Sunday, November 30, 2014

Writing Your First Book, Pt. 1

A couple of days ago I submitted the second draft of Fencing Academy to my publisher. A day after that, I saw the cover art (which is REALLY cool!) Needless to say, I can't wait to share it with you all. I thought I'd write a few thoughts down on writing a book. Perhaps it would be helpful for those of you out there thinking about writing one.

The process of writing says something about you. Not to sound cheesy, you do learn an awful lot about yourself. You discover whether you're a morning or evening person (me, I'm a morning person, though I've always fancied myself a night person), what sort of work flow works best for you, and whether you're a do-it-all-now-and-revise-later person or a make-sure-it's-perfect-then-move-on person.

The late-and-great Kurt Vonnegut reckons there are two types of writers, and he gave funny names to them which I can't remember offhand. The first type writes as quickly as possible before going back and taking a long period of revision. The second type writes slowly and surely, making sure each sentence is perfect before moving on. The good thing about the first type of writer is that they get rough drafts out very quickly. The good thing about the second type is that they don't really have to revise. There is no "superior" method, it's just what works for you. I had always thought I was in the first group. It turns I'm in the second group.

The point is that you don't know these things until you find them out yourself. Until you learn them, it's very difficult to follow projects through to completion. I think that's the value in starting big projects you may or may not finish, you find this stuff out. And as you find them out, you learn, finally, how to follow through. So if you're the sort with a billion aborted projects, don't despair. You're doing the right thing, keep aborting projects until you get the hang of things.

The next part of this series will come before publication, and it will go deeper into challenges you might face. You'll get to see the cover art before then, hopefully. The cover is so good I feel a little inferior to it... I only hope the story is as good as the art!

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

AIF Toolkit v1.0.0

The AIF Toolkit v1.0.0 is being released with only minor modifications from the v0.8 release. It should be backwards compatible. Click here for the download link.

The only feature difference worthy to note is that there is now a finer degree of control over willingness, though you won't notice it unless you use it. More importantly, the AIF Toolkit is now licensed Creative Commons.

Creative Commons License
AIF Toolkit is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This is to allow people to --

1) Create and release their own modifications to the AIF Toolkit.
2) Collect donations, kickstarters, patreons and so on for work based on the AIF Toolkit.
3) Outright sell stuff made with the AIF Toolkit.

As this is the v1 release, the AIF Toolkit is now officially "out of beta", so to speak, and "stable" as far as that goes. That doesn't mean that there won't be changes in the future, but I will endeavor to make sure releases beyond this point are backwards compatible with prior ones, or at least can be easily updated, barring new releases of I7.

If you are planning on using the AIF Toolkit beyond making free games, I'd still appreciate it if you read the incredibly short FAQ that comes with the license, and shoot me an email.

I was hoping to have a printed manual out for the v1 release, but I don't and that might come in the far flung future.

Monday, November 10, 2014

Thoughts on Master of the House

Let's get some bookkeeping things out of the way first. Since ExLibris has gone on vacation, there is something of a need for people willing to write in-depth reviews. I don't really want to fill that role, sometimes I just don't have the patience to, but I will the best I can. The point of these semi-reviews is not to give recommendations for the AIF community on what to play, although that might be a happy accident. I'm really writing these for the authors, a little acknowledgement that writing AIF games is difficult, and that every game at least deserves a serious response even if it doesn't get one. Even if I write a bad review, it's not to crush the author but just to show that someone took it seriously enough to think about it.

Of course, that wasn't a prelude to me reviewing Master of the House badly. This is a positive review, I really like Master of the House, though I must admit I didn't finish it for reasons out of the author's control. It is a highly-refined sex romp, in the sense the gameplay elements are really well thought out and breaks a bit of new ground. And, to boot, it has good writing. An important thing in text games. In any case, this review is months overdue already, so let's get into it.

The story is nothing to write home about. A young man goes on a quest to become the "Master of the House", an ubermencsh with a harem of sex slaves. Including your own family, of course. An absolute fuckton of incest ensues as you assume your rightful place as the alpha male. None of the characters are particularly deep, but they are entertaining and distinctive, and Abby's determination to make you into a sex god is rather endearing.

MOH has the an odd honor in that much of the sex scenes are threesomes, with Abby often joining you in your antics. This is an impressive feat indeed, considering how difficult it is to write threesomes. There are few throwaway descriptions, and Minterlint never seems to fall into common pitfalls of writing sex scenes. Grammar is sometimes off ("You're hand is never leaving my pussy!!") but it's rarely frequent enough to be distracting. A+.

The biggest issue in these sex scenes is the frustrating disambiguation. It's distracting to have to write "rub abby's tits" all the time instead of just writing "rub tits". It gets even worse, of course, when there are more than two characters. "Abby lick Paige's pussy" is almost more trouble than its worth. This seems to be common in games written with Adrift, but I've played Adrift games that didn't have these issues either. An improvement here would make a huge difference.

Much of the game is about exploring the house, and the exploration stuff is a mixed bag. It's fun finding hidden things, but the fact you're forced to use the "search" command makes exploration more arduous than it needs to be, especially since that's the only way you can find some things needed to progress the game. This is all exacerbated by MOH's big ass map. Shouldn't examining be enough? On the other hand, "collecting" sex moves is really creative and really links the exploration mechanics with the sex stuff in a cool way.

After you've found the requisite items, the puzzles are nice. They usually involve a little more than just giving someone the right items without being illogical, gamey, or overly complicated. Because I'm shit at puzzles, of course, I had to use a walkthrough, but I can easily imagine getting through it (eventually!) without one.

MOH is just a nice romp. It's not the most brilliant thing ever made, but it's damn fun at what it does. I'll finish it eventually, I want to see how it ramps up toward the end, but my playtime so far has been disjointed because of other commitments, and it's hard to get back into IF games once you haven't played it in a month.

Sunday, November 9, 2014

Happy 50,000 Views!

Hi everyone. This blog has gotten 50,000 views. While this is small-fry stuff, it at least means a few people are reading this, and I've found in myself enough self-discipline to update this. It might interest you what the demographics of the blog are. Probably not, but this is my blog and I can do whatever the fuck I want.

Views by Country

Here's a list of pageviews by country:

  1.  United States, 17658 views
  2. Germany, 4808 views
  3. United Kingdom, 3979 views
  4. France, 2588 views
  5. Canada, 2487 views
  6. Australia, 1470 views
  7. Netherlands, 1331 views
  8. Italy, 1298 views
  9. Sweden, 1212 views
  10. Russia, 928 views
Unsurprisingly, the U.S. takes the #1 spot. I think the most surprising part was Germany taking the #2 spot. Danke! I shall raise a glass of Hefeweizen in your honor to wash down my kielbasa and sauerkraut. UK, I'll... I dunno, burn Guy Fawkes or something, and say "God Save the Queen". I live in the US, so it has to make do with my tax dollars. Following is France (merci!), not really that surprising because of the Shark's Lagoon. Canada and Australia are english-speaking countries, so this is also natural. Next, Netherlands, Italy and Sweden are all neck-and-neck, and finally Mother Russia makes a valiant effort as #10. спасибо!

However, because I'm also a nerd, I wanted to figure out which countries I was the most popular in. I divided the number of views by the population of the country, and multiplied that by 10,000. And, well, the results were very surprising, as you'll soon see.

Popularity by Country

EBPI (Estimated Blog Popularity Index) calculated by (total views)/(country population) * 10,000
  1. Sweden, EBPI 12.4
  2. Netherlands, EBPI 7.8
  3. Canada, EBPI 6.9
  4. UK, EBPI 6.2
  5. Australia, EBPI 6.2
  6. Germany, EBPI 5.9
  7. United States, EBPI 5.5
  8. France, EBPI 3.9
  9. Italy, EBPI 2.8
  10. Russia, EBPI 0.6
Holy shit Sweden. No one even comes close. I dunno. Should I start saying nice things about King Karl XII? Eat lutfisk? Maybe start writing games with Swedish NPCs? Tack. That's "thank you" in Swedish, or at least that's what Google translate tells me.

And let's not forget about the Netherlands. I know it's difficult maintaining the world's best water drainage system but in between that you've found the time to read the blog. Thanks for that. Your country sounds lovely as fuck and I'd like to visit one day. And Canada, thank you too. Enjoy your poutine and avoid the moose this winter.