This is a great example of why Discord is not the right platform for this kind of thing.
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anyone has the source code?
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These are the two most recent builds of the actual game as far as Iâm aware. Unfortunately, I wasnât able to implement the absurd amount of writing that went into this project before it closed.
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What will happen to unimplemented story vignettes might those ever see the light of day?
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I canât reach the google drive they were on since the project closed, so youâd probably have to ask MODOK and the other writers about it.
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feels strange to me tbh.
As someone who volunteered on this project briefly (around a month or so), Iâm going to hop in here to say that I donât think MODOK123 was trying to pull anything over on anybody with this. It wasnât a scam or a rug-pull, it was just an overly-ambitious project headed by somebody who wanted the final product to exactly match his personal vision without being able to actually manifest it by himself.
I would encourage anybody reading this who intends to design a game which is large enough in scope that they are unable to make it on their own to keep the following in mind: when you bring on other people to work on your project, they are going to have their own perspectives and interests regarding the project. Even from the brief period of time I interacted with MODOK in trying to write things for his game, it was clear that he was in a cycle of taking volunteers, trying to work with them to get the game made in a manner matching his specific vision, and then feeling as if he had to trash or remove the content made when it didnât meet whatever precise criteria he had in his mind. This meant that it never actually went anywhere, because all the volunteer content went directly into oblivion over and over again.
For sake of transparency, at one point in my life I worked as a âspec writerâ - which is someone who writes to the specifications of whoever pays them. I volunteered to do this for him for free, and work with his needs to get some practice in the field again, but he got frustrated because I wasnât understanding his vision quickly enough for him and âfiredâ me. I say this not out of bad blood - to reiterate, I donât think there was any malice involved in any of this - but because it seems to be why this project was just constantly treading water.
I agree with @Mbauto on everything they said - the project had a huge scope, MODOK had no hope of doing it himself, and you have to be concerned about the burn rate of volunteers on a project with as niche an interest as this. I just want to suggest two additional items: first, if youâre going to bring on volunteers, you should look into contracts ceding whatever work is performed to the project to avoid legal risk. That will allow you to keep what exists as a âmorgue fileâ to draw from, either for raw materials or even just, at bare minimum, a âhereâs what I donât wantâ negative example. No reason to tread the same ground over and over again.
The second point is a simple one - volunteers are volunteering for themselves, not out of a sense of duty to the creator of a project. They have some reason to be giving their time, whether it be out of an interest in seeing a project come to completion, or an interest in stretching their creative muscle on a part of a project without having to make one from scratch, or any number of other reasons. You need to give them something for their time and efforts that makes them feel as if that time and effort is worth it, or theyâll burn out/blow up and quit. Work with your volunteers, make them feel appreciated, compromise with them. If youâre entirely uncompromising in your personal vision for the project, youâre really better off sticking to something you can make yourself from start to finish.
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Hi, I have a doubt. Is there no way to play the game currently?
I just read that the game was on discord and it seems that Discord no longer exists. So I was wondering if there was any way I could at least play it. Thank you. And Iâm sorry if my English is bad
Welcome to weight gaming @albos. Downloads from the post above are what is left of the game. Unfortunately, the developer chose to close down the discord and not publicly link the game anywhere.
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Whatâs really important to note here is that we had a great team of volunteers working on this project and we couldnât be more grateful for their work, the team worked to ridiculous lengths to make this possible and despite best efforts it just wasnât possible to reach the end point at this time.
In an ideal world we would have had a much larger budget which would have helped to lift some of the pressures involved in this process.
One difficulty we did come across was volunteers being vague as to their abilities. They were then brought on board and it was discovered quite quickly that their work and/or style wasnât a good fit. We arenât in the business (through lack of a better phrase) of keeping people on board when it just wasnât going to work out, that wouldnât be fair to them or to the project.
In terms of removing work that was prepared. This would have been done by the editors/proof readers, myself being one of them. I would read through the work and remove anything that sounded and/or felt out of place and amend anything that needed to be corrected. If you really think that your first attempt at writing something is going to be 100% perfect, I am sorry to say that, that is wishful thinking.
Final point to make is that all the work that was completed on this project has been saved for future use. This isnât the end of LITWTMH, itâs just on hiatus for the time being until we are able to secure additional funding and put a more defined plan in place to reach the end goal.
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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, Iâll 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.
Thatâs fine but the original dev has walked away from the project, restructured the patreon to focus on stories and writing and closed the gameâs discord down. Saying that itâs on a break is kind of misleading. If others are wanting to continue working on it and plan to do so at some point thatâs fine. But it shouldnât 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 donât think it is misleading. Itâs as honest as I can be at this time. The project is on a break. How that project returns is obviously something that I canât explain right now as I donât 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 wouldnât 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 didnât make this clear in my earlier post - I didnât 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 wasnât âgetting itâ and set loose.
I didnât chime in here to throw salt in wounds, I did it because people were starting to mutter about LITWTMH taking peoplesâ money and running and I donât 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 didnât have the ability to create it on their own. Thatâs not an attack on anybodyâs character - itâs an observation of the management issue which has caused the project to bog down and reach the point where itâs been closed (if, apparently, temporarily?).
Itâs 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 âoriginal visionâ 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 didnât work out. Thereâs 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 âperfectâ it. That doesnât get you the perfect game, it gets you Duke Nukem Forever.
Thatâs the message I have to the other developers on this site. Itâs 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 âfailed gamesâ never get a post in the first place, let alone three yearsâ worth of updates on it. So itâs worth considering LITWTMH for âlessons learned,â and the lesson I think developers should take away from it is âlet people play your game even if you think itâs not good enough.â 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 didnât 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 didnât 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. Donât 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 thatâs okay! Trying to make a massive, âteam requiredâ 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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Whereâs 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 donât 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 youâre probably aware that the writing was going quite a bit better than the coding was going?
Personally Iâm 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 youâd 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 canât 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 isnât 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 Iâll 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 isnât anyoneâs personal info in there. Itâs a lot to go through, so it probably wonât be ready until after the forum migration on Thursday.
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