December 2023 Development Log (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

Alright, so... if there are any typos or mispellings here, I apologize. Next time I take my laptop anywhere for a couple of days I am definitely for sure 100% bringing my keyboard with me. A sticky old laptop keyboard does not compare to a mechanical one.

Anyway. Let's talk about A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest: both the old version and the upcoming new version. Mostly the old version, 'cause... new version is still in the planning phase.

This month I decided to pull back from developing things forward (sorta, kinda, as you'll see by the end of the post, I still did plenty of programming) to take a look backward instead. I realized that it had been months since I had even opened up the original Quest version of the game, so... I decided to open up the source code and take a look at everything.

Why? Simple, really. I wanted to remind myself of what I enjoyed about it the most and what I disliked about it the most. The things that inspired me to create the game and the things that, well, made me stop making it. I think it's important to look at and evaluate both of these things before getting too deep into, well... remaking the game. The latter is more important than the former, at least to me: I don't want to make the same mistakes that ultimately lead to the original game getting cancelled.

If you are not familiar with A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest, then here's a link where you can download and play the final version of the game before it, well, got canceled. I won't be using anything from this project going forward - bar some characters and themes and the like - so it's safe to play it without spoiling anything about the new game. It's also a pretty big game even if it's a cancelled project... if I recall correctly, it had 200,000 words of content or so, or, about as many words as a pretty large novel.

I will go over the positive things first, though... and honestly, there's more positive to say than negative anyway. So, let's get the gushing over with.

A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest: Positives, Or, The Stuff I Like A Lot

The first thing that I noticed is that I'm still very, very proud of the game in terms of visuals. I remember when I was originally creating the backgrounds for this game I was worried that they weren't all that great or that I'd end up thinking they were 'bad' in retrospect, but... I really love the backgrounds in this game, even now. Don't get me wrong, they're not perfect - they ain't the best visuals the planet has ever seen, far from - but they definitely work very well and I'm extremely proud of them even over a year later... which is why I'm going to be peppering them throughout this post as I keep writing.

Whether I will keep this style for the reboot... remake... thing is unclear in my mind right now. I know for sure I won't be reusing these backgrounds - I want the game to be as new and fresh as it can possibly be - what I am not sure of is... will they look like this? Will they be made in Blender? Will they use a similar color palette? Do I want them to look more friendly and open instead of cold and isolated? Not sure: but going through the game has put these interesting questions in my mind. Given that the game is going to entering proper development next year I'll need to answer them soon, so... good time to start thinking about them.

After walking around and looking at all of the backgrounds and stuff, the next thing that I did was, well, interact and talk with all of the characters! There was a lot of them in the game: Hart, Wilson, Takayuki, Gianna... the list goes on. Because you don't/can't do a whole lot of talking in A Tiny Furry In A Huge World, I had forgotten how much dialogue I had wrote for the characters of Huge Quest... and it was fun to reread it and get back into their heads and rediscover everything that I was trying to do with them. To kinda soak in their lives and the world building that I was doing. This really never happens when I read my old stuff, but here, for a couple minutes a couple times, I almost forgot that it was me who wrote it all in the first place. Like I was discovering these characters for the first time ever. A strange feeling for sure.

In general, there is quite a lot of world-building in A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest: not just in dialogue, but in other places. I would like to offer a similar level of world building in the remake/reboot for sure. Plenty of characters to talk to, plenty of objects to interact with, lots of interesting and diverse locations to visit, and, of course, lots of macro/micro and voreish scrapes that you can get yourself into. I think that this is the thing that embodies A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest. To put it simply: a well-detailed and lively world that can be as interesting as it is dangerous.

Out of this love for the characters, I also want to try and carry over some - if not all - of the folks that featured in this game to the new version. They may well be given different roles and have slightly different backgrounds and be doing different things, but... the spirit of the characters will still be there. What makes Wilson Wilson will be present and alive, even if he isn't a bartender. It might sound silly since they aren't real people, but... I think these characters deserve a proper chance to have their stories told, to live and breathe and be as close to real people as they can be.

So you might be wondering... when are you gonna talk about how you felt about the vore in this game? When are you gonna talk about how the steppies made you feel? That's a difficult one, because... my own magic doesn't work on me? Or, my own work doesn't arouse me. Not because it isn't sexy - I think it's very sexy - but because I am too wrapped up in my own self-consciousness to be able to enjoy it... if that makes any sense? I'm constantly thinking about how I wrote this and how I wrote that and man should that word be there to really be able to sink into it, and, y'know, do myself an orgasm.

I did read some of the juicier portions of the game, though... if only so that I could wrap my head around the sorta tone and feel that I was going for. To put it simply, the tone was... grim? Very cruel content, very bad endings where explicitly terrible things happen to you as a result of being stepped on, or ate, or ending up in some guy's pants somehow... the point is, on the scale of nice vore stuff to nasty vore stuff it was definitely pushing nasty vore pretty hard. Even the sole 'peaceful' ending in the game (with Wilson) is clearly a harsh failure state that ultimately ends in you being mercilessly ate by a snake.

I think I would like the reboot to be a little more... light-hearted in this regard? Now, don't get me wrong. If you've read my stuff then you'll know by now that I'm a big fan of nasty vore and really mean stuff, so there will obviously be plenty of that too. I just think it would be nice to have some more playful macro/micro content alongside the grimdark stuff: both for the sake of levity and for, well, variety.

I do like the content in the game, though - quite a lot - in terms of it's tone and the like. That's why it's in this section. So don't expect the general feel and vibe to change too much beyond there being a bit more emotional variety in the consequences of your actions.

So, to put it shortly: the things that I really like in this game are the visuals, the characters and the general story/themes, and, even if I think the macro/micro and vore content could do with a little variety, I also think the vore content is great too. I think these three things are factors that made the original game popular in the first place - particularly the last two - so even if I'm not using any of that content in the remake/new version/whatever then I think it will be important to try and create the same vibe that it all had, roughly.

So... what about the stuff I didn't like? Or, more appropriately.. what kinda killed the original project off? What made me cancel it in the first place, and... what's the best way of avoiding that with the new game?

A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest: Negatives, Or, The Stuff I Didn't Like

Honestly? Replaying the game, content wise at least, I did not find anything particularly hateable. I'd like to change one thing with the gameplay, and... I have two big issues with the source code, or, the programming bit. I'll go into the programming stuff first and broach gameplay later because it's a bit of a larger topic.

I'll start with the obvious: Quest was not a good program to try and make a game like this in. Going into exactly why would be long and boring, so to give a short answer: Quest is not a program designed to make a particularly large game with. Tiny World gets away with it because it's a sandbox, but Tiny Quest was going to be a long and linear game that had a lot of choices and consequences and even RPG elements. Put it this way: the game wasn't even a third complete, and Quest was already throwing weird errors at me that I had to get around with jank.

This negative has been already solved: I will be making the game in Game Maker, or, a more robust engine that can handle things like this.

The second is feature creep, or, not planning ahead properly. When I first made Tiny Furry Quest, I didn't really have a solid plan in mind for it. I just figured... hey! Fantasy town. Tiny Furry World vibes: you get shrunk and have to figure it out. That could be fun! I had a rough idea of the town in mind, but... no real locations, no real characters, just... ideas. This was fine at first but as development dragged on and I kept getting more and more ideas... well, the scale of the project just kept growing and growing in my mind, and it eventually turned into a literal mountain of thoughts and half-finished and half-wrote and half-programmed things.

The solution to this? Easy: have a better plan. It's the reason why I went through the game in the first place... to plan. Now don't get me wrong... it's not going to be a complete plan. There's going to be a few gaps here and there because this is how my brain works: I literally cannot plan an entire thing, especially without wanting to deviate. But it's going to be a better plan than hey you're shrunk in a fantasy town and... I'll think of the rest later. It needs to be, otherwise it just won't get made.

In other words, I'm going to go for a bit of a smoother operation this time.

So... gameplay. What was wrong with the gameplay? Nothing, really. It's a text adventure and it's a perfectly fine one honestly. You can explore, there's a few puzzles, characters to talk to, a world to sink into... as far as text adventures go, it's, well, a text adventure.

But I kinda wanna make something more than a text adventure? I think that this game, this world, this setting, with all of it's magic and beasties and fun stuff would make for a really good RPG, or, at the very least, a game that has more RPG elements. This might include combat and level ups and the like, but things that I definitely want to include are things like skills, gear, a magic system, and more choices and consequences for your various actions.

In other words... well. I've made two, technically three, maybe even technically four text adventures in the time that I've been developing games. I yearn to make something a little different. A weird text adventure/point and click/RPG hybrid thing. With lots of macro/micro and vore, of course. And also text! I'm a writer, so there'll be plenty of that... it'll just be broken up in a more interesting way.

This will be good, because it'll make vore/macro encounters feel a lot more like a result of the gameplay rather than it just being something like... hey, walk up to shoe and deliberately go underneath it for no reason to get crushed. Or go up to a macro and literally call them a fucker so they eat you. Or whatever. Point is, it'll make the encounters feel a little more natural and surprising, rather than it all just being a sorta vore gallery like Tiny World or parts of Tiny Quest were.

Okay... I think I am done talking about A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest for now. More than anything I wanted to go through my thoughts and feelings on the whole game in detail, and, I think I've done that!

This is the main bulk of the dev log. I know it's not talked about anything that's in active development, but before I went ahead into the future I wanted to spend the last part of the year looking backward at what was a pretty cool fucking game. Hopefully it'll have an even cooler future.

Space Shooter Game (bonus)

This month to sharpen up my programming skills I decided to make a little game that I would have no reason to make otherwise to kinda keep myself sharp while I focused on commissions.

I ended up making a top-down space shooter: kinda like Galaga or Gradius or whatever. I've attached it to this post if you want to give it a shot! The neat part about it is that I coded every single line of programming myself: no tutorials, no textbooks, no nothing. I used all of my own knowledge to sorta jury rig a kinda classic arcade game together.

It's neat, but very imbalanced! There are no sounds or music or anything yet. Over the next couple of months I think it'd be fun to develop this a little more and just kinda put it on the end of a dev log occasionally, sorta like a what's up bonus game. I will definitely not be spending a ton of time on it going forward - I'm a vore game developer, not an arcade game developer - but given that it's a nice way to learn and flex my skills within the new engine I'm using it should serve as a nice practice piece at the very least.

Honestly, I wanted to type a little more about it, but this keyboard is really getting on my nerves, so... I'm just going to attach it to this post and let it speak for itself! Arrow keys to move, Z to shoot, and X to fire chaff (it destroys enemy bullets). There are ten waves total. Can you beat them all? (probably, if you get the right/enough OP powerups) Ah yeah and it only works on Windows.

Alright, that's it: I'm done. I'm never typing on this laptop keyboard again.

I know that this wasn't the most revealing dev log in terms of the future, but... I hope you enjoyed reading my thoughts on what worked and what didn't in Tiny Quest. If you were a bit bored of the past, then don't worry: next month's dev log will be about the future.

Happy holidays, everyone! I hope you all have a great time. 

I'll be back a couple more times before the year ends with some juicy stories as well as a little post to close out the year as I like to do: a thanks for being with me in 2023 sorta thing. I'll see you for that stuff soon!