Monday, December 24, 2012

On the Survey

If you haven't seen it already, MVOL v0.10 is up on the "play the game" page! Go fondle that poor kitty, he must be lonely!

Now. The survey on where to go from here has a week left, but it's already seen a much larger turnout of votes than I expected-- and more surprisingly, there seems to be very little consensus on an answer! There's easily the potential for one or two options to climb past 50% if they're widely favored as the survey stands, but I've watched it linger in the 40's at the highest for some time. Thinking about it, I realized that I might not be terribly clear in what each option means-- there's only so much space for questions without clogging up the survey, after all!

So, with that in mind, I thought I'd take a little time to clarify what my thoughts are behind each option. If you find you've changed your opinion on what you'd like to see next after reading this, you should be able to easily change your response to the survey by clicking the "change your vote" link near the bottom of the survey.


Vagina/NoDick for your Avatar

Your avatar being the crude, humanoid representation of your will that interacts with Lith on your behalf, the one referred to as "you" when you play the game-- this would unlock the option of having a vagina either instead of or in addition to a dick. This would not be considered the "main mode" of play, however, and the player would have less options available to them if they didn't have a dick-- due to the nature of Lith himself. Some achievements would be impossible, and there would likely be fewer sex scenes available, but the game would have a good deal of content adapted to handle avatars sans dick.


Vagina/NoDick for Lith (cuntboy? maleherm?)


 Technically, the idea of Lith being female is split into two things here. This one would unlock the option for Lith to have a vagina instead of or in addition to his dick. He would still be referred to as "he," but could be configured to be a woman anatomically by some means or other. I haven't spent a lot of time just yet figuring out exactly how that would work-- whether it would be a transformation you could induce in game, or something you set at the beginning. The former would make more sense, probably, but the latter would be more "convenient." Anyway, people that like vaginas would probably be interested in this. Breasts may get thrown in with this, as they shouldn't be as hard to add, relatively.
 

Girl Lith ("she" and "her")


 The other big problem with trying to make Lith a girl is that, whereas the game always says "you," which is gender neutral, it says "he" all the time in reference to Lith. Going through the entire game and setting it up such that Lith would be referred to as female is a massive undertaking on its own. With the combination of this and the above option, Lith would effectively be a woman-- but each have their possibilities if used alone. Breasts could also be included with this option, effectively making Lith a shemale by most definitions, or simply a transgender of some kind without-- a cat with a penis that identifies as female. With just the V/ND option above, he would still be referred to as "he," hence the suggestion of such things as cuntboy and maleherm, the terms I've heard used for a "he" that has a vagina-- with and without a dick, respectively.
 

Bonus Mode, play as Lith interacting with Avatar


 I've had this option in the back of my mind for a long time-- ever since I realized that I had, in a way, made a serious mistake in designing MVOL. The largest audience, as far as I know, for Lith's exploits in the stories you all met him in was people that enjoy being on the bottom-- people that like to fantasize about being Lith. But when I made this game, I put the player quite explicitly in the viewpoint of an outsider-- the often-dominant partner that interacts with Lith. So in an effort to mend this oversight, I've formulated the rough idea of an alternate reality: dreams. The idea would be that, when you sleep, you have the option to "dream" of being Lith, interacting with your avatar. And whatever your avatar has become under your guidance is the creature Lith must interact with, for good or ill, naughty or nice. It would be a much shallower experience, with few options and scenes, but at least one or two for each possible configuration of your avatar, as the options come up. If it saw a lot of interest, I'd likely expand it, but it would never become the "point" of the game, or sizeable to match what already exists, I'm afraid. But it may well be what some folks were looking for when they first came to find out that the character they knew and read of was being imported into this game.
 

Dominant Lith


Hard as it may be to believe, Lith is a switch! He can greatly enjoy getting pounded every day of the week and every hour thereof, though he might never admit it, but he also is quite fond of doing some rutting of his own when the situation is right. This option would essentially add another variable to the game-- how dominant Lith sees himself in your relationship. If you submit to and pleasure him often, he'll grow more confident, and start taking a more active hand, eventually mounting you more than you mount him. Of course, he'll never lose his love for cock, but you'll see a side of him that has been exposed very little in my past work, and that some people have professed a deal of interest in.
 

More Detail for my Avatar in regular scenes (species, endowment size, demeanor, knot)


As I mentioned recently, my code as it stands is somewhat cumbersome. I've recently expanded my programming vocabulary into the wonderful realm of parsing, however, and adding extra code to stories should be a deal less cumbersome and distracting than it was originally. So where many scenes in the game might only make reference to the size of your phallus a couple times and your species only so far as whether you have paws and/or a knot, I would much more easily be able to go through and customize scenes to reflect your individual avatar's variables-- cock size, breasts, species, naughty vs. nice, how well you know him, perhaps these other variables we've been talking about adding. Classic scenes, already in the game, would essentially be revamped with new content to nod to who and what you have made of your avatar, and I would also know that this is a priority for writing in the future, if it has a large showing in the votes.
 

More Endowment Options for Avatar (larger breasts/dick, other?)

There was a bit of fuss early on in the game's development when, for basically the reasons above, I trimmed out some of the extra options for the avatar. Some of them, like ball size and dick thickness, were folded into dick length to make an overall size stat, and I've been pretty happy with that. But things like larger sizes for breasts and dick would be more doable now, and I could certainly see there being a significant demand for them. I've already gone ahead and included more species-- that wasn't that hard to implement, though it may come back to bite me if I'm retrofitting old scenes more thoroughly according to the option before this one. For other options, I'm open to suggestions-- I don't imagine there's a very large demand for smaller breasts and dicks for the avatar, but configurations such as alternate heights or builds? Tall and muscular, short and effeminate, towering and curvy? I don't know if these would be huge appeals to a lot of people-- it is, as ever, a matter of what's more appealing, and a better use of time and energy.
 

The point of this survey as a whole is to get a better idea of what would be most appealing to everyone, what they most direly desire to see added to the game, and immediately. These are all options I'm considering, but they might not all make it, and many of them will probably have to wait quite a while. So, what is most important to you? That's what you should vote for.
 
Thanks for taking the time to read all this, and for playing my game! Happy voting!

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