Let’s talk about my large-scale plan for Project Wild One, and where we are in it now. I’ve had a lot of feedback during development either saying folks couldn’t understand where exactly I was going with the game’s design, or else making suggestions that are clearly based on a very different vision for this game from mine. This is fair, for two reasons.
The first is that I didn’t go into development of this game with a complete vision of what this game would actually be in the end. I’m still figuring out some of it now. The second reason is that, for all the work I’ve put in so far, the game still doesn’t actually have its most important element installed yet. There’s a lot going on with these two facts, so let’s dive in!
By the Seat of My Pants
Once, video games were designed by starting with a “Design Bible.” You’d come up with the entire idea of what a game was going to be, detail it all in text, then pass that out to all the people working on it so they could all work toward the same goal. There were some good reasons for that then, but today, it’s clear that going in fully decided on everything the game will be before you’ve done any actual work is a recipe for folly.
The obvious reason is, something is always going to go wrong. Something you think you can code just won’t work. Something you think you can present on screen well will never look good. Something you think will be fun just never quite gets there. Games are far too complicated to never have these problems, and any initial design will have weaknesses, no matter how much you try to plan and look ahead.
The less obvious reason is, it’s not always clear where the real strengths lie in what you’re trying to make. Sometimes you can start with a basic idea pointed one direction, build a game, then find it’s actually a lot more fun for players to focus in another direction you never would have anticipated. Some minor aspect of your design can be more fun than the entire rest of the game.
If you lock in your design at the start and commit all your resources to it, you’re basically doomed to either create a game with many unforeseen weaknesses and ignored, unexploited strengths, or to waste loads of spent resources on components you’ll have to discard to make a better game. You have to go in with an open mind, find the most important parts of your design, and adapt everything else to support those.
In a way, this is what happened with My Very Own Lith. I started with a very small, simple idea, and I paid attention to the feedback I got and how people engaged with the game. Originally, the game would basically “end” at the collars. You’ve established your relationship, hurray. But players wanted more, wanted that to mean something, and they were very intrigued with the setting and its possibilities. The core strength of the game was Lith, the anchor of your emotional investment, and we still only knew a little about him.
So I expanded the game. I embraced the mysteries and fantastical nature of the Void, and used it to allow Lith to chase his wishes, revealing more about what he really has going on inside in the process. Your choices could lead you down strange, twisting paths, fraught with danger, uncertainty, and emotional turmoil. Some choices led to tragedy, but if you managed to scrape through, you might find a real understanding and resolution to the conflict hidden at Lith’s core at the end of it all, and find your own true identity in the process.
I certainly couldn’t have imagined all of that would happen when I first decided to make “some kinda game about my OC,” but as I explored the possibilities, it developed on its own to play to my strengths as a developer and Lith’s strengths as a character and emotional center. So I knew, going into Project Wild One, that I couldn’t presume to decide exactly what the game would be from the start. I had a lot of things I knew I wanted to see, that I thought would help develop the adult gaming community and that I could be motivated at length to work on, and I had to explore how that all could best be explored and matched to my skills.
What I Want
Being an indie game dev is a very special experience, because it allows me to choose exactly what I make and how, but it also demands a lot of me, day after day. There is no “relaxed busy work” with this job. Every single day, I have to be ready to make important decisions, to arrange every single piece from the biggest to the smallest to all align toward the same goals. Working on something I care about, something that always gives me direction and motivation, is critical. This doesn’t mean I get to be selfish about designing this game. It means I have to be selfish about the design. If I try to design for someone else, uncertainty quickly becomes an overwhelming burden slowing everything down, and the quality of my work drops rapidly. I hope that my work does give others happiness, but I have to design for myself first. So let me ramble some about what I care about in adult games, and what it drives me to put into Project Wild One.
I’ve played a lot of adult games. I’ve tried hundreds at this point, of many different types. I love many of them for different reasons, and some frustrate me because they feel so close to greatness but fall just short, and many just can’t hold my interest for very long, or even make me uncomfortable. I’ve tried to examine what works well for me in each of them, and what doesn’t, and while a lot of that is tied to things like my personal kinks, beliefs, or artistic preferences, there are a few fundamental differences that I feel make some games better in a way that isn’t tied to anything so personal or subjective, but that directly affects me as a human being and a sexual entity. I won’t talk about all of them right now, but there are a few that especially inform my plans for PWO.
The big one is this: the relationship between actual sexual content and gameplay vastly changes the feel of the game. Some games only show sexy stuff when you “fail” or “lose.” This works for certain narratives, encouraging the sense that you are “pure” or “virtuous” while still allowing you to get sexy stuff. I could talk a lot about how this plays into our needs and psychology, but for now, I’ll just say I don’t like what a negative connotation this attaches to sex. Some games also have sex scenes if you “win” in something like a fight, which does make it feel like a reward, but they have to work a careful balance to leave you not feeling like a creep. Some games have all their sexy stuff almost completely detached from gameplay, happening in a pure narrative scope, with gameplay happening in between. This always frustrates me, because it is only during the actual gameplay that I actually feel immersed and like I am “doing this thing,” while a long narrative or a cutscene feels jarringly detached from me.
Obviously, that last overlaps a lot with MVOL, and you might say it’s one of the game’s biggest weaknesses: you have very little control over how things go, especially in sex, and indeed there’s very little gameplay at all. I have to rely entirely on the strength of my prose to keep you immersed. This is part of why tackling this issue became central to my goals for PWO. Some of the strongest, most stimulating, most memorable moments I’ve experienced with adult games came from something very simple: a sex scene I could actually interact with, where it felt like my sexual partner reacted to me directly. Not acting out some pre-written script, not just doing the same simple thing over and over, but where an NPC did something unexpected and human that created a moment of real, emotional and sexual excitement in me. Yes, this was an illusion, but it was a far, far more effective and compelling illusion than 99% of what I’ve gone through in adult games.
So I decided that I wanted to create a game that could provoke that feeling as much as possible. I wanted to make a game where the sex was always central to the gameplay, where you had as much control as possible over what your character did, and where NPCs could act in ways that felt emotionally real. I want you to flirt with someone and feel uncertain if you’ll be rejected. I want you to fend off unwanted advances, but be tempted to give in. I want you to find someone that feels special, that is everything you’re looking for in a sexual partner, and worry about whether they’ll turn out to have a dealbreaker you don’t see yet, or whether they see a dealbreaker in you. I want you to have sex until you’re exhausted, but when they want to go just one more time, because they just desire you so much, you smile and go for it, because you can’t say no to them. And I want all of this to happen dynamically, based on your actions and what each NPC has going on inside, so you will never have the same experience twice. You’ll never know where this encounter is going.
I know that I’ll never be able to design NPCs that actually replicate human behavior convincingly, even within the narrow confines of what they can do in a game. There will be times you snap out of it and realize this is just a program. But I want to build a system that can give you those moments that seem to me like the most universally special and satisfying thing adult games can do, as often as possible.
Everything Serves the Design
To be clear, I didn’t have this idea totally fleshed out when I started either, but I knew that I wanted sex to be at the center of the gameplay. I knew that was important. Almost everything else was left ambiguous, because I knew that if I ran into an issue where something else conflicted with that central goal, the something else had to change. So instead, I started with that central goal, began building systems to support it, and used it as the starting point for just about every design choice to follow.
At first, I thought that just building the system for all the sexual possibilities would be the biggest challenge– keeping sex central to gameplay, using gameplay to reinforce the sense of having sex, means I would need rich systems for handling all sorts of sexual situations and making everything you do in sex have gameplay consequences that lingered after. This is critical to making the sex “feel real.” But the more I explored how to actually accomplish that, the more it became clear to me: there was a bigger challenge lurking behind that one.
For sex to feel real, you need to feel like the one you’re having sex with is able to do just about everything you can– if each NPC was limited to just doing a few things, they would feel less like people and more like fixtures, toys, no matter how well-crafted. They had to be able to stimulate you, to feel pleasure, to be attracted to you or to reject you. This meant they had to have preferences, and their own goals. Their own thoughts and plans.
This might sound like a big jump to you. You’d be absolutely right. This is the step that just about every sane designer would look at and say “actually, let’s aim for something simpler. This isn’t really the focus of our design, so let’s pare it down.” And that’s fair. But the more I thought about this challenge, the more I realized that it was the perfect challenge for me. I have, since childhood, been an avid student of the mind. I study myself, and I study others, and I have long honed the ability to let go of my self and assemble a different mind inside me, to better understand how and why someone acts how they do. Exploring the nature of people and their struggles both internal and with others is central to my motivation to write. I won’t say my understanding is perfect, but this idea, this goal, would play perfectly into my strengths and passions, and it dovetails well with the strengths of MVOL, to feel like a natural extension of my existing reputation.
Project Wild One isn’t the first game to have direct gameplay for sex scenes. I’ve played several, and I admire some aspects, while remaining frustrated with others. I think that this lack, this omnipresent simplicity, is the core of it. I will never perfectly replicate a human, but indeed, a sexual fantasy probably shouldn’t do that anyway. I only need to get closer to that feeling for the core goal of my game to be completed successfully. How far I can go in that direction, how much I can make the NPCs feel like people while being rewarding to interact with, dictates how much of a success this game will be, in my eyes. Everything else I design for this game, from the story to the gameplay to the aesthetic, will be made to serve that goal.
An Empty Frame
So in that context, I think you can see why I keep referring to Project Wild One, as it is now, as “not even showing what sort of game it is yet.” I’ve been working to build up the mechanics for sex as I described before, but also systems for flexibly describing that sex, for customizing the PC and NPCs, and for couching the sex in larger mechanics of the world to give it meaning and consequences. All of this has been preparation and support, building the basic tools and context so that I could build a system for NPC control, knowing the rough mechanical context they’ll be interacting with.
And yet, the current system for NPC control is laughably insufficient. Characters are erratic, irrational, short-sighted, and frustrating. A lot of complaints I’ve received about the game suggest changing something else, but to me, they all point to this single problem– the problem I knew I would have to live with until I finally got to… here.
I’ve chipped away at the sides of it, I’ve done everything I can to build supporting systems for it, and I even managed to chop the whole beast into two halves and duct tape the first half onto the old system so I could avoid going too long without an update. Now, after I’ve taken a break to tackle a hundred little things to hopefully make the game more fun during the wait, I’m ready to finally, finally build The Real Deal.
I call it the Interp-Theory Mind, because it uses a large series of templated objects called Interps, representing interpretations of events it’s seen, and Theories, consolidating those ideas into a larger sense of what’s happening right now, to robustly form ongoing ideas of the world and everyone in it for each separate NPC. It tracks what’s going on now as well as a large-scale sense of the past, it can reinterpret past events as it learns new things, and with this update, it will weigh its own various needs and desires to decide on a course of action that makes sense for it moment to moment. I’ve already cracked a lot of the biggest challenges with it, and the coming work will still only render the system in its most basic form, but it will finally be a single, complete system for turning all of the things an NPC can perceive into actions that follow a consistent, internal logic.
This system is the centerpiece of Project Wild One, waiting to slot into place, and its addition will mark the first version I would actually call “a playable prototype of my goal.” I have a lot of things I hope I can add to it after that, and there are many mechanics and features that would be wholly reliant on this system already being in place I haven’t yet been able to even start on. This update will be the turning point for the entire project.
What Comes After
It’s possible that one of the most universal experiences in playing a game is to wistfully think about what features could be added to improve it. I’ve been dreaming about things I could add to this game since halfway through making MVOL, and the more I work on it, the more ideas I have, and the more I develop the ones I’ve been holding close all this time. On top of that, every time I put out a new update, the most prevalent feedback I get is “it’d be great if you added X, Y, and Z to this game!” If there is one thing I could never possibly lack for, it is ideas for what to add.
Sadly, it’s obviously much harder to implement a new feature than to come up with one. I knew that since childhood, but recent updates have forced me to come to terms with just how true this is, and with what it means for choosing how exactly to design this game. My mantra for looking at ideas for additions to MVOL (and good lord, there were many) was “that would not serve the main goal.” MVOL has a very tight design, and while it is very long, it is arguably also very lean when it comes to content that doesn’t serve the game’s main goal in one way or another. While there are certainly many, many possible additions that might make the game better to one person, or even to several, they would also add flab to the game as a whole and distract from its true purpose. One of the reasons I was excited about PWO was that it could accept a much larger range of possibilities into itself far more smoothly than MVOL ever could. Its goal is so broad and flexible that many things could serve it, at least in some way.
This has let me incorporate many more suggestions from players smoothly, and it’s allowed me to develop far more of my own ideas to support and enhance what the game wants to do. I’ve been pushing myself to constantly grow as a programmer so I can build new, better systems for bigger, better, more complicated ideas, and while it’s been terribly challenging, it’s also been tremendously rewarding. Still, I do have to turn down a very large portion of ideas from others and myself for not being a good fit for the game, or adapt them into alterations of things I already planned– and yet, I still run into a new, very serious problem.
MVOL’s design was, mechanically, dead simple. The entire game’s series of systems might have been less complicated than one of the major systems I’ve built for PWO. Since v0.01, the focus of my work on MVOL was writing, which is a relatively steady process with a relatively predictable rate for completion of any given portion. I say relatively, because if I’d told past me that writing is a steady and predictable task, he’d laugh in my face. But compared to designing new systems from scratch, it’s far steadier work. Every time I start building a new system in PWO, I go in excited and optimistic. And then Game Development happens, and everything goes to hell.
Last year was a rough year for just about everyone. I can’t say this was entirely unrelated, but it was a rough year for me for a very different reason. Well, reasons, but let’s focus on the large-scale result: I’d finally finished a big update, and declared I wanted to do a “quick, small update” as a break from that. And to do that, I made the worst possible choice: I tried to build a new system. So it bloated into a massive update that took forever. And, uh… that process happened twice in a row. And that was 2025, for me.
So I’m looking back with a healthy heap of chagrin, and I’m forced to accept the truth: I can’t just keep adding new mechanics to Project Wild One all willy-nilly, no matter how fun it might be, how exciting it might be, or how much better it might make the game. I’m still sitting on dozens of ideas I’d love to incorporate into the game, and just about every one could work well and support the main goals, but I have to accept that I need to get even more picky about what I add. I can’t even add all the things that would work perfectly well toward the game’s goals, because if I add them early, it delays getting to the real meat of the game, but once all the main stuff is added, most of these mechanics can’t really be added after without forcing massive reworks to the main content.
This has been… tough for me to confront, just how much I need to pare down even the most promising and fun possibilities for the sake of time, but I know that the truth is, in this regard I’m like a rich man complaining about not being able to afford a third yacht. My supporters have allowed me the incredible freedom to work on what I want, by my own directive, without any hard deadlines or having to worry about paying the bills if it takes another month to finish something. This is an incredible privilege, and one that 99% of game devs do not enjoy. I don’t want to ever take that for granted.
Indeed, with MVOL, I followed more strict, self-imposed deadlines, because that still felt practical with writing. These years of learning, designing, and programming new systems have been almost impossible to structure strictly without forcing massive compromises to quality. I’m sure that it’s this reality that lies behind many of the most disappointing games we find thrust onto the market: they could have been great, if they had more time, but they were forced to compromise nearly everything to hit a deadline. Project Wild One has, without a doubt, benefited immeasurably from the freedom to take the time it needs, to design the right system for each of its needs, then implement it properly, even if that ends up taking longer than initially expected.
But we still have to be realistic, and accept our limitations. I can’t just build new systems for this one game forever, especially when it is still yet to truly “show its worth.” So many of the systems I’ve built, I’ve barely begun to show off– they can do so much for the game once they have proper content to work with, but right now I just need them to be there at all so I can move on to the next system. These last couple updates were my biggest “diversions” from otherwise focusing wholly on getting to a complete ITM as soon as possible. That was part of why I wanted them to be quick and light, and I kept telling myself I’d make them so, but even “non-essential systems” are still systems that need proper time to design and develop.
So from here on, working on Project Wild One, I’m refocusing on the real goal. I’ve let all of these other systems take up far too much time, and while I’ve worked on several other games intermittently since then, I technically started work on PWO in late 2020. It’s past time I make at least the most basic version of “what this game is” to me a reality.
Everything Else
I’m feeling confident about taking this big next step, and if there’s anything I feel uncertain about, it’s what I’ll actually be focusing on after this update ships. Hitting that huge milestone is terribly exciting, and so many new things will open up for me to work on once that system is in place, but it’s also true that, while I’ve been pushing off a million things I’d love to do with PWO until after the ITM is complete, I’ve been pushing off some pretty big things outside the project, too.
As I write this, another wave of reports and complaints are coming in that MVOL isn’t working for people. It seems that for some reason, passing late February on a Windows computer renders MVOL, specifically, unplayable for a lot of people. Setting your clock back, or using special apps that run a program in a sandbox that convinces them it’s a different date, seems to resolve the issue. That’s been a weird one. Before that, we’ve seen a lot of folks no longer able to play the Android version, and of course, the great Flash extinction. The game is complete, but its playability is spotty at best.
At this point, I’m confident that I can port MVOL well to Unity, which should give it a much longer playable lifespan. I don’t foresee any serious issues, it would basically just amount to a great heap of work, and maybe cursing my younger self some for odd choices I have to replicate along the way to recapture the old game accurately. Still, I think the work is worth doing– and I’d like to work on a parallel project when I do, to also refine MVOL into a “final cut” version in which I go through and tighten the game up in many respects, add a few extra touches, and offer it as a product for sale on Steam. The original, complete game will always be free, but I’ve always intended to eventually offer a “premium” version of some kind, and I think I’ve had a long enough break to feel ready to work on the game a little more.
Still, I didn’t want to get into that until PWO was “standing on its own.” So that will be the big question on the far side of this update. The ITM will finally be complete, albeit in a bare-bones state, and I’ll probably have so many things I burn to add to it as soon as possible to show off what it can do, to make it better, to make NPCs feel more alive, and to finally add all the things to the game in general that I’ve been waiting for this moment to add! But it will be the very earliest I could comfortably step away from the project for a minute, as well. I’ll be spoiled for choice. I’ll probably hold some kind of vote to at least see how my supporters are feeling about it all, but I know I’ll be going into it with a lot of conflicting, strong emotions.
The Right Now
I’ve composed most of this to try and make a thorough explanation of “what PWO is all about right now” that I can point folks to for some time to come. But this is also a dev journal, so I should talk a little about where we are right now, specifically. Sadly, there’s not too much to say.
Once v0.10 was out, I took some time to straighten myself out and relax. I’d been pushing hard to get the update finished and out there, and I took some time to take care of my life and try to look at the big picture of things. I’ve been reading a good book or two on game design– I’d eschewed the practice for a long time, honestly, because any time I’d tried, it felt more limiting than helpful. Now, I feel like I have enough practical experience that the right book can offer me new ideas that integrate well into the understanding I’ve already established. It’s been a very valuable and enriching experience so far, and it even made me feel rather inspired. I started making good progress drafting out the core ideas of the other half of the ITM, figuring out what parts were crucial and what the tough design questions to work through would be.
Then I got hit with whatever this damn bug going around is, and I couldn’t think straight. Literally could not focus on anything. It was… maddening. I wasn’t even sick in any other way, just terribly tired all the time and couldn’t think clearly. I couldn’t even focus on the damn book enough to process what it was saying. And it’s just lingered for weeks and weeks! I barely managed to keep the basics running, fixing a few reported issues with v0.10 and handling the various supporter rewards and releases. It was only when I forced myself to really focus again on the recent Side-Write, and it turned out better than I’d expected, that I realized I might at least be capable of short bursts of focus again.
So, this Dev Journal is my first big push to get things rolling again. I’m crawling up out of whatever this muck is, and I’ve been wanting to lay out everything going on with the game clearly, partly because I feel like I’ve utterly failed to express in the past just how much the game “isn’t itself yet.” I think I’ve finally captured that decently here. With any luck, I’ll finally be back into real design work soon.
I wish I had better news. It drives me nuts to have lost so much time, but at the same time, I find myself claiming a certain victory out of it. In the past, I would have felt so insecure and anxious about “wasting time” that I might have entered a depressive spiral. But I’ve been doing a lot of work on myself, and I think I’ve come a long way in that respect. I’m not happy about losing the time, but I’ve largely come to accept it as “a big, involuntary vacation,” and tried to enjoy it as well as I could, even though I couldn’t even focus on gaming or anything like that most of the time. Hopefully it’s done me some good, and I’ll come back into this nice and fresh. So, I’m happy that I’m handling it well, both because it’s better for my health, and because I think I’ll be ready to bounce back and get actually productive sooner, without feeling compelled to immediately go into crunch “to make it up” and make a mess of the pace of the work.
Well, it’s been a big mess of a post, but I think I’ve accomplished most everything I was aiming for, and I hope you feel like you have a better understanding of how development is going both in the big picture and the close-up. I appreciate your reading through all this, and following my work. Most especially, I appreciate my supporters for keeping me alive through all the craziness of the world and letting me keep working on making something I love and can be proud of. We’re very close now, and while I know it will take some time to tackle this beast, I’m already filled with a deep sense of anticipation for the moment PWO can show its real face to the world at last. I hope you are too.
Bonus
I didn’t want to distract from the larger scale stuff I wanted to explain, but I’d also intended to present a more concrete list of features I’m keeping in mind for PWO’s future with this journal. I shared this with my supporters a while back, but in light of everything, I’ve re-tuned the list some since then to be more picky about what should make the cut. Hopefully this should also help you get a better idea of where Project Wild One is going! Check out my detailed plans for PWO’s features here!