v0.25 is Live!

Hello, everyone! You can play the new version right now by going to the Play the Game tab at the top!

Development on the game has been frustrating for a while now. I'm not getting as much done as I want, and I'm not getting the particular things done that I want. I guess "slow but always managing to carry on" has always been MVOL's story, and this bi-monthly schedule has probably helped a lot, but I still feel like I can do better.

Originally this update was supposed to be largely focused on getting the post-Stone Door content ready. But the more I tried to work with it, the more I realized that there were so many problems and questions and tricky bits I hadn't accounted for in planning it out that I needed to figure out before I could really write it all out, both in terms of practical, line by line writing and coding and in regards to the overall feel of the scenes and how players would perceive them. I've often been pretty interested in how dramatically players' reactions can differ from the thoughts I had going into the scene, but here I realized there were some pretty serious issues on that front that needed to be addressed. So it's turned into a pretty big puzzle!

Well, after struggling with that a long time I decided I needed to switch focus just to make sure v0.25 could have enough new content. The Wooden Door has been pretty sparse on content, and there was one particular idea I'd had in mind a while that I thought a lot of people would appreciate: scenes that play up your species more than other features, to really make you feel like it matters that you're a dragon, or a human, or a horse. Usually in any given scene, I'm either focusing on the particular thing that makes this scene unique, or trying to touch more on things like what collar you have and the nature of your relationship. And of course, that's all with the given that almost every sex scene forces me to at the very least acknowledge both the various mixtures of genitalia and Lith's dominance, if not re-writing the scenes altogether several times to account for all that. So there doesn't tend to be much room for other things.

And it doesn't help that I have a bit of a bias. While I do find the variety of species in the furry world very cool and I like exploring what it "means" to be a certain species, it doesn't really hold the fascination or the emotional charge for me that it seems to for a lot of people. Some people are super into, say, foxes specifically, and want every single scene to reflect their foxy nature, but I can't really get as into that. With everything else, it just doesn't feel like as big a priority.

But these scenes are my big chance to try and make up for that a little. Of course, that does mean that there's effectively a lot of content here that you won't be able to see because it's buried deep in the game and you only get one small portion of it according to your species, which is less than ideal. But I'm hoping that means both that people will be encouraged to try out other options for species a little, and that this will be one more way the game rewards replaying in general! And I'm hoping those that really dig their own species will like getting their own moment to have something a little special on that front.

That was the big push of new content this update. As usual, there are two new pieces of art tucked away in the game as well! I still want to focus on the post-Stone Door addition next, but I don't know how many more problems that is going to throw at me. I'm going to try and force myself to get some "just for me" writing in now that this is out, that's a step in my creative cycle I've been neglecting lately, and I think it's been giving me a really hard time because I always think I won't really need it. It's important to remember why you love what you do, you know?

That covers it for today. Thanks for reading, folks, and I hope you enjoy!