DEV Q & A (Patreon)

Folks,

I get asked a lot of questions about the game and dev stuff and I’m always willing to share my inputs for those who are interested so I wanted to give you folks a chance to throw any questions my way in the comments section and I’ll try my best to answer (without giving direct future plot points away). Here’s some sample questions I was asked recently about the origin of WTHI to give you an idea but feel free to ask me anything…

So, let’s start at the beginning:

In the beginning God created the heavens and porn…

OK, we won’t go back that far so I’ll start with the beginning of WTHI

Q: How did you come up with the idea for the game?

A: Obviously taboo is a very popular fetish but isn’t allowed on Patreon. So I wanted to come up with a scenario where there was some sort of forbidden temptation without actual taboo. So I went with a family that MC grew up with, without being blood relatives.

I wanted a scenario where these familiar people haven’t met MC as an adult. So although they know him, they are only just meeting him for the first time as an adult. So keeps the conflict of familiarity / new relationship tone.

Then I needed a reason for MC losing contact with Monica & the girls (Mom’s death / Dad’s custody) and a reason for re-connecting several years later (Father’s death) and I started from there.

Then wanted some mystery/intrigue to keep things interesting rather than just an endless fuckathon....

So I came up with the will story and developed an antagonist (But needed to keep the antagonist a mystery and make player unwrap some layers to find out who it is) so I created the mystery email and the will conditions (hoping it introduced some mystery, suspicion & conflict).

Q: How long did it take to develop from an idea into the first episode?

A: I really cannot remember exactly when I started thinking about developing my own game or when the seed of the idea started but I’m guessing it was sometime around October 2017.

Then I spent a couple of months just messing around with Daz and renpy to learn how they worked and to see if I could get the hang of it. Once I realized I had figured out some basics (very basic I hear some of you snigger), I decided to give it a go. And then spent maybe another couple of months putting Episode 1 together.

The initial draft was way too OTT from a “horny teen” tone and there was way too much internal MC monologue (basically force-feeding the MCs thoughts onto the player rather than the other way around). So with self-critique and listening to player feedback I made some edits and released the “final” version of episode 1 sometime around March 2018.

Q: do you start with characters personalities during creation or just build their personalities as you progress?

A: Basically for each of the girls I came up with their character first (who they are, how they fit into the story, their starting relationship with the MC and their potential story-line). Then I created their look (or in Elaine’s case, Aeilion created her look) and then build from there.