The Mage's Tower post-development curiosities

Hey hey!

I hope everyone's having a wonderful week! This time, I'm bringing something slightly different. This might interest some folk and not at all others, but I thought about doing this around the time I finished up the development of The Mage's Tower and it sounded like something I'd like to see if I belonged to a Patreon like this, so... why not?

In this post, I'm just gonna elaborate a little bit and show some things about how it was to develop The Mage's Tower!

I've had a good handful of people asking me how I did it, how I did some parts of it, and some folk interested in Twine, the tool I used to make it. It's an absolutely great tool that I super recommend! Therefore, I thought that as a patron treat, I could elaborate on all of that and some other things about the game as a whole.

Regardless, let's get to it so I don't write TOO much in this. I get carried away sometimes...

So, as I mentioned, I created The Mage's Tower using Twine, a tool made specifically to support interactive story. I used it with Sugarcube, which is one of the few available formats you can write/code in inside Twine and, in my opinion, the most amazing one. It brings so much to the table! Many of the things I did in Mage's Tower were easy to do because of the tools it provided, such as the scene where you're supposed to wait for the lion (that was a controversial one!).

As most of you know (because you were here!), we also kind of created The Mage's Story together. Before I started, when I had nothing but plans to create a short game to mess with such tools and try out this writing style, I asked all of you what kind of setting and what kind of kink you all would like to see the most! Remember those polls? The results were...

I guess we ended up not having demons in the game, huh. To be fair, when I made this poll, I had a completely different idea in my head, but in the end, I decided to shift towards being trapped inside a mage's tower. I knew I could go haywire with magic and kink that way, which I know is what most people wanted. x) It also kind of happened because of the kink poll that came with it. Remember that one? The results were...

These two polls shaped The Mage's Tower as it came out. I mashed these ideas, mulled them over in my head, and did the best I could with them! Bondage was key, so I made sure that there was going to be a whole lot of it and, in the end, it shaped the entire first half of the game and then some! I was decided to add CBT as well because it came close to winning, so I planned the first bad ending with that in mind! Admittedly, I did not plan to add Mind Control from the start, but as development went on and remembering it got a decent amount of votes, I managed to add a little bit of that too. Edging... well, it's me, so it was bound to appear here or there, heh! Milking was a kink I decided to ask in the third bad ending because of this poll as well.

When I first made the poll, I kinda thought Edging would win. If it had won, The Mage's Tower would be a completely different game, I guarantee you all, as I would have shaped it from the beginning to make sure it was a core feature in it!

These two polls shaped the entire idea of the game. The last poll we had, which was more recent, was regarding the kink that should feature in the game's end, and those...

and for higher tier patrons:

Yeah. You guys clearly wanted Chastity! For those that have already played through the endings of The Mage's Tower, you know that Chastity is a core element of it and I think it worked super well! Again, if any of the other kinks had won, I would have built something completely different, but that's part of the fun!

In the end, while I had a LOT of work and The Mage's Tower ended up taking a lot longer than I initially thought it would, it was definitely worth it. I feel like you guys enjoyed and I certainly enjoyed trying something different. In the last two months, I barely got to finish any regular stories because of it. I'm sure some people are bummed about that, but I hope that going through The Mage's Tower made up for that!

A few more stats of the game overall I'd like to share as it is now finished is that, at the end, The Mage's Tower totalled almost 70k words between all the branches, possibilities, and different versions of text you can get as you play through it all. That's... a whole lot! It's definitely more than I usually write per month if you total it all up, which kind of explains why I was rushing so much to get it all done! It was a whole lot of writing, plus coding, styling, testing... whew!

For those that are curious, The Mage's Tower's Twine project interface ended up quite crowded too. Here's a small look of what you've played through:

I can't even fit all of it in a screenshot with the maximum zoom out. :P

Finally, since we're talking about the development, I thought I'd share some curiosities as well. At least the ones I can think about! Like...

* When I concepted the whole thing, I thought about making some kind of roll system where you'd roll to try and pass 'skill checks'. That got scrapped, though, as randomness didn't turn out to be something that mashed super well with the story. :P

* When I started writing it and for about half of the first build, I had also planned for the player to be able to choose their character at the start. Drekkar was the warrior, but I had a wolf mage called Nero who was less brawn and more brain as an option as well. There was a lot of text specific for Nero, as well as many variables that controlled who you were playing, as things were supposed to change here or there depending on who you were playing and what you could do! In the end, I scrapped that idea as well, as handling both characters was a lot and I thought I could add Nero later if I wanted to.

* I had different floors planned for The Mage's Tower. The beauty of it is that I could add as many crazy floors with different kinks as I wanted! In the end, I only went through two before escaping. One of the floors I had planned in the initial concept but that didn't went through involved dealing with a giant plant and having some tentacle vine related bad endings.

* I also had a fouth ending planned where Drekkar would go a bit feral on Ivex if you finished the game with your arousal (from the very beginning) at very high. I had planned some rough handling and knot-******* the panther, but in the last month I had so much to do that I scrapped it. It didn't fit super well to have that reaction at the end without changing some other things in the game anyway, in my opinion.

These scrapped curiosities are some of the things I could still add to the game if I continued developing it. I could, as it turned out to be a super fun thing to do, BUT, as I mentioned several times already, I wrapped it up because it was supposed to be a short precursor to a bigger project.

I've been working on this bigger projects' details and outline for a while now. I'm almost ready to start creating it and I hope to have some insider things to show very soon! This one is not nearly as kinky as The Mage's Tower... or at least, not JUST kink. For those of you that have read my 'How Royalty Works' series, think that, but in game format. Basically, I'll work hard to create a good story, good characters, and a fun read as my main priorities. Rest assured that there will also be plenty of spicy scenes, of course, but not all the time like in The Mage's Tower, and not all of them so rough. I hope you all will like that as well!

In the mean time, I have some short stories that will be coming soon. That's all I can promise! For now, this post has gotten big enough, so I'll stop. For those of you that have read this far, thank you!

I hope you enjoyed a bit of an insider look at how the development of The Mage's Tower was for me. It was a lot of work, but it sure as heck paid off! If anyone has any questions about anything related to that, feel free to ask in the comments or discord too and I will for sure answer. :)

Thank you so much to all of you for supporting me, as always! None of this would have been possible without you! \o/