Lithier
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The Development Cycle
🕑 Added 2020-07-08 02:39:14 +0000 UTCWant to know what's going on? What's the plan on the large scale? Why am I talking about all these different games? Get all the details here!
Where We Began
My work as a developer started with My Very Own Lith, an experiment in jumping from pure writing to a very text-heavy but very personal simulation of my oldest, most developed character. I learned a lot over the game's development from 2012 to 2020, when I finally published v1.0. Now that the game is complete, I have dozens of ideas for games I'd love to make, and it'd drive me crazy to try and pick just one. So it's time to enter a phase of experimentation!
Where We Are Now
I have different themes and mechanics I want to explore, different sexual spheres and fetishes I'd love to indulge in, and an endless procession of ideas begging for a home. They can't all possibly fit into one game, and after spending eight years on one huge game, I'd dearly like to try and make some smaller, tighter games that can experiment with ideas without being a massive commitment. I think this would be the best way to try out a lot of different ideas and learn more about what works and doesn't as well as generally force myself to improve as a developer!
So here's the plan: from here on, I'm going to pick one Main Project to work on as something steady that I think most people will generally enjoy, and on the side I'm going to work on Side Projects that I think have potential. This means I'll have a wide variety of tasks and challenges available to me at any time, which I'm hoping will help me get more work done total over time. This lets me follow my inspiration to write one kind of content or other, or to work on one kind of mechanics or another, and it lets me put something aside for a while if it's getting frustrating without wasting time.
I'm hoping that this will mostly amount to me spending about half my time in a given month on the Main Project and half of it on a Side Project, though some months might be more just one over the other, and some months might have a little extra from others mixed in. Whatever the case, my big goal is to have a new release ready to go every month or two. Which is to say, I'll aim for every month, but sometimes it's not worth the extra trouble getting a game to a playable state before it's really "ready" to play, so I expect I'll skip a month here and there as needed.
New releases will go to the supporters first, then a month later they'll go out to the public for free. I expect my release schedule will more or less alternate between the Main Project and Side Project, unless two compelling Side Projects come up back to back. I'll mostly choose where to focus my work, but sometimes I'll put it up to vote for the community to choose what concept I should turn into a prototype next, or what prototype I should develop further, and I'll push more of my focus on that for the next month.
Where We're Going
In the long term, I'm hoping to create several very small, finished projects as proofs of concept for various ideas, maybe have a few discarded projects that proved not to work as well as hoped, and to have one or two Main Projects that are well on their way into being fully developed, respectable games of their own. I may switch my Main Project occasionally if one of the Side Projects proves especially interesting and promising, but I'll always try to keep it to something most folks will be interested in.
The real challenge here will just be to keep the Side Projects as small and tightly designed as possible to make sure they get finished, rather than getting greedy with their designs. Almost every concept I'm working with has the potential to be a very robust, full-scale game if the core concepts would work as well as I think, and it's incredibly tempting to try and build with that in mind, but it's always better to start small. If a game goes well as a tiny little thing with satisfying mechanics, then you learn a lot for building a sequel or "full version" down the road. But I'll never have enough time or resources in my life to make all of these games a full reality, so it's important to manage my time well!
Eventually, we may reach the point where some particular game concept has done so well I want to switch my focus onto it completely. Right now I'm enjoying the freedom of experimenting with new ideas, something I always wished I could do when I was in the middle of MVOL's long development, but I do recognize that this is something of a transitional period. I don't know how long it will last --maybe a couple years?-- but I hope that I'll learn a great deal in the process, and you'll get a lot of really interesting new games to try along the way.
Why We're Doing This
I know this sounds a little unusual, even in these strange, heady times where crowdfunding lets people like me make a living building furry sex games. I'd never try to pull this if I were just beginning as a developer, but at this point, I think I've proven that I have the skills, and the plain stubborn determination to keep going no matter what once I've started, to reliably make a game happen. And if you're here, then hopefully you already think I make pretty good games.
Before I started any of this, I explained it all to my fans, I gave them all my reasoning, and I put it to a vote. Do you want me to go for this, or should I just stick to one project? And I guess I did a good enough job on MVOL that both my supporters and fans in general were largely in favor of trying this out. Now, it's up to me to make sure they don't regret it.
I honestly don't know how this is going to turn out, but I know this is a big opportunity for me to do more and be more than I am now. I'm going to do my best to rise to the occasion, and all I can ask is that you try my games out, and if you enjoy them and can afford it, maybe lend a little to the cause. I've earned enough to make a living off this, and now I'm hoping I can start affording to bring in help to make my dream a reality faster, and with much better implementation on things like art and coding than I could hope to do on my own.
Either way, as long as I can keep making games, I know I'll be happy. I'm deeply grateful to all of my supporters for helping make this happen, and I'm going to do my best to live up to all of your hopes, while doing things the way I feel is right! If folks aren't happy with how this is going in the end, I'll go ahead and switch to a more permanent project, but hopefully by then I'll have a much more solid idea for which game would work best.
Thanks for reading! I hope you've got a better idea of what we're doing around here now! Fingers crossed, it may all be just crazy enough to work. If you want more info about what's going on in development right now, I make news posts about general stuff once or twice a month on the main site, and more specific posts about my current work as a supporter reward right here on Patreon. I'm going to be doing my best to stay in touch with all of you and get feedback regularly, so keep playing, join in, and make your voice heard!
