Posts

The Curse of Updates

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The CHYOA format, making the most of it, and how it applies to House Semya. Everybody’s different, so I’m not suggesting that there’s any one ‘best’ way to do it, but there are a couple things that I’ve noticed over time that affect how I’m handling my ongoing stories. My favorite is to write something with lots of options and interactivity and post it all at once so that when engaging with it the first time, the readers get to hopefully enjoy having the options and getting to actually click things. I would find it frustrating to have to wait days or weeks for options to appear and waiting for a big multi-branch story to be posted piecemeal would be pretty annoying. We saw this in the latter days of FSC. Writing up all that material with all those choices is a lot of work, but it’s also fun, so that’s not the problem. The problem is getting people to actually see that story. This isn’t just true of CHYOA; it’s true of most similar sites, but stories get bumped to the top when they’...

House Semya

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There’s a lot to unpack here. My last blog post talked about why we went with family values as the theme for House Semya, now let’s talk about the rest. I had three mostly separate challenges with this story: how go about telling a fantasy story and how to do a family story and have them at least mostly succeed at being kind of sexy. On fantasy, I thought about my own experiences reading fantasy novels and things I’ve read about other people reading them. I looked at some of the eroticism in things like Game of Thrones, and observed how even old-timey fantasy was massively horny. I concluded that from my perspective, the most attractive fantasy smut wasn’t smut at all. It was “legit” storytelling that happened to include a larger amount of horniness. I decided to risk going a little bit more plot and exposition heavy and to try to get some characterization in there instead of just throwing us into massive orgies. I felt like that would make a stronger story and make the family compon...

Wholesome wholesome wholesome

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The latest in well-reasoned, meticulously planned things that are definitely not tone deaf and impulsive! In addition to taking commissions, I had two projects planned for this summer: FSCR and some kind of trappy crossdressy yaoi thing. To fully understand what has happened, we must go back 3000 years to when I first started taking commissions. I noticed a pattern back then: there were a lot of commissions about Riley and Kayla, a lot of commissions about Riley and Mary, sometimes a commission about Kayla and Mary, and then a lot more commissions about Riley, Kayla, AND Mary. It wasn’t like I’d never been to the internet before; I knew about the ’family’ tag on CHYOA and even back then a casual glance at the front of Pornhub was heavily loaded with Step-Bro/Step-Mom coded stuff that slapped you in the face with the truth. But you know what? That was never really *my* thing. I like trappy hentai and Sean Bean and Michelle Yeoh. And Colin Firth. Hentai anime from the 90s. I’m very norma...

Twine games and *stuff*

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This is a long one, but this contractually obligatory boobie gif will help you get through it. Riley’s Room exists . I really like making stuff like that. For better or worse, the current version of Twine is less friendly to images than the one I used to make RR, so let’s get this out there now: VFU Twine stuff for the foreseeable future is text-only. Even if Twine was better with images, I personally don’t use AI for anything, and the VFU probably doesn’t even break even let alone turn a profit, so there is no budget for like commissioning artwork. So, we’d probably be looking at prose-only stuff either way. This matters because lewd games specifically are probably strongest when they involve good visuals, and the lewd game market is crowded with games that have just that. So, it makes no sense to try to compete with or even really get into that space. Prose is what we have, so prose is what we’ll work with for now.  Last summer, I started work on an SSS Twine game. An actual game...

Choices in the new SSS

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As I’ve yapped about at length in the past, how much freedom to go with in a story comes with pros and cons of all kinds. For this summer’s SSS, we are going with a relatively tight outline. Some choices will contribute more to invisible scores than to immediate consequences. We’ve done this before in different ways with stories like Batgirl Against Everyone. An example of how this looks: Suppose the movie we were basing the story on was FRIDAY THE 13 TH , which is about horny camp counselors getting chased with a machete. A choice might be: “Cover for the lifeguard or go start making lunch.” Immediately, either choice will lead closer to excitement of some kind. Lifeguard is swimsuits and flirting while making lunch is an opportunity to get closer to the cook. However, the LIFEGUARD choice would be a +1 to ‘Responsible Counselor’ while going to the cook might be +1 to ‘Good listener.’ Later in the story, in some situations like running from the killer, if we have a certain ‘Respon...

Summer 2025, New Blog

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It’s summer. Commissions are open and Sapphic Sorority is about to start a new arc. The old blog was just too terrible. I think its terribleness is one of the reasons that I didn’t update it more, but there are just so many projects that we really do need one sensible place to keep track of them. I’d have liked to just use Ko-Fi as that place and do my blogging there, but AO3 doesn’t like people linking to that, so we’ll do it here. I always think there’s no way anybody cares enough about some smutty stories to need all this info, but then someone DMs me about something and it’s just like “I really need a website,” so this is the compromise. Whether anyone cares or not, this is where I’ll blog a little about what I’m learning, what I’m planning, and my reasoning for creative decisions. Feedback is always welcome. I like writing stuff that’s fun for me, but it also needs to be stuff that people want to read, so I need to know what people like and don’t like. How can we make the mo...