Do you mean someone else continuing the work? Because it seemed pretty clear the dev was washing their hands of this, dropping out from the dev scene and moving on from what they said.
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For the time being it was decided that a break was needed from the project.
Because of how much hard work has been put in so far, I’ll be damned if I let this project go to waste.
It will come back in the future once we have been able to put in place a more full proof plan.
That’s fine but the original dev has walked away from the project, restructured the patreon to focus on stories and writing and closed the game’s discord down. Saying that it’s on a break is kind of misleading. If others are wanting to continue working on it and plan to do so at some point that’s fine. But it shouldn’t be expressed as the project on a break in my opinion. Clearly things are going to be changing if/when the project is worked on by someone else.
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I don’t think it is misleading. It’s as honest as I can be at this time. The project is on a break. How that project returns is obviously something that I can’t explain right now as I don’t know. Whether it returns as a game or individual stories or something different is to be decided.
No-one has reached out at this time to say that they want to continue working on it. If they do at any time of course their thoughts will be taken on board. All of these are if, buts and whens.
I could just say that the project is going to be thrown in the bin, but that wouldn’t be true.
I never had any of the issues you are claiming to have in this project. If you felt that way that is fine but not everyone who worked on the project.
As it appears I didn’t make this clear in my earlier post - I didn’t have any issues working with MODOK. He was blunt, sure, but he was also clearly stressed about the state of his work. His creation was floundering, and it bothered him. I volunteered, I put in a small amount of work, I was told that I wasn’t “getting it” and set loose.
I didn’t chime in here to throw salt in wounds, I did it because people were starting to mutter about LITWTMH taking peoples’ money and running and I don’t think this project was ever intended as a cash-grab. It was just, as I said, somebody trying to bring about their precise vision when they didn’t have the ability to create it on their own. That’s not an attack on anybody’s character - it’s an observation of the management issue which has caused the project to bog down and reach the point where it’s been closed (if, apparently, temporarily?).
It’s not a unique issue to this project. Happens to lots of games, happens to lots of projects in general. The push to make something perfectly match the “original vision” causes so many creations to flounder, because… well, at the point where the vision is being actually made, dreams have to come face-to-face with reality. And the reality is, you have to work with what you have available and make compromises based on the fact that this is an incredibly niche interest to be building a game around. The funds are limited, the number and skill-sets of people willing to volunteer are limited, and so your scope cannot be limitless.
Look at the games which are active here, popular here. They are in active development. They have bugs, they have typos and bad grammar sometimes, they end abruptly when you hit the end of the scripted plot. There are hotfixes and broken builds. There are mechanics that are implemented and then stripped because they didn’t work out. There’s a ton of jank. But, and I cannot stress this enough, they EXIST. They are playable enough to function, they update regularly in response to reported issues, and they continue chugging along. Meanwhile, there is an entire vast graveyard of games that never made it to launch in the first place because their designers wanted a perfect one-to-one recreation of what they envisioned in their imaginations, going back and reiterating over the same basics over and over and over again in an attempt to “perfect” it. That doesn’t get you the perfect game, it gets you Duke Nukem Forever.
That’s the message I have to the other developers on this site. It’s not a unique issue for this particular project, but this one was one of the biggest and most prominent examples simply because of the visibility of it. Most “failed games” never get a post in the first place, let alone three years’ worth of updates on it. So it’s worth considering LITWTMH for “lessons learned,” and the lesson I think developers should take away from it is “let people play your game even if you think it’s not good enough.” The perfect is the enemy of the good, and a playable game is always better than a perfect vision of a game that never gets made. You can fix jank. You can correct bugs. You can add content. Whereas an unmade or unpublished game is just a dead one. Compromise between your vision and your reality to get something out the door. Pull back the scope, look at what your actual available tools and resources are, and make something that resembles your original idea but matches that reality. Then publish it. Get eyes on it. Learn what people liked about it and what people didn’t like about it.
Refine the sequel. Opt for a remake with the lessons learned. But get something out there first.
EDIT - To add, since I didn’t really link this point to my prior one; part of compromising your vision with reality is to compromise with the tools you have available, including the volunteer resources you may have. The project never made it to launch because the scope was never compromised, both in terms of quantity or quality. When I was brought on, my task was to rewrite from scratch a literal introductory scene - one of the first in the game! That, simply enough, should not happen. I KNOW somebody already wrote that once. Probably multiple times. And if it exists, either refine it or print it. Don’t scrap what already exists. It destroys team morale when people think that their contributions are not appreciated, and almost certainly led to the high rate of volunteer churn this project suffered. I wrote professionally, but most people willing to make assets or code or writing for a fetish game will not have that background. And that’s okay! Trying to make a massive, “team required” game about making people fat for sexy-times means accepting that your team will have limitations and working with that fact. It may not meet the original vision, but again… better that something exist.
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Where’s all the art?
I think that the art was amazing and the writing was pretty good too, but the code/gameplay ended up being an impossible hurdle.
If the writing had only had to focus on say one girl, I think this would have been a quite good illustrated story, or comic, or pdf? Maybe?
I don’t fully see why there was such a big focus on making a game, when no one on the team was an expert in coding a game.
As a proofreader you’re probably aware that the writing was going quite a bit better than the coding was going?
Personally I’m a little biased, as I feel like renpy is easier to learn coding in than twine is. Despite twine being designed to be easy.
EDIT: To clarify twine harlowe is likely a good candidate for making a CYOA VN about a woman and a man. But… for a simulation style daily life lifesim style game about any number of characters. I think you’d need/want to use tools like vscode and github alongside twine sugarcube or renpy.
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As someone who briefly volunteered, I will say I share a lot of similar sentiments with @TheWell-Being . My time was very short, and I will say I jumped ship early because I felt overwhelmed. From my experience, a big issue that led to this cancellation was relying too heavily on volunteers to pull all the weight. You have volunteers for the coding, volunteers for the writing, volunteers for the art. You can’t expect to keep a consistent team when everyone involved is doing this in their free time, and the project lead is expecting everyone to pull the most weight.
Another contributing factor was the fact that almost NOTHING was ever released to show any sort of progress or clear indication of what the game would actually be to the public. I can recall one very early and janky build with very little content being released on the Discord. How can you expect people to lend their time or donate to a Patreon when there isn’t anything to showcase what the project is actually going to look like and how it plays? Promises can only go so far, to keep supporters trust you need to show that their time and capital are actually being used effectively.
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Good news everyone. I was able to get ahold of the Google Drive and I’ll be posting a zip of all the Scripts and Design Info from the project in .docx format as soon as I make absolutely sure there isn’t anyone’s personal info in there. It’s a lot to go through, so it probably won’t be ready until after the forum migration on Thursday.
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Alright, here it is. Every single document we had regarding how we intended to implement code, planning out the story arcs and more than a few scripted sequences for each character written out by our writers. Here’s hoping that people can make use of it and, if nothing else, learn from our failure.
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A lot of these drafts are pretty good!
’ In time, you will know the tragic extent of myour failings…’
Is this project canceled because if it is I’ll gladly take lead
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But first i need to know if it’s canceled or not
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This project has so much potential and I’d like to develop it into an actual thing if its truly canceled.
If it is canceled here’s what i was thinking I can do all the writing on my own and maybe some proofreading help (except for any coding which I’ll require help) and art (although not necessary)
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It’s cancelled 100% from what I’m aware of
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The original dev is no longer working on it, closed down the discord, restructured the patreon to be focused on stories and cancelled it. If anyone is working on it, which so far no one had any plans or stated as such, they would be working on it the same way you would. Taking over a cancelled project that was given out to the public.
So am I allowed to take lead on the development? or did they not give permission for anyone else to take over
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Not a question I would be able to answer. I would guess from the other comments that were said that MODOK would be fine with it, but probably reaching out to them on discord about it would be better than someone trying to answer that.
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