Hello everyone!

Sorry, have to skimp out on the fancy text again this month... there's enough going on without that, I think... it'll be back next month, promise. Next month is Halloween, and I can't resist the urge to put a fox in a witch's hat...

Rather than go on with a preamble, I'm just gonna get straight into it! This month is going to have a big game update for v1.4 (though is it really v1.4?) and there's also gonna be a bunch of stories since I have, like, three of them almost completely wrote and ready to roll out.

Ready? Let's go!

Game Stuff

I'm going to be talking about v1.4! If you haven't played it yet and you don't want to be spoiled, then, well, scroll down real quick, or, uh... stop reading?

Let's keep going a little longer...

... and a bit more...

... and, okay, it'd be obnoxious if I kept going, right? So...

v1.4 is not v1.4. If you've played it by now then you might have figured it out! This is no mere version update, this is...

Surprise!

I feel like I've had a lot of bad surprises lately... there was the sudden call to England last year, then the emergency move... so, for once, I wanted to do a nice surprise...

This was not originally the plan... sort of. I was working on a genuine version of v1.4 at one point, but I decided to stow it as soon as I realized that the port was actually feasible. The plan of action that I had - I came up with it last year - was to get the port done and then start working on the sequel in earnest. The port ended up coming together because of emergency circumstances, and it came together better than I could have hoped, really, so...

I think v1.4 was interesting, but I think that this will be much more interesting. I'm not deleting all the work I did on v1.4, but I am, as I said, stowing it or shelving it for now. At some point I might finish it up and actually put it in the game! I might just release the text files. Most likely, I'll not do either and much like the original event room stuff it'll just kinda sit on my hard drive, waiting, wanting...

Anyway. Stream of thought time. I've been working on this for over a year, and I've been holding back my thoughts on it...

When I was young, there were two sorts of games that I was particularly drawn toward. These were RPGs and point and click adventures. To me, these sorts of games - back then and now, really - are the ultimate way of being able to tell a story. It's like a book or a movie, but it's interactive. You can stop to smell the roses or speak to that guy on the side of the road or waste a whole bunch of time fishing if you want to... or a whole bevy of other activities.

So, as a game developer... if I can call myself that for a second... I am drawn toward making those two sorts of games. Vorevival is my genuine attempt at an RPG, and A Tiny Furry In A Huge World 2 is going to be genuine attempt at a point and click adventure game. It's just, you know, they're both going to be stuffed to the gills with vore and macro/micro stuff, so...

More on Vorevival in a bit, but, keeping on topic with A Tiny Furry In A Huge World 2... work on it started about a year ago. Back when I was in England dealing with my ill Mum last June, I was obviously quite miserable... I wanted to work, to create, but I couldn't get in the headspace to write for obvious reasons. One night, kinda desperate for inspiration, I dug through my bedroom closet and found an old sketchbook of mine. I mean old, like, maybe even almost two decades old... and there were all of these beautiful sketches in there.

Looking at the sketch book was a very strange experience. Obviously I had drawn everything on the pages, but for many reasons - the passage of time, the fact that I was a different person back then, etc - it felt like I wasn't really looking at my own work. Because of this, I was able to appreciate my own work in a way that I never had before... to not have the hateful critic within me obsessing over each and every line. It was strange, to be in this in between state... to be both the creator and the first-time viewer all at the same time.

Before last year, I hadn't drawn in a while... it had been a little less than a decade, I think. I gave up on drawing because I didn't think that I was good enough to really do anything with it and it was also sort of... purposeless, I suppose. But I wanted to create, and I was inspired by what I had drawn all those years ago. At the time I was desperately trying to get A Tiny Furry In A Huge World v1.3 finished. It was heavily on my mind, so... for fun, for myself, I decided to try and draw some of the A Tiny Furry In A Huge World characters.

I was there for hours doodling them... various different styles, various different characters, various different poses... I had never really thought about how the characters would look in a visual sense before. To create a literal visual depiction and to write one is a very different thing. When I write, I prefer to give off vibes rather than provide reams of accurate physical description, because I think that it means the reader can better imagine the character in the way that is the most attractive/interesting to them. So I had never really seen them in this way before.

It was fascinating, and kind of sad, in a weird way... like, yeah, it's really cool that Aimee or Janice look like this, but I'll never really be able to show that off in a meaningful way. I thought about how it'd be cool to have visual representations of the characters in game, but how at the same time that the game isn't really designed for it... at the end of the day, the game was wrote with the express purpose that visual representations of the characters wouldn't be included. So to just tack them on felt like it would be cheap...

But I wanted to do something regardless. So that's when plans for A Tiny Furry In A Huge World 2 started. It seemed like a good time to do it... the original game kind of feels complete. I say kind of because it's the sort of thing where you could just keep tacking content onto it forever, making the whole college even more of a maze than it already is... but I feel like this approach is kind of abrasive. A lot of the endings in the game are hard to find already because they're tucked deep into menus and submenus and subsubmenus and...

... so to keep tacking onto that problem would be bad. At the same time, though, I want to continue doing things with the characters that I created and the world that they inhabit. I also want to give those characters and that world a story that it deserves. A Tiny Furry In A Huge World is all over the place in terms of the plot, mostly because it was never really wrote with a plot in mind in the first place... so there are a lot of contradictions, some deliberate, some not deliberate. It was never really meant to be cohesive.

A sequel is a blank slate, sort of, and having a blank slate means that I can start from ground zero. For that reason, even if this game is familiar, it might contradict what came before... at times, even, it might even contradict itself... I think that's just in the game's spirit at this point, honestly.

Anyway... I've been working on it for about a year. It's quite far along! More of it is wrote than it is programmed, but, lots of it is wrote, so, getting an update out for it every month should be relatively easy. I've also programmed the game in such a way that adding content to it is incredibly easy, so, finger's crossed, development on A Tiny Furry In A Huge World 2 should be quite smooth, at least for a little while.

Naturally, like the original game... or like most games... it's going to be a multi-year project. Like the original game, too, I'm making sure that there's going to be plenty of opportunities for polled content. This will include characters, areas... all that good stuff.

Since this is a new project, I'm going to do a Q&A since I find it's the easiest way to condense lots and lots of information...

Q: What will the game be like? Will it be like the original?A: Mostly, yes. I want it to be a sandbox like the original game rather than anything linear. You can't really see this yet since the game is only the prologue or whatever right now, but as the game is updated it'll become clearer and clearer that it's a sandbox game where you can visit any area you want in any order and experience all of the scenes in said area in whatever order you want. The main difference is that all of these areas are going to be tied up together with a central narrative in mind.

In other words, if you don't care about the story and just want to see the vore, then it'll be easy enough to ignore. But if you're someone who wants to pay attention to the story and engage with it, then there'll be plenty of avenues for you to do this. For people who really want to cut everything out and just focus on the scenes, the game will eventually have a scene selector like the original game. In other words, the 'juicy' content will be plentiful and easy to access.

Q: Will insert my favourite character from TFIAHW be in it?A: Everyone who is in the original game will make an appearance at some point. Even the weird little bit part characters that only appear in a scene or two. This doesn't mean that every single one of them will have brand spanking new macro/micro content, but... most of the big players will. Also, a lot of the new players will! There will be a lot of cool new characters as well.

Q: What will this month's update have in it?A: Some more plot, and about four scenes/endings worth of macro/micro shenanigans.

Q: What were you working on over the past year?A: There was a whole lot of learning. This, for the most part, was a ton of spritework-related lessons and GML2 tutorials/classes. Hours of them! Days of them... weeks, even. Perhaps, maybe even months! Hard to say. I buried myself in it, and I didn't really want to talk about it... it still feels weird to, even. Like, hey, yeah, I was learning how to do my job! Haha, how impressive...

Naturally, I'm still learning things, but the game in it's current state of being is the result of about a years worth of iterations, refinements, redesigns, throwouts, until we have the version that you've (probably) played that I am really, really happy with. So, yes! For the past year, I've been toiling away on this in secret, making as robust of a game as I can manage... and I think that years worth of work will pay off! It has already, honestly... the prologue was amazingly easy to put together.

Q: This is like, the third new project in a bit... it's not going to end up on the sidelines, is it?A: Nope! I have monthly updates planned for this game until the end of this year and beyond. It's also important to point out that this is not a new project. I have been working on it for over a year and I am extremely confident in it. I can promise and assure you - and everyone else - that this is not just some prototype or half-baked idea. I would not throw out a true sequel to my most popular game and just like... forget about it.

It's obviously not going to happen overnight because A Tiny Furry In A Huge World has a huge amount of content, but, be assured that this game is going to end up being even richer in content than that game is, by the end. It wouldn't really be a proper sequel if it was smaller...

Q: What about Vorevival?A: Work on Vorevival continues to progress. It's not something that I'm rushing, but it is something that I am actively working on. Here's some rough, WIPish screenshots as proof!

When it's ready it will be ready, and when it's ready it will be the version of the game that I am proudest of. This is the approach that I took with releasing A Tiny Furry In A Huge World 2: I made sure that the UI was mostly finalized, that all of the systems worked, that everything was tuned up and in perfect sync. I did not like having to rush out barely working versions of Vorevival back when it was being actively maintained every month, and I'd rather not do that again... it's one of the reasons why I made A Tiny Furry In A Huge World 2 as easy to add content to as physically possible.

I think as a developer and as a content creator I am done being like: here's this rough prototype that I made, it's pretty neat huh? I mean, maybe not completely done because it's fun to do that sometimes, but, when it comes to committing to a long-term project like either of these games, I want them to have a stable and solid codebase. With Vorevival, I'm also adding the condition that I want it to have a couple of hours of content ready before the first proper release comes out. I want the new, shiny version of it to come out and for it to be something that people can really sink their teeth into. It's just more exciting that way...

Q: What about A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest?A: That one is a bit of a deeper cut, but is relevant because it was a spiritual sequel...

Probably the simplest way of putting it is that A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest is something that I constantly think about and want to make. Over the past few years I've tried several times to make a version of the game that feels satisfying to me and I've not been able to. I am hoping that by making both Vorevival and A Tiny Furry In A Huge World 2 I can learn what I need to learn in order to make that game, well, exactly what I want it to be. In my head, the version of that game that I want to make is the ultimate culmination of all of my abilities... something of a magnum opus, if you will.

In short, it's something that I think about often, and, ultimately, will be made eventually. But not until I'm ready.

This has been a very long section... so, the too long didn't read of it is: A Tiny Furry In A Huge World 2 is going to get monthly updates! The first coming at the end of this month. It's gonna add the game's first new scenes/endings (vore and macro/micro stuff, yay!) and ultimately it will evolve into a sandbox-like game just like the first one, only it's going to have a more cohesive plot for those who care about that sort of thing.

Thank you to everyone for the kind words so far! I've had a lot of DMs and it's been overwhelming in the most lovely way... I'm glad you're all excited for the game, and I promise I'll do my best to make sure it lives up to everyone's expectations!

It's relieving, in a way, to finally have this out... it was a big secret. And now it's out in the open, and I can work on it in earnest. Exciting, exciting!

Oh... as a game aside... there will be an update for the A Tiny Furry In A Huge World port this month, too! It's not going to add content, but it is going to make the port feature complete as it were. I should have it out in a week or two! For the beginning of the month, I'm going to focus on...

Story Stuff

This will be a much shorter section, I promise! Though not because there's going to be a small amount of story content this month...

Last month I promised three stories, and I kinda failed to deliver on that... I'm really sorry! I got those stories pretty much wrote, but I was too busy focusing on... y'know, all the above... so I never quite got the finishing touches on them that I wanted to do.

To try and make up for this, during the first half of the month, I'm going to put some extra focus into story writing. For example, tomorrow, I'll be publishing the first of those three stories, and then I'll be swiftly releasing the rest of them, too...

Since game production should hopefully go smoothly, I'll be getting at least one - maybe two - stories out on top of that this month, too. I'm excited to show them off to you... they're real naughty and a whole lot of fun, I think.

That's it for now! There's normally a mental health section, but aside from the usual, I'm honestly feeling pretty chipper this September, so... I'll skip it!

I'll be back tomorrow with a story! Until then, I hope you're all having a lovely September so far!