queenkyobi
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A Tinier Furry In A Huger World Moving To Monthly Release Schedule
🕑 Added 2021-09-19 01:08:46 +0000 UTCA true mouthful of a title - try saying all that twelve times fast.
There are going to be some important things in this blog, but the most relevant is that the release schedule of the game is changing to monthly rather than fortnightly. This is for several reasons, all of which I'm going to go into immediately.
To make this abundantly clear because I don't want it to slip by anyone - THE RELEASE SCHEDULE OF TINIER FURRY IN A HUGER WORLD IS NOW MONTHLY, which means that yesterday's drop is going to be the only game content drop this month.
Now I am going to go into why, because I think that it's important to be completely transparent.
First of all, it's not because of a lack of motivation or because I have other projects on the side. It's purely because this game takes a whole lot more work to craft than A Tiny Furry. It's the only reason. And it comes down to one simple thing, really.
JUSTIFICATION BEGINS
Writing this game is an infinitely bigger project than A Tiny Furry In A Huge World. This is obvious in the fact that the game is 200,000 words long and isn't even out of it's first version yet. In terms of narrative, it's a big story, and, in terms of vore and other scenes, they're typically much more complicated.
Why? Because the world is much more interactive. Think of the number of NPCs that you can actually hold a conversation with in Tiny Furry. There's quite a few, yes, but all of them are direct lead ins to endings where the game stops and resets itself. You can't walk away from any macro conversation and then resume playing the game. Why? Because making these characters remember and then later react to you is a lot of work.
Think to Ms. Matthews - the first character in the game, and arguably the simplest pred I've ever made - and you can't actually even have a conversation with her. She's asleep! Why? Because it was my first update and I wanted to make it as simple as possible. Making it as simple as possible means not having something like a proper conversation, because a conversation opens up so many different variables that you need to account for not only as a writer, but as a programmer.
Much of Tiny Furry was wrote with a similar philosophy in mind. For me as a writer, publishing on a weekly schedule, the simplest way of doing things was to strive for simplicity. Here's a pred. You can get in their shoes, you can get in their pants, you can get in their mouth, you can also talk to them. It had to be done like that because the weekly schedule didn't permit for much else.
As development went on to avoid sameiness though I ultimately I had to open it up more and more as the game developed - we had the fox, for example - and then, it got to the point where I made Oscar, which was a somewhat narrative driven experience that was influenced by the dialogue choices you made with him.
But even this is nowhere near as complicated as the prologue of Tinier Furry, which features multiple conversations that you can walk away from that later ultimately have consequences when you're shrunk. This isn't without going into the other variables, such as whether you keep the elf, or whether you bother to talk to Reiko, or whether there's Hart at the bar, or whether you talk to Gianna in the alleyway or not. These are all remembered and later referenced, because the approach is to make something more akin to a proper CYOA, rather than a giant/giantess sandbox. It's a linear vore experience with many branching paths and alternate outcomes depending on your choices ... rather than a big vore playground that has little to no lasting consequences for your actions.
Which means that it takes more time to make. And that, as the game grows, the biweekly schedule is becoming harder and harder for me to keep up with, to the point where it's having a knock on effect on the rest of my work. The past two weeks have been utterly exhausting. Crafting this has been amazing fun, but it's also been a wrangler. Writing 30,000 - 40,000 words of vore in a fortnight plus coding it all together in a program that likes to fall apart every ten minutes with no real breaks leaves me feeling exhausted, no matter how much I adore the work.
At the end of the day, though, I think this leads to a higher quality product. A much more interactive and unique experience that ultimately takes the best of what I do and applies it to a vore adventure. I think that what I'm making is unique - and fun - and will stand out amongst the crowd. I think it contains some of my best writing ever, and, by the end of it, will be the best thing that I am probably capable of making.
With that said, though, I understand that some people might prefer me to make something simpler than this ... which is why when the first version of this game is completed, I will be opening up a poll to see if people want me to continue developing this into the games second act. If people would rather me divert onto something simpler, or even Tiny Furry again, then I will do that. At the end of the day I want to make what the people want me to make. That is more important than pursuing a vanity project that the majority of my fanbase may or may not be interested in.
For now, though, until this first version is done - or this first act as I am now calling it in my head - I will be working on doing one big monthly release rather than two medium sized releases. I am estimating that this will take up until the end of the year to do. There is a lot of work that still needs to be done before I am comfortable with saying that the prologue and the first act are wholly complete.
By moving onto monthly releases, it will also give me more time to breathe. I opened up a Discord server and I've barely interacted with it because I've been so busy working on the game and other things. By spacing things out a bit better, I can give myself to interact with my community ... and my friends ... and ultimately have better mental health and less exhaustion as a result. Don't get me wrong, I don't plan on slacking ... but taking one day off a week would be nice.
THE JUSTIFICATION IS NOW OVER
I hope that this is okay with everyone. I promise that it will be worth the wait, and ... more importantly, that this will help me avoid things like burn out and general exhaustion. Being able to focus for the rest of the month on commissions will ultimately keep me mentally well, and ... well, will lead to more stories being posted up here anyway.
With that said, though, I will be posting an update schedule for the next three months shortly. This is going to go over what content will be going in the game in October, November, and December - or, in other words, what you have to look forward to.
Before I can do that, though, I need to run some polls so that you guys can determine the order that it's all worked in ... and before I can run polls, I need to be transparent about the content that I have planned to go in this update. So, the next blog post (coming in a few hours) will be all about the lovely character and vore opportunities that are coming up!
And it'll have a poll. Polls are cool, right?
I hope you're all having an amazing weekend!
Comments
Queen Kyobi
I agree, and this is the general philosophy taken with most of the choices in the game - either they switch something off, or they start an alternate time branch that resolves itself before too long. The issue is that even doing this is complicated. For example, the fact that the game has a graphic digestion toggle and a gore toggle means that multiple variations of scenes often need to be wrote to account for taste, because graphic digestion and gore are something that occur in pretty much any oral vore or crush scene. This means writing two variations of the scene each time effectively. Disposal is less of an issue because it's just an extension to the scene put onto the end usually, but that's still extra writing that needs to be accounted for. This is just taking into account the (very simple) yes/no like/dislike have/don't have options that the game has already. Even simple choices like this effectively lead to double or triple the work, especially when the previous game didn't really have these choices. There's also the fact that this latest update didn't take any choices into account beyond - do I want a cock vore, oral vore, or anal vore scene - and it was still 30,000 words long between the various toggles. Combined with all the programming, it's work that is better spread out over a month rather than 14 days for the sake of my sanity. So, yeah, there won't be any huge infinite paths, because then we'd get bogged down forever. The game is going to be a fairly linear route that has consequences along it based off of what you've done, but ... even done simply, it takes a lot more time than the more scene select approach of Tiny Furry. With that said, though, when the tavern is completed and all is said and done, moving back to something simpler and more scene selecty is going to be polled as a potential option if people want that.
ZaneofBane
Rather than seeing choices branch infinitely, I'd rather them close after a while or toggle a switch. That way the choices have a simple or temporary effect. This would keep choices significant without spiraling into infinite variety. Either a choice results in a yes/no like/dislike have/don't have option or a short time branch which resolved itself. This would give choices weight while limiting the bloat. Just my 2 cents.
