Progression and thoughts on my first game (Patreon)

Unforseen consequences, an erotic interactive novel, is a new journey for me and in many regards a first.

I feel like it's time to share my first impression after spending a noteworthy amount of time on this project already.

General overview:

Time spent alltogether is more than expected.

That being said, I am having more fun with this than anticipated so the time spent is not an issue at the moment, therefore I will keep going strong.

Cons/Struggles:

Writing/Language

Let's start on the issues with writing:

I think I may be spend too much time on the writing sometimes, going back and forth between wording and also trying to make the story fit the imagary.

In total this means it often is an iterative progress.

• I imagine a scene and think up a storyprogression 
• I search for images and try to adjust the story according to the image
• This gives me ideas for follow up images and then the process begins again
• And then you tend to proofread it for any change

In total that means I have to go back and forth a little to get every scene right.

Overall this creates a more immersive experience (at least i hope it does), but it does cost tons of time.

Now for the language part:

Even though I am not a native speaker I have spent most of my free time for the better time of the last decade with english media. This means that I felt like language won't be a barrier, for certain situations it proved to be wrong. I was never much of a writer in general, so maybe I would have this problem in my first language too, but I didn't expect it to be such a time eater. In short there are two problems:

• Words I am not used to in writing and therefore have to check for spelling.
• Synonyms so i don't repeat the same words/phrases over and over.

Maybe this gets better as I keep going, maybe I will run out of options and the language will get repetitive, not sure what will happen there yet.

Imagery

Although I was afraid I might have more of a problem to edit the Images/GIFs this turned out to be easily doable. (still time consuming). Altogether I am hitting a lower technical barrier than i feared, but it is still more time consuming than anticipated at the start (maybe also due to the first point with the writing, where I keep going back to images to get them right) so I will still list it under struggles.

Pros/upsides:

Difficulty of HTML

I thought that the "programming" would be the biggest entry barrier, but it turns out there is literally nothing to it. With the script I found (also thanks to other games on the TFGames.Site). I just had to take the shell, delete old text passages, and was able to retrieve the logic and setup from my predecessors. I made sure with a little 1 hour research that I am not violating any copyright laws, but the code states (as far as I can read it and understand the terminology), that it is open source and free to use, so hooray.

So all I have to do at the moment is use some right syntax for images/copy past some code to progress through the pages and focus on the story.

Not only a huge timesaver, but honestly it was the first thing I looked into and I am not sure I would have spent several days/weeks to learn HTML to get started.

There only was one thing I was not able to figure out yet -> how to change color of text passages. I read into it and yes normally you would to it by inserting some <font> argument, but it seems like the open source code I copied prevents you from making changes in the certain screen sections, and the full code is way (way) beyond my understanding.

So the stylistic option of color is currently taken from me.

Final word:

I am incredibly happy to have started this, especially in corona lockdown times, this is a great recreational activity for me.

One last point I didn't really wanna list under cons, because honestly is it really a con if you enjoyed consuming content like this so much that you decided to create your own erotic story ;p. 

Writing and searching images of this matter hours on end can get you... "bothered" and time spent to resolve this also went up. Maybe it is a good sign, hopefully others will have a similar experience reading the story, because that's the whole reason it is created.

Next post will be the newest version together with some insight on what will be coming next.