Dev Journal: Vision and Enlightenment

Well, I ended up putting this one off for a while, and now I’ve suddenly got a lot to talk about.

First thing, the results are in from my recent survey! It looks like both Project Matchmaker and Project Wild One are seen pretty favorably overall, but Project Wild One was the clear winner between the two. I’ll take a minute to go over some of the details.

I asked how excited you guys are about each game individually on a scale of 1 to 5. Both games were positive overall, with more 5s than anything else, but PMM saw 22.9% of the vote at 3 and 28.1% of the vote at 5 (“MOAR”) while PWO had 12.5% and 42.8%, respectively. It looks like people don’t dislike PMM, but PWO is definitely getting a more passionate and positive response overall. Supporters were more positive about both projects, but still gave PWO a higher rating overall.

Next, I asked how you would feel about supporting my work if I switched my main project from PMM to PWO. The biggest response was a 3– right in the middle, no big change, at 36.2% of the vote. But the overall vote was much more positive than negative, with 26.9% at 5 and only 6.2% saying they’d be much less interested in supporting. And the supporter vote leaned a little more positive than the average!

This is right after PMM came out, when you’d expect its support/excitement to be highest, so unless lots of people disregarded my request and read ahead to my grumblings about troubles with PMM and excitement over PMM before voting, I think these results have been pretty clear cut. The feedback I’ve already been hearing hasn’t been a vocal minority but the signs of a game that gets a stronger reaction and sense of excitement out of people. It’s certainly a more technically ambitious project, and one that challenges me in a lot of new ways while making it possibly harder for me to show my established strengths, but right now it looks like it’s the project that both my fans and I are most excited about.

To be honest, I’d been wondering about doing this from pretty early in PWO’s design when I realized how much damn fun I was having with it, but I’m always the cautious type, and there were a lot of other variables to be concerned about as I mentioned before. But I think the time is right for me to announce: from here on, Project Wild One will be my new Main Project!

I’ll have to go through and update my info in various places in the days to come, and I’m still working mostly on Project Voice at the moment, but I’ll look forward to diving in more on PWO soon. With my various troubles with PMM, I think it’s safe to say I’ll be putting it on the shelf for a while, but that doesn’t mean I’ll never come back to it. It would require a lot of work to overhaul it and get it into a proper state to be built out further, but there are a lot of charming ideas in there that I wouldn’t mind expanding on someday.

Now, there were a few more questions on the survey, so let’s go over those real quick. I also asked for some more general feedback on the prototyping process so far. I asked how much you all feel like these projects aren’t exciting and I should put out something more new and different and got a very negative response, with 46.4% of the vote in the 1 slot, meaning PWO and PMM are in fact “different enough,” so to speak. Supporters actually voted more positively here: the folks keeping me fed wouldn’t entirely mind something more new and exciting? But it was still a strongly negative response overall, even from them.

Next I asked if you wish I would make something more similar to MVOL. This still got a very negative response, but a less… resounding one than the preceding question. 32.7% of the vote landed in the 1 slot and 31.4% in the 2 slot, so a fair portion of people were at least a little tempted to want something more similar to my old work. This response was also more positive among my supporters, though still negative overall.

The last directed question was, are you still excited to see more ideas and prototypes? As opposed to being better off focusing mostly on the prototypes I’ve already made. The response here was very… middling, with a negative lean. 26.1% of the vote landed on 3, with 41.9% of voters on the negative side and the remaining 32% on the positive side. Supporters were a little more positive on this one too, with a weighted average landing almost exactly on 3.

So, looking over all of this, here’s what I’m more or less reading as the attitude from the crowd: “We like the prototypes you’ve made, and we want to see more of them. If you’re excited to make more prototypes then that might be cool, especially if it’s something more similar to MVOL, but we don’t want to see these projects languish as prototypes forever.” With supporters adding in a bit of “We’re still fairly interested in seeing new prototypes, but mostly agree with the above!”

And indeed, there were a fair few opinions that read very similar to that in the final section of the survey, the write-in! You guys were very kind and supportive, which is always such a balm to my heart. Sometimes I worry you guys are spoiling me. But I do appreciate all your kind words, and I appreciate your taking the time to share your thoughts and concerns. I saw a lot of discussion comparing and contrasting PWO, PMM, and MVOL, and some concern that with how long it can take to turn a game into a complete product I should probably try and pick something to stick to soon.

There was excitement about the possibilities with PWO and concern about how little emotional content it has. People did seem to like how PMM is developing and have some excitement for the themes and characters, but also concern that we wouldn’t get to know them as well as we did Lith. I saw some concern with the clunkiness of design and the lack of content with both projects. I saw complaints that PWO had too much clicking and too little text, and that PMM had too much text and not enough control. It’s clear that folks have already gotten very attached to these projects and have a lot of hopes and wishes for them.

And that’s great! And yeah, a lot of the worries I’ve seen expressed are issues I’ve been aware of and hoping to implement solutions for down the line. All in due time and all that. But I do think there’s one important, if difficult, element to the prototyping process I have to acknowledge:

If I’m too afraid to let go of a prototype, then that will hold me back from really experimenting and dreaming with the possibilities. That’s exactly why I call them prototypes, and why I put Project in the name each time: they’re not full games yet, they’re ideas that might become games if the original idea proves worthwhile. The final goal of this prototyping process is to accomplish a few things:

1. Find the best possible single project to work on moving forward.
2. Explore enough of the ideas I’ve got bouncing around in my head that I can feel content knowing I picked the right one, and can move forward without regrets.
3. Maybe inspire someone else to pick up an idea or two I won’t have the time for but that deserves some development?

If I treat every prototype I make as some kind of iron-bound contract to eventually turn it into a complete project, then that’s not a prototyping period. That’s just making way too much work for myself all at once. I knew going into this that I would make tiny demos for various ideas, and that inevitably some of them would excite both you and me, but that they wouldn’t be quite as exciting as other ideas and… at some point we’d have to let go of them and accept that my attention is better focused elsewhere. It’s fun and exciting to keep rolling out new ideas, but that bittersweet knowledge that only one will actually turn into a full game is the trade-off.

The important thing is, I’m learning things from every prototype. Each one represents a lot of my questions, ideas, ambitions, and wishes for the future of the medium. And once I’ve made them at least playable enough to put in your hands, then I can start getting answers to my questions, and I can put all the rest to the test to see what works well, what doesn’t, and what new challenges or limitations I hadn’t thought of will arise. This has helped me refine my ideas for other prototypes, discarding some now that I know they just won’t work, while tightening the design of others to hopefully give them better chances. I don’t know how many more prototypes I’ll roll out from here. I’ll try to strike a good balance between new ideas and starting to flesh out Project Wild One properly, but I don’t think I can be satisfied just yet that it’s the best out of all the ideas I’ve got boiling over back here. Hell, chances seem good that a few new prototypes can give me more feedback and insight to better refine PWO anyway, even if it does stay my Main Project and go the distance. I’m always hungry for more input and more different ways to look at the question of how to make a good game.

Project Voice is arguably a good example of that, and a subject I should really get started on. This is a pretty long Dev Journal already, and I haven’t really gotten into what the hell I’ve been actually doing yet.

Well, the short answer is, I ran into a brick wall on it, but I’m finally breaking through. When I went in, I thought it would be really cool to make it a very “visual impairment-aware” game and try to be a piece of media that spreads awareness and portrays the life of the blind or visually impaired accurately. I do try to “do good” with my games, and disability is a difficult and emotionally charged subject. But… I spent a lot of the last month doing research, trying to get a stronger feel for how similar the life of a blind person is to anyone else’s, what differs, how the world treats them and how they do things from day to day, and I learned a lot… but I just couldn’t get to that sense that I really understood them. I looked at blind-friendly games, I liked the idea of making this game literally fully accessible for the visually-impaired to play it easily.

I wanted to make this work, but… things weren’t moving forward. I kept trying to reach that space where I felt confident that this would “work,” and I just couldn’t get there. I fell into a sort of creative paralysis trying to balance all these things and find what felt “right” when so much of it was about a lifestyle, about a world that I’ve never experienced, that I’ve never really been involved with before this, but that it felt very important to get exactly right. If I contributed to the public perception of the disabled in a misleading or even hurtful way, I’d be… I couldn’t stand it.

You might say, well, would it really hurt that much? It’s a small project, literally the first prototype that’s not meant to be turned into “a full game,” and it’s not like millions of people play my games or anything anyway. And… that’s a big part of why I eventually decided it wasn’t worth getting into all of that, in the end. Even if I do put in the research and literally interview blind people to talk about what blind sex is like, this is going to be… a very small, practically one-off project, that relatively few people will play. In the end, I think it’s more important that I don’t portray these people poorly, than that I portray them well. So for this project at least, I’ve decided to let go of the idea of playing with the theme of visual impairment.

The truth is, the core of this project is a series of goals focused around voice acting and sound. The whole blind idea was a secondary addition. I explored this idea for last month’s Side-Write for supporters, going over all the possibilities I could think of for how to build the project to meet those goals, and I honestly didn’t expect too much to change, but by the end I found that I had a new idea for the game’s story that felt much more comfortable and doable to me. The creative paralysis was gone, and pieces were falling into place almost effortlessly in comparison.

I do feel bad that I can’t rise to the challenge to spread awareness and acceptance for the differently abled. I’m hoping that there are creators out there that are much closer to that life and have a much stronger, deeper understanding of what it’s really like, that can do it justice better than I can. I still might touch on the subject in the future, at least as a side thing, to an extent that I can feel confident in, but I’m just not ready to make it the star of the show, so to speak.

So in the last week I’ve been figuring out a lot of the project from scratch under the new idea. I opened up some discussion with my mid-tier supporters on the discord last night, and I’ll be putting out a vote for supporters soon as well to try and nail down some of the details. I’ve recorded some test lines (a lot of last month was also getting equipment and generally preparing for my first real foray into voice acting with test scripts and the like. There’s been a lot of… getting over the embarrassment of hearing yourself intimately say lewd things in your ear.) and I’m fleshing out the story and all that. This format, having to record everything and get the inflection to “work” between different variants, is going to add a lot of new restrictions and challenges. I’ve suffered a pretty big setback having to throw out all that work and worry, but things are feeling a lot better now, and I’m hoping production will go much smoother from here.

Phew. That was a lot to go over. I think I’d better wrap it up there for now. Thanks for voting, folks! Thanks for reading all this, and thanks for supporting my work! If you’re a voting-level supporter, keep an eye out for another vote popping up on Patreon and SubscribeStar soon! Either way, hope your summer (or winter) is going well!