Changes Incoming!

In case you don’t know what’s going on, I’ve been talking a bunch about how MVOL has gone and what comes next! You can get more info on all that here! I held a big series of surveys after talking it over, then compiled all the results and talked about those, and now it’s finally time to take all of that and jump into action!

July is a big month for me as a game designer! My Very Own Lith v1.00 is coming out tomorrow (today I guess, running a bit late trying to get all of this out there first), and I’ll finally take that momentous step into being an adult game designer with a finished game in my portfolio, which is surely a small and prestigious group, from what I’ve seen. But that also means it’ll finally be time to get serious about my projects beyond MVOL, and that, in turn, means it’s time to start making a lot of changes!

I’ve settled into a nice routine with MVOL, mainly churning out content, but it’s time to start really challenging myself. I’m going to change how I make games, I’m going to experiment with what kinds of games I make, and I’m going to resolve to change up how I engage with my fans, as well as change and expand how I engage with my supporters in particular. There’s a lot coming, so let me explain what’s happening from here, step by step!

New Development cycle

Starting this month, I’m adopting a “hybrid” model where I work continuously on one larger project I’m more confident in while working in smaller projects as experiments regularly. I’m going to aim for “mostly monthly” releases, in which I’ll try to have a release ready on one of my projects at the start of each month, but I recognize that sometimes that won’t be practical.

Up to this point I’ve been releasing every other month because that gave me enough time to generate content in a healthy chunk you can play through all at once, and it minimized the extra work required turning a game from “in development” to “playable.” Every time I release an update, I have to stop and do a not-insignificant amount of extra work just to make sure that particular update works smoothly, and especially early in a game’s development, that can be much more work than if I were to just keep developing the game focusing on my long-term goals for it. In other words, every release I put out there increases the total work the project requires and pushes the finished product’s release a little further away, and while it’s important to release updates along the way, sometimes it’s just not worth the extra work.

So if, come month’s end, I find it’ll be too much trouble getting the project I’ve been working on into a solid, playable state, and I don’t have enough new content in a side project for it to be worth asking you guys to play it again, then I’ll skip releasing that month. So by “mostly monthly” I mean I intend to put out a release every 1-2 months– sometimes my main project, sometimes a side project. This should give me lots of variety in content and challenges to tackle, and it should let you guys enjoy a lot of different kinds of games.

Along with this accelerated schedule, I’m planning on upping my engagement. It’ll take some getting used to, but from now on I’m also aiming for “mostly weekly” updates on development– half-public, half-patron only. So every month you can expect 1-2 updates on here explaining what’s going on with development, maybe in vaguer terms, and on my support platforms there’ll also be 1-2 updates a month that are more specific and spill the beans on what exactly is coming up. I’m still feeling out how this is going to work exactly, but the idea is to average 3-4 updates a month, skipping a week occasionally if needed but largely alternating each week between public and supporter news. Maybe these more frequent posts will help me rein my news posts back down to smaller than novellas!

That’s the basic idea of how I’m planning to work from here, based on what feels practical to me but balanced with what seems to be a priority for you guys, going by the surveys. Now, let’s talk a little about what I’ll be working on!

Future projects

As I’ve mentioned before, I have over a dozen game ideas at the ready with basic docs and sometimes a whole bunch of details already written up. It drives me crazy how many different game ideas I’d love to make into a reality, and this is my chance to try and do that, if I can restrict myself to making the games small and simple enough, at least to start, to be practical. That’ll be the real challenge!

My Main Project for the foreseeable future is a game that I think bears a lot of similarities to MVOL, but still goes in a lot of new directions and should have a lot more variety to it in the long run. I’m hoping this means that folks that loved MVOL will be more comfortable with it than some of my more “out there” ideas, but at the same time I’m trying not to pigeonhole myself as a designer. We’ll see if I can pull the balance off!

For now, I’m not going to give it an official title, but its working title is Project Matchmaker. I’m going to be delivering a lot more info on this soon, but the super short version is: you know those scenes where you follow someone going on a date, secretly giving them advice to help them hit it off? It’s like that, but you’re inside their head, and also you can rewind time to use what you’ve learned and try different options, and you get some special powers to help out. Also, you’re trying to make unusual, often interspecies relationships work between aliens both familiar and bizarre, and how you shape their relationships can save or endanger billions of people on the galactic scale. And once you’re done with one relationship, you can time travel to another potential couple in trouble… depending on if they even exist in the timeline you’ve created.

It still has a lot of kinks to work out, and I’m probably not explaining it super clearly, but that’s a rough sketch of the idea. Mid-tier supporters got to mess around with a super early build sketching out the very start of the game a little while back, actually, but I’ll finally be getting started on it seriously this month!

After that, I’m not sure what side project I’ll be starting up. I don’t intend to purely alternate between projects, I expect they’ll kinda overlap some, but for now I think it’s a decent way to get started. I may choose one for myself, or if I have the info ready, I may leave it up to my supporters to vote for my first side project!

In fact, let’s get into that: I’m overhauling my support platforms for the big transition!

patronage and support

First off, the big news: I’ve started up an account on SubscribeStar! This is going to make things a touch more complicated, but it’s been a long time coming and I have a few strong reasons to go for this.

Dual Options

Lots of people have mentioned wanting to support me but not wanting to go through Patreon for various reasons, and I’ll admit that sometimes I’m frustrated with some of the company’s choices and actions. SubscribeStar seems to be a solid alternative that mostly matches everything Patreon does, with a few perks and a few weaker notes. Notably, from what I’ve been told, they’re much more flexible about the content you can deliver on their platform and are much more welcoming to adult creators in general. On Patreon it often feels like you’re not entirely welcome, and furry content has had a rocky history on there in particular.

One of the more prominent notes here is that Patreon seems to have a very broad interpretation of things like bestiality, including some confusing accounts of content between humans and furries getting taken down. I think this was more a consequence of the exact nature of the content in question, but it certainly makes it sound like the top-scoring kink from the surveys, sapient ferals, would not be welcome on there. I’m still not 100% on how issues like that will be handled in the long term. It may be that games that have some content Patreon doesn’t care for will have alternative, Patreon-friendly versions, while others that are too focused around something Patreon doesn’t like will have to be SS-only. I’ll certainly keep you guys up to date on that as we go.

Other than that, I intend to make the two platforms identical as far as I can! I’ll offer the same rewards on both, and I’ll experiment with having “combined milestones” where support on both platforms count toward the one number for new goals. I may have to tweak that some, as SS seems to use different methods for displaying your support numbers (and takes a larger cut, though if you follow my link specifically to sign up, hopefully I can recoup some of the difference), but I want to keep the two venues on even footing so nobody feels like they have to support on both or anything.

Milestones

I’m a little trepidatious about setting milestones from here, I already feel like I’m going to be pushing myself pretty hard trying to develop multiple new projects and really expand my skills to meet the challenges these new concepts will bring, but I guess the big thing from here is– if we can increase the budget, I should be able to bring people on in more serious, permanent roles to help out. So far I’ve been contracting artists regularly (which has honestly been the most stressful part of the job) and occasionally getting programming help, but if I could afford to pay an artist a regular amount to fulfill all of the projects’ graphical needs, I’m hoping it would get easier to establish a rapport and communicate efficiently, and my work would gain a more cohesive visual direction. It’s been really interesting having so many different artists take a crack at Lith, but I do hope to have a more unified style in future projects if I can help it.

Past that, if I could get a proper programmer helping me out regularly, that could definitely help accelerate the development of prototypes and the expansion of ongoing projects. I can program enough to get basic things accomplished, but an experienced professional could take a lot of the stress and wheel-spinning out of trying to implement new features, or even get started in new engines. This could be a huge help in getting projects rolling out faster and with more robust features.

I have mixed feelings about these ideas, to be honest– I’ve had a lot of rough experiences in the past trying to work with others. I’m not sure how much of it was bad luck and how much of it was something about me, but I do suspect that my, ah… passion for details can be a little overwhelming for people to deal with, sometimes. It helps me create work I can be proud of, but it can also mean I end up expecting a great deal of thought and care from anything put into the project, verging on perfectionism. I’m used to dealing with these habits in myself, but others aren’t. I’m hoping I can find a good middle ground if I get the opportunity to develop a long-term working relationship with someone, but in the meantime, I’m just doing my best to handle everything that goes into making a game on my own, with a little contracting help here and there.

Rewards

Now! Let’s talk about how I’m going to handle rewards for support! This is going to get a little more complicated, since any reward directly related to the game will have to be related to the games, all of them. I’m going to have detailed explanations up on both platforms, but let me give a quick review here.

Every time I release a new build, mid-tier supporters will get to play it first. Two weeks after that, low-tier supporters will get access, and a full month after the initial release, it’ll go fully public. In the past, I’ve used my “advance releases” as “preview builds” that still had a lot of rough spots and even some content missing, but I don’t want to do that this time around. The advance release will be the finished, ready product, and it’ll go out a few people, then to more people, then to everyone, exactly the same. Short of some serious bug that comes up in the meantime, of course.

Along with getting exclusive news on new developments, supporters will get robust outlines of upcoming projects so they can better understand what’s on the way and what my long-term goals are for each project, and past certain tiers, they’ll get to vote for how I should build them! I intend to offer votes on a variety of subjects, sometimes right out asking which project I should work on next, sometimes just seeing how people want certain characters configured, or maybe if certain content is in the game. I don’t intend to turn this into “supporters make all the decisions and the game turns into a generic mess,” but if I’m having trouble deciding something, or if I’m flexible on it and think you guys will care more about certain things, I’ll be happy to pass the decision on to you.

A couple tiers above that will be the sounding board. Mid-tier supporters will be invited to make suggestions and discuss my ideas with me, maybe offering names for some characters or even offering me some inspiration now and then for things I’m struggling a little with. I intend to get pretty candid about my plans and desires in this channel, and while I’ll always have final word on any design choices, this will be my quick and easy venue for getting opinions from my die-hard fans. I’m thinking I’ll put some questions in the Discord and some in exclusive posts on the Patreon and SubscribeStar so people can comment with their thoughts, depending on the nature of the question.

Above that, along with getting a triple-powered vote in the polls, supporters will get the option to get their own little personal touch in the game. Maybe this will just be adding names for random side characters, maybe a silly callout, just some kind of addition that lets them leave a fingerprint on the game to show they were a huge part of making it happen. How exactly this will be implemented will vary from game to game, and I’ll have more specific details for things like this on each project’s page. Each time I go to release a game update, the people who were supporting in the month leading up to it will get their special touches like this included.

Step up from that and I’m offering the chance to “rename” characters– either as a publicly available alternative in the options menu or something private, they can choose one character and give them a different name. Whether that means renaming the main character as yourself, or making yourself the romantic target for others, or just putting a favored character’s name in the game, it’ll be up to you, though I may veto publicly adding names if I don’t think it’ll be appropriate. Along with that, they’ll have the opportunity to give suggestions/writing prompts for my monthly Side-Writes.

Lith’s Diary has finally come to an end after exactly five years and sixty entries, and from here on I’ll instead be writing a more varied host of side content, be it diaries for other characters or just snippets of something related to the worlds and characters the games are set in. This can take a lot of different formats, but I’m going to try and make it something relatively quick and casual, possibly non-canonical, that helps give you some insight into the people and situations we’re peeking in on. These will be available at a low tier, but high-tier supporters can put in suggestions I’ll look over before starting each month. Want to see something similar but for a different character? Maybe you just want to know more about a certain character in particular? I’ll use any prompts that I think will spark something interesting to write and to read. I hope to partly use these to help me feel out the background on these worlds as well!

Now, the classic low-tier reward has been a cheat-enabled copy for MVOL, but I’ve had the impression some people have been a little disappointed with those cheats, and as I struggle to find time to check out other game projects I enjoy following, I think I’m coming to better understand. From here on, the base-tier reward will be… well, it’ll vary from project to project, but the basic idea is, it’ll be something to help you get to the content you want, faster. Maybe that’ll be some basic cheats, or an “easy mode,” or a hint system or a map, or even a straight-up walkthrough, I’m going to try and provide basic perks that help you get to what you want to find more easily and quickly if you’re low on time or just tired of playing the first half an hour of the game yet again.

Art previews and the art archive are carrying on over, as are the daily updates, with any new content I write up going straight out in an email that night for you to get the absolute earliest access to new stuff possible. I’m also planning to implement a series of Super Cheats again at a higher tier, giving more direct control over the game, or maybe access to the debug menu, to really help you turn the game inside out and shake out all the content. And as always, all supporters will get a discord role to show they’re helping the project as a whole. Let’s see… Oh! And mid-tier supporters can add a name of their choice to the credits as well, to be honored for helping bring new pervy-feely games into being.

I think that covers everything. Phew! I’ll be putting together much clearer, more detailed explanations on the platforms themselves, but that’s a quick overview of the model I’ve settled on. I only just settled on the final model today, and the tiers are all set up on SubscribeStar if you already know which you want and want to get started now, but I’ll be rolling out the full docs and making all the changes on Patreon after MVOL’s full release is rolled out and I’ve had a second to catch my breath.

Conclusion

I’ve never been very comfortable with change, and I’ve been letting this moment stress me out for just about a year now, but we’re finally here, and I’m going to do my best to tackle this opportunity to become a better creator! I want you guys to feel like I’m in touch with you, like I’m communicating clearly what I’ve got going on, and like your support is appreciated. My passion is always focused on the creation first, but I want to be a little better about getting all of you involved in the process from here.

And on top of that, this is going to be a big challenge for me as a creator in general. I’ve been pretty used to working in Flash, but it’s very much on the verge of death and it’s high time I learn how to program in something else. I’ve been muddling around in Unity, but I think I’m going to try a few different engines for different projects to see how they compare and take advantage of their strengths for certain concepts and gameplay styles. This is all going to be hard, and things may go a little slow in the beginning, but I’m going into this with all my stubborn determination to make something good, and I’m hoping I’ll grow a lot in the process. I can be relentless about making something just right, but I still have a lot of gaps in my skillset to work through before I can really catch up with my own ambitions.

Thank you, all of you, for following, playing, and supporting the project. I’m only here to meet these challenges because you guys took notice of me and decided my stuff was good enough to be worth your time, and I appreciate that. I’m going to try to keep being worth your time as I transition into all this new, scary, exciting stuff.

Keep an eye on this blog, because this is just the beginning! Don’t forget to bookmark, or grab the RSS Feed on the left, or follow my Twitter! And if you’re not on the Discord, holy cow come join us, we’ve got a very friendly place going! Lots more news is on the way, so look forward to it!