Interesting. Maybe I could fold that into the “silly” reward as a sometimes thing?
And the last few questions were about a rather tricky subject: physical rewards.
I’ve had a lot of requests for merch over the last couple years, and the main upshot has been that I could offer merch, but it would usually be a lot of extra work to get going and put up for sale and distribute, and with things like a plushie (one of the most common requests) it would have to be done in a very large run to not be prohibitively expensive, meaning that I’d have to be sure a lot of people were going to buy before I could commit. Now, Patreon offers an option for making merch for me, based on my designs and specs, presumably allowing for small runs and all that. Which is great! But it also means that I’d have to pay them a significant cut in the process– switching to a merch plan means they take a larger percentage cut of all my income as a flat, on/off deal. So this means I couldn’t just like… run one little merch thing and see how people like it. It would be very… all or nothing, do no merch or do a whole bunch.
So… that makes these results pretty difficult to work with. It’s true that the “That’d be great!” spike up higher than the rest of this series, especially for supporters, but for something I thought might get people super excited, the average score is pretty underwhelming. Almost exactly as many supporters are on the opposite side, completely uninterested, and the public are just less enthusiastic in general, mostly settling on “That sounds decent.” This doesn’t sound like the kind of enthusiasm to jump on a reward that makes it worth the big push…
The non-clothing options didn’t do much better, either. The general votes were a tiny bit more favorable, but supporters were less excited, and still just as uninterested. This is a tough one. Maybe people would be more excited once they saw the actual items in question, but Patreon’s weird setup for the merch is something like… “once you’ve supported three months you get shipped one item as a reward,” so that the cost is split over a few months to be less of a potential hit. It makes sense, but that means a big delay before I get any actual feedback on the merch, and if I want to cancel it after, I’m really not sure how that would work for people that have already been supporting on that tier to work toward it.
It seems like a shame to just never try it when folks might really like it when they see it, and most folks aren’t really rejecting it so much as not going crazy over the basic idea, and it’d be nice to finally offer merch without having to worry about doing all the logistics stuff myself, but… it’d be a big jump with a big cost and open up a lot of potential problems. I hoped the vote could help me decide, but dang. I guess we’re all kinda on the fence.
Alright. That’s the last graph! We’re finally done with all the crazy numbers and stats for now. Next, it’s finally time for…
Your Write-ins
I put off reading these till the very end for a few reasons. I didn’t want a few people’s specific sentiments to skew my interpretation of the large scale numbers, and as a bonus, it let me give people absolutely as much time as possible to get their in and be seen. I just finished reading all of them in the last couple days, up to the most recent I could get. And I did read every last one, though with over a hundred write-in’s on each survey, I did end up skimming some of those that were extraordinarily long. I certainly appreciate your enthusiasm for feedback, but I don’t want to let one person’s lengthy report or lecture drown out five other people’s more concise thoughts too much.
Overall, there were a few sentiments that repeated a good deal, some that were chaotic and all over the place, and at times, an amusing number of exactly opposed opinions. I guess if you have a balance of people saying your work should be more one way and people wanting it the exact opposite, you must be in a fairly decent spot, right? Well, I’ll get back to that thought in a minute.
First, I asked about people’s favorite parts of MVOL, if there was anything past what I suggested as options to rate. This was a really touching and uplifting section to read, you guys had so many kind things to say. A fair number of you took the time just to talk about how much the game meant to you emotionally, that it had had a serious impact on your life and helped you as a person. I’m really glad my game could be a positive influence in so many people’s lives. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to talk about what my job is with others, especially in public, but I think it’s this, that it feels like I’m still really making something meaningful with some measure of emotional and maybe even artistic worth, that lets me maintain a certain amount of pride, even if I know some people would doubt it or simply not understand.
For the next section I asked for what you thought was the weakest part of MVOL, and I saw a lot of interesting variety. This is where that amusing opposition really came up the most– people wanted less of this but also more of it, they thought I did this too much but also wished I’d do it far more often. That said, a few things definitely came up more consistently. People did wish there was more art in general. Lots of folks grumbled about the sheer volume of text, especially with single, super-long pages. They didn’t like how it got much, much heavier in the second half of the game and the gameplay was reduced to a few limited choices rather than giving you the feeling of control you had in the first half. I could justify these things, but it’s true that purely from the standpoint of a game designer, these were failings. These, among many things, were casualties of me treating this as something not quite the same as a game. I think that it paid off in the end, but it’s true I should be careful of repeating these sins in future projects.
There was also a lot of frustration centered around how hard it was to find certain content, especially when it came to finding the new content with each update. I’ll admit that MVOL’s style of gameplay, so far as you can call it that, does not jive very well with incremental additions of content. If I told you what the content was, or where to find it, then that would often remove a lot of what makes it feel “special,” because MVOL’s strength tends to be in the unexpected turns and depths, where you assume if you try something there will be nothing there, or a shallow excuse for skipping forward with more traditional content, but I didn’t hold back, and I think it made the game more rewarding as a whole. But that becomes nothing if you already know it’s there. I’m sorry to all the people I frustrated with my insistence on a constant, cryptic mystique, maybe even seeming condescending or elitist when the community would back me up in just saying “go explore!” I know the frustration in playing a game once and then being told I have to redo a bunch of it just to get to the new content, and it’s probably worse with a game like MVOL. I wish I could have spared you that incremental frustration. My only side justification would be that, as much as you’ve played, chances are strong there’s content you haven’t seen, and I like to hope that even on your fifth time through looking for new content, you might run into something old that you just never saw before. I was happy that it gave people a reason to explore many different routes, many different times, but if you treated it as a chore and just did the exact same thing as on every other run you’ve ever taken through the game, then chances are you never enjoyed that aspect of it.
Other than that, in the section I left open for general feedback on MVOL, I got a healthy variety of suggestions, thoughts, and opinions. There was a repeating opinion that releasing every other month was fine– that updating every month would only make things like the above problem worse, and such small chunks of new content would not really be worth going to the trouble to find. I can certainly see the logic in that– I myself sometimes like to leave ongoing projects I follow alone for months at a time so it can accrue lots of progress before I come back and enjoy all the new stuff at once, and a few people mentioned doing that with MVOL.
There were also a lot of critiques that I could certainly understand, but could only say that I could not have made MVOL any other way. I wasn’t trying to just make “a game,” I was trying to make something special, devoted to exploring a single character and making him feel as real as possible. Sometimes that meant things would be frustrating or hard– and the more you looked at it as a game rather than a person, the more frustrating it could often get. I’m sorry to frustrate people, but I’m not sorry to have made MVOL this way. Sometimes you don’t have enough information to make a good choice, or sometimes you make the reasonable choice and get punished for it, or make a bad choice and get rewarded. That’s arguably bad game design, but that’s how real life works. I had to stay honest to my characters, and I couldn’t bend them to your convenience so that making the “right” choice always led to everything going perfectly.
Going through these write-ins makes me realize I may never have quite explained an important part of how I work quite clearly enough, so let me further explain this while couching it in another piece of feedback I got in the next section.
When I asked, in general, for feedback on how I should build my future games, after asking a lot of questions about balancing various game design priorities against each other, I got a lot of interesting advice and ideas, but one recurring response from a lot of people was: believe in myself. Make the game how I think is right, or how I want to make it, or however will keep me motivated. They liked how it turned out the first time, after all! And I deeply, sincerely appreciate that. It means more than I can say that I’ve earned this much trust from you guys.
So let me make this clear. I will always work in the way I think is best, to accomplish my own goals. If I try to make things to satisfy others, things grind to a halt. I am my own most severe critic, and it’s my own harrowing standards that I’m always fighting to satisfy. Let me take a moment to sound like a weirdo.
Whatever I make, I’ll be doing the best I can to meet my own goals and satisfy my sense of how things “should” be, not by popular opinion or by what others desire, but by my own internal logic of what is “right.” This is a fundamental element of how I work as a person, and as a creator. I always struggle to understand how things work and fit together, then I explore it further by replicating these things and how they work in mental experiments. Things like people, and worlds. Every world I create is a finely tuned machine of a thousand precision parts, and if I try to taint that with someone’s external, flawed ideas of how things should work, you might as well throw a wrench in the gears.
Now, with a measure of care, I can modify things and add new factors as I go. Every piece that I add has new implications to follow and interpret into still another new piece, and in this way I can alter things, carefully, after the fact, but it’s very limiting. Once I’ve started working with a story, once I’m deep into it and I’ve done all the preparatory work, it becomes very rigid. This world already has a destiny and it cannot be substantially changed, and it will not abide by illogical side additions.
Okay. Enough sounding like a robot. What all of this means is: once I’ve started properly on a project, a lot of decisions are effectively set in stone. But before that point, I can have a ton of flexibility in what exactly I’m making. Indeed, to an extent, restrictions and added requirements can help creativity flourish, as it prevents blank page paralysis. It gives you something to work around. So now is, effectively, the time to find out what people want. As I develop games, as I’ve seen with MVOL, people will suggest and request a million things that just would never, ever work, but that I might have been able to build the game around to begin with. Of course, some of them still wouldn’t work as I wouldn’t enjoy working with it and it’d slow down the project for lack of motivation (unfortunately, I do still have an emotional element in my creative process) but others are much more a matter of “maybe you should have said that at the start.”
And that is why I’m going above and beyond to get your feedback on dozens of things right now. I will design to meet my own standards first, but within that framework, I have a lot of flexibility right now, before things start to truly solidify to the point I can start writing and designing in earnest. I want to make something that all of you enjoy, but to be perfectly honest, your enjoyment tends to be something like a side effect– my best work comes when I struggle only to satisfy myself, and what comes out of that usually satisfies most people with moderately similar interests. So I want to be in the best place to start, to make all of you happy “by accident” as I fling myself at this mess of problems and missing pieces again. As some folks have correctly noted, it’s when you start trying to satisfy “everyone” that you get a bland, forgettable product, and that’s not what I want here. I want to make something unique and focused, even if it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Hopefully, having multiple smaller projects like that will help make sure everyone has something to enjoy without losing that focus per project.
Phew. I think that covers the strong trends that came up in questions of design and mechanics. Next up was sexual content, which had a… wildly varied write-in section. There was no strong theme so much as a mountain of different fetishes, some of which I enjoy and some of which I’m simply incapable of writing about. I’m very sorry to say that I just can’t get excited about lesbian content, for example. I can work up enough to write a scene about it occasionally, and you should find three or four of them sprinkled throughout MVOL, but I’ll never be able to write about it in the volume needed for a proper position in a game, I’m afraid. Sorry!
Similarly, I’m not really interested in feet, violence, size theft, feeding/weight gain, oviposition, watersports or strangling, and I honestly find handjobs boring. I can’t say none of these will ever show up in my work, but I’m not going to actively try to include them so much as it might come up by accident. Overall I’m kinda neutral on bondage stuff, which was a fairly popular request, but I do think there’s a time and place for it that can be exciting. I also saw a lot of requests for impregnation, which has been a small theme among requests for MVOL as well. It’s not a big one for me, but I can see the fun in it and I’ll probably work some of it in here and there.
There were a few others here and there, some common ones that I already enjoy and will probably work in eventually, a few spares I just saw once here or there. There were a lot of fetish suggestions, so many I actually saw one or two new ones, though I’m pretty sure one or two others were just joke answers. Pretty sure.
Lastly, I asked for feedback on how to run the project as a whole. I saw a lot of that touching feedback about doing what I think is best here, and others encouraging me to take breaks and not overwork myself, which is kinda embarrassing. I tend to have a lot more downtime than I’d like for various reasons, and if I had a more reliable work ethic then I’d get things done steadily all the time rather than cramming a lot before deadlines, but that’s exactly why I stick to those deadlines so hard, to make sure I’m still getting things done at all. It’s up to me to work out a better balance so I’m never overworking myself or beating myself up, while still making sure a good amount gets done.
There were also a few different opinions on votes, with some wanting voting on future content to be open to the public so an elite few don’t skew all my work in strange directions, and others feeling like if too many people can vote, then we’ll only ever see the most generic, popular content and never some of the niche stuff they enjoy as a minority. That pretty well sums up the conflict, I think– I want a voting system to strike a good balance between “what everyone wants” and “making supporters feel like their desires matter.” That will be the precarious balance I want to strike, that occasionally we can get something a little odd because supporters nudged things over that way, and sometimes we’ll just go with what’s popular to the most people. I’ve had a few ideas on how to accomplish this, but I think the best rule of thumb is this:
I will always exercise my own judgment first, and in most cases, I will make the final call. Votes are for seeing how the players feel, especially those that are giving up their own hard-earned money to help me keep a roof over my head, and they inform my choices, or pick things that are less directly essential to the design but maybe will make things more pleasant for the players. The system I’ve been using with votes for MVOL was basically that I had lots of ideas for potential side content or features, and I’d use the vote to see which things people want more urgently. Some things I knew would be needed eventually, so it was more a question of adding it now or “eventually,” and others I wasn’t sure about, so if it did poorly in the polls I’d probably skip it. I have no intention of ever being “controlled” by the polls or feeling like I need to warp my plans around others’ opinion in a harmful or detracting way.
I guess there’s a certain irony in concluding such a huge series of posts all about communicating with all of you and getting your opinions on what I should do next with the assurance that I’ll never let others influence me too much. It helps that a lot of people have encouraged me to go my own way rather than try to always satisfy the crowd, I suppose. I’m always going to try to do the right thing to make a good game as I see it, but I only ever see these games “from the inside,” as an extension of the concept I’ve created in my heart. I’ll never see them how you do, so it’s important to try to understand how you see it, and what you want or expect from it. I’ll never satisfy everyone and I don’t intend to, but sometimes a little nudge to the design here or there can make a world of difference for people.
Conclusion
Alright! I’ve finally gone through every last piece of feedback from all of you! Even putting this summary together has been a bit of a haze of data for me, so I’m probably going to be rereading my own summaries and going over the charts some more before I really absorb all of it and get to the point where I can start making real decisions. Along the way I’ve been making a lot of little mental adjustments, expanding or revising the floating concepts I’ve got waiting to be turned into something playable, occasionally taking a little inspiration from your suggestions.
But the big decisions still need to be made. At this point it looks like I’ll be going for the “hybrid” plan, with one “main” project and a few side projects I work on one at a time, so I’ve got a variety of things to work on and to offer to all of you. I’m hoping that’ll help me maintain a schedule with a monthly new release, or close to every month, if I’m loosely alternating between a “main” project and the side ideas, so each one will have two months to develop before I have to have something playable, effectively. That said, I got a lot of feedback that it doesn’t have to be monthly, so maybe I’ll call it a very loose monthly schedule and sometimes skip a date if I don’t have anything ready, or offer something odd as a substitute?
I’ve had a few fervent requests for other support platforms and it looks like I’m on track to expand to one more, especially to enable more diverse content, but it’s tough to expand to anything that completely removes the fees and nonsense between us. If you really wanted to just throw money at me without rewards, you could always donate to my Paypal to minimize the middle men, but services like Patreon really do help a ton in streamlining the process, to distribute rewards, make things simple and easy for both new supporters and long-term support, to make sure that only those actually supporting get the rewards, and handle all the weird complications that come with international transactions. I can’t say I’m happy with all of Patreon’s choices or actions, but I do appreciate the service they provide, as I never would’ve been able to actually make a living as a game developer without them.
At this point, it sounds like merch through Patreon would probably be more trouble than it’s worth. Folks rightly pointed out that most of you wouldn’t really want to display merch for a porn game, and it’d be pretty tough to develop designs that invoke the feel of MVOL without, at the least, implying you’re a furry if you go out wearing it on a shirt or something, and that’s something a lot of people don’t feel comfortable with. Plus later games’ imagery might be less cute and wholesome right on the face, which would make it even harder. I’ll be looking into other ways to make merch happen that people do actually want and would enjoy, but the struggle there tends to be both making it happen in a way that is affordable and would actually sell out, and without creating loads and loads of work for myself that has nothing to do with making games.
I do have my first new project in development already, the one I’m tentatively planning to work on long-term. It’s a bit of a cheat, as you might almost say it will have a few separate games inside it, but hopefully it’ll feel like one larger, satisfying package once it’s gotten that developed. For now, the first properly playable version will probably feel like a very small, simple game on its own. I’ve actually released a super rough teaser on the Patreon for that project already as part of the Monthly Mini Update, though I’m a little worried it’s so haphazard and first draft at this point it might give people weird impressions of what’s coming. I have literally a dozen other ideas waiting, and I keep coming up with more at random, but it’s a matter of figuring out which ones will be most practical to actually follow through on, to be worth all the work and headaches that come with turning an idea, the easy part, into something playable. I always found it kinda funny when people came offering to give me ideas for things to work on, as though it might be something I was short on. I largely make games because I have so many ideas and I’m frustrated they’re not already out there.
I still need to figure out what the new rewards will be, but at least I have a very rough framework for what my future projects will be like. I’m still going to be working some on MVOL in the months to come, as there’s still more I need to do to make sure it lives on past the “death” of Flash (it’ll still be playable, just not getting security updates anymore) and the later portions of the game don’t have much art yet. I’m slowly removing the obstacles between me and some kind of final, polished version of the game available for sale, maybe even on Steam! But I haven’t even fully researched what all that will actually require, and some slowdowns are still being worked through. For that matter, there are still a lot of pieces I’m scrambling to figure out before I can even half-heartedly claim that the game is ready to be called “complete.”
I’m planning to figure out the tiers, rewards, milestones, and all that soon, so I can give everyone a healthy warning sometime this month for what’s going on, but I plan to keep the existing rewards on Patreon at least through the release of v1.00. I plan to make the actual changes sometime mid-July, to adopt the new schedule, transition more fully to working on new projects, and implement new supporter architecture.
If anything, at this point it’s going to be a relief to finally start doing this crazy thing rather than endlessly anticipating and worrying about it. Stress comes from a sense of being in danger without being able to do anything, so I should feel a lot better once I have the chance to put all this energy to proper use actually making something, even if it does force me to struggle and change and learn a lot. I already knew this year would be a hard one for me even before 2020 went to hell in just about every way possible, so this has been quite a trip. But sometimes things have to get hard before they can get better.
Thank you all for following me, for reading all my rambling, and for helping me figure out how to do all this from here. I hope you’re staying safe and healthy as can be, and that by the time 2021 rolls around we’ll all be stronger and living better lives for all the difficulties we’ve had to go through. In the meantime, I can only hope that my silly game about a dorky cat brings a little solace to a few troubled hearts out there.
Keep an eye out for more news before long! Cheers!