Themba's sprite will come in two colors and function exactly how it does right now. So, yes, there will be a sprite for his "true form".
I'm having some trouble understanding what you mean for the second question, and as a matter of principle I don't want to comment on the scene you are referring to. But I can say that Asterion's sprite will not change as a consequence of that scene.
Alright.
Look at the list of Olympians. Check how many are women and think back to which Gods are important to Asterion. That's your answer. I knew we'd need a number of female characters because of that alone, plus a few more for other reasons, and that they'd be main plot important for Act 3. Ultimately the sausage fest of Acts 1 and 2 was always going to be a temporary state, which could be justified in-universe by Hermes' intervention but would necessarily be shaken up as the plot escalated.
We simply cannot finish the story without bringing in [REDACTED], and [REDACTED] who's seen [REDACTED] all along via [REDACTED], and [REDACTED] who's one of the few [REDACTED] in [REDACTED] who's been given [REDACTED], and so on! And how could I forget [REDACTED] who's known for her [REDACTED], which is very convenient for the [REDACTED].
And since I'm saying all of this, here's a funny one: who are the narrators? Have you figured that one out? And if you did figure it out -- have you really figured it out? Though I personally think they only count halfway for this discussion, since they don't appear on-screen.
Oh, and then there's Robert's mom... I can't wait to have her appear in the story! Can you imagine what a mother of demons must look like? The woman who sculpted him and all his siblings, whose thumbprint shaped his navel, whose hand is the symbol for the Nuremberg demons? We've been building up ideas for her since the game started!
And then there is... the prosecutor... But I'd rather not speak of her for now. I'll say she takes some notes from my favorite Ace Attorney prosecutor, and that I'm abslutely giddy to write her!
So, yeah! We're gonna have female characters, and I'm really looking forward to their roles in the story. Hell, just today I was editing some dialogue from Luke's mom, and that might just be one of the best moments in the highlight scene of his overhauled hangouts.
Acts 1 and 2 of Minotaur Hotel were written over 2 or so years when we were working under a philosophy of "Superserve your first audience" -- in our case we were working with gay men in mind. It was not a bad idea, I think it did a lot to establish our readership.
We tried to include female characters where we could (and the Hinterlands, in particular, had serious thematic reasons for it, I consider it very core to it in fact), but nonetheless there is no on-screen female character as part of the main cast.
The stretch of content we are walking into right now, Act 3, is something we've worked while informed by the reality that now we already have a loyal audience, and, if I may speak frankly, the cast of men we provide is already satisfactory in number, depth and quality. The "superserve your first audience" advice, while still important, is no longer the first on our list. Moreover, Minotaur Hotel has a foot firmly planted on literary fiction -- and if having a female character is what the story needs to explore its themes, that's what must be done.
In short: expect a more diverse cast going forward. We plan on introducing a female character, most likely in Chapter 21, who'll be part of the main cast. She's one of the characters I'm most excited about, I've been working on her concept for years. There'll also be other female characters, though they won't have as much screen time, and we're also introducing a trans character soon in Luke's overhauled hangouts.
There is another reason I could offer as to why there're no female characters, and it's actually the most direct and simplest, but it'd also be a bit of a spoiler. I can say it if you want but it's something people can already make out from what's already in the game.
I've thought about releasing the original draft to the public, yes, but there are a few issues. There's a bit of 4chan edgy humour there which I've since looked back on critically and have come to regret, so I'd need to take time to reread it all from scratch. But since I'd be doing that with the goal of presenting this text, I'd also feel tempted to polish other parts where I was very much rushing things -- at which point a bigger issue becomes apparent.
The truth is that the text of the quest is, itself, incomplete without the context of the threads where I posted them. The input I received, and which was not recorded into the text itself, fills in gaps that become apparent now that we are years removed from it. So I'm afraid that reading it would be a very fragmentary experience -- or, in order words, the experience as I envisioned it cannot be recovered. It's gone, the moment is gone, the context is gone, the dance between writer and participative reader is over and everyone's gone home, and I don't know if something comparable can be reconstructed in a way that I'd consider sufficient.
That said, I'm not really embarrassed of my work there. Of course there are all those issues I listed, some resolvable and some not, and there are other things I could also point as issues, but I still look back fondly to what I wrote then. Some excerpts were fantastic and made it into the game in one shape or another, Oscar's introduction being one of them, and it had a kind of chemistry which I cannot think ill of. In a sense, the core of what I wrote there became the seed for the fantastic things we've worked on for years now, and whatever flaws I can point do not detract from what I accomplished then.
Maybe once I'm done with Minotaur Hotel I could set aside a month or two to go back and thoroughly reedit the whole thing -- keeping the original text more or less as-is, but combing through the archives of threads to at least recall things and connect things better. Adding in comments too. Who knows, we'll see. I don't want to plan that much ahead because lately I've already been looking back to it with a greater fondness for certain aspects I once considered bad, and I've made my peace with them. I'm giving myself the time I need.
Onto your second question, things changed a lot from the original 4chan quest to the current VN format, but the core of the story remained the same. Once we started developing it as a game, however, we pretty much stuck 95% to "the plan".
Yes, the old man at the start was always planned to be Poseidon -- we left in plenty of foreshadowing from the very first builds. Originally the location you were in (either a train or bus station) changed halfway through the scene and that was a clue to the magical things happening. We later edited that out because it confused people too much but we still kept the sudden moments of lucidity, which are when Poseidon is capable of trying to lie to you about his history.
The Olympians' involvement has remained almost the same as we originally planned. They're going to show up later in the story -- what has changed is that they'll now be introduced one by one during Act 3, those elements are reasonably late additions. The visit to Mt. Persephone is "also" a reasonably late addition, dating back "only" to the time when Asterion takes the MC to the underground and they wrestle (which was many years ago by now, you can see that even the things we did change were thought out well in advance).
I suppose one of the biggest changes from quest to VN was the addition of Themba (who fleshes out Asterion's history), Khenbish (the most normal guy in the cast) and Pedro (Pedro) who together made the game much more resonant with myself. They're the Global South crew who pulled Minotaur Hotel away from the geopolitical broadness that was easy for anyone to swallow and into the more magical realist tone that I wanted to impart onto the game. The Hinterlands in particular did not exist in the quest and Storm arrived on his own at the end of the quest, and a different character called "Black" served his role in helping Asterion develop as a character.
You could say that, in making Mino Hotel into a VN, I was able to show more of myself and my own thoughts as a writer. The VN version is more sincere, at times it feels as though I've taken off the training wheels and I'm capable of pulling off all the advanced tricks I know myself to be capable of executing.
And yes, there are cut characters. There was a jackal and a cosmic bird who I did not have much fun writing, and also a slug I did not develop very much, plus a big and very sad lizard. There was a hydra, the "Black" I mentioned, but they're coming in as a recruitable character during Act 3.
The House of Asterion was an inspiration, yes. Check out the other answers in this Q&A, we mentioned it a few times already.
I sent your question to the rest of the writing team. For now I'll respond only for myself and then complement it later:
1. I'd say my favorite combinations are...
2. I want to write a story about some figures of Brazilian folklore, including but not limited to the pink porpoise, and I really want to write a story in Minoan Crete set a few decades after Asterion's death, focusing on a cast of mythical beings we see represented in some archeological sites -- specifically gryphons, daemons, cyclops (mammoth-flavored cyclops) and more.
3. Yes. This was always the goal. Some specifics changed over time but that aspect was always there.
4. It's a climax, but it's one of the first steps in rising action for Act 3. We're going big. (Mind you, while there'll be other sex scenes, they may even be more intense, but none will be as long as this one.)
We usually have to set aside some time to sit down and research for each character. It's usually Kangarube and I chasing as many primary sources as we can, trying (and often failing to) talk with people from those cultures, and immersing ourselves in their literature and art.
Sometimes it's easier, sometimes it's harder. For instance, P and Storm were easy for me because I'm Brazilian and taking notes from my own culture. Khenbish was particularly difficult, it's hard doing research on Mongolia.
You might want to check out some of the other answers we provided in this Q&A, the topic of research came up sometimes.
2. The programmer who did the heavy work for the most intensive systems in the game is nanoff, I cannot credit for his work and its complexity. That said, I am proud of designing the gameplay loop (day starts with some narrative, management session, hangouts, R&D and exploration rewards, end day) and writing the content that works with said mechanics.
I'm also generally proud of how we manage all the game's variables -- we managed to squeeze a lot of complexity and variability while mostly relying on just a few narratively-relevant variables.
3. Probably some geriatric Facebook page where grandmas and grandpas post crunchy GOOD MORNING gifs everyday and exchange knitting patterns. He always says GOOD MORNING.
Readers don't realize the physical reality of developing these games.
I think most of them think about their normal life and all the free time they have -- the quiet nights after work when it's not exhausting, or all the free time they have during college, or maybe they are unemployed and have a competent, caring support network... And then they think "I can put some hours to make a fun project". At first it's dreamy and carefree because they are well-rested and fresh. And they think that's it, you just do that and keep doing it, that's their idea of what developing a VN must be like.
But that's really not it, at least not for long. The reality is that making these games becomes incredibly concrete. You do it for a day, and you have to do it the next day too, and the next day as well. You'll forego opportunities to hang out with friends and family for this, and then you'll struggle to tell them what you were doing. You'll make life decisions based on your commitment to it -- you can't take this 2-year long professional commitment because it'd stop you from developing your game. Your finances will be affected, because for a lot of people they could be making more money elsewhere, and even if this is a great deal for you it's not so simple when it becomes a fulltime job.
You'll get tired, and you'll get a creative block. You'll rest and get back on your horse -- and you'll get a block again, until you learn how to push through it. You'll learn that you can keep working even when you're tired, and that a creative block doesn't mean you can miss deadlines and leave your team hanging. You'll learn that there are levels of tiredness, and that what you considered "super tired" is only the first level of exhaustion -- and there's at least ten of them, maybe more.
And it's gonna become physical, yeah. No one told me that a good office chair is "writing equipment", but it damn well is. One day I wrote while sitting on one of those tall chairs, a bar stool as they call it, and it left me in profound pain for more than a week. Nowadays I use a weird, fucked up ergonomic keyboard that clocks me as a fucking psycho because wrist injuries are no fucking joke, and I have 50 macros to reduce repetitive movements while coding expressions. I have an ultra wide monitor because my vision hs gotten worse and I need some geriatric features to be able to write well. I have a guest bedroom in my apartment but I'm facing the reality that I'll have to turn it into an office so I'll have space for all the things I need, but I'll also have to figure out what the fuck do I do about the wallpaper because post-it notes don't stick to it, and I need room for my wall of post-it notes. Even then, there'll come a point where my body starts communicating with me through a variety of discomforts -- and you gotta learn to listen to these things if you have any intention of doing this game dev thing for long.
It just keeps going. There is a physicality to making these games, or perhaps to any form of game dev, that people just cannot imagine. There are intersections, extremely significant ones, with pre-existing health issues and their treatments. There'll be devs who get a ADHD diagnosis and improve their focus significantly when they're medicated, and you'll have people on the autism spectrum who basically harness that same neurochemistry at will and start producing Vyvanse endogenously, but then can't turn it off -- and that's when you start seeing devs coming up with daily or weekly rituals to self-regulate somehow. Me, for instance, I could work during weekends, that's when a good chunk of the team is most available, but I decided to keep my weekends to myself because otherwise I'd go crazy.
I could keep going for hours about this, but that's enough for now. Take care of yourself breastie.
I don't know at what level of writing you are so I don't know what advice to give you, but I think one of the things that most helped us is having a grasp of pacing -- how to handle the scenes and players' emotions so it all flows well. When to make something jarring, when to make it slow. I think that's one of the key things for FVNs.
1) What has been the most surprisising thing you have found during your research on Myths and the cultures they exist in?
That Aphrodite is a Kyprian deity much older than the Greek pantheon, associated with the sea and fertility, which completely recontextualized her origins to me.
Mythologically she was born from Uranus amputated genitals, a deed accomplished by his son and father of the Olympians, Chronus. But then this puts Aphrodite as preceding the entirety of the Greek pantheon -- and that makes sense with the archeology! In fact, it seems that Poseidon's domain over the sea is a later development, as originally that fell on Aphrodite.
I think that is really interesting.
2) When it comes to our band of strange but relatable characters, who did the MinoHotel team not expect to be as much of a hit as they did?
I did not expect Nikos to be as favored as he is. We originally hoped it'd be a 50/50 split between him and Pedro but in truth Nikos is one of the most beloved characters in the game, period.
And thank you. I'll sing you this and another song.
How much of this is in line with a field of study for school or perhaps work and how much of this is more in line with your hobbies and interests?
Just adding to what Kangarube said:
At this point, for me, by the power of autistic hyperfixation my hobbies and work have merged. I certainly started on the hobby side of things, but I've gotten so serious about it that when I last went to Crete I was mistaken for an archeologist multiple times.
That said, I majored in Law, but I am not a practicing lawyer.
The way that I manage all the variables is that I know which choices actually matter on a narrative level and what they mean, what their consequences should be. Whether or not you made a sandwich during your breakfast with Asterion doesn't matter too much in the long run, but there's a little list of things that we're going to call back to frequently and all the way to the end.
I already know how these variables will affect the story. There is a logic to them, which is clear to the entire team but probably inscrutable to the readers.
Perhaps the more interesting question is "How to construct these choices and consequences", to which my answer would be:
Think of the world, its characters, its events, as having consistent logic throughout all of it. Things keep going when the readers aren't looking at them. People have their stories. The world has its logic -- and you set out to keep these things consistent, moving and evolving.
When you start from the ground up like that, it's easier to come up with manageable variables.
What other Visual Novels that inspired you guys writing style and /or passion in making your own VN?
Phoenix Writing was my first visual novel, so there's that. I'd also count Star Fox Command as a VN, but I'm a weirdo like that.
Nowadays I think bringing up Morenatsu is a bit gauche, and I have a number of criticisms towards it, but it opened my eyes to the power that a visual novel could have -- to grab and hold one's attention, to tell a compelling story with limited resources. Later on I stumbled on Killigan's Treasure, which was more robust on the mechanics, and that one really opened my eyes a lot.
That said, all those influences pale in comparison to Italo Calvino, who is unquestionably the man who set me down the path towards interactive fiction. Motherfucker was writing 5 steps ahead of his reader at all times, I swear to God. He could write branching narratives with linear paragraphs on a printed book.
Calvino would have loved visual novels, had he lived long enough to sink his teeth on them.
Now, in response to your second question...
Hi Wattson here. There is a lot to unpack in your questions and could probably fill a good essay on the topics, so apologies if I cannot get to all of it. I'll try to start with the most useful advice first.
To learn python and more general programming, I always like to suggest w3schools.com. It has a great Try It Yourself feature that allows you to play with the language and teaches you the basics very well. I will often even refer to it to refresh myself on basic methods of strings and lists and stuff.
That said, in my view, computer science can be both easier and harder than other types of "art". Easier in that, a lot of computer science books and tutorials you can find online for free. When I was in school, even teachers were suggesting to just pirate textbooks than actually recommending them. Turns out the people who built the web don't care much for gatekeeping their craft.
The hard part is that it is a particular kind of mindset. Unlike art or music, it requires more of a puzzle solving mindset than creative. There is creativity to be found, but the tools boil down ifs, whiles, math and functions, and some things do have an objectively correct answer.
I could get into speculation on why some people are more hostile about teaching the craft, but I do know there are people who are likely to be happy to help you. The Renpy discord/lemmasoft forums have been very supportive in my experiences and most FVN creators are happy to talk about how they did things. I learned from school, so if you're looking for a more "self-taught" or apprecenticeship path, I can't offer much help.
I also wish I could comment more on the managment sim side of things, but a lot of that was alread in place when I joined the team, so I don't have much to say on that directly. However, I did build up a lot of the backend of Killigan's Treasure, which was quite complicated. The best way to go about doing these bigger additions to renpy, or any game really, is to try defining what it needs to do from the outset. Design docs will always change as you go along, but the more you know in advance, the more robust you can plan things out.
If you don't know what you want, try prototyping with something smaller until you can make a demo of it. The attempt will teach you a lot about what works or doesn't with the systems you want to build. Eventually, that prototype will become a confusing mess of spaghetti that you can't stand working with anymore, and at that point you should start from scratch. Its heart wrenching, but your second attempt will come together much faster and be a lot better than the first. Depending on your scope, you may even have to do this multiple times, but refactoring is almost always for the best to save on headache long-term.
Let's just say that some of the staff might act unprofessionally with each other later in the game. We've been prototyping some new mechanics that should be very fun for you -- this whole system which will pick short scenes from a pool semi-randomly, based on which characters are in your crew and at which point of their personal stories they are.
If by collabs you mean fan games or modding, go for it! We have a thread about that. Minotaur Hotel was made in ways that make modding not so difficult, in fact. I subscribe to the notion that players customizing the game to their preferences is a good thing.
Since Kangarube already answered the first question:
2. I don't know how long it'll take to finish the game. Last year I made the estimate that it'd take me two years to write the rest of Minotaur Hotel, and I guess that estimate was true for the assumptions we had back then but since then I've had to put on many hats. Wattson is a great programmer but there are some tasks that only someone with a deep understanding of the characters and their introspection can do, like picking their expressions, and under our current structure that falls to me.
I'm hoping that once Chapter 21 is finished (written, edited, implemented) I'll be able to pin down a real estimate of how long it'll take to finish the game.
That said, after Minotaur Hotel is done I intend on writing more stories set in the same universe. I already have two games on the outlining stage. A few years ago Alpha0 told me that Minotaur Hotel was my Disco Elysium and I guess that's true, this is an universe I wouldn't mind working on for many, many years.
So, if you want me to keep going, buckle up. You're gonna get what you want. I don't plan on stopping anytime soon.
3. There's no "most canon" route, and "routes" don't really describe how MH works, but if I had to pick what set of actions lead to the playthrough I find the richest it'd be:
1. Figure out all of Argos' puzzles and translate the pages of the Argoi's diary. figure out who he is before Chapter 18.
2. Take every opportunity to associate Jean with Hermes -- make the toast to Hermes in front of him, and name yourself as "Hermes" on his phone.
3. In the Hinterlands, complete the skinless god quest and take Pedro to the pond, then follow the trail to the shed.
4. Optional: In other playthroughs explore the expanded hinterlands for more magical realism shenanigans, and visit the Small Cabin in Chapter 20.
5. Optional, but highly recommended: Prioritize hanging out with the staff over Asterion's translation project. Go for as many hangouts as possible with your favorite characters.
The first 3 points activate what we internally call "Detective Mode", which triggers some unique moments and lines. I consider that to be the most literary playthrough style, it provides more insight on some key aspects of things.
The number of total management sessions (that's what we call each in-game day you can assign tasks on) was decided so that players should be capable of going through all the hangouts for all the characters they recruit, assuming you don't waste time. This should still be the case even if you recruit a lot of optional characters.
We have no plans for merch right now, but we are open to the idea.
And we love fan work! You might want to check out this old thread where I go on about it to an extent.
Speaking only for myself, in terms of mental endurance I believe some of it comes from character, and some from things I went through. I'm the sort of person who draws a long-term plan to achieve my goal, and when something goes wrong I try to adapt to new circumstances. I also don't like breaking promises, and I did promise to finish the game -- that's more of an anchor for me than most people imagine.
I also believe that writing a novel (visual or otherwise) just inherently demands a kind of resistance against discomfort. The process of writing is often fun, and it's always enriching, but when you set out to do it for years or decades you realize that on the long term it will almost always demand that you cope with a high amount of mental effort. And, past a certain point, when this becomes one's job, that effort becomes physical as well.
I'll also admit that a bit of an obsessive trait is probably positive, too. The slight obsessive capacity to latch on to an idea for years until you see it to its end.
Now, in terms of lived experiences... I think a key thing for me is that I started publishing my writing very early and, crucially, I ate a lot of shit. I know what it's like to spend years writing a book that will not move more than 300 copies, and what it's like to put your work through the Amazon Kindle algorithm hell hole. That really set my expectations for how bad things could be.
So, when I came over to FVNs... Well, some people might think of all the issues in this space, but my attention went to how much better this is than traditional publishing. It's easy to say that things are great now, but even back during our first release, when our number were far from impressive, I quickly realized how good this readership could be.
Friendship is important, too. I think it's a lot harder to give up on a project when you're accountable to others.
All of that said, if I had to say what was the biggest factor for me... I simply love writing. I love the act of writing, I love the outlining, I love chasing ideas. I don't like programming -- that's evil and heteronormative -- but I love almost everything else. And when you love something it's not really that big of a burden, is it? Even if it makes you tired at the end of the day.
Now, in terms of logistics, right out of the gate I think it's important for me to bring up that I live in a cheap country and was able to get some decent savings going. I say this as a segue to the bare reality that, you know, you can't make creative work if you can't somehow pay the bills. And, in our case, I had to put some of my savings into the game to get things rolling. This wasn't necessary when Minotaur Hotel was a project among friends, but we had to make the transition into becoming a game development studio that pays its team, and with that comes a number of realities that any small business owner will have to deal with.
Now, during most of the project's lifetime our team worked under a consensus-based decision-making format. We discussed the plans for the game and, almost without exception, we were capable of reaching an agreement between the ENTIRE team. I tried to make things as horizontal as possible, which has its strengths and weaknesses, but over time the team saw me as the director nonetheless. I think that format was almost always good and an important factor to our longevity -- everyone in the team was able to bring up issues, everyone's input mattered, but at the end of the day I made sure things were thematically coherent always. This keeps the project together and going.
Now things are a little more professionalized -- we have to worry about deadlines, financial realities, scheduling, etc. Things had to become more vertical and organized. It changed, but even now we carry some leftovers from this format (Awoo is director over Wolf's writing, Nemo directs Kota, etc).
There's no way around it, I think longevity here comes down a lot to how the team manages itself. Leadership matters.
Does this answer your question? If you want me to dig some more in regards to any of those points, just say so.
There is no simple, straightforward answer to that.
First of all, each religion and its afterlife has its own rules, and not all of them even allow someone to "convert" -- and some, in the universe of Mino Hotel, used to allow it in the past but no longer do so. That is the case of Hades, it no longer accepts new souls. That said, do keep in mind this is what Robert said, and you can safely presume that his knowledge on this matter is limited. On top of that, there is more to this decision from Hades than it can be conveyed in a cursory conversation.
Additionally, there is a sense of history to the world of Mino Hotel which has not been fully explored. We have seen a lot of the mythology, and we've seen a lot of "the people these myths were based on aren't exactly how they were portrayed" -- this extends to the religions as well. I don't intend on going anywhere too controversial, I think this could easily get stupid or bad if we focus too much on living religions, but do keep in mind that things do not translate 1 to 1 from real life to Minoh-verse, there is a lot of "things are not as they seem, things did not happen in quite the same way as it was told."
Well, yes, but first a brief explanation: Minotaur Hotel started on 4chan as a "quest", which is basically a format of interactive and collective storytelling where readers suggest what should happen and a writer acts as a sort of DM. Back then we received suggestions for characters, some of which made it over from those early days (Kota and Luke), but most of them didn't.
Most notably there was an Egyptian jackal called Jojo, a gecko called Nito and some kind of bird made of cosmic void, appropriately called Voidbird. Though I didn't like some of those back then, nowadays I look back to them fondly. That said, I must give the caveat that Nito is in the game, but he's locked in the zone of non-existence, forever lost in the code, never to see the light of the sun again.
Now, excluding those characters and despite what it may seem, the development of Minotaur Hotel has been rather lean in the sense that there was very little "wastefulness". We managed to put in almost everything we set out to have. Except for the Hinterlands, we had quite a bit of cut content there -- we've gone into detail over the years about that. A whole lore document got cut (Pedro's Spellbook, which we published recently on Patreon) but now that I think about it, there's another thing.
So, at some point I thought about adding a vampire to the Hinterlands -- but it was going to be a very specific, surgical and loving reference to a writer from the state where the Hinterlands happen. He was a local journalist who I had the privilege of meeting and he was one of the earliest people to vouch for me as a writer. Sadly he passed away years ago, so I wanted to have this character as a nod to him, and as a way to discuss some topics about creativity. It was going to be a rather literary moment.
I don't want to get too deep into the themes of my own work, as by this point I believe my work speaks for itself, but an important topic for Minotaur Hotel is characters doing their best out of the wrong, unfair, and twisted situations they are in. It's an unfair world on top of which people have built self-reinforcing and unequal systems, but somehow these characters try to make things work, and oftentimes this is accomplished by acknowledging how wrong these systems are and exploiting them.
The power imbalance you bring up is part of what this story is about, and we have not finished our discussion of it. Minotaur Hotel as a work is very concerned with that — you can see it echoing, for instance, in Pedro's and Oscar's story, and in Asterion's backstory (the tablets mentioning Tithonus)
I feel confident we'll succeed in telling the story we set out to tell, and that includes further explorations on the power imbalance between the characters. This update in particular has multiple layers touching on this topic, both overt and as subtext, and I feel that we accomplished a fantastic exploration on the topic. But, ultimately, I respect your stance and your ethics. I cannot fault someone for sticking to their principles. Goodbye.
Thank you, leafo. This is excellent work and I can see myself using it very soon on my own projects.
Now, if I understand this correctly, these new tools give patrons access to projects on Itch for as long as they remain supporters in the appropriate tiers. If I wanted to grant my patrons permanent and irrevokable access to a project, what would be the most appropriate way of doing it with the currently available tools?
I suppose I agree that the FVN scene didn't change 'that much', in the sense that many of the trends we observed and were able to pin down back then have remained present. Though a few games were able to reach their conclusion successfully, the reality is that "FVNs" are an accessible game development niche where almost anyone can release a first build promising incredible things, but extraordinarily few can develop into a long project and write it to its conclusion.
But things, in many regards, did change, and I've been meaning to do another survey sometime this year to assess it.
For starters, I think the many game jams over the years have caused a substantive shift in the scene by enabling and normalizing shorter projects, and with that came a greater experimentalism. The FVN scene that I observe today is less stilted, less restrained by rigid expectations and suppositions of what makes a good FVN.
If I had to summarise what was the reality of the scene back in 2020, it was that almost everyone to a greater or lesser extent had to grapple with the expectations set by Morenatsu and amplified by the first wave of FVNs in the 2010s. Developers had to at confront the notion of multiple routes and what their cast of dateable characters should look like.
Since then, however, the FVN scene has simultaneously settled on new landmark projects that influenced others (Adastra and its linear structure and focused narrative are the big one, no doubt) while also growing comfortable with taking influences from works well outside the niche. The FVN scene, also, both became obsessive with and eventually let go of its apparent "big bad wolf", the notion of "my wolf" (mind you, I mean this in regards to how developers, for a while, latched onto the idea that adding wolves to everything was the only way to financial feasibility and a lack of wolves spelled some degree or another of doom).
Other things changed, as well. This is merely guesswork but I think that, while the game jams enriched the community and made readers more receptive to experimental projects, they also did make discoverability into a bigger problem because now Itch's Gay/Furry/Visual Novel tags are more crowded. I also think the matter of representation has evolved significantly too, because nowadays we have more developers who are not gay cis men, and more readers who are not gay cis men. I know for a fact that the Minotaur Hotel readership is much more diverse than what I originally imagined when we started things back in 2019!
I could keep going, but I only have so much time tonight. Suffice it to say, some things just keep changing, and some just stay the same. Such is life.
