1.1 & future projects

well hello

i've never really used itch.io's devlog stuff, and then also i wrote a big first draft and accidentally reloaded the page, erasing all of it, so let's see how draft #2 goes.

so as i imagine is true for a lot of you, 2020 (and 2021) has been a big mess of time. a lot has happened in my life! not a whole lot of it is porn-games-related though. mainly, insofar as i ever had a regular schedule for working on gamedev stuff, COVID definitely destroyed that, so i haven't really been working regularly on any writing or gamedev project for a while.

while working up to the initial 1.0 release, i had mostly just kept quiet and slogged along and then released it when the whole thing was done, and so the game has always been more-or-less a 'finished product' to me, even with all the weird warts and half-finished features, rather than a prototype that's waiting to be expanded on more. it was never really my intention to have this be a project that gets worked on perpetually, with version after version coming out. 1.1 was started on a whim, really -- i wanted to fix up the most obvious issues and maybe finish some of the half-finished scenes i ended up cutting in the initial release. as i kept working on it, the conceptual scope kept growing, though. in order to release the game at all, i ended up cutting out the entire latter half, so any project that was about adding in cut content had a pretty much infinite well to draw from, and that started to wear on me. as i've gotten closer to 1.1 being complete, i started to think about a potential 1.2 update, with even more cut/concepted stuff i couldn't finish for the 1.1 update, and that was mostly just exhausting.

i'll probably finish the 1.1 update at some point, but for now i'm feeling pretty burnt out on the whole project, so i figured i should probably post something for the people eagerly waiting for the update. it'll probably happen! don't hold your breath though!

so, for the time being, here's what i've been working on:

• the latest prerelease of 1.1. it's got a bunch of missing scenes for the new npcs, and a fair amount of busted half-finished content, but it fixes some scenario bugs and i think all-around has something like 50k words of new scenes, scattered throughout.
• immediately after publishing 'the new hive' i started work on an untitled werewolf game project, which is now pretty outdated. i think the conversation system was a little bit overambitious unless i was okay with huge reams of generic text. i guess it worked for morrowind.
• more recently, i've been messing around with little twine mechanics demos, mostly to try out ideas and try to see if they've got any potential for a longer project. or, you know, to just throw together some smaller projects, since not everything has to be some 300k-word behemoth. anyway the only one that's got a measurable amount of content is uhhh this final fantasy 7 porn fangame, which i may or may not work more on; who knows.
• (also a wrote a bunch of fanfic and posted it to my ao3, in case you're not aware i have one. but those aren't really game projects)

anyway that's what i've been up to for the past year-and-a-half or so! really, right now what i'm mostly focused on is trying to concept up some game ideas that i can finish in under 50k words, since that's an actual achievable goal, rather than the endless, sprawling concepts i usually have for games. i guess we'll see if i come up with one :V