2023 in Review (Patreon)

We're getting near the end of the year, so I thought I'd do one post looking back over the past year and another tomorrow with plans for 2024.

As this is going to clash with the regular update post, I thought I'd quickly go over that now first.

The week between Christmas and New Year is always a weird one.  There are always a few IRL distractions to work around.  I did manage to find some time to get some stuff done.  The next harlot to be released should be the Forbidden Smotherer.  I figured out what the rest of her scenario should be and most of it is now written.  She won't be ready in time for the end of the month, but I should have her out very early in January.  I'm hoping that will be the last of the slipped deadlines and I'll be back to regular end-of-month releases from January onwards.

I also ported over the last of the tier 1 harlots to HoHH1.5, including the new ones Sister Squeeze and Nicolette.  That's 35 in total.  I need to do a ton of testing to make sure nothing got broken, but I'm hoping I'll have a proper HoHH1.5 demo out soon.

Onto looking back over the whole year and it was pretty good... mostly.  I remember trying to write end-of-year posts a few years back and scrapping them because they were mostly whining about projects that were started and didn't go anywhere.  Committing to always putting out a weekly update to patrons has definitely improved my work ethic and discipline.

The main focus was on the current major ongoing project, House of Hellish Harlots.  As I've written previously, this has become a more ambitious project than the initial idea, but only because the individual scenarios are longer and more detailed (and arguably better) than the initial intent.  Rather than panicking, I've just kept plugging away and I'm now at 77 of the 100 or so required.

There was one issue I was concerned about, and that was the project growing too large for the Twine editor to handle.  I was able to resolve that at the start of the year by using Tweego to break the project into separate modules.  While looking into it, I also opened up more possibilities for HoHH, but more on that in a mo.

The one major change of plan revolved around the 7th short story collection.  My publisher ended at the start of the year, so one of the urgent tasks was to get those books back up under my personal self-publishing account.  This was done, although I still need to make them available as paperbacks.  I also wanted to have a 7th collection to follow on from that.  Initially, that was going well.  I created a surplus of HoHH releases and set aside a month or two to write the remaining short stories.  The first month of that didn't really get off the ground and for the second something else came up.

The something else was the realisation I could add graphics and art to HoHH.  When I first looked at  Twine, art and sound assets seemed a no.  You had to embed them into the story and that usually made the project so large it ran too slowly to be playable.  However, Twine is just a game dev program that spits out an HTML page.  With the right <div> tags and CSS you can format it like any other html page.  Which, with the addition of some harlot art and AI-generated backgrounds, gives something like the screenshot above.  This was something I was excited about.  HoHH is still going to be a predominantly text-based game, but adding a few art assets and a slightly nicer screen layout should make it look a little more interesting and closer to a regular 'indie' game.

Overall, I've made some good progress there.  I've hired an artist (marwmellow) and they're working through the harlots.  The AI backgrounds do an adequate job for now.  I made a false step on the UI front.  I need to rethink that.  The icons do need better art, but I think the backgrounds to the text box and other art probably needs to stay nice and simple as is.  I need to stick to my strengths and be aware of my limitations.  Keep things simple and let the writing carry the project.  The harlot pinups will be a nice extra, but I think if I was to start thinking of adding CGIs for the various H-scenes we'd be entering dangerous never-ever-finish territory.

To fund the art commissions I created additional $5 and $10 tiers.  To give those subscribers extra I've added a series of harlot spotlights to showcase new art every couple of weeks.

Overall, this was a big boost to the HoHH project.  I don't mind getting sidetracked here if it substantially benefits my work elsewhere.  The same will be true if I get hit by a killer story idea and need to take a break from HoHH for a few weeks to write it.

The other short story project I've been working on is to upgrade the old H-space bestiary stories.  This has been a little mixed.  Ideally, I'd have liked to have put one out every month, but schedule hasn't really allowed.  I liked the updated short stories I did put out.  I would have liked to have done more.

This year I also did my twist on the #Dungeon23 brainstorming project.  This was an interesting exercise.  I came up with Ur-Carnosa, City of 10,000 Brothels as a location.  I think it's given me a nice starting point for a future game project, although I think I strayed too far from the initial '10,000 brothels' concept and ended up with a few too many generic videogame level locations.  I did eventually fall behind on this, but I will finish it off over January and February of next year.

I was pretty disciplined for most of the year.  I had a bad month around Apr/May when the short story writing for the 7th collection never got going and another one around Sep/Oct that knocked me completely off schedule for everything.  I think that's typical for me.  I tend to work 7-day weeks because I find the 'work' enjoyable, but there will always be the odd month where productivity takes a nosedive.  The main difference between now and past years is I've stayed focused on the current main project rather than losing interest completely after one of those 'off' months.

Thank you for the support and interest throughout 2023.
I hope I can continue to entertain you throughout 2024.
- manyeyedhydra