Project Wild One v0.01: The Savage Frontier

At long last, the very first prototype build for Project Wild One is complete! Mid-tier supporters can play it right now, with others jumping in a couple weeks from now, and the game will go public in a month. Whenever you start playing, please do be sure to look over the tutorial information, or you will be very confused and frustrated!

I have been both looking forward to and dreading this day for a long time. When you get down to it, even the premise for this game’s creation seems… dubious, really. I built my reputation and my following through my focused efforts on writing an emotionally engaging interacting narrative largely centered around two characters. It was basically one or two steps too advanced to not just be a choose your own adventure book. Folks loved MVOL for the characters and the extensive sexual prose, but they felt the actual gameplay was lacking in many ways. And now?

Now I’m trying to make a game that’s all about the gameplay, that will feature very little strength of character or linear narrative. 90% of the things people liked about MVOL won’t apply here, and a lot of the elements I failed on are going to be taking center stage and will make or break this game. Hell, even the themes and tone are largely going to be radically different. It sounds frankly ludicrous to even attempt, let alone to do it all while living off the money from people that loved MVOL and want to see more like that.

I’m worried that this game represents me being selfish, that I’ve shown a talent for writing and a bare competence as a game designer but I want to show I can be a great game designer as well. I’ve long aspired to that role as well, and I’ve grown up studying games and thinking about what I’d make and how, what mistakes other games have made and what their greatest features were. I love the idea of making truly engaging games, and I want to do that. I want this to be another pillar of my abilities as a creator. That has gone largely untested until now, and now I’m forcing this part of myself to center stage.

But if I’m going to create the best work that I can, then I need to follow through on my passions and try to turn the ideas that most fascinate me into something that others can enjoy. More than that, if I’m going to keep creating in new and better ways, I need to learn and grow. If nothing else, Project Wild One has been a massive help with learning how to work in Unity, how to program in C# and how to make a game run from the ground up. Even if this project crashes and burns from here, I can take everything I’ve learned and make other games better with it. So I don’t feel like it was a waste of time.

But I’m certainly scared of what people will think when they open this game. The worst part is, it’s not even a game at this point. You can’t really win or lose. It’s a prototype, a tech demo, that I’ve taken a little time to try and make look less bland than Project Matchmaker v0.01 did. As it stands, it barely even has any written content, and almost every single element in it is a placeholder for something better I’ve been dreaming up for the far-flung future. v0.01 isn’t a game, it’s practically… scaffolding. A foundation and scaffolding for what will come. But I’m hoping that what is there will help you come to understand what’s coming, to at least get a vague idea of the direction I’m going in.

Well. All of this is setting the stage for trying to explain what’s going on with Project Wild One, both on the large scale and the small. A lot of it is still nebulous, but I’d like to take some time today to talk about what’s here, and what’s coming.

long term goals for project wild one

First, I’m going to take another crack at explaining what this project is actually supposed to be, way down the road. While MVOL was all about trying to portray a single character as thoroughly as possible, PWO is more an exploration of a gap in game design.

I’ve talked about this a lot, so I’ll try to keep it quick. Pornographic games rely on immersion more than anything else to make you feel like you’re “in the moment,” moreso than maybe any other genre. That’s what makes porn games so great, because gameplay is great for getting you immersed more easily and thoroughly than any non-interactive medium. But porn games very often put the gameplay somewhere else and make the sex a consequence, or a side note, or even a reward for failure! Only a few games have put the gameplay right in the sex, and there has been a lot of struggling over how to make that work, discovering new issues that this brings to the fore. More than that, they tend to be very restrictive about what you can do when. To some extent that’s necessary, of course, since too many choices can be overwhelming to a player, but anytime you say “I want to do this in this situation!” and the game doesn’t give you that option, that’s distracting and disappointing.

I want to create an engine for various kinds of interaction, most at least tangentially related to sex, that is flexible enough to allow for a lot of different possibilities the player might want to explore. More than that, I want to build it in a way that allows it to be easily expanded. I don’t know how many times I’ve had people say “this game is great, but it’d be perfect if you’d just add (my particular fetish/interest/species/power dynamic/madness)” and I would have to apologize and explain that it just really wouldn’t work with MVOL, since that game is very restrictive both in mechanics and theme.

But if I can get this engine to where I’m hoping, then that could open up a lot of new potential answers to that question. Depending on what folks want, it might be literally possible to just add that capability to every character in the game. That’s the ideal that would probably happen less than 20% of the time, but if all characters work off the same universal engine then things like that can become possible with relatively little work. In other cases, it might be more practical to build it as something that has specific restrictions, something that can only be applied to certain types of characters or in certain situations or configurations of the game. Or, if all else fails, if it’s something I’m just not interested in adding or don’t have the time for, I’m hoping there could be another option eventually: telling you to go add it your dang self.

Along with this flexibility, another of my dreams for Project Wild One is to include some measure of customizability or moddability to it, where people that are willing to put in the time learning how could generate their own content for the game, whether that means a character to add to existing scenes that acts how you like, or creating whole new scenes, or adding your own new game mechanics/fetishes/etc. Of course, a lot of this would rely on programming skills I still haven’t begun to develop, so for now I largely have to refer to that as a dream for someday. But the point is, this is a project laying the groundwork for possibilities like that. This project is about finding a way to make more kinds of sexual content available and practical at least to a basic extent within one greater framework.

The example I often come back to is, well, vore. I know that’s an interest only some of my fans share with me, and I respect that. That’s part of what I’m trying to accomplish with this game, making something that enables various fringe fetishes but doesn’t make them a blatant presence in everyone else’s playthroughs when they don’t want it. And that goes much further than vore.

I’m hoping that with this system, I’ll be able to enable all sorts of silly things you see only happening in furry sex. Penetration of all sorts of unusual holes. Extended cum inflation mechanics, with tracking for things like flooding all the way through or cum with unusual effects. The same mechanics you need to make vore work are also helpful for other kinds of extreme insertions, like size difference or hyper. Micro/macro could easily fit in this system, as could having multiple dicks, or tentacles, or whatever unusual sexual anatomy. What I’m hoping is that the framework I’ve been building will trivialize the process of adding many other kinds of content down the road as we flesh things out. When you get down to it, a lot of the crazy furry fetish stuff out there does follow its own sort of internal set of logic, which is something I’ve been trying to translate into proper game mechanics in a sort of Unified Furry Physics Theory.

Which isn’t to say this is anywhere near a full physics simulator or anything. But if I can find a solid way to make all sorts of sexy stuff happen dynamically rather than through pages of prose that change slightly for your configurations, then that should open up a lot more options for the player and get a lot more immersive at the same time.

But… that’s all plotting for the far-flung future. Those are confused and distant dreams of a utopia of sexual exploration. Today, we’re taking the first shaky, risky steps in that direction. So let’s talk about what I’ve actually accomplished so far.

what v0.01 is and is not

One of my most fundamental fears is disappointing people. I don’t want people opening this prototype up all excited and hoping for amazing things and seeing… this mess. So let me try to adjust your expectations a little, and frame your mentality for going into this demo.

The bulk of work that went into v0.01 was creating the framework behind the scenes. A huge chunk of this was the penetration system: a universal language of holes, things that go into them, and where those things go if they go in there deep enough. How do the holes resist if you put something too large in there? What consequences are there? How does that change other actions you might try to take? What happens if you do get deep enough? What happens to stuff you leave in there? How much does the shape of what you’re putting in matter? How does all this differ if it’s just a piece of something getting put in and taken out a bunch, or something getting pushed through whole? How do all these stats and behaviors differ for different kinds of holes, and different things lying behind them?

These are the questions I’ve had to break down and turn into a series of rules to cover every possible extremity I could find. I’ve built systems for tracking characters and their various anatomy and all the stats for both, with rules for how they can interact with each other, what actions characters can take and when, and when those might be easier or harder to do. I built all the basics of making gameplay baseline functional. Then, when that was finally nearing a point of barebones playability, I asked my supporters what I should do about how you interact with this great mess of rules and stats. I gave a few options, and they agreed they wanted a proper AI built in.

So I needed to figure out how to make characters interpret all the information they had available (and no more than that) and make decisions between possibly dozens of different actions. They had to have memories of your past actions and their own, opinions on what kind of creature you are, and their own desires, drives, and fears to dictate their actions from one moment to the next. All of that was a great mess of programming and philosophical delving to get to what I consider an absolute baseline to have interesting, somewhat sensible characters for you to interact with. They’re still going to act strangely, but hopefully it feels at least close to what a creature in this situation might do.

Past that, I built in some basics for actually playing the game. A little progression, the rewards, and the actual UI for seeing and understanding what everyone is doing and what’s happening in general. It’s all still janky and very barebones, but you should be able to keep track of what’s going on, even if you don’t always understand why it’s happening. And I tried to make it not too ugly to look at.

That’s pretty much everything that’s in the game. It’s been a ton of work and I’m proud of all I accomplished, but… compared to just about anything else you’ve probably played in the last fifteen years, it’s going to seem very lacking. The gameplay isn’t balanced or even particularly fun, there’s no real prose to enjoy during intimate scenes, the AI’s behavior can get repetitive and even frustrating sometimes, and somehow at the same time it’s not even challenging. I don’t expect you to want to play this game for very long as it is.

But that’s not what this release is about. I wouldn’t even call it a game at this point. This is me trying to show you that yes, I have been working this whole time, and there’s a rich wealth of mechanics and design buried in all this, even if it’s hard to see right now. This is a tech demo, and I’ve avoided building too much in any one spot that I know will get replaced entirely later with something better, once everything that supports it is ready. Pretty much anything you can actually see is just there to serve as a temporary face for what lies beneath.

So, what should you look for in this release, and what is going to be added later? Right now, the main thing I’m proud of is having a fairly elaborate system for sexual penetration, which is mainly highlighted in what happens when it’s strained. Here are a few activities you should be able to accomplish if you’re interested in this version of the game:

• Start small and train your orifices to take larger and larger insertions. Or train one to be especially yielding while keeping another nice and snug.
• Train other characters you meet, over multiple encounters, to take your especially large insertion comfortably.
• See how many loads it takes to completely incapacitate another character through cum inflation.
• Experiment with building relationships with characters through multiple encounters.
• Develop strategies for fucking anyone you meet into submission without being incapacitated yourself.
• Get a feel for how different orifices “behave” with what you leave behind in them.

The game has a lot of moving parts you won’t be able to see very clearly. This may be frustrating, but as with most things I make, I encourage you to try to think of it less as a game and more as a peculiar encounter. In this case, some imagination may be required. My proofers got frustrated with some things, like: “why does this character keep offering other kinds of sex when we’re already having sex?” And to me, if I try to imagine a creature doing that, that could be interpreted as “this character wants to have sex with you this way next!” or “this character wants to have sex with you any way you want!” Things like that won’t be spelled out for you, but I’ve put a lot of work into trying to at least make the characters’ actions and the mechanics make sense, if you’re willing to use your imagination a little. I know, games haven’t asked that of us since the 90s. This is the true retro feel.

As far as what this game doesn’t have that I’m hoping to add later, I feel like I could pretty much go on forever. One of the most notable absences compared to my other work will be… any kind of emotional connection or involvement. Right now this game is basically a “casual sex sim among people and creatures wandering the wilds,” and you literally don’t share a language with any of them. They are bodies to interact with, to derive satisfaction from, as they try to do the same with you. This hints a little at the main game I want to make as the heart of Project Wild One: something very action-oriented, with just a little maneuvering before one or the other strikes. That said, I hope to develop this engine so that rich characters and narrative do become possible down the line. Maybe some characters will be robust enough to respond in a unique way to most any action you can take, while others will have one or two main narrative lines– and if you don’t like where that’s going, you can just fuck them how you want or what have you and write your own story from there. This will also be an experiment with the conflict between strength of story/characters and player agency, trying to strike new balances in letting you do what you want, when you want, and still have a compelling experience.

That’s all far down the road. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to accept that some element is “good enough for now” and move on just to get this product as playable as it is in just a few months. Hopefully the work I’ve put in will make adding those later bits easier and more practical in the large scale as this game steadily gets bigger and more complex. For now, the important thing is sharing some small glimpse of the ideas I’ve been working on and the mechanics that will make them possible.

What happens from here

In this prototyping phase of my career, it’s important to get to a working prototype as quickly as possible and get all the basics in there to see if the greater concepts are possible, practical, and actually will be effective in feeling somehow rewarding to the player. On that count, I’ve learned a lot already about where the difficulties in a lot of these ideas lie, but I don’t think I’ll be able to learn too much about whether this game as a great concept will actually be fun just yet. The main concept is too complex to really be properly represented yet, while something like Project Matchmaker is much easier to at least get a glimpse of quickly and easily to judge how you’ll feel about it.

The main thing I’ll gain from all of you playing this version is feedback on your expectations, what works and what doesn’t from what little is there, and insight into what I might need to add that I haven’t thought of yet. The bulk of feedback I receive will probably be more or less “you should add this thing you are already planning to add later!” but it should also be interesting to see what gets suggested out of what I have in mind and what does not. So I hope you guys will give me plenty of feedback and share your thoughts about this initial prototype!

Now that this build is FINALLY done and shipped off, I’m ready to refocus my efforts in another direction. I’ve been coding non-stop for months now and it’s got me pretty beat, and the main thing Project Matchmaker needs right now is some aggressive overhauling in the backend to get it where I need it to be for future content additions… so I really need something less code-intensive before I dive into that.

On top of that, my original plan was “a new release every one to two months,” and so far I’ve failed spectacularly at that! So at this point, I’m setting the goal to get some writing done and ship a new release in one month to show that that schedule is not just lip service. I’ve already got some fresh art stocked up to add to MVOL, so we’re about due for a v1.01 anyway. I’ve had a little trouble getting back into that mindset after finally telling myself the game was done after all these years, but I’ll see if I can’t shake up something fun to add on for at least a little side content. I certainly left myself plenty of open spaces for some more light-hearted additions.

Other than that… life carries on. I posted a new story recently if you didn’t see that, just something silly and fun to blow off some steam and prove to myself I haven’t lost my writing mojo with all this coding. If you want to get more extensive news on how development is going, half of my Dev Journals are exclusive to Patreon and SubscribeStar, so consider joining the project to help me make weird games. If you’d just like to hear more random stuff about what I’m up to, I do try to pop up on Twitter here and there, and I’ll announce any of my side productions on there too.

Actually, if you look on there today you’ll see that my next weekly game stream with my closest friends and biggest supporters is going to be an Audience Participation Day, meaning anyone watching can join in on the games! We’ll be playing a mix of Jackbox games and Cards Against Humanity with a bunch of custom furry cards, and all those games can be played in a browser, or probably on a phone. Most weeks we play some other game like Raft, Barotrauma, Minecraft, or Tabletop Simulator. We just finished a big run of Satisfactory and we’re still figuring out what we’ll be playing after this week. You’re always welcome to swing by and check it out, we run all day Sunday starting at 1pm PST, often going for six hours or more.

And… yeah, I think that’s about all I’ve got that’s worth mentioning at the moment. I’m still holding my breath here hoping folks at least find some excitement in the potential of this project, but it also just feels good to finally be able to turn off the programming side of my head for a little while. Thanks for reading all this, and for following my work, and thank you for your support. It’s been a hell of a time, and whatever happens, I’m proud of the work I’ve gotten done. I hope that shows through.