AMA3: Tlaero

Time for another round of answers to the questions you folks have asked.

Did you guys ever envision the success you've had? 

I got into this because there were some things about the way others were doing it that I didn't like. Did I think I could improve on what they were doing? Yes. If I didn't think that, I wouldn't have started. But, did I think I'd have over a million people play my games? No. Not in my wildest dreams. 

How much does fan feedback influence you, if at all? 

Quite a bit, actually. Many of the things I've tried to do in my games were a direct result of the discussions people had after a game was released. The four options for Lucas' backstory in Finding Miranda came from people saying they wanted more interesting male characters. The different paths through the game were a result of long discussions about how Redemption for Jessika was too linear.  The characterization of Paul in Saving Chloe was a result of the discussion about how Marc in RfJ was "too weak." I tried to make Lucas "stronger," got a bunch of feedback that I hadn't succeeded, and went back to the drawing board for Paul. 

Similarly, the branching scheme in Saving Chloe was a result of people strongly disliking the branching in Finding Miranda. And the whole plot of Coming to Grips with Christine came from feedback from Getting to Know Christine players who said, "If a woman did that to me, I'd leave her for sure."

However, I'm far less influenced by people who want games that I don't want to write. Demands for swinging and cheating and incest don't have much impact on me, because I'm not interested in writing about those subjects. I know that limits my audience and success level, but so be it. I'm also not a fan of the Hollywood trope of "Things are going well, then there's a big argument or misunderstanding that leads to a breakup, and then they get back together." People have suggested that I should have my characters fight with each other to strengthen their relationships. I'm sure there are women in the world who like arguments with their lovers. I'm not one of them.

Did the final scene in Coming to Grips with Christine imply that we'd get another Keeley game in the future? And, if so, will Keisha have a part in it?

Yes and definitely. (-:

How did you find your way to working in this genre?

For me, it all started with "Virtual Date with Ariane." Saying that ArianeB (the developer) is better than her contemporaries is like saying that Niagara Falls is a place where some water goes over a hill. VDwA was so much better than everything else at the time that it's hard to even consider it to be in the same genre (and, in fact, I don't). But there were a few things about the game that I didn't like, especially the concept that you needed to get a girl drunk to have her sleep with you. And it seemed like all of the other developers who were influenced by ArianeB seemed to pick up on and reinforce those things. I gave feedback for a while, but eventually decided to put my money where my mouth was and do my own ArianeB-style game.

Do you play erotic adventure games too? Which ones do you like? What would you like to see more of?

Not as much as I used to. Time playing games is time not spent working on my own. I've loved everything ArianeB has made. I was shocked by how ambitious "Brad's Erotic Week" was/is. I liked "Art with Carla." I was seriously impressed with "The Last Sovereign." I liked a number of the LOP games, especially those written by iksanabot. I find "My Very Own Lith" to be really interesting. I understand what all the fuss is about with Summertime Saga, though I don't actually like the subject material. I haven't tried the recent games that everyone is so enamored with on F95Zone, though. 

I write games that I would want to play. If there's something I'd like to see more of, it's games like mine, so that I can experience them as a player rather than a writer.

Of all the different gameplay mechanics you've tried, which have you liked the best?

I think I've said this before, but, of my games with Mortze, I feel that Elsa had the best sexual ramp, Jessika had the best story, Miranda had best main character, and Chloe had the best gameplay. While Darkness Falls is naturally episodic and will continue to be, I didn't feel that Christine was well served by the episodes. ("Live and learn, or you don't live long.") We're trying something different with Pandora, and I'm hopeful that it will great. But my mental model for the gameplay on the game that comes after Pandora is most like Saving Chloe.

Is there any chance that you'll do another game in a female perspective?

Yes. The challenge is that Life with Keeley was one of my least popular games, and the majority of the negative feedback was that people didn't want to play a female. So, I know that the female perspective game will be less popular than our others. That's not going to keep me from making it, since it's a game I really want to write. But I've got to time it right and make sure I do something that fans will really like first so that they give me some latitude with the female perspective game.

How did you decide to go with the silhouettes as your signature imagery?

From my days as a novelist, I knew that I needed the title pages to share a visual style so that people could tell at a glance which games were mine. This is kind of like how you can tell a Harry Potter book on a shelf by just glancing at the cover's art style. (No, I'm not J. K. Rowling.) In one of the early images of Keeley that Phreaky sent me, he had set the lighting wrong, and she was practically a silhouette. I liked the look and instructed him to go full on silhouette in the next games' title pages. I continued that when Mortze joined me, and even played with the theme by doing the silhouette sex scenes. I especially like how those turned out. Unknown to probably most of you, between Phreaky and Mortze, I had started working on a game with another artist. His schedule with his own game meant that we couldn't make it work. But we had talked about doing a silhouette sex scene in that one. There was no magic in that world, so it would have been the characters in a dark room in front of a window. Having a magical solution with Elsa made the mechanics of it much easier to pull off.

A long question about being banished to a desert island where food and shelter is provided. What 3 things I would bring?

The question stipulated that if I brought music, I could only bring one band. Etc. I'm almost always listening to music. I definitely listen while I'm writing, and often while I'm working at my day job. So, music is going to have to be one of my 3 things. Which band is a tough choice. It's going to be one of my favorite bands, but I like so many. Bonus points in this case go to a band with a lot of albums, since that gives me more to listen to. This seems to suggest that I should take Iron Maiden. Can't go wrong there.

Presumably I can't have access to internet, because then I'd have Spotify and all music. But I'd want a laptop with Word so I could write.

I'm going to stretch the boundaries of the question with my third thing. I want my guitar, my amp, and Songsterr. Songsterr is kind of like saying, "I want the internet" but it's really just fancy 21st century sheet music. If I'm going to spend years on a desert island, then I want to get a lot better at playing the guitar than I am, and for that I need the sheet music to learn from.

When making our games, what percentage of time is spent writing, programming, and creating pictures?

Since Mortze and I are on different continents, it's hard to compare time spent on my parts and time spent on Mortze's. It's not like we sit in the same office with each other and work at the same times, etc. I'll let Mortze go into more detail on what goes into his parts, but I can describe mine. 

I occupy pretty much all of my "idle" time with writing. Any time I'm walking to a meeting. Any time I'm driving to or from work. Any time I'm waiting in line at a store. When I go to bed. When I wake up but haven't gotten out of bed yet. Etc. During those times I'm working out scenes and dialog and plots, etc. in my head. When I get them to a state I'm happy with, I sit down and actually write the first draft on a computer. That draft usually goes into much more detail than what I had in my head. And I often get stuck here and have to figure things out. The first draft is the hardest part. Then I do edit passes, but cleaning stuff up is much easier than creating it, so edit passes tend to go pretty quickly. 

Programming comes in three parts. First, I wrote the tool I use to create these games, and some amount of programming involves creating or updating that tool. Second, I wrote the underlying code that the pages use to act the way they do. Third, individual pages sometimes need specific code to operate. I've written enough of these games now that the first and second parts are pretty stable, and I rarely change them. So, when I talk about programming in a Wednesday "Progress" report, I'm usually talking about the third part. That code is never very complicated. Check a few variables, do some math on them, and change pages as a result. But in some scenes there can be a lot of it. For instance, in the upcoming DF episode, there's a scene where you need to look for clues in a room. That required a bunch of small functions and a lot of testing to make sure all the possible things the player might do, in all the possible orders they might do them in, work. 

I'd say that, if there's no new technology or anything fancy that needs to change for a story, then I probably spend 85 to 90% of the time writing and 10 to 15% of the time programming. But that's building on the months and months of programming effort that I've already put in for the first and second parts.

A lot of games have moved from being based on Flash to Unity. Do we ever consider changing our engine? 

First, we never used Flash. We've always been HTML and JavaScript based. People had to leave Flash because it is being phased out of the Web. But HTML isn't going anywhere anytime soon. So, there's nothing driving us to change that. Unity is a different beast altogether. I can program in Unity, but it would substantially change our games in ways that don't work for me. Although the graphics in our games are rendered in 3D, they're all pre-rendered by Mortze and sent to me as completed jpeg images. If we moved to Unity, Mortze would need a substantially different skillset than he has now. And the programming effort would go way up for me. Rather than spending 85% of my time on the story and 15% of my time on the programming, it would probably switch to 85% of the time programming. Which would mean that the games would either take 5 to 6 times as long to create, or they'd have 5 to 6 times less story. 

Also, the games would be less visually complex. Mortze has two of the fastest GPUs you can buy, and his images take minutes to hours to render. If we were doing true 3D in Unity, that same rendering would need to happen in roughly a 10th of a second on your computer.

What about Renpy? Why not use it instead of Adventure Creator?

There are always a few people who complain that they hate the UI in my games and think everything would be better if I switched from HTML to Renpy. Renpy is similar to HTML in that it uses pre-rendered images. So, nothing would change for Mortze. I have a few thoughts on the topic.

The tool that I use for creating HTML pages, Adventure Creator, is something I wrote myself. I originally wrote it to help non-programmers be able to create these kinds of games, but, at this point, I'm one of the only people who uses it. I've heavily optimized AC to my work style, so I'm very fast at creating pages in it. Moving to Renpy would substantially slow me down.

Not to get up on a soapbox, but arguments that the UI hasn't changed so the game must suck make me wonder how the book format (you know, words on paper) survived for so many centuries. Imagine if George R. R. Martin was spending his time changing the page layout instead of writing his next novel. Why would anyone think that's a good idea? I'll take the words, in order, please. I don't care where you put the page number. I suspect that people who refuse to play my games because they're not in Renpy wouldn't enjoy them in Renpy either. 

The other issue with Renpy is that it makes you download an executable. My games are played roughly 10 times as often online as downloaded.

All that said, Renpy does have some advantages. Unlimited saves. The ability to skip all those pesky words and get right to the next place where you make a decision. A reduction in the damning criticism on F95zone. I actually spent a few weeks in December modifying Adventure Creator to output in Renpy format. My thought was that I'd continue to use the tool I'm productive with but release the game in both HTML and Renpy formats. I got pretty far with it but kept running into limitations in Renpy that didn't let me do the things I do with my games. I'm sure if I spent enough time on it, I could get there. But I realized that the time I was spending on Renpy was time I wasn't spending making the next game. So, I stopped. I may come back to it again in between games. 

Do you have any tips of suggestions for someone who wants to get into writing?

The actual question was about writing episodically, but the jury's out on whether I actually do that well, so I've broadened the question. The best advice I can give is to write the kind of things you, yourself would enjoy. No matter how good your story is, there are people who will hate it. No matter how bad your story is, there are people who will enjoy it.  Chasing criticism or praise leads to madness. So, don't. Write a story that you like. That way, the most important person in the world will approve of it. If you're into incestual tentacle sex, write about that. If you're into romantic stories with vanilla sex, then write about that. Don't let either the perverts or the prudes make you second guess what you're doing. If you like the thematic elements of your story, then you're doing it right.

Yes, there are mechanics that are non-subjectively good and bad--grammar, dialog, pacing, etc. But you get better at those things with practice. Practice a lot. Mechanically, your first story will be bad. Your second will be better. And your third will be better still. Writing is a skill, like any other, and the only way to get good at it is to practice. Keep at it.

When will the next Pandora game be finished?

I hate to do this to you, but the answer is "When it's done." We're not far enough along to be able to make any predictions yet.

I think that covers all of the questions asked. I'll keep doing these as long as you folks keep asking questions.

Tlaero