Posting a new Story Game

[AlinaX]

And it's live!
Make Me A Futa: Halloween Special

 

[AwkwardlySet]

And it's live!
Make Me A Futa: Halloween Special

Huh, you actually went into worldbuilding and character development for this one. I made mine a simplistic story with plenty of choices. Well, it's a good and fun story, even though the kinks aren't my thing at all.
Btw, I have no idea what some of those terms in the choices mean. Not everyone has a vocabulary of porn and sluttiness in their heads!

 

[AlinaX]

Voting is weird: 5514551 so far.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Voting is weird: 5514551 so far.

What's weirder is the low number of votes. SciFi is usually a good place for that, especially considering how many followers you have.
Yeah, weird. I thought this thing would be popular.

 

[nice90sguy]

How is this doable from the author's point of view? It seems like an enormous amount of work. A long hike for a short slide, so to speak. Is it actually enjoyable? I've never encountered a story game so I don't know.

If you think of it as a "branching multiverse", yeah, you're right, you get a combinatorial explosion.

If you think of it as maze, then it's easier:

• The maze has more than one way out: That's the mutliple endings.
  
  
• The maze has branches, where you have to decide which way to go: That's your menu options.
  
  
• The maze has paths, taking you from the start to the end(s), via the branching points. The paths are the bits aof narrative taking you to the next place.

Going beyond the simple "maze" metaphor you can get more sophisticated, and think of your story's main protagonist as state machine. That's how some real computer games are implemented. You keep track of the player's states (lust, energy, willpower, etc), and update them as the story progresses, either during the narrative ("As she talks, you find yourself focusing more and more on her lips [lust = lust + 1].", or as the result of the player's choice: "You tell her to strip [dominance +=1] ; She tells you to strip [dominance -=1]"

With states, you can "loop back" in the story to an earlier decision point (menu), and change the narrative accordingly. E.g. If one menu option at a certain point is to "leave the room and resist her seduction", you can make the story go back to that point repeatedly, and allow the MC to leave only if your [willpower] is high enough.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

As my story game comes closer to completion (I am still a couple of days away from finishing) I feel like sharing some thoughts on this whole experience. I must say I had fun doing this, at the start especially but also during some points in my story. But...
It didn't take long before the fatigue started kicking in. @AlinaX also said something along the same lines. Seriously though, the whole thing is so cumbersome by design. If you really want to offer some meaningful choices and diverse paths to your readers, you will end up writing a lot of different branches, and fuck me, that can be hellishly tedious, especially when for the sake of giving reader a choice, you have to write angles you don't really enjoy writing.
So I ended up simplifying what already was a simple story with many choices, by cutting off one whole romantic/sexual interest, which means I got rid of a third of my story. It will still be a 25k words story, with playthroughs of no more than 4k words in my estimate. Honestly, I don't see myself doing this again.

I don't know how popular these story games are with readers, but for authors, I really don't see much appeal to get into it as it is right now. And I am not talking about coding here - that part is simple for anyone with basic programming knowledge, I am talking about investing so much effort and time into something that ends up as a relatively short if somewhat repeatable experience for readers. I mean, I could have written five or more individual stories of similar length for the time and effort it took to write this one. So the only way I see to motivate authors to write these story games is:

1. Making it so the story game can have multiple authors, which means the story appearing on the author's page of each author and their names being displayed as authors of the story in the new story list etc. That way we can have some fun collaborations so that each author can write one or two branches, those that fit the themes they like writing. The possibilities are vast, much more so than chain stories as all of the branches could be written concurrently and the story could be published relatively quickly.

2. The other way that I see would involve Laurel and Manu allowing AI-created visual art, which could then be used to illustrate the story game, making it much more attractive and much more of a game than it is right now. It could possibly motivate authors to write some visual novel or even sandbox style story games that are so popular. These would obviously be better written than most of the stuff that is produced in Ren'Py or Unity these days, and would likely lead to a sustainable Patreon model for such authors, as is the case with most decent erotic/porn games.

I obviously have reservations about #2 for the reason I explained some time ago, but as always, it's all up to Manu and Laurel.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

If you really want to offer some meaningful choices and diverse paths to your readers, you will end up writing a lot of different branches, and fuck me, that can be hellishly tedious

Well d'uh. There's no way around that. No special software can change that.

 

[NoTalentHack]

2. The other way that I see would involve Laurel and Manu allowing AI-created visual art, which could then be used to illustrate the story game, making it much more attractive and much more of a game than it is right now. It could possibly motivate authors to write some visual novel or even sandbox style story games that are so popular. These would obviously be better written than most of the stuff that is produced in Ren'Py or Unity these days, and would likely lead to a sustainable Patreon model for such authors, as is the case with most decent erotic/porn games.

As someone who's tried it, it's an order of magnitude more effort to make a "real" VN than a text-only one, and (as you've noted) it's an order of magnitude more difficult to make a text-only CHYOA than just writing a story. The big problem with Lit's system in general is that none of the authors get paid in anything but comments and score, even without including the Story Game stuff in the equation. I'm guessing the views are pretty low on these compared to other stuff (especially for someone working in LW or I/T), so what's the draw?

I mean, Nutaku is a sponsor here. Why not just write your Ink-based game, learn enough Godot or Unity to get by, and buy some art off Fiverr or partner with a visual artist or even use AI art? I'm going to make one just to say I did, but I'd be hard pressed to either suggest someone else do so or to make a second without some kind of recompense.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

As someone who's tried it, it's an order of magnitude more effort to make a "real" VN than a text-only one, and (as you've noted) it's an order of magnitude more difficult to make a text-only CHYOA than just writing a story. The big problem with Lit's system in general is that none of the authors get paid in anything but comments and score, even without including the Story Game stuff in the equation. I'm guessing the views are pretty low on these compared to other stuff (especially for someone working in LW or I/T), so what's the draw?

I mean, Nutaku is a sponsor here. Why not just write your Ink-based game, learn enough Godot or Unity to get by, and buy some art off Fiverr or partner with a visual artist or even use AI art? I'm going to make one just to say I did, but I'd be hard pressed to either suggest someone else do so or to make a second without some kind of recompense.

It all comes down to motivation as you said. There needs to be some kind of payoff cause otherwise no one in their right mind would continue to write these. I came up with #1 as a sort of motivation that would come from simple fun, even though it is unlikely many authors would actually organize themselves for such multi-author stories.

#2 draws its motivation from popularity and potential financial gain. Visual art is imperative for that, in my opinion. AI-art is so easily created and therein lies its appeal, because I doubt many authors would bother with hiring a visual artist (those don't work cheaply and they take time to produce images) or even working in Dazz studio to create their own renders (This one takes immense work as I am sure you know better than me)

There are likely other possible angles, but as you said, the key is to motivate the author enough to go through all the work that a decent story game requires.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

My story game should be up soon... hopefully. It's been stuck in pending for three days now. One would think they were gonna give some priority to these story games, all things considered.
I mean, this type of story definitely needs some special love in my opinion. The only story game by an actual Lit author is the one posted by some nerd named Alinax.
There are some other stories there but I believe those aren't genuine Lit stories, which I think most of you will realize once you click on those authors. So there is only one, and no, this isn't a Highlander trailer
I am truly curious to see where this thing goes. They seem to have invested some time and effort into this.

 

[AlinaX]

Took a week to okay my submission.

 

[AlinaX]

There's one by GeorgeTasker who was prolific until ten years ago. I do wonder how beta testers were picked for this.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

There's one by GeorgeTasker who was prolific until ten years ago. I do wonder how beta testers were picked for this.

Ten years and not a single story and then he writes a story game... yeah, I'd say these accounts were only used to post these "sample" stories... They needed them to start the ball rolling and to show some examples. That's my best guess

 

[oneagainst]

Stupid question: since this is basically a programming language, does lit allow immediate editing of the story once it's published or does every bugfix need to go into a story review queue? If the latter, it's a hard no from me.

I'm a pretty competent coder (I once managed to write a multiline Bash script and have it work first time) but with the conditionals and variables it's going to need play testing.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Stupid question: since this is basically a programming language, does lit allow immediate editing of the story once it's published or does every bugfix need to go into a story review queue? If the latter, it's a hard no from me.

I'm a pretty competent coder (I once managed to write a multiline Bash script and have it work first time) but with the conditionals and variables it's going to need play testing.

I would guess that they don't allow that, since you could then change the story and potentially violate the rules. But yeah, that should be one of the things possible to do if this thing is going to see some popularity. Most of these games are developed slowly over time, with paths and choices being added, like adding a chapter to a regular story sort of.

 

[Manu]

My story game should be up soon... hopefully. It's been stuck in pending for three days now. One would think they were gonna give some priority to these story games, all things considered.
I mean, this type of story definitely needs some special love in my opinion. The only story game by an actual Lit author is the one posted by

Sorry about the slow release. There are a few things that we're still working on in the User Control Panel related to how Story Games Activity Feed messages are sent out. We've tested the story and we can release it anytime, but I was hoping to roll out a few things we've improved there first. We'll release yours this week for sure even if I can't get the Activity Feed work out this week.

 

[Manu]

Stupid question: since this is basically a programming language, does lit allow immediate editing of the story once it's published or does every bugfix need to go into a story review queue? If the latter, it's a hard no from me.

I'm a pretty competent coder (I once managed to write a multiline Bash script and have it work first time) but with the conditionals and variables it's going to need play testing.

One of the things that Story Games are helpful for is to test our new Versioning System. You can see the Version Changes in the Story Info Box on the Story Game Space Heat, for example. There is more work to do on Versioning, but once the bugs are worked out on Story Games, we intend to make it available for Stories, Audio, and all other works published on Literotica. New versions do have to be approved, but it should streamline the process. Game developers roll out updates and expansion packs more often than Story authors, so we hope that it will make that process easier and faster.

As far as testing, I've been working on a system to test the Story Games before they're published. The system I'm working on can generate a report with any bugs it finds, which we can then send to authors. There are a lot of narrative things that automation can't find, but that's true in traditional Stories as well. We want to make sure that published Story Games meet the quality standards that Lit Readers expect, so I'll continue to work on tools and documentation to help authors with their development.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Huh... It's out, I think? It happened like an hour ago or so. It's the first time I've seen it happen in the middle of the day.

https://www.literotica.com/g/one-night-one-bar

I am not sure what to make of it as the view counter doesn't change no matter how many times I click on the story or how many times I do a full playthrough, and as you all know we get almost instant updates of views and votes in our control panel. Also, while it is listed in Story Games, it's not listed in the Fetish category or in the New Story list, which, if working as intended, would definitely suck as I am not sure how many people actually click on Story Games category. Not many, that's for sure.

It could also be that this is just Manu doing some testing, I suppose. Weird.

 

[AlinaX]

It was that way for me too. It did appear later in the usual places.

 

[nice90sguy]

It will definitely be a busman's holiday for me to make a story game here, as I spend my working life coding. And frankly, Inky is completely awful and not at all ideal for games. It's a shame Manu opted for it over (say) Twine , but I guess anything else would be too hard to sandbox.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

It was that way for me too. It did appear later in the usual places.

That explains the low number of votes/views you were getting, I suppose. And it's the same with my story now.
I'll just go ahead and say it. I am unhappy with this approach and treatment. The story shows up only in the Story Game list and nowhere else. It should have at least shown up in the Fetish category list, but it didn't. I mean, who in the world checks out the Story Game list where nothing happens? There are practically no new story games showing up there. Why would anyone who already clicked on that list a couple of times and saw that there is nothing being added, click on that list again? Who is going to find my story?
This is a simple stroke story I wrote and it's far from being my best work, but it took considerably more time and effort than a regular story and now there is nothing to show for it. The view counter doesn't even work for story games it seems, so we don't know how many people saw our story. Probably a shockingly small number. We can basically hope only for our followers to find it.
Being read by as many readers as possible and getting feedback is the only reason I am publishing my stories here, and now I feel like a fool for writing this one.

 

[AlinaX]

I had low scores at first, I think, because it was glitching. For the past few days, there have been occasional likes and comments.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I had low scores at first, I think, because it was glitching. For the past few days, there have been occasional likes and comments.

Far fewer than there should be, I'd say. Nothing in this approach makes sense to me.

 

[AlinaX]

I suspect Manu wants to iron out and test all the new features before inviting the masses to play.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I'll just go ahead and say it. I am unhappy with this approach and treatment. The story shows up only in the Story Game list and nowhere else.

Because it's still in testing mode?