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.
Alright, this is it! With this update, the main storyline content is now complete, and all of the endings I have planned are now in the game. There are also just tons of changes and additions with this version, so I’ve got a lot to go over. I know some folks may be a little sick of hearing this by now, but one more time, the bulk of the new content for this update is hidden content. I’ve been thinking a lot on how I’d make sure people can find it, but the thing is, this is meant to be literally the most hidden, hardest to find content in the game, that you hopefully will only find after you’ve seen just about everything else.
I’ve been working on this update right up to the last minute so I’m a little wiped out, but I’m pretty proud of it. The big news for this one is that The Hidden Section is now complete! It got a pretty huge chunk of content with this update, and technically I could still go back and add a few last bits, but it’s at about 95% completed and has proper endings and everything. So that should be great news for the folks that like it, and the good news for those that don’t is that I’m just about done making any of that content from here out!
v0.42 brought us most of the Final Ending sequence, but I didn’t have time to do all the content for the other option on the big, first choice. You can now go either way! It’s gonna be a similar experience part of the way, then break off into a notably different thing after you’ve proven yourself. I’m sure some folks were disappointed they couldn’t make “the big choice” that was built up all that time as they wanted to.
So I’ve discussed the things I think I did well with MVOL, most of which I’m hoping to carry forward into my future work as much as possible. But I also feel like working on MVOL has taught me a lot of important lessons about erotic games, and I really want to push in some new directions to “do a better job” in several metrics, including making the experience better for all of you guys, making this less stressful for me, making it more successful for me as a business, and getting more people to play my games. So let’s talk about flaws and mistakes, and how I want to do better next time.
I have a lot of criticisms for myself and a lot of things I want to improve on, but before I get into that I figure it’s a good idea to discuss what I feel I did well in making MVOL, both to give a more well-rounded view and so you guys don’t think I’m being too hard on myself later on. I’m certainly proud of what I’ve accomplished so far, even if there are many, many ways that I might wish I had done better. Inversely, please don’t take this post as me bragging about my accomplishments, and certainly if you think I haven’t done so well as I describe, you should let me know, as well as if there is anything you admire about MVOL that I don’t cover here. I’m also trying to get a strong idea of what made up MVOL’s “appeal,” so I don’t lose sight of that too much in my future works.
Hey, guys! I’ll be getting back to talking about the past and future of my work soon, but a couple things have cropped up that I’d like to talk about quickly.
My Very Own Lith is finally nearing completion! While it still needs a good deal of content and several more endings added before it’s ready to move into beta, and I expect to still have a lot of work to do on the game after that before it’s a finished project I can be happy with, I do think now is a good time to start talking about the future beyond MVOL. This project has been a huge part of my life for a long time now, so it’s a little strange and intimidating to even think about what will happen when development is over, but it’s also pretty exciting.
This one is a whopper! We took a break from the main storyline to chase side content for a couple…
Hello, folks! In case you didn’t see the post over on my Patreon, I thought I should update those interested on the situation. Usually I try to maintain a pretty regular cycle with MVOL’s development, in which I release the new public version of the game on the first weekend of the release month (would’ve been next weekend), the advance version a week before that, and the pre-release Monthly Mini-Update a week before that.