MVOL v1.00: Every Ending is a Beginning

On January 28th, 2012, after a month of frantic work relearning how to program, I uploaded a very basic, cobbled together MVOL v0.01. Looking over that page, it was apparently an incredibly buggy mess, but also got a strong reaction from a lot of people. After that, I worked on the game in my spare time, releasing very slowly, but people asked for ways to support the game, so I opened a Paypal. Eventually they suggested a Patreon, so I opened one of those, and this… very gradually turned into a living for me.

It started as just the idea of getting to the collars. It was more an experiment than anything. But people loved it and wanted more, and as I thought it over, it was true that I didn’t really “resolve” any of the things I’d brought up… so I developed some pretty crazy ideas for what could come next. I still remember how nervous I was leading up to that first door reveal, afraid everyone would reject the sudden turn in feel.

It’s been a long, long road. It still doesn’t really seem real that the game is finished. And I mean… I could probably keep tweaking, refining, and adding side stuff here and there for quite a while, but I think it’s in a good place right now. It’s not perfect, but… I’m proud of it. And with how hard I am on my work, that’s saying a lot.

My Very Own Lith v1.00 is now available to play. The game is in a state I feel I can call complete, though I’ll still be making an update to it now and then to add some art, maybe a few scenes, make some more tweaks. But it’s finally a Product rather than a Work in Progress. And it didn’t even take as long as TF2.

This last leg of development has been rough. I had some dark days in the last month or two, struggling with a lot of things, game-related and otherwise. I might go into a little more detail in another post, but for now, I’ve got too much to talk about with the game itself.

So let’s talk about what’s new! There’s no new content in the classic sense of full, written scenes, but a great deal has changed. The closest thing to new content right now is a system I’ve been working up to for some time. As usual, I don’t want to spoil too much, but I can at least make it very clear and easy how to access it.

24 hours, real time, after you reach an ending on a playthrough you started in v0.90 or later, an option will appear on the game’s main menu. This will give you access to small snippets of content that change in real time, sticking around for a week before disappearing forever. If you want more, you’ll need to start a new game from scratch and play through to the ending of your choice. Some endings have content, and some don’t, though I think you’ll find it pretty easy to guess which are which. I created this to address a lot of frustrations players have expressed with wanting to know what happens “after the ending,” worried that their character died or some such. I hope this will help create a satisfying sense of closure for players, as well as give you something to check in on now and then for a month or two after playing.

That’s the big written addition with v1.00, but it’s far from the only change or addition. I’ve been cooking this up with an artist for over a year now, but at long last, MVOL has its own animated sex scene! It has variants for species and plays out in multiple phases under player control, and we spent absolute ages getting the expressions and motions right to make it feel authentic to the scene. It’s available in the early game as a couch alternative to an earlier piece of art. I hope you enjoy, it’s been an absolute beast to make happen!

Also, you may notice immediately on opening the game that I’ve finally replaced the game’s sounds. The piano notes I’d been using before were lovely, but I didn’t have all the rights I needed on them to go forward with my plans of someday making a steam version, and I was overdue to get something custom tailored to the game. I was struggling with this for months as well, but I finally got in touch with a professional to record new notes as well as several special flourishes for special moments, including a new introductory flourish, which I’ve combined with a new light intro animation that I think helps MVOL feel much more like a completed product.

Thanks to voters, I finally dug deep into text formatting and overhauled the game’s look with a lot of bold and italics effects I’m hoping will really help make things pop, including making a lot of unlock messages more prominent for those running through old content quickly. I haven’t done a deep dive to enrich all the game’s scenes with nicer text effects, that’s something for a future update, maybe along with some large-scale revisions and editing to tighten things up, once I’ve had some time to step away from the game and let it sit. Still, I think it does a lot to make the game look nicer! Also, I finally implemented real emdashes! That’s a big one for me, personally.

And this was a second-place choice for voters that I wanted to dip into at least a little, so the game has had several new achievements added! The “file achievements” section always felt like it was missing a little something, so I’ve added two new achievements, partly because, by my calculations, that now brings the max possible points to a nice, round 300! I… was going to add an achievement for that, but I was adding this stuff at the last minute and we didn’t have time to test everything for the achievements. So once I know 300 is possible, but no more, I’ll be able to update the game to turn the achievement on, but for now it’s just there as a promise for later!

I know there are a lot of completionists out there that enjoy tooling around looking for all the game’s hidden content, and the achievement I had in there up to this point only covered a pretty small section of the game, and wasn’t even all that complete for that section anymore. So for v1.00 I’ve rolled out a full set of achievements with progress tracking for completing large sections of the game, including every scene and every major variant! Unfortunately, we also didn’t have the time to test these out fully, so I’m hoping you guys can let me know what progress you can make on getting max points and on 100%ing these sections! This is one of the many little things I’m expecting to tune up for a v1.01 down the road.

A while back I added lactation to a lot of scenes by a high-tier supporter request, but there was one scene I forgot about in the early game that definitely had some potential, so that’s finally been kitted out with some milky goodness. I also added one small hint that I’m hoping will help get people in the right mindset to find some of the game’s hidden content, and I fixed a huge slew of random little bugs, some of which have been annoying me for years! It feels great to finally track these things down.

Looking over my activity logs… the rest of it is basically just wave after wave of refining and bug fixing for the new stuff in this update. I don’t know if it seems like all that much to you guys, but this update represents a lot of wrestling with programming and sometimes absolutely bizarre, seemingly impossible glitches and bugs to make sure everything is just as perfect as I can get it. For all my efforts there are still some things that will have to be handled in that v1.01, or in a hotfix if a more serious issue comes up, but I put a lot just into making v1.00 a version ready to stand on its own for a good, long time.

If you haven’t seen already, I’ve already made a post to talk in more detail about what’s coming after MVOL! Big changes are on the way for how I make games, how I engage with all of you, and how I handle support. I’ve finally made my decisions on the large scale, but a lot of this I’ll have to figure out in the details as I go, so we may see some things shift around as I work out what’s practical in the long term. It’s a huge transitional period, and I don’t want to put myself in a position where I’m burning out trying to make all this happen.

But for now, that’s all you should need to know to enjoy this update. Keep an eye out for more frequent news posts on here, and if you aren’t already, consider pitching in on the project! I’ve got a lot of big plans for what comes next, but if I’m going to give you guys the richer graphics and gameplay you want, I could use some professional help! I’m now on Patreon as well as SubscribeStar, so you should have lots of options for helping make these games happen, and lots of rewards will be rolling in!

And if for whatever reason you can’t support, it’s also a huge help to spread the word about my work! Now’s a great time to introduce new people to the game, and the more people enjoy my work, the more support will naturally come in! Share it with your friends or on Twitter, Discord, Reddit, wherever you hang out, and you’ll be helping make more games like MVOL roll out faster!

In any case, thank you all for joining me on this crazy ride! It’s been a long, long time coming, but we really made it happen. Lith’s story is complete– or at least, this chapter of it is, and I think it’s high time he got the chance to rest and enjoy a little peace. He’s got a lot of possibilities ahead of him, and we’ve got lots to look forward to ourselves! For now, though… I think I’m gonna take a little time just to breathe. I do try to pace myself, but it feels like I’ve hardly let myself really relax in a long time. There’s still so much to do… but it can wait a little while.

Cheers!