2022 Wrap-up, and the Shape of Things to Come (Patreon)

TL;DR

• No currently announced release date on Season 2 Episode 1
• Monthly Patreon-exclusive releases
  • Initially, these will be the patron-voted game overs in Season 1
  • Once ready, we’ll switch to Season 2 work-in-progress builds
• Public releases will remain at one-episode delay (with the exception of Season 1 Episode 14, still releasing on February 8th)

First things first, we wanted to offer a tremendous thanks to everyone. The support and enthusiasm for Another Inner World has exceeded our expectations at every turn, and we are truly grateful.

A Season One Retrospective:

We started this project at the beginning of 2022, though the planning for it began in the months prior. We released the first three episodes publicly on March 8th, with Episode 4 being available early to patrons. On the 8th of every month after, like clockwork, we released a new episode.

In that year, we wrote 650,000 words—including 121 vore scenes and more than 40 ways to die! We hit over 100 concurrent patrons, 20 of whom have been with us since the project launch.

These were all above our expectations… including word count. The goal was to keep each release around 30,000 words on the high end. This seemed like a very reasonable, very sane goal, leaving us plenty of time to outline, write, revise, and edit our work all before creating the Twine version for rigorous bug testing. After Episode 9, every single episode has at least twice our expected word count, with the finale escalating further to over 100,000 words. To put that in perspective, maybe 3,000 words of Episode 14 had been written in advance, meaning we produced the equivalent of an average-length fantasy novel in under a month. Don’t get us wrong, this is an achievement—both the number of words we were able to write, and the fact that we hit every deadline we set for ourselves throughout the entirety of Season 1—but it is untenable.

When we began in March, we had a head start on releases: Episode 5 was ready to go and Episode 6 was nearing its final draft. This lead slowly diminished until we hit the point where we were still working on the draft two days before release. This left us with smaller and smaller windows for review and editing, and made the final hours before releases into a stressful crunch fueled entirely by caffeine. It also meant we weren’t delivering the best quality releases we could have. Deadlines became an increasingly regular consideration when deciding which scenes and scenarios to include, and while we’ve tried to prioritize making something we think you’ll enjoy, we’re not going to pretend things haven’t been left at the wayside or rushed because the release date was drawing near and we still had thousands of words that needed to be written elsewhere.

What to expect going forward:

First things first, we’re going to be taking a break. We need one, badly. This doesn’t mean we’re putting the project on hold entirely, but it does mean at least a few weeks off where we’re not writing daily, and especially not hitting the 5,000+ word days we’ve been pulling to keep up.

As we mentioned in our pre-Episode 14 post, this means Season 2 Episode 1 will not be releasing on February 8th. We don’t have an exact release date planned, and that’s actually going to be something we continue going forward. The monthly full episode releases have forced too many concessions, both in terms of time spent working and the story itself. For the sake of continuing to produce quality content, we need to slow down the release pace.

That’s the end of the bad news. The good news is that we’ll still be putting out monthly content. In January and February, we’ll continue running polls for the inclusion of extra game overs in previously released episodes (and possibly upping the frequency on these polls during the inter-season wait). You can expect the first release with some new scenes in early February.

We’re also going to try to get a Scene Gallery up and running within the game itself, meaning that there will be an additional screen after the Episode 14 end page where you can mess with conditionals and view most of the vore scenes in the game. This may take a while to get fully functional, so please be patient.

Meanwhile, we’ll start working on Season 2. While we’re not committing to specific dates on full episodes, we will be producing Interim Releases once a month.

These will include:

• A Patreon-exclusive, relatively functional Twine file with a work-in-progress of the latest episode
• About 30,000 new words, roughly edited; sometimes more, sometimes less
• No guarantees on vore scene/game over count (the game overs in particular are frequently left as placeholders until the episode is mostly written)

No exact date for when the first Interim Release will be ready. Again, we need some time, both to recuperate and to make sure we’re adequately planning ahead. We’ll continue posting announcements here, and we’re available on Discord to answer questions. New episode releases will be announced 1-2 weeks in advance.

As for non-patrons, public releases will continue to lag behind by a full episode, meaning Patreon will always feature the latest and greatest. Episode 14 will still be releasing to the public on February 8th, but the extra game-overs will remain patron-exclusive until Season 2 Episode 1 is fully available to patrons.

Thank you for all your support. We’re looking forward to continuing Another Inner World in 2023.