Side-Write: Lithier's Diary

Hello. So far with these side-writes I've tried to theme them around what I'm working on next, and with the Wild One making the rounds, next up on my plate is a small update for My Very Own Lith. Now, in the past, I would write "diaries" for Lith while I was working on his game, and my first thought was to do another one of those, for old time's sake. But... Lith already said his goodbyes in the last entry, and I think it would feel kinda hollow to push out another one after that. His diaries were a catalog of the process of turning MVOL from a tiny project into the fully-fleshed out v1.00, all sequential every for years, and I think it's better to leave them as one solid whole.

Well, of course, if you read those, I think it was fairly obvious that a lot of the stuff he rambled about was pulled straight from my life. It was kind of an odd experiment, re-filtering my life and experiences through his eyes, but folks seemed to largely enjoy it. So when I was thinking about what to do instead, maybe find some way to write something fresh about MVOL's world, but somehow without any spoilers, I came to an idea that felt much less awkward: offering my own "diary entry" of sorts. I'll touch on stuff with MVOL anyway and what's going on behind it, so I feel like it still fits fairly well as a sort of homage to what was without trying to drag it out.

My first thought was to talk about my feelings on the project at this point, or on where my career is right now, but I kinda feel like between all these dev journals and my big series of blog posts a year or so back talking about my feelings on MVOL and the future, I've gone over a lot of that several times over already. Hell, I've gotten pretty damn personal about exactly where I am emotionally at times, and what working on these projects has done to me, for good or ill. I'm even hoping to put out another supporter dev journal soon, I believe I'm well overdue on that if you don't count my endless rambling with PWO's release as one, but I'd like that one to be situated just on the other side of me finally figuring out what content I'll actually be adding to this update.

So maybe this would be a good time to talk a little about how I feel about MVOL now that I've been away from it this long and I'm trying to come back to it. I've touched on some of this here and there, but you might enjoy some of the details I think.

Well, the main thing I think I've touched on before is pretty similar to what brought me to this particular style of side-write in the first place. I feel like MVOL is... "complete." It was a great, nebulous, unfinished thing for so long that it was a massive emotional moment for me to accept that it was actually finished, and one that it took several weeks to actually process. Lith's story was complete, and he could finally rest. Both the character himself, and the Lith in my head. So when I try to come back to the project now there's this immediate sense of wrongness to it. This is complete. I don't need to add more, and I don't want to bloat out the story with nonsense that isn't needed. As ridiculous as the word count of this game may be, I built it expressly wanting to keep it "tight," to not allow any waste or anything distracting from the game's goals. Everything needed to feed into it in some way.

When people suggested adding something extra they'd like to say I'd usually say "I don't have the time, I'm focused on the big priorities," but a big part of that was more that even if that content could theoretically be made at some point, it would add to MVOL's size but take away from its focus. So between disliking "extra fluff" and emotionally turning the page to put that chapter of my life behind me, it's hard to get into it again, to really get into the zone to hunger for this thing to be made, deep down. Just about any of my best content comes about because I feel like "it needs to exist," and it can only exist a certain way, and I need to get it just right. If I don't have that, then it'll feel... hollow.

Anyway, that's a lot of self-justification and artistic whining to wrap around the fact that it's hard to come back and add more to this game. But I did leave myself one easy in-- a section of the game specifically meant to be purely optional, have almost no tie-in with the story, but serve as sort of a quirky way to have fun with Lith and learn more about him in more indirect ways. When I stamped "finished" on v1.00, I explicitly left the Wooden Door as the one big thing that's "maybe not quite finished," in that I could probably leave it as is (though the "weird stuff menu" feels a little strange then) or I could add a decent amount more to it without disrupting the game's flow, theoretically.

Initially I thought that should be pretty easy. It's an open ticket to include all sorts of weird fetish stuff, which is pretty neat since MVOL has technically turned out very vanilla compared to the breadth of my interests. But it's proven harder than I thought to really nail down where to go from here. I'm not sure how much of that is just being "rusty," and how much I might have sort of written myself into a corner.

One of the silly ideas I'd had in my back pocket since early on as a "maybe someday" was to include options for hyper. This snack makes THIS part of you huge, go have fun! I even include a clue in the game that the caterpillar already has at least one of those but it's holding out on you.

But every time I got closer to putting that in, I hesitated. It felt a little too... goofy? Or maybe like it was crossing a line into a specific kind of weird that would turn people away. Which is probably silly, especially now that I have this "weird area" set aside, but when it comes to decisions where I don't already feel like I know how it "has" to be, I do try to take players' interests into consideration, and a lot of players will play through just about everything just for completion's sake or for always wanting more to read even if it's not something they "like," and writing something going super deep into a weird fetish knowing how many people might read through it cringing and completely failing to enjoy it feels wildly uncomfortable. I'm only really putting that one together right now, actually. Oh, and on top of it being a weird fetish, many people will be intensely alarmed that "this weird thing I don't like is happening to Lith!" so it gets even worse.

And the game does have a lot of weird and extreme stuff in it already, but a lot of that is sort of in "punishment areas," where you get the feeling this is happening because things have "gone wrong" somehow, so if you feel uncomfortable then that is arguably appropriate, anything that helps the player empathize with the characters is a plus. But if it's somewhere you get to willingly and freely just to have fun, then making people super uncomfortable feels especially wrong. So how can I include heavier fetishes without it having a net negative effect on players' experiences?

And to add on to that, the jello item actually complicates things more than I expected, at least in terms of gathering an idea up into something that feels "right" to move forward with. Technically, the jello ability enables scores of different fetishes, so the vast majority of things I could think of to add come with a rider of "well, if I want to do that, I could just make it a jello scene, it doesn't need to be its own whole thing." But... looking at what to add as new scenes with the jello also feels weird. That's actually one of the big drawbacks to transforming characters, and indeed having too few restrictions in general: things start to feel less special when everything is possible.

Let's get uncomfortable together with an example. If you don't like weird fetishes, maybe skip this paragraph? One of my more recently acquired interests is the idea of head fucking: a dick going into the head, usually through the ear, and somehow it's not lethal but has some silly effect like making them ahegao wildly and orgasm constantly or get brainwashed into an eager receptacle, something like that. It's very intensely intimate and compromising, much moreso than something as petty as letting someone fuck one's throat or tailhole. So. Obviously if I included this in the game as its own snack, or as one new possibility with a new snack, it would make a lot of people uncomfortable. And of course, that's also something that can be done very easily with the jello. Technically we already explored something similar in one of the setup jello scenes, so saying "okay, now put your penis in THIS random part of my body haha!" seems very underwhelming suddenly, and loses a lot of the meaning it has when it's a more direct anatomical interaction.

The freedom of the jello makes so many ideas like this feel sort of pointless. Possible, but purely arbitrary and unnecessary. That's the destroyer of ideas that is the blank page, the open check, the utter lack of restrictions. The real fun is almost always in exploring our limits and pushing them. So even if a hundred incredibly intense fetishes are suddenly enabled, most of them will suddenly be entirely unexciting being accomplished with jello. Hell, in some ways it's directly impeding other ideas. Another one I considered was an item for going full macro. Players could enjoy a colossal Lith playground, right? And watching him be super nervous about damaging anything with as little as a step, things like that. It could be fun. That would mean I'd have to go back and redo/add an alt for one section of jello, though, where it literally plays with the idea of "feeling like a giant." Looking back, I tapped into so many things in just those two little scenes that now make other possibilities feel pointless.

So, yeah, it's been pretty challenging. But I've been working my way to solutions. One decent solution for "content being too weird" is to try adding things that, while appealing to more unusual interests, is just sort of neutral to those uninterested in the subject rather than immediately repellent. I've had a fair number of requests over the years for a way to impregnate Lith, and I feel like an item could be a decent way to handle that without disrupting the entire story too much. It does run into some complications with things like maybe making the player pregnant instead, or else how it works with a female player, but it could be manageable. I think even for people that aren't super into pregnancy, it could be a fun, emotionally rewarding thing, if handled right. I'm mainly struggling with the question of what would actually happen AFTER the pregnancy. Continuing the story with them actually having and raising a child would be a massive distraction, mess up a lot of the story, and take loads of resources. But it also feels wrong to make it an "ending," where they settle down to start a family in the valley or something like that, especially since it could be easy to get locked into that in your save without any real way out short of some really uncomfortable "alternatives." I've ended up wondering about alternatives where whatever comes out somehow isn't of much consequence, a lot of the focus is on the pregnancy and sharing that experience one way or another, but if the end product is trivialized then that suddenly takes a lot of the emotional value out of all the content before it, especially for replaying. What the hell do you do AFTER the pregnancy? That's been my big question for a long time, and I haven't gotten a good answer so far.

As far as the weird impasse jello brings us to, I guess it comes down to needing to embrace the strengths of jello, and embrace the strengths of actually having anatomy separately. Looking back, I do regret some things about how I wrote the first jello sex scene. I like some urethral content but it does feel rather out of place there, and I ended up going far more "anatomically accurate" with it than would even be necessary for if it happened with proper hyper or something. The point is, I should have made it feel more "jello-y" so that I left the possibility of exploring something urethral, through hyper or macro or whatever, as more of something special that can only really happen with real flesh. Similarly, I feel like I should make an effort to focus jello scenes on things that are specific to jello rather than just a "think of all the possibilities!" blue sky approach. There's certainly plenty of unique stuff to dip into there, if I'm brave enough.

For that matter, some of the ideas that come up as interesting possibilities for snacks kinda conflict with the rest of the game, sometimes getting too close to other content or even wanting to straight up replicate it. If I was really willing to go all in on the idea then I could probably add a few extra variants here and there and make it work alright, but that's put still more ideas on the "maybe" shelf with nothing really feeling like a solid, "must have" choice.

I'm still dealing with this lingering feeling of "did I make the right choice? I still haven't gotten any validation or affirmation for all the big risks I've taken" after PWO and it's making it harder to make these tough choices and feel out the best path. I've got absolute loads of possibilities, but it's been a lingering question for months now just which I'm going to go for. I need to make a decision and start writing right about now, so...

So that's where I'm at, right now. I guess a lot of my work isn't even writing or programming, but plotting everything out, making sure I choose the right path to go down to make sure everything goes just right. I believe I'll get there, so don't worry about me or anything. This is far from the first tough conundrum I've faced, and far from the last I'll solve.

That's life, a series of tough choices with some boring stuff in between. I hope you've been able to overcome your own tough choices of late, with how tough things are out there right now. I deeply appreciate your continued support through this mess. I've been pretty scared about what would happen as the economy suffered, and at this point I'm just glad I still have a job, especially this one. So, thank you, for keeping me going. You've changed my life more than I can say.

And thank you for reading through one more silly, rambly mess from me. I hope if nothing else, this gave you a little special insight into what goes on "behind the scenes" with MVOL. For what it's worth, Lith sends his thanks and his warmest wishes as well. May your choices pay off, and your days to come be bright.

-Lithier