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.
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.
On January 28th, 2012, after a month of frantic work relearning how to program, I uploaded a very basic, cobbled together v0.01. Looking over that page, it was apparently an incredibly buggy mess, but also got a strong reaction from a lot of people. After that, I worked on the game in my spare time, releasing very slowly, but people asked for ways to support the game, so I opened a Paypal. Eventually they suggested a Patreon, so I opened one of those, and this… very gradually turned into a living for me.
I tackled the bulk of the big surveys I rolled out in the last few months covering MVOL and how I should build my future projects in the last post, and today it’s time to go over the results for the last survey, then talk about some of the write-in feedback I’ve gotten! I’ve learned a lot of important things from these surveys and I’m really happy with how they’ve turned out overall. It’s been a ton of work, but I do want to do more of these in the future to make sure I’m staying in touch with you guys! Let’s get started!
Alright! I rolled out a big series of surveys to cap off a big series of posts talking about how I think MVOL has gone and what I’m going to do from here, and I gave a healthy amount of time for everyone to give their opinions before I downloaded all the data and spent some time wrangling it up into a bunch of useful numbers and graphs. It’s taken a lot more time and work to get this all put together than I expected, but I’m definitely getting some helpful info! Today I’m gonna go over the results from the first three surveys and how I’m interpreting them, then talk about how it’ll influence my choices from here.
This update has a wide variety of changes in it, so I’ve got a lot to cover. There are two new sections of content, the early game has been heavily revamped, a limited system for customizing your species is up and running, two new pieces of art are in there, and lots of little changes besides. Also, two big announcements!
Over the past several months I’ve been writing a series of posts explaining my thoughts about how MVOL has turned out and all my hopes and plans for the future. Today I’m going to try and sum up the very heart of what I’ve been trying to say with all that, and then I’m going to link a survey I’d like as many of my fans to respond to as possible. If you haven’t read the posts before this, I absolutely encourage you to check it out from the start so you can get all the details, but for those that can’t put in that much time reading, hopefully the wrap-up here will give you the gist of it, along with a few extra notes.
The big series of blog posts I’ve been putting out the last few months has all been building up to the survey I’m working on now. But… it turns out I kinda have a lot of things I want to ask you. So I’m breaking the survey down into parts to make it easier for you guys! With that in mind, I’m shipping out the first survey a little early.
To be honest, this section has been the most difficult for me out of this whole process. I’ve rewritten it in part or in whole something like six times now, partly because I’m uncomfortable with some of the things I have to say about myself, and partly because I only came to realize what I was really trying to say more recently. Making a career out of designing my own game has been amazing, and I deeply appreciate that you all have supported me to make this a reality. That said, it’s only now that things are finally changing up that I’ve come to realize just what an effect it’s had on me. I’ve grown comfortable with the cycle of producing endless content, primarily in text, for this one game– even though it’s been grating at me to be so focused on one thing to the point of repetition by this point.
At this point, I’ve gone over the big lessons I’ve learned from MVOL, both from my successes and my failures. I’m hoping this gives you a pretty strong sense of context and helps you understand the mindset behind the changes I want to make from here, but I haven’t actually been very specific about what changes I want to make in how I make games from here. For this post, I’d like to get into the details of what ways, specifically, I want to push myself to improve in making adult games, and what I want to experiment with in the “small prototype” plan I mentioned before. This should give you a better idea of what, specifically, is coming– or rather, what’s being added to what I already do, in one project or another. Take a look, and if you have feedback, I’m always happy to hear about it.