A lot of the development for Project Voice has been characterized by frustration, delays, and a lot of anxiety. It’s been a huge challenge on many different levels, and keeping any kind of momentum going on the project has been pretty tough. So it’s hard to overstate my relief at this point to report that the project is finally coming together and looking better every day! I just got the game to the point it actually “plays” and all the basic functionality actually works this week, which I’m coming to really respect as a huge factor psychologically in engaging with the game and all its needs.
It’s been about a month since my last public dev journal, when I broke the news that Project Voice had hit a wall on the concept stage, but that I was finally really getting things rolling with it. Then a couple weeks ago I dropped a whole bunch of behind the scenes commentary about the process I’ve been going through on my supporters with the supporter-exclusive dev journal. At that point I was just about done with the writing for the project, and the last two weeks have been turning more to focus on the audio side of things, both for recording lines and exploring how to turn those recordings into actual game assets.
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.
First of all, if you haven’t had the chance to play Project Matchmaker v0.02 yet, it is now available to the public! You can grab it from the menu on the left (or maybe above on mobile?) and you can get all the info on what’s going on with this update over here. Once you’ve played the new update, and hopefully have played Project Wild One as well, I’d like to get your opinion! I’ve made a short survey you can fill out through the link below. Now, I’m going to give some context, but the important thing to me is to know how you personally feel about these projects, so you’re welcome, maybe even encouraged, to fill it out before reading on.
The first prototype for this game was sort of a teaser more than anything. The game looked very bland, you got some character development, then it stopped just short of the actual sex. Boo! Well, with this update we can finally finish that scene, including three completely different versions of the sex scene depending on what kind of anatomy these newlyweds have had hidden away. Speaking of which, the art has been expanded with a couple states of undress to let you see what all they’ve got going on!
Working on Project Wild One has had a lot of weird implications for coming back to Project Matchmaker. For one, it made me a little embarrassed to have released something so unappealing to look at… implying that now that I’ve gone and made PWO look halfway decent, I’ve accidentally raised the bar for myself and now I feel like PMM needs to match it. I’ve always believed the content comes first, but it’s true that the packaging, the GUI and all that, can do a lot to “set the mood” and alter your emotional impression, so it’s probably true that I should at least strive not to hinder myself overmuch in that regard. Unfortunately, this game’s themes might actually be more demanding, style-wise…
Today’s the big day for the little update to MVOL! You can get all the info on what’s been going on and going into the update in my post over here, and you can download the new version from the menu on the left (or above on mobile I believe) as well as find the HTML5 version for online play.
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.
One month ago, Project Wild One finally released v0.01 to supporters, and I was frustrated that it had taken so long when I had pledged to shift to a “one to two month” development cycle during this stage of my career. I wanted to put out new updates every one to two months, and so far it had only been two months or more. So I set myself a deadline to get at least a small release done in no more than one month, and today I’m following through on that with MVOL v1.01 shipping to supporters… under the definition of a month as 30 days.
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!