For a few reasons that may become clear, I think this is a good time to review where we are overall. If you’ve been following my work closely this may be rather repetitive, but I’m hoping to have a fair number of new people reading this, so I’m going to try and give a quick background.
I started making MVOL as a hobby in 2012, and it eventually turned into my job. I finished it last year, and in that time I had about a million ideas I really wished I could make into games, but there was no way I could choose between them. I want to see how they work, whether I can make them happen and whether they’re actually as fun or compelling as I hope. So I started what I’ve called the prototyping phase of my career. I did a lot of surveys to get feedback from everyone on what I should do from here, and the consensus was that I should follow my passion to make the best games I can, and hopefully a variety of work means I can maximize my “uptime” and avoid getting burnt out on any one type of task.
So I changed everything up and put together a prototype for Project Matchmaker, then Project Wild One, and those are both available for everyone to play now. I think that those two games make a pretty solid sampler of where I’m hoping to go from here, maybe even of the two extremes: games that are similar to MVOL but not just “MVOL 2,” and games that are much more out there and challenging me to become a more robust designer, to make games that are “more game-like” and more robust and all these things that I saw as shortcomings in MVOL by the end. A lot of my fans did have frustrations with some aspects of MVOL, and who knows how many people were turned off so much by all those aspects and never really came to enjoy my work.
I don’t consider any of those parts of MVOL mistakes, though. Well, only a few of them. I’m pretty happy with how MVOL has turned out for the goals it was designed to meet. Now I can finally try and show what I can do while aiming for new goals, like “make an emotionally compelling and erotic experience that isn’t also incredibly depressing.”
So I’ve got some good examples of where I’m going from here, and I just shipped an update to MVOL with some fixes and a little bit of new content to my supporters. And I realized that this is pretty much the best time to stop putting it off and try to get word out there. I want to put my games in more people’s hands, and I think MVOL deserves a larger playerbase, even if it is on an outdated platform at the moment. So it’s time that I buckle down and get capitalist with some advertising.
It’s a little embarrassing to admit how difficult that’s been. I often feel like I’d be best suited to just focusing on creating and letting the quality of the work do the job for me, but any decent product deserves support and a meaningful effort to get it out there, in front of people. Figuring out how to present the game, especially given its nature as an experience, has been hard for me, probably much harder than it should be. I’ve always tried to avoid spoiling people, I want them to get the full experience, but how do you tell people that there’s more, how do you tell someone that they’ll enjoy it if they like X without telling them that there’s X in there and ruining the surprise? And it’s basically a very compact presentation, it needs to have a tone, it needs to be punchy and have the right timing, it needs to be informative but only enough to tease out interest… I probably worry far too much about it, really. I know I wasted too much time on getting all this ready, certainly.
You may have noticed, the site has been updated a little. Flash doesn’t work in a browser anymore, so I’ve taken a cue from other dev sites and put my news front and center when you come to the site, and I’ve made a new splash page for new folks to see what all I’ve got going on. And it’s disappointing to admit that’s been the bulk of the work I’ve done since shipping MVOL to supporters. I did end up a little burnt out after what a struggle it was making that update happen, so I took some time off, as well as handled some personal life issues that had cropped up, but a lot of this time was just letting stress over how to turn all my work into a pretty, marketable package hold me up. I’m finally ready to put up the first ad, though, and hopefully I can get a couple more going shortly with much less trouble, but I also feel like I’ve had enough of a break and it’s time to get back to my real work again.
Project Matchmaker has been waiting a good while now. I feel much more ready to work on its mechanical side, which is great, since it currently has a lot of issues in the backend. I commissioned the basic engine to help me get started in Unity and it was a big help, but the text parser needs a serious overhaul, and the system for rewinding time, together with the save system, have some underlying issues I’ve got to handle before I can really move forward. I tried to make it work as best I could, but you may have noticed, for example, punctuation disappearing after any gendered pronoun, and the prompts for “discovering” new info/routes were static. Lots of little details for now, but I have a lot I want to do from here that just isn’t possible as the system is built now.
So that’s where I’m going from here. In the meantime, MVOL is up to v1.01 for supporters, and should be opening to more of them this Friday, as I’m aiming for a public release on the 23rd. If you just found my work, thanks for coming to check this out! I hope you have a memorable experience. And if you’ve been following me a while already, thank you for sticking it out with me. I hope I’ve given you plenty of reason to be excited about what’s coming from here!
Thanks for reading!