This month has been underwhelming for personal throughput, but there are some nice changes in this patch. I’d like to promise that I’m ready to climb back in the saddle and start banging the hammer on some new Fen-written content and personally slap things into code, but the backlog looms eternal.
Right now I’m on page 213/230 of the Love Starz (a k-pop style band with three interesting girls), but my brain actively rebels from the idea of sandpapering it against more smut. There’s still hundreds of hundreds of pages of stuff behind it, but it’s harder and harder to keep my focus on this every time I try. For the first time in maybe 10+ years the sexual stuff is the least interesting part of my job (a matter of personal taste and feeling, not a judgement on quality necessarily.)
I’m not entirely sure how to handle that.
I am going to hard close event submissions for now. If they re-open, it will likely be in a much more limited form with no guarantee of feedback. I’m going to have to be more picky with my time and likely be less thorough with projects that are on the edge of acceptability.
Image Pack here (requires stand-alone flash player).
0.8.098 Changelog:
- New alternate Frosty bust by DreamerOfTheBlue.
- Bold text should now use a bolder font than it used to for better visibility.
- Shou’s in-game representation should now have bust art, by Shou.
- Gena138 coded a small Exhibitionism expansion for Erra (written by HugsAlright)
- Korgonne offspring now have some interactions available, written by Freed85 and coded by DrunkZombie.
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I understand the backlog is monumental, and processing event submissions is laborious … But is there no way to delegate a good chunk of that effort? One man can’t hope to personally curate and shape every single word in an expanding project like this one – At least not without someone(s) doing an initial ‘sandpapering’ pass first …
He’d have to pay someone to get quality work done :p
I’ve been under the impression Fen has been the only person working on TITS for awhile now.
Sort of getting a yanderedev vibe…
As a person that’s both followed both TiTs and Yandere Simulator for quite some time I can tell you it’s not even close. TiTs: hours of story and smut. YanSim: I got a shiny limited edition t-shirt which is probably the most tangible thing I’m ever gonna see from that project.
get the hell out of here, fen and yanderedev aren’t even in the same universe, hes been doing this for years now so some burnout is expected
He’s not even Innoxia bad, let alone that bad.
He’s far from the only person working on TiTS. Gedan is the primary coder and is working on converting the game to a whole new “engine”, and just from this post, you see that two other people are part of the coding crew. And then there’s the art team.
Fen is the primary content reviewer/approver, and he’s been going through the already massive backlog of submitted content for at least a month, now. Just this Kpop band is 230 pages, and he mentioned a 60 page Kimber expansion in a previous post. Some burnout over the sheer amount of reading that has been done is expected.
Well, *if* that’s the only way, then I still don’t see the problem?
I mean, failing that, surely there’s some people in the community that would be willing to help do stuff like proof read or implement writing into code.
It seems like this entire project relies on one man for 99% of progress and that seems not only brutal as hell, but also really silly when the project has clearly outgrown that kind of development model – And that’s something to be celebrated, not to be resisted by slowing down development just to avoid delegation rather than direct control.
given the amount of cash flowing through the patreon, this should not be an issue.
Investment is required to grow.
for clarity, its $31,800 a month.
Woah! $31,800/mo… Yeah that would seem more than enough to hire someone to help clear the backlog … If not more than just that.
Nearly 32k a month?! Fen could bring in a whole team and *still* pocket gobs of cash at the end of the day. Maybe then we’d get something more than Yet Another Dickgirl?
He HAS a full team. That money doesn’t just go into Fen’s bra, dingus.
Updates to TiTS has slowed drastically over time.
By the by, what happened to those “Changes since last public patch” Segments?
Would need some of those changes to have a segment, eh?
The last update was the last public update. No backer builds at all in july
Oof. Well at least it looks like that last month managed to get Fen caught up with the Backlog. Shame it looks like it will be a long time before any of the interesting fan-stuff appears again. But, at least this means Fen will have more time to devote to the Main Quest.
Poor Fen <3
Wait… Erra exhibitionism expansion?
A few new scenes, accessible by raising her exhibitionism level through any of her already-existing public scenes.
Now I’m just having the mental image of a very disgruntled fen looking nearsightedly at his monitor while a literal mountain of smut looms behind him.
I do not envy you in regards to this task.
That bold font certainly is bold. I wasn’t aware that button font was supposed to be in bold before this.
Well all I can say is that eventually the game will start feeling like smut for the sake of smut (which it mostly is, but I digress). What might help is to explore the sexual content as a vehicle for the story and game play rather than the other way around. Since in the end focusing on one aspect for so long will feel like beating a dead horse. Just something to think about, I can tell to a degree you are already doing it whether you realize that fact or not.
That’s kind of been mine and many others complaint about TiTS since its inception compared to CoC1, TiTS got a lot better about this over the years and it was not all just submitted content but something i have often noticed over the many years i have been loving these games is how much fen and co seriously underestimated how much players want narrative story and how many are actively turned off of smut for smuts sake, a lot of people want sexual interaction to be a reward of sorts for getting to know and helping a character out and building a bond and relationship with them, or to sit in support of the games plot not as its driving force, granted there are others that want as few barriers between them and the porn as possible and would be dissatisfied with having to put in any more work then rolling up to a shop keeper, asking if they want to bang, and then immediately getting down to business. to each there own its a balancing act so i don’t envy fens position too much.
Writing is temporary but BACKLOG is eternal! …or something like that.
Hey Fenoxo, have you ever played Inheritance?
(Note: They will introduce a system of transformations in the game. Example futanary furry and other aesthetic and non-aesthetic things.)
it’s long been my impression that the sex and sex-adjacent content in these games has been very overdone. it’s difficult to want to play any game this heavy-handed continuously, even if i find it difficult to picture how the writing could be balanced out to still deliver the same variety of smut at the rate that the more “utilitarian” users, let’s say, would find satisfying. for my part, if this is a signal that the writing will become more focused on story and gameplay with time, i’d welcome the change of pace.
Sounds like burnout to me. If you have been going for a full month on the same task you will probably get at least a little bit burnt out. Smut’s great but the brain craves variety.
If you do submissions again you might consider trying a different way of pacing yourself. Or perhaps a community sourced way to put the really good submissions first on the docket?
This might be kinda cool! Like a community voting thing on the forums. Rate by idea, execution, and how much work it still needs.
I agree it’s a good idea – let the community filter the backlog and then Fen can just filter what *he* wants to put in his game out of what the community voted for instead of having to go through the entire backlog himself – but then that takes the discovery of new content out of the game because we’d already have read new submissions before they are even implemented. Maybe just listing them to be voted on by descriptive title instead of us reading the entire submission would work though. That would keep the sense of discovery when you get a new scene for the first time but still reduce the number of submissions he would have to wade through by himself.
Definitely sounds like he needs some kind of intermediary between him and the worst of the backlog though.
take as much time as you need off mental health is important, plus being burntout on smut is a damn shame since smut is like lifeforce man
Can we turn down the bold size?
fen sounds like he needs some hand holding long walks on beaches and interesting personality’s truly his depravity has grown
but in all seriousness i do hope fen does not burn him self out
” For the first time in maybe 10+ years the sexual stuff is the least interesting part of my job” …. am i the only one who wouldnt mind just normal non smut stories included? XD
but seriously i can only imagine how high the backlog must be, heck even my playing tits backlog is already growing since like a year since content, especially big long one character contents, are coming out faster then i can play them.
So just take your time create the game how you feel is best and dont stress yourself too much trying to force stuff in that only ends up feeling forced.
Given how much this community has grown and how many submissions there must be flooding in now, it’s understandable that things would have to change so that the pile of digital paper doesn’t just keep growing into ridiculousness.
If you need a break, Fen, take it. With everything going on between the world itself going bonkers and the complete rework of TiTS code, I think you’ve earned some personal time. Just don’t go burning yourself out, with submissions closed, at least the pile won’t be infinitely growing any more.
Just going to help hammer the nail in: TiTS has clearly become too large and diverse for a single man to personally curate all of its content. Some form of community sandpapering or even hiring someone else to triage content submissions seem like ideal courses of action. But first things first, Mr. Noxo: TAKE A MOTHERFLIPPING BREAK!
Can we return to the good old fays when you wrote down what changed since last public patch?
He did.
The last patch before this was public too.
There wasn’t one back then either.
Alright so I guess this is where TiTS development ends. It was a good run guys.
Hardly. We have only begun!
So many comments ‘asking for’ less smut, I am positively surprised. I tend to completely skip over 90% of the smut until it feels ‘fitting’. I always felt like I was the only one who was looking for another scene of story over an extra sex scene for some random character.
But anyway, paying others for the work you don’t like to do tends to be a wise thing. Plus a generally active community can be a great help as well. Good luck figuring some good way out!
try to take of yourselves.
Howdy, never really made a comment like this before, so here goes nothing. I saw in a previous backers only post that you were reaching out to community writers for help, and I was interested in finding out how I’d even go about trying to qualify for that sort of thing.
, keep up the good work Fen & Co. I’ve been following your work for some time now, and I gotta say it’s been one helluva ride. Don’t be too hard on yourselves.
As someone who also works in a creative field, passion and work mixing can be a heady tonic, one that grows bitter after a while. I do not envy you your position, Aden, but I offer you my awe, gratitude, and advice; rest, brother. Everyone needs it.
Aden? Is that Fenoxos real name?
YES! I, for one, am really wanting some just, like, y’know, more interesting, exciting, maybe even thought provoking story things added, I already am lovin’ what’s here, but I think this game would be loads better if it was maybe not 75% fucking.