Practice - Dev Diary (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

Thanks to you guys, I love my job. I get to be a writer, movie director, game developer, project manager, head of PR and marketing, artist, animator, logo designer, studio executive, the list goes on. 

The hardest thing I do? Consistency. I'm the kind of person who enjoys the challenge of learning something new. I can tolerate some monotony and boredom, but I'm happiest when I'm practicing a new skill and improving my craft.

That being said, a big part of being skilled at something isn't what you learn at first, it can only be acquired through repetition. I've been writing stories for two decades now, and that's my comfort zone. Creating fun characters and putting them in a room together to see what happens. Bringing a story to life and figuring out how the pieces come together like finishing up a jigsaw puzzle.

My biggest challenge in writing a story has been in finishing them. It’s easy to set it up with a fun situation, get to know the characters a bit, have a rough idea of where the story should go and put it on a shelf to never finish it. A potential story is perfect in conception but increasingly difficult in execution. Why not leave it in the perfect stage?

It's not that I never tried. For some stories I skipped ahead to the ending, but never finished the middle section to bring it all together. I had the attitude that short stories weren't as cool, so why finish one when it could potentially be turned into a completed novel?

Well, I did finish one short story about a pirate and showed it to Laura (yes, that one). For fun, I also showed her a TV show pilot I completed about a group of friends picking up a hitchhiker with a demon that possessed a character named Laura. She didn't really like that one 

This was back when she convinced me she'd changed, that she was no longer a bully. She claimed she’d found Jesus, and because of this she said the sex scenes in my stories surprised her for being so graphic. I took a look at my other stories and realized it was a common theme, so I thought, “maybe I should split up the sex scenes and turn them into their own thing”. 

It wasn't too long after when she tried to convince me to call her classmate Jenn a fat ass at a bowling alley, for no other reason than to be a bully and I realized she was full of shit.

Eventually, this turned into the opener of the short (and never finished) story titled Hypnosis. I posted it on a breast expansion story site theoverflowingbra and it got over ten thousand views with positive feedback which was more of a response than anything else I had done. I wrote another story, and another. Some of them were better than others, but they all had something in common. I still didn't know how to write a solid ending.

I kept writing, but over the next few years it mostly consisted of writing and rewriting the same few stories, getting stuck and not knowing where to go next. I wanted to complete something, but that was always elusive. The only traction I found was in writing the NSFW stuff because at least then people would read it. Especially if it was about tiddies. 

I didn't finish college, I just took the classes I wanted to learn and stopped. In the back of my mind, I figured if I actually found a job I liked, I would be far less likely to follow my dream to become a writer. So, I kept working jobs I didn't particularly like. 

Ten years passed. I kept writing a bit on the side, trying to improve my craft, but didn't make nearly as much progress as I wanted to. I realized only having shitty jobs for options didn't mean I would work any less. Oops. Still, practice is practice, and I continued to improve.

Finally, I wrote a story I was proud of. It was still NSFW, but that's okay. As long as there was still a great story to tell, the level of NSFW content was irrelevant to me. I had started playing adult games around the same time, realizing the games in pop up advertisements weren't all there was to offer and some were quite decent, especially the ones that had strong narratives. 

I'd always wanted to write a video game. Splitting paths, multiple endings, that sounded like quite the challenge. I figured this was my chance to try, and jumped right into it. I looked at the story I’d finished and wanted to adapt it. It would be about a guy moving in with one of his friends and her housemates. They would have a thing, but he would also be distracted by his other new roommates. A little drama, but mostly a fun time.

However, I didn’t think I was ready for this as I had to learn graphics, game design, and all sorts of things, so I decided to make a practice game first. It would be based on my short story Hypnosis, and would serve as my practice. I was still a bit skeptical of my abilities to write an ending, and this would be an easy solution. The game would have several of them. Good ones, bad ones, one for each girl, some for ending up with different groups of them. I figured it would take around a year to complete, and I could take all the experience I’d learned and apply it to my main game.

A lot of people loved it, so I jumped in with both feet. Every waking hour I worked on it for over a year. Sure, I still made sure to spend time with my wife, and we still went on vacations, but I was putting in 12-16 hour days every day of the week. I wanted to put out a new update every month, and I would push to make that happen, often staying up all night to finish a release.

But as the game grew in popularity, so did the pressure. It was no longer for me and a few fans, there became tens of thousands of players, many of them offering criticism. Constructive feedback is always helpful, and I appreciate it when it’s well intentioned. But it can get overwhelming at times, always being questioned and second guessed about things as I spend years of my life trying to push this project to its logical conclusion.

Part of me wondered if I was capable of making the outline work, if the concept in my mind would finish the story in the right way. But on the plus side, that’s the fun of a game with a split branch narrative. I don’t have to pick an ending, I get to offer several and let the players choose their favorite. 

So, I practiced with a few side endings. What if the MC’s dick got too big for the girls? What if one of the girls took the watch and used it on him? Bad endings can be fun. But they’re also easy. What about endings meant to satisfy? 

Next, I tried bittersweet endings. The broken watch ending was meant to be satisfying in its own way and yet leave players wanting more. If it was perfect, what desire is there to return to the main game? I took the story in as different of directions from the main story as I could think of. To my surprise, the characters fought back, not content to keep eating and growing without fighting against it first. They needed to be convinced by the player, and that became the focus of the branch. 

This led to multiple endings, leaving the girls at different sizes, always growing larger with each one. Not everyone likes the huge sizes, and this meant most players could roughly find something to their preference. The update became about the growth itself, emphasized by it being undesired and unstoppable. 

I mentioned before that I regret detouring to the branch because of how long it took away from the main development. But I don’t regret the branch itself. It was great exercise for how to steer the plot going forward, and it was valuable practice for how to end the game in general. 

I’ve heard ending a story described as landing a plane. You’re taking hundreds of tons of metal hurling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour and trying to bring it to a full stop without destroying everything onboard. I always thought it sounded a bit dramatic, but then again I actually landed a plane when I was 15. It was only a little 4 seater, and the pilot also had controls, but I don’t think he realized the tall kid he was taking up for a spin had never driven a car before. Thankfully the kids in the back enjoyed themselves. And hey, I’d played flight simulator, so that’s something. That story added nothing to this topic, but who can resist adding anecdotes?

Anyway, instead of jumping into that original idea I had for my original game, I began Endowed as a new challenge. A real plot, an older, slightly more mature MC with more experienced love interests. I also tried writing a side ending for Endowed. But instead of one, or four, it finished up with over ten. More practice, more experience trying to land the plane by getting used to the buttons, steering with the joystick, trying to figure out all the moving pieces and what they do. I was excited for it, I thought it had some of the best scenes and work I’d done yet.

But all those things took time away from the main stories. And, although the main reason I spent so much time on the broken watch branch was because it was voted for, I still wasn’t quite comfortable with the process. I wasn’t quite satisfied with the endings, I felt like I needed more experience. More practice. The basics are there, but the execution left something to be desired.

This is where writing stories comes in. They take a fraction of the time, as there aren't multiple paths, visuals and animations to match up, coding, all the things that make game development so time consuming. Only simple, straight forward storytelling.

So I've continued writing on the side. Often on my phone when I'm doing other tasks. Watching my kid play with his toys, for example. Before bed as I'm trying to fall asleep, on a car or plane ride. Now I have dozens of stories. They are fun and easy to write, and they also help keep me sane by ensuring I'm still practicing and improving my craft.

I've published four of them on here so far, but I have dozens of them. Problem is, they take time to polish up. If I'm going to post a story, I want it to be readable. I want it edited, at least on its second draft, and typically with visuals added. And this all takes time. Still only a fraction of what it takes to put out a single episode of a game, but still a few days. And to be honest, I often find editing to be the boring part. But it's necessary.

Over the past year I've talked about posting them multiple times, but there's always a new game update to work on. As soon as one is finished, the next is already behind schedule. So, part of the reason I've been holding back is I realize a lot of you aren't here for stories, you're only interested in the games.

And that's totally understandable, but a big part of this post is in trying to explain how valuable writing stories are to me in practicing my craft. I no longer get stuck writing for the game nearly as often, as I have more experience writing out scenes and episodes, allowing me to hit less speedbumps along the way. And, ideally, as we get closer to the end of the story for Hypnosis, the game will finish stronger as a result.

So I'll make a post describing my upcoming story Taylor on Saturday with the first chapter on Monday. I'm super excited for it, as I believe this story is my strongest yet with fast pacing and fun character dynamics.

Thanks for reading my wall of text!

Meanwhile, work is going well for the next Hypnosis update. Currently I'm still working on visuals, and it looks like I'll post the updated version of Episode 14 first followed by Episode 15. Aiming for sometime next month.

Thanks, everyone!