Postmortem

There's always room for improvement, but fundamentally I think there's a few areas that stand out for where I mismanaged Love Games & Love Signs.

1. Scope 
It was too fucking long.

I know that sounds  unusual in this sphere, but a lot of my other writing is in short stories (which isn't to say that I haven't completed a handful of rough drafts of novels and other novella length works). Trad pub expects tight stories. Indie pub allows for stories that wouldn't get traditionally picked up. I don't usually love to linger in a piece for too long, but my creative choices backed myself into a corner.

What I wanted to do was to revise the piece as part of the artistic upgrade, but I didn't have the bandwidth to keep chopping and chopping and trimming until something shining emerged. That doesn't even account for the sort of sunk-cost principle, the pain it would feel to cut out something I had shelled out of pocket for a CG even if the work would be better for it. If I had a better sense of the scale of the work from the start--and I had restructured it heavily from the initial conception--it would have been something like 20k of common route, a brief introduction prior jumping into a novel length route for each of the characters. Something like 20k + 280k for the four routes (and then maybe a 20k epilogue? Who knows. All idealism at this point for the execution). Instead I had like 120k for the common routes and 110 for Gin. Too long.I didn't need to do that, but I felt a need to write a certain length to each scene in response to 'industry standards'. 

It's a classic issue of when one denies their vision for what they believe others would want. It only harms a piece. One will write with an audience in mind, but one must own one's own creative decisions. I failed when I didn't properly mete out the length of the days.

And it wasn't as though I hadn't already trimmed the scope to something that I had hoped was feasible. I was blithely ignorant of what the cost of good art is at the conception of the project, and that is something not to be understated. When I started working on Love Games in some capacity 5 years ago, I was trying to contemplate something that I thought would capture the zeitgeist of furry visual novels. Maybe it would have if I released it in 2020, but not in 2022 following the COVID boom in other works. I had matched my then exuberant love of TTRPGs with the Chinese zodiac, 12 boys representing each animal to try and date. All games need some sort of brand, some call to action. People either want something that feels excessively fresh, or they want something that keeps hitting the same familiar beats (like when one sees the seventh Star Wars film after the first six). 

I had contemplated four boys per TTRPG, one doing DnD-esque, one doing Shadowrun-esque and the third homebrew content. Splitting up the zodiac into consumable chunks, able to be expanded depending on reception to the work (or perhaps expanding the workforce by hiring other competent writers supposing reception was merited). I had also conceptualized another workaround a ways in when I realized it was unlikely I would ever hit the full scope, a sort of quick short story speed-dating to see all the members of the zodiac, but it's no use in ruminating over that which will never come to fruition.

But maybe that long of a slice of life was out of vogue if it wasn't an already existing work. Maybe literary romance wasn't what this space wanted. Maybe I had read the scene wrong.

2. Understanding the Market 

I went into this with the belief that what was missing in the marketplace was more serious writing. More focus on craft and prose. That if I wrote well enough, I would drag in people for enough support to reliably fund the art.

That was demonstrably false. Good art is king, and good art is expensive. You only have one chance to make a first impression,  even if my attempt to relaunch with new art was meant to do otherwise. As much as I did care for the original sprites, I've also seen things like Gin's sprite being called a crackhead lol. Something clearly wasn't resonating perfectly like that.

And as I had previously alluded to, I think the amount of responses to dating sims has long diminished. We're currently in a wave of horror and SFF. My timing was off--one can't get by with literary genre when the market isn't looking for it. I simply didn't understand what others wanted well enough, putting too much of my own expectations against what was right in front of me. This is also self-evident in my attempt at the occasional promotional activities I did. I wanted people to submit their female OCs for free, but I never got any responses. Anya would never have her weed smoking gfs. The audience that I was theoretically pointing to with that request was not the one reading my work.

The first artist I even approached for sprites accepted the money, and then just... fucked around for 9 months due to real life bullshit, and I only periodically probed because I had other creative shit going on as well. I'm perhaps complacent. I don't have the mettle to have to follow up with people for what's ostensibly a hobby so often. I just want people to turn in what they say they're going to do in a timely manner.

And even so, that art still would have mattered more than my words. When I see people look at a new story, the first things they say is stuff like "Oh a derg", not "oh how interesting a retelling of Othello". The visuals outweigh the narrative; as long as the narrative is largely sufficient, it will sustain the audience that the visuals pull in. I'm a writer. Trying to run this solo is insane.

3. Art and Running the Project

 I don't have the energy to chase people down endlessly for art, or keep shopping for new people as the amount of unprofessional people don't check in without prompting or turn in sub-par product when testing fit and it's not worth it to fight with these people who aren't living up to professional standards in the first place except maybe in the product they peddle.

Art is king, but seeing it take around four months for the last response in DMs for a sketch is painful. I've got a day job. I can't do this. I can't have my motivation sapped as I wait for materials, because I would be waiting either way. Just like any creative I have multiple visions, not just one. I can't be gated to just one thing for so long.

The options were to write up tens of thousands of words ahead and then wait months for art to be done, or just have a bit of a buffer and then have to wait for any new assets. And I'm not even programmatically minded. I liked the medium for the sense of having visuals and the opportunity to play with form and presentation. I bit off more than I could chew solo, in what the medium demands to be successful and what I could successfully do solo, let alone based on cost.

I think at best I was making around $40 a month. Over time, I think I invested around 5k into the project's art needs. I did not properly measure out the cost of making the work commiserate to the average project's success. I dreamed a dream that was beyond my reasonable reach. I could supply my writing for free, but in this sphere the main hired resource is anything but written, and even those I don't expect to hit reasonable market rates. It's yet another item that saps motivation, the ideal of this disparity in this pay.

While man shouldn't create solely on the back of inspiration, losing that desire to continue because one is still waiting for more art is rotting. If I'm just doing my interactive fiction, I don't need to wait for anyone else. I can continue at my regular pace and make solid progress. This was series after series of being gated for the ambition of having something pretty and clean and fishing for comments for art that only sometimes hit no matter how much in the moment I loved it and wanted others to love something as much as I did.

Visual art is king for furries, and I am not a visual artist.

I couldn't even successfully promote the work meaningfully. I tried running a free oc cameo contest, but due to the strict nature of the parameters of said contest I got 0 responses (no weed smoking GFs for Anya :/ ). No cross promotion from other creators, no cross pollination of fandoms when attempting to stretch whatever fans I had over to others when I did interviews. I could not grow the product sufficiently, and whatever patronage I got could not recoup money at the same rate that quality art demanded. If one cannot get organic word of mouth discussion, one is failing, even if that word of mouth discussion is about which boy to bed. A work is doing well if it is being talked about unprompted outside of updates--engagement is the metric by which a work is measured.

Final thoughts 

I don't know, I had some other stuff but I lost it after the internet closed on the first draft of this and it's tiring to go through this. Feels like picking at an open scab this second write-up around. But I think this hits a lot of the high points of items that I didn't properly account for or think of in my starting of this project.