I got some positive feedback for setting up a place to discuss MVOL scene-by-scene, so I've gone ahead and set up a subforum for it! You can find it here, on the MVOL forum, though the age screen may send you to the main page. You can either click the link again after accepting, or just find it under "MVOL Discussion" in the subforum "Scene Discussion." I've only posted two scenes so far, as I thought it would help to try and start a little focused in, try to get a little conversation going, then add more scenes over time.
Each scene is posted with a full transcript of a sort of "default playthrough," and also comes with some commentary and explanation from me on what was intended and what I worry may have gone wrong with the scene. I hope this can serve as a little bit of a prompt to get people to share their own thoughts on the scenes-- how they felt first reading them, whether I succeeded in what I was going for or if I was right to be worried, things like that. Any discussion about the scene itself, how it's written and how it fits into the game is welcome. Just please remember that discussing how to find scenes or do things in the game goes in the Guides & Help subforum ^.^; Anyway, if you're at all interested, please come join us and share your thoughts! I've opened up with two of the big "introductory" scenes in the game: the opening moments of the game itself, and your first time entering the stone door for the blue collar.
And in other news, To Own a Wolf, Chapter One is finally complete once more on Amazon Kindle! I did run into a content block one more time-- strangely, the only part I'd returned to the description that time around was the praise from readers. Very confusing. But I'm just glad to have this behind us! Hopefully, this means I'll finally be able to post my first brand-new, eBook exclusive story next week! Stay tuned for news there!
Lastly, you may be interested to know that I've joined a friend of mine, Nich, in producing a few Let's Play's for perverted games! We're talking about doing a Let's Play of MVOL later, if that would even work for a text-based game, but we've started by playing around with a couple goofy flash games about molesting sleeping furries. Apparently Nich didn't have any friends to do furry porn games with, so he was stuck with boring skin people games. We had a lot of fun, though I kinda feel bad making fun of somebody else's game ^.^; Anyway, if you've ever been curious what I sound like spouting dirty jokes and pop culture references while sexually tormenting birds and wolves (and if so, holy cow, what?) then you're in luck! Come check it out! Just look for the ones with "sleep" in the title. Also, furries on the thumbnail will probably help tip you off.
Friday, October 23, 2015
Saturday, October 10, 2015
New Business and Old Business
Hey, folks! Lots of bits and pieces of news for you today. If you're already poking around the right circles, you may have already heard the first big thing. I've actually been holding off on making this announcement for quite a while, waiting for the right time, but it looks like I'm going public just a little early.
I don't know if you ever heard of a little Japanese 3D porn game company called Illusion, but I really liked their work. I couldn't usually understand much of it (even with fan translations squeezed in) but being able to see and control 3D models as they do the naughty, directing the action and swinging around to the perfect, sometimes impossible angle for the best view, was a pornographic triumph in my book.
So when Wolvalix from the development team for The Cathouse Tale approached me to take full control of the story, characters, and writing for their game, I was more than interested. A furry, English version of those 3D porn games, complete with story and full-on gameplay? Hell yes, I said! Well, I don't think I literally said that, but it was my general attitude!
Now, I wanted to wait to reveal this until there was actually... well, something to reveal. Unfortunately, the team ran into some trouble just as I came on board-- they wanted to make a big upgrade to how the game animates characters, but it took much longer to get together than they'd hoped, and things like setting up a proper dialogue system for me to overload with rambling, eccentric characters got pushed down the priority list. So right now, there isn't really anything new from me over there to check out.
But the team is turning things around and getting ready to put out a new release (hopefully) soon, and it's going to (hopefully) have at least a little of my writing in it! And besides that, it's just a pretty cool new game that I think will be a real asset for the furry community once it's really up and running. I recently stepped into a sort of Communications Manager role over there to help take some pressure off the guys handling programming and such, so I decided it was high time I make the announcement! If things go well, you'll be able to enjoy at least a little of my work over there soon, and a whole lot of the other guys', if you haven't already! I'll keep you posted!
And I know some of you will be concerned that this will eat into my time for MVOL. The short response is: Don't be. The longer response is that, while I may have some ambitious plans for the story side of CHT, the simple fact is that their dialogue system consists of little speech bubbles. I'm gonna be using lots and lots of them, but you can't really write all that much in a format like that, and you don't want to bore the players to death reading it all, flipping through too many of them. So there's not THAT much writing for me to do, and for that matter, it will take the rest of the team much, much longer to do all the work that goes into creating scenes and content than it will take me to write up the conversations that set up the content. I don't expect this project to eat into my time in any noticeable way-- rather, I think it may make one more nice little complement to my other work. I've enjoyed having my other stories to work on when I'm not in the mood to talk about Lith, but this should make a much better bit of variety, I think. MVOL isn't exactly very dialogue intensive, in comparison!
So that's one piece of news! Next up, something good, and something bad.
You may be familiar with my eBooks. I announced on here as I edited, polished, and published the first five Parts of To Own a Wolf on Amazon. Well, I've been getting ready to publish my first brand new story on there, and there have been a few different steps to that process. First, I've expanded my reach to publish my eBooks on multiple platforms. As of today, part five of To Own a Wolf is up on Smashwords, a site which, in turn, publishes to many other eBook sites on my behalf. At least, that's the theory. I've confirmed that my work is up on Barnes & Noble, Inktera, and iTunes, though some may be slower than others to get all five Parts, and SW claims that they're also going up on Kobo, Baker & Taylor Blio, txtr, and Scribd, but I haven't been able to confirm that. If you guys are more familiar with/subscribed to these services, I'd be interested to hear if you can find my work! Either way, if for any reason you prefer another service for procuring your eBooks, chances just got much better that you can read my work by your channel of choice!
With that said, Amazon recently gave us a reason to be glad for the alternatives. Another step in my preparing to publish a new eBook was to go back and edit all my old eBooks to update a few small things in formatting and add some new links to the back. What I did not realize is that every time you make even the smallest edit, Amazon has a specialized reviewer look over your submission to make sure the work still meets their requirements before it's published. I went through this same process for each eBook when I first submitted them. What I also did not realize is that they would reject half of my work-- which didn't just reject the edits, but permanently banned the books from being sold on their site.
To be honest, I was a little shocked. I was a little... angry. I contacted them, and received a form letter reiterating that the books did not meet their content guidelines. Their content guidelines, as far as I can find, are about as vague as humanly possible, by the way. But I've found circles that discuss these things and have felt out exactly what Amazon does and doesn't allow, and to be honest, after I found out how Amazon usually handles this stuff, I was a little surprised that my books had made it through in the first place.
Not that Amazon doesn't do erotica, or furry erotica, or things much, much worse (both in quality and in offensiveness) than my work. There are a few large issues you have to understand. One is that they don't actually read... basically any of the work that's submitted. Oh, they might run it through a spell check and maaaybe a filter or two for real red flags, but mostly they judge by the title, the cover, and the description. My original description had been very open about what's going on in the book, even going out of its way to be helpful and explicit about how sexual things are going to be, and what the reader could expect.
This set off a lot of red flags. Hell, putting "wolf" in the title was a red flag. They don't like bestiality, and if you mention animals in a story tagged as erotica, they don't like you. So throw in words like "slave" and "snake," not to mention that I literally gave tags for sexual activities when they don't like you spelling things out too much, and it's easy enough to see how this happened. They do things their own way, and you have to play by their rules to get in.
Now, they did say that I could resubmit the story if I edited it to better meet their content guidelines. So I edited the forematter of the book a little and trimmed down the description to be a deal less offensive. I wasn't ready to take "wolf" out of the title, but I hoped for the best. They rejected it. I got a little frustrated.
Third time was the charm, though. I submitted it with a two-line description, and one line was a disclaimer that none of the offensive things I thought they might be worried about were going on here. I'm happy to say that the book went through, and I'm breathing a little easier.
So, what now? I'll be publishing them, again, once a week. I have two more to go, and I'll be experimenting a little bit to see how helpful and informative I can make the descriptions without being "too informative." And when that's done, hopefully, I'll finally be publishing my new eBook, a rather longer entry that's an all-new story, never before published in any part, any draft, anywhere. It's going to be a little weird, since I probably won't get much feedback on it, but hopefully folks will like it!
And on a last note, if any of you purchased To Own a Wolf Parts 3, 4, or 5 before all this went down, could you drop me a line? I want to know how the ban panned out on your side. Can you still read the copies you've downloaded? Can you still download it again? I'm hoping they're not being too... unpleasant about it on the customer's side.
Those were the two big events I wanted to cover today. Now, two smaller notes before we wrap this up!
To follow up on the text formatting issue in MVOL: I still don't know why this is happening :/ On the other hand, I've found that it actually isn't exclusive to v0.18-- at least for me, it seems to do this for old copies as well, going way back. I couldn't find another game with justified text fields like mine to see if it was doing the same, but at this point, I think the most likely cause is that Flash itself has screwed something up with one of its recent updates. So maybe they'll fix it at some point and this will just go away, or maybe I'll have to leave it left-aligned from here on and just grin and bear it. The main alternative I can see is to try and find another way to present text-- I'll be looking into my options for that shortly, but I don't think there are very many. It's true I've been dissatisfied with the text box and the scroll bar in a few ways, so maybe I can find a way to improve the whole experience while I'm at it, if I'm lucky.
And lastly, I know I talked about setting up some kind of feedback discussion for MVOL's scenes, which still sounds awesome, but with everything else going on, it got pushed off a ways. But I'm gonna try and get started on that this coming week, so keep an eye on the blog for news on that!
Phew. I probably could have broken that up into a few smaller posts, but honestly, it's all kind of "current news!" I've covered a lot, and probably forgotten some details, so hit me up with comments or questions! And as always, if you want the very latest about how MVOL is coming on, my Twitter is rolling along, and I report every time I get more writing in, occasionally with little teasers of what's to come. Thanks for reading, folks!
I don't know if you ever heard of a little Japanese 3D porn game company called Illusion, but I really liked their work. I couldn't usually understand much of it (even with fan translations squeezed in) but being able to see and control 3D models as they do the naughty, directing the action and swinging around to the perfect, sometimes impossible angle for the best view, was a pornographic triumph in my book.
So when Wolvalix from the development team for The Cathouse Tale approached me to take full control of the story, characters, and writing for their game, I was more than interested. A furry, English version of those 3D porn games, complete with story and full-on gameplay? Hell yes, I said! Well, I don't think I literally said that, but it was my general attitude!
Now, I wanted to wait to reveal this until there was actually... well, something to reveal. Unfortunately, the team ran into some trouble just as I came on board-- they wanted to make a big upgrade to how the game animates characters, but it took much longer to get together than they'd hoped, and things like setting up a proper dialogue system for me to overload with rambling, eccentric characters got pushed down the priority list. So right now, there isn't really anything new from me over there to check out.
But the team is turning things around and getting ready to put out a new release (hopefully) soon, and it's going to (hopefully) have at least a little of my writing in it! And besides that, it's just a pretty cool new game that I think will be a real asset for the furry community once it's really up and running. I recently stepped into a sort of Communications Manager role over there to help take some pressure off the guys handling programming and such, so I decided it was high time I make the announcement! If things go well, you'll be able to enjoy at least a little of my work over there soon, and a whole lot of the other guys', if you haven't already! I'll keep you posted!
And I know some of you will be concerned that this will eat into my time for MVOL. The short response is: Don't be. The longer response is that, while I may have some ambitious plans for the story side of CHT, the simple fact is that their dialogue system consists of little speech bubbles. I'm gonna be using lots and lots of them, but you can't really write all that much in a format like that, and you don't want to bore the players to death reading it all, flipping through too many of them. So there's not THAT much writing for me to do, and for that matter, it will take the rest of the team much, much longer to do all the work that goes into creating scenes and content than it will take me to write up the conversations that set up the content. I don't expect this project to eat into my time in any noticeable way-- rather, I think it may make one more nice little complement to my other work. I've enjoyed having my other stories to work on when I'm not in the mood to talk about Lith, but this should make a much better bit of variety, I think. MVOL isn't exactly very dialogue intensive, in comparison!
So that's one piece of news! Next up, something good, and something bad.
You may be familiar with my eBooks. I announced on here as I edited, polished, and published the first five Parts of To Own a Wolf on Amazon. Well, I've been getting ready to publish my first brand new story on there, and there have been a few different steps to that process. First, I've expanded my reach to publish my eBooks on multiple platforms. As of today, part five of To Own a Wolf is up on Smashwords, a site which, in turn, publishes to many other eBook sites on my behalf. At least, that's the theory. I've confirmed that my work is up on Barnes & Noble, Inktera, and iTunes, though some may be slower than others to get all five Parts, and SW claims that they're also going up on Kobo, Baker & Taylor Blio, txtr, and Scribd, but I haven't been able to confirm that. If you guys are more familiar with/subscribed to these services, I'd be interested to hear if you can find my work! Either way, if for any reason you prefer another service for procuring your eBooks, chances just got much better that you can read my work by your channel of choice!
With that said, Amazon recently gave us a reason to be glad for the alternatives. Another step in my preparing to publish a new eBook was to go back and edit all my old eBooks to update a few small things in formatting and add some new links to the back. What I did not realize is that every time you make even the smallest edit, Amazon has a specialized reviewer look over your submission to make sure the work still meets their requirements before it's published. I went through this same process for each eBook when I first submitted them. What I also did not realize is that they would reject half of my work-- which didn't just reject the edits, but permanently banned the books from being sold on their site.
To be honest, I was a little shocked. I was a little... angry. I contacted them, and received a form letter reiterating that the books did not meet their content guidelines. Their content guidelines, as far as I can find, are about as vague as humanly possible, by the way. But I've found circles that discuss these things and have felt out exactly what Amazon does and doesn't allow, and to be honest, after I found out how Amazon usually handles this stuff, I was a little surprised that my books had made it through in the first place.
Not that Amazon doesn't do erotica, or furry erotica, or things much, much worse (both in quality and in offensiveness) than my work. There are a few large issues you have to understand. One is that they don't actually read... basically any of the work that's submitted. Oh, they might run it through a spell check and maaaybe a filter or two for real red flags, but mostly they judge by the title, the cover, and the description. My original description had been very open about what's going on in the book, even going out of its way to be helpful and explicit about how sexual things are going to be, and what the reader could expect.
This set off a lot of red flags. Hell, putting "wolf" in the title was a red flag. They don't like bestiality, and if you mention animals in a story tagged as erotica, they don't like you. So throw in words like "slave" and "snake," not to mention that I literally gave tags for sexual activities when they don't like you spelling things out too much, and it's easy enough to see how this happened. They do things their own way, and you have to play by their rules to get in.
Now, they did say that I could resubmit the story if I edited it to better meet their content guidelines. So I edited the forematter of the book a little and trimmed down the description to be a deal less offensive. I wasn't ready to take "wolf" out of the title, but I hoped for the best. They rejected it. I got a little frustrated.
Third time was the charm, though. I submitted it with a two-line description, and one line was a disclaimer that none of the offensive things I thought they might be worried about were going on here. I'm happy to say that the book went through, and I'm breathing a little easier.
So, what now? I'll be publishing them, again, once a week. I have two more to go, and I'll be experimenting a little bit to see how helpful and informative I can make the descriptions without being "too informative." And when that's done, hopefully, I'll finally be publishing my new eBook, a rather longer entry that's an all-new story, never before published in any part, any draft, anywhere. It's going to be a little weird, since I probably won't get much feedback on it, but hopefully folks will like it!
And on a last note, if any of you purchased To Own a Wolf Parts 3, 4, or 5 before all this went down, could you drop me a line? I want to know how the ban panned out on your side. Can you still read the copies you've downloaded? Can you still download it again? I'm hoping they're not being too... unpleasant about it on the customer's side.
Those were the two big events I wanted to cover today. Now, two smaller notes before we wrap this up!
To follow up on the text formatting issue in MVOL: I still don't know why this is happening :/ On the other hand, I've found that it actually isn't exclusive to v0.18-- at least for me, it seems to do this for old copies as well, going way back. I couldn't find another game with justified text fields like mine to see if it was doing the same, but at this point, I think the most likely cause is that Flash itself has screwed something up with one of its recent updates. So maybe they'll fix it at some point and this will just go away, or maybe I'll have to leave it left-aligned from here on and just grin and bear it. The main alternative I can see is to try and find another way to present text-- I'll be looking into my options for that shortly, but I don't think there are very many. It's true I've been dissatisfied with the text box and the scroll bar in a few ways, so maybe I can find a way to improve the whole experience while I'm at it, if I'm lucky.
And lastly, I know I talked about setting up some kind of feedback discussion for MVOL's scenes, which still sounds awesome, but with everything else going on, it got pushed off a ways. But I'm gonna try and get started on that this coming week, so keep an eye on the blog for news on that!
Phew. I probably could have broken that up into a few smaller posts, but honestly, it's all kind of "current news!" I've covered a lot, and probably forgotten some details, so hit me up with comments or questions! And as always, if you want the very latest about how MVOL is coming on, my Twitter is rolling along, and I report every time I get more writing in, occasionally with little teasers of what's to come. Thanks for reading, folks!
Monday, September 28, 2015
Unjustified
So the last week before the release was a huge scramble trying to make the graphics happen in time, and I've mostly been catching my breath since then and dealing with some real-life stuff I had to put off, but it looks like we're paying the price for that time that I should have, ideally, spent making sure the game... well, worked.
I caught the issue with the stone door path back into the void pretty quick (you might have gotten a glitched copy if you were fast to download, try grabbing a new one if so and you haven't heard of this already) but it looks like there was another, stranger issue. I think this might partly be a glitch with Flash itself, but-- well, MVOL uses Justified text so that both the left and right sides of the body of text are flat. It looks nicer that way! But for some reason, it's going too far with it now, and partial lines are also being spread to fit the width of the screen, which is very not right.
Strangely, the issue seems to be something that can not show up at first, but "infect" every instance of the game later. Either that, or it really is a direct effect of a recent Flash update. Either way, the most direct fix I've found is to simply not justify the text. So I've put up a left-aligned version of the game on the Play the Game! tab! If you're having issues, download that, and you should be okay to play and read comfortably. I'm hoping to find a better solution soon, but I want you guys to be able to play in the meantime without the game being an ugly mess.
I've been hearing a few other issues with the new release here and there, and I'm starting to think it may be because of the new, larger image files. I'm looking into solutions; right now I'm thinking it may be an issue with players trying to run before they've loaded everything, but if I can't force it to pre-load, then I may just have to try offering folks a compressed version and see if that fixes things. For now, if you're having issues with text, grab a left-aligned version, and if it's something else, try opening the game a different way! Opening it in an internet browser usually seems to work okay, but Flash Projector and some mobile devices seem to be having trouble.
Sorry for the inconvenience, everyone! I wanted to make the game beautiful, but beauty comes with a price, it seems. Hopefully I can straighten this all out soon.
I caught the issue with the stone door path back into the void pretty quick (you might have gotten a glitched copy if you were fast to download, try grabbing a new one if so and you haven't heard of this already) but it looks like there was another, stranger issue. I think this might partly be a glitch with Flash itself, but-- well, MVOL uses Justified text so that both the left and right sides of the body of text are flat. It looks nicer that way! But for some reason, it's going too far with it now, and partial lines are also being spread to fit the width of the screen, which is very not right.
Strangely, the issue seems to be something that can not show up at first, but "infect" every instance of the game later. Either that, or it really is a direct effect of a recent Flash update. Either way, the most direct fix I've found is to simply not justify the text. So I've put up a left-aligned version of the game on the Play the Game! tab! If you're having issues, download that, and you should be okay to play and read comfortably. I'm hoping to find a better solution soon, but I want you guys to be able to play in the meantime without the game being an ugly mess.
I've been hearing a few other issues with the new release here and there, and I'm starting to think it may be because of the new, larger image files. I'm looking into solutions; right now I'm thinking it may be an issue with players trying to run before they've loaded everything, but if I can't force it to pre-load, then I may just have to try offering folks a compressed version and see if that fixes things. For now, if you're having issues with text, grab a left-aligned version, and if it's something else, try opening the game a different way! Opening it in an internet browser usually seems to work okay, but Flash Projector and some mobile devices seem to be having trouble.
Sorry for the inconvenience, everyone! I wanted to make the game beautiful, but beauty comes with a price, it seems. Hopefully I can straighten this all out soon.
Saturday, September 19, 2015
v0.18 is Live!
Pop over to the Play the Game tab to play the new version now! Also, if you've already downloaded/played the game elsewhere on the day of this post, please force-refresh the file! There was one bug that made it through to release, but the files have been re-uploaded with a fix!
It's been a wild ride making this update happen. The Patreon has funded two new pieces of art for every new version of the game, which I thought would be a snap, but problem after complication after delay turned three months into two weeks, with no art ready! I had to put aside my goals for the specific art I wanted for this version and scramble to get something else ready in time. Fortunately I found some very helpful artists willing to make this happen for me, so the new pieces are ready in time! I also took some time to overhaul how MVOL handles art, including the way it's presented and the quality and compression it applies. The file has actually doubled in size after all this (the loading screen seems much more appropriate now!) but I think you'll see a distinct rise in quality, especially if you're not playing the game at native resolution!
Past that, a bunch of new story content is jammed in there! It totaled over 15,000 words of new content, including two new endings and the first path out of the stone door and back to the void for good. We're pushing well toward the end of the stone door, but if you'd like to get a more concrete idea of exactly how far along we are toward completing this arc, you can check out this helpful post on my Patreon!
Lastly, I've been working with my new variant writer to massage some of the old scenes. We haven't changed very much so far, partly because I realized that I need to revamp my text parsing system with something a little more powerful! So you can look forward to more of that in future versions, but for now, there's just a handful of little edits for quality and variance here and there.
It's great to finally have the game out for everyone to see! I'll be getting to work soon on setting up a discussion for you all to join as I discussed in the last post, so keep an eye out for more news here! For now, I think I'm gonna go lie down...
It's been a wild ride making this update happen. The Patreon has funded two new pieces of art for every new version of the game, which I thought would be a snap, but problem after complication after delay turned three months into two weeks, with no art ready! I had to put aside my goals for the specific art I wanted for this version and scramble to get something else ready in time. Fortunately I found some very helpful artists willing to make this happen for me, so the new pieces are ready in time! I also took some time to overhaul how MVOL handles art, including the way it's presented and the quality and compression it applies. The file has actually doubled in size after all this (the loading screen seems much more appropriate now!) but I think you'll see a distinct rise in quality, especially if you're not playing the game at native resolution!
Past that, a bunch of new story content is jammed in there! It totaled over 15,000 words of new content, including two new endings and the first path out of the stone door and back to the void for good. We're pushing well toward the end of the stone door, but if you'd like to get a more concrete idea of exactly how far along we are toward completing this arc, you can check out this helpful post on my Patreon!
Lastly, I've been working with my new variant writer to massage some of the old scenes. We haven't changed very much so far, partly because I realized that I need to revamp my text parsing system with something a little more powerful! So you can look forward to more of that in future versions, but for now, there's just a handful of little edits for quality and variance here and there.
It's great to finally have the game out for everyone to see! I'll be getting to work soon on setting up a discussion for you all to join as I discussed in the last post, so keep an eye out for more news here! For now, I think I'm gonna go lie down...
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
So Let's Talk About MVOL!
Quick update: I've been flailing at the whole art issue, and it looks like I should have art ready in time for the main release! Barely! My proofers are looking over the new content right now, and I'm hoping to have it ready for an advance release this weekend. I always feel like I'm not adding enough to the game, but current wordcount for new content is over 15k! That means I'm actually writing, for MVOL alone, at about half the rate I was at my prime when I was keeping The Schedule in days past. So I think that's pretty good, actually!
Now, the big thing I wanted to talk to you guys about is: I want more feedback for MVOL. I get emails and comments and such from people that like the game and the overall impact, which is great, but I yearn for the kind of comments that I'd get on stories, where people get into the nitty-gritty of how specific scenes made them feel, what didn't make sense or fell flat, and what they didn't like about my work. In other words, constructive criticism.
Of course, it makes sense that I didn't get much of this for MVOL! It's hard to say "Dear Lithier, I liked the one scene where you talk to Lith about this and then he says this one thing, and I was playing a dragon so I think that's why he said THIS, and that was nice but I kinda wish that this and this happened." It's a pain getting so specific about the circumstances, because the content is hidden throughout the game in all these twists and turns, and very specific circumstances can open a new trove of things to read! That also means it's very easy to, when commenting on something, spoil it for others. It's hard to comment on anything happening behind the doors without spoiling the doors for new people coming to the game, for example.
So! Here's what I was thinking: What if we took the time to focus on single scenes at a time and discuss them? What if I selected scenes from the game and transcribed them to a page where folks can read it to get a reminder what it is, and I can talk some about why it exists and what went into writing it and even touch on what different outcomes can be seen in it, and then folks can comment on it with their experiences, opinions, and impressions? Maybe if we were reeeally lucky, people would even start discussing scenes, or at least ideas in them, with each other! I'd love to see the sinister truth of what impact my writing has had on people.
And this wouldn't just be to stroke my ego. I'm going through old scenes in the game, along with my new variant writer, and working on sprucing them up to make sure everything is up to my current writing standards. In most cases that just means catching a typo or two or spicing up some repetitive word choice, but if I can get feedback from you guys on what was unclear or didn't work as intended, then I can make the game a better experience! One awesome thing about having this big body of work as a game I'm releasing in versions is that it can continue to live, breathe, and grow in all aspects!
So that's the idea! You guys get examples of scenes from throughout the game complete with some developer commentary and the chance to make your opinions heard, and I get delicious feedback to help me improve the game! There are two questions that I have to ask you all, though. Would YOU be interested in taking part in this? What can I do to make it welcoming for you to take part in the discussion? And secondly, where would it be best to set it up? It actually seems to me like the forum may be the best place for it. It's a little more user-friendly for comments and discussion. The downside is that people would have to make accounts in order to comment.
What do you think? Would you join the discussion? Would you be willing to pop onto the forum to try it? I expect I'd be linking new discussions on here as they go up, maybe every week or every other week, so you wouldn't have to go hunting for them. Comment here to let me know (you don't need an account), or you can always email me at lithiers@gmail.com! Thanks, everyone!
Now, the big thing I wanted to talk to you guys about is: I want more feedback for MVOL. I get emails and comments and such from people that like the game and the overall impact, which is great, but I yearn for the kind of comments that I'd get on stories, where people get into the nitty-gritty of how specific scenes made them feel, what didn't make sense or fell flat, and what they didn't like about my work. In other words, constructive criticism.
Of course, it makes sense that I didn't get much of this for MVOL! It's hard to say "Dear Lithier, I liked the one scene where you talk to Lith about this and then he says this one thing, and I was playing a dragon so I think that's why he said THIS, and that was nice but I kinda wish that this and this happened." It's a pain getting so specific about the circumstances, because the content is hidden throughout the game in all these twists and turns, and very specific circumstances can open a new trove of things to read! That also means it's very easy to, when commenting on something, spoil it for others. It's hard to comment on anything happening behind the doors without spoiling the doors for new people coming to the game, for example.
So! Here's what I was thinking: What if we took the time to focus on single scenes at a time and discuss them? What if I selected scenes from the game and transcribed them to a page where folks can read it to get a reminder what it is, and I can talk some about why it exists and what went into writing it and even touch on what different outcomes can be seen in it, and then folks can comment on it with their experiences, opinions, and impressions? Maybe if we were reeeally lucky, people would even start discussing scenes, or at least ideas in them, with each other! I'd love to see the sinister truth of what impact my writing has had on people.
And this wouldn't just be to stroke my ego. I'm going through old scenes in the game, along with my new variant writer, and working on sprucing them up to make sure everything is up to my current writing standards. In most cases that just means catching a typo or two or spicing up some repetitive word choice, but if I can get feedback from you guys on what was unclear or didn't work as intended, then I can make the game a better experience! One awesome thing about having this big body of work as a game I'm releasing in versions is that it can continue to live, breathe, and grow in all aspects!
So that's the idea! You guys get examples of scenes from throughout the game complete with some developer commentary and the chance to make your opinions heard, and I get delicious feedback to help me improve the game! There are two questions that I have to ask you all, though. Would YOU be interested in taking part in this? What can I do to make it welcoming for you to take part in the discussion? And secondly, where would it be best to set it up? It actually seems to me like the forum may be the best place for it. It's a little more user-friendly for comments and discussion. The downside is that people would have to make accounts in order to comment.
What do you think? Would you join the discussion? Would you be willing to pop onto the forum to try it? I expect I'd be linking new discussions on here as they go up, maybe every week or every other week, so you wouldn't have to go hunting for them. Comment here to let me know (you don't need an account), or you can always email me at lithiers@gmail.com! Thanks, everyone!
Monday, August 31, 2015
Troubles and Preparation
Hey folks! September is almost here, and that means v0.18 is on the horizon. I've got new content written up, hopefully more on the way, I've got a variant writer getting started, and I have... well, I'm trying to get new art for the game.
In case you haven't seen, the Patreon is going nicely, and we've hit the goal to start seeing two new pieces of art for each release! I'm excited for it, but the application has gone a little rougher than expected. Commissioning art is hard! Especially, it would seem, when your needs are as unusual as mine.
I've had artists with really cute work turn me down for even slightly nsfw images, I've heard issues with contracts and work being used in a game rather than for personal consumption. I've seen artists bow out due to personal issues and up and stop producing due to lack of inspiration. I have been trying, on and off, to get art for this release since days after v0.17 came out, and... well, I'm still trying.
I have specific goals for this next release, but I'm starting to think I may have to settle for something else, just to get art done. I try to shop around and find art that is both of quality and good value for the price, but as the deadline looms, it looks like I may have to throw my budget out the window just to get something into the game in time @_@;; One way or the other, I mean to meet my goals for art and see to it that it's quality work going in!
But that's for me to worry about, and for you guys to enjoy, when all this has finally turned into delicious pixels. The next version is coming in the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled!
In case you haven't seen, the Patreon is going nicely, and we've hit the goal to start seeing two new pieces of art for each release! I'm excited for it, but the application has gone a little rougher than expected. Commissioning art is hard! Especially, it would seem, when your needs are as unusual as mine.
I've had artists with really cute work turn me down for even slightly nsfw images, I've heard issues with contracts and work being used in a game rather than for personal consumption. I've seen artists bow out due to personal issues and up and stop producing due to lack of inspiration. I have been trying, on and off, to get art for this release since days after v0.17 came out, and... well, I'm still trying.
I have specific goals for this next release, but I'm starting to think I may have to settle for something else, just to get art done. I try to shop around and find art that is both of quality and good value for the price, but as the deadline looms, it looks like I may have to throw my budget out the window just to get something into the game in time @_@;; One way or the other, I mean to meet my goals for art and see to it that it's quality work going in!
But that's for me to worry about, and for you guys to enjoy, when all this has finally turned into delicious pixels. The next version is coming in the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled!
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Variant Writer Deadline: This Sunday!
Hey, folks! Submissions have started slowing
down, so I reckon it's time to set a deadline. I want to get as many
samples from as many people as possible, but I can't wait for too long,
so I'm setting the deadline for submissions to 11:59 PM, Sunday the 9th, Eastern Standard Time. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, check out my last blog post.
If anyone out there is still working on a submission, I'd encourage you to send me what you have as soon as possible. I'm always happy to look over your progress and give feedback to try and help you get a better idea of exactly what I'm looking for. I believe fervently that there is a talent for this among you, but I can't see it if you don't take the time to try and show me.
If anyone out there is still working on a submission, I'd encourage you to send me what you have as soon as possible. I'm always happy to look over your progress and give feedback to try and help you get a better idea of exactly what I'm looking for. I believe fervently that there is a talent for this among you, but I can't see it if you don't take the time to try and show me.
Once the deadline has passed, I will look through all the submissions I've gotten for each applicant again. Putting more work in will certainly help, but the primary attribute I'm looking for will be the quality of the variants submitted. If one of you is clearly meeting the goals outlined for a variant writer much better than the rest, I will be happy to announce the position filled. But if, as I expect is likely, there is a similar amount of potential apparent in many of you, then I will choose out the smaller handful of applicants to go on to the second stage of the process. Either way, I will be notifying everyone I've heard from by email when my decision is made.
Those that move on to the second and final stage will be given a choice between three much larger samples to work with. If you submit a piece for the second stage that I feel you put a decent amount of work into, I will be happy to send you $15 for your time and effort. This isn't indicative of the final pay scale you'd be seeing once you had the position, since I don't expect to use any of these submissions directly in the game, but rather to make sure you don't feel like you're wasting your time putting as much work as you can into making the piece you choose shine. Hopefully between these larger, more intensive pieces, I will be able to judge the best applicant for the job. I look forward to working with all of you, and I thank you very much for taking the time to work with me in the hopes of making MVOL the best game it can be. I know this can be a strenuous process, but I hope that for each of you, it has at least been informative and interesting, and given you a bit more insight into MVOL and its development.
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