Lewd Town Adventures Anniversary Public Post.

Hello everyone!

Happy Birthday to Lewd Town Adventures!
This week multiple posts are going up for different tiers because of this special occasion. Personally, I'm not really a fan of distributing information based on tiers because this proves how much the world is not an equal place... Edit: I kinda stopped doing that.

I don't know if anyone noticed it but...

Lewd Town Adventures is officially one year old!

Not to blow my own horn but not many other people have achieved making a game like this within such a short time frame.
For this reason, I am making multiple large posts with a lot of extra information, images, and wallpapers (as well as a bunch of spoilers).

1 Year Ago...
Let's go back to the start of making this game and go through 12 months of development, sort of. Technically, though, I actually started learning how to do things and how to create this game back in February 2020 after I lost my job, like many of us around the world is due to some sort of virus...

The "Alpha" release took 6 months to make, including learning how to do stuff. It had about 2 hours of content. The stupid thing though was that - after I was almost done - I realized that it looked like shit. Sometimes we creators can be blinded by what may seem totally amazing at first, but in reality looks a bit off...

This is why I had to redo quite a bit of the game render-wise.
The amount of crappy images were just bad.

Quality vs Quantity:
I am someone that naturally wants to make things good.
I'm not saying perfect here because I am not a perfectionist, in my eyes that's another word for being afraid to fail.

However, I do strive to make things as good as possible. At the same time I realize that as a game dev you also have to set realistic expectations for yourself and the audience you're going for...
If I wanted I could spend hours on a few images/animations. Sometimes I still do that but that also means having a very slow work pace and perhaps losing impatient fans.

All of this would result in lower content update packages. So I had to make a consensus decision on how much time to spend on certain things, when to let it go and move on just to have actual progress.
I know not everything is perfect in the game, and some things likely will never be as perfect as they can be; nonetheless I am really doing my utmost best on each and every scene.

But just like anyone I have days where I am more motivated and the results are just better than others. Overall I can't complain though. WYSIWYG.

Initial Choices & Player Reaction:
I chose a different style for this game when I started.

There was no real reason for this; I just always strive to be somewhat unique.
I think I just happened to like the art style more. From what I have seen, this game seems to be the only one using these tools to release content like this. Sure, quite a few other games use the same program, but I always try to be unique.

If I knew from the start what I know now, I probably wouldn't have done it like that. Why not? Look at all thick, DARK lines: they make things a lot more difficult than it should have been if I used smaller outlines.

When I first released the game the majority of comments were very negative. And not only centered around the look of the MC in the prologue... So much hate and backlash stunned me...

I felt like I had just wasted 6 months of my life... But at that point, I thought maybe I could turn things around with a bunch of tweaks since the game development overall was not too far into a final form. Maybe I could salvage most of it...

It hurts a lot when you spend so much energy and time making what you think is awesome and hilarious, only to have hundreds of people say your work sucks ass.

In hindsight, I believe many of those initial 'players' didn’t actually play the game... Or maybe they (like Xo Mo) were not into / completely unfamiliar with anime-based stuff. Which is all fair I guess. Everyone has the right to their opinion. Some things are more accepted in certain cultures than others... Some people find their niche interests and anything else is just weird to them.

Funnily enough, I now think a part of the critique was fair. That's only because I got a lot better at everything. I've facepalmed myself many times for the earlier code/scenes/renders of things I made. The first few versions of the game also had a few thousand typos/grammar issues, which I either did not notice or did not know how to fix properly.

Luckily, Xo Mo fixed the vast majority of those.

Behind the scenes... Writing:
I might have mentioned before that I am not a professional writer. With all the deep conversations, character personalities, and jokes I want the game to have, for me it was and is the hardest part to produce.

The writing/story/jokes themselves were always fine IMO and I have learned so many things since I am not a native English speaker. Ever since I started writing I've learned how challenging it can be to write cohesive or elaborate lines of dialog and narration.

To some people writing comes naturally; for me it does a little bit. But since I'm not very confident in what I write it sort of becomes a doubt thing. This means I'll go over the story/dialogue way too many times, and put way too much thought into it.

When I go for a walk or grocery shopping, I'm obsessively thinking about what to write, what to add, humor, plotlines, character tweaks, etc. It's somewhat normal to be thinking about the stuff you're creating, but for me, I tend to go way overboard. It sort of drains the fun out of it all.

I still enjoy writing a bunch of scenes BUT if I had to write all of them (especially with the game main path choice splitting the content into two diverging storylines and play styles), I would have quit this game months ago. It's just too much extra work, overwhelming and exhausting. 

I saw that coming though and that's why I went on a quest to find someone that could help me out. I set out on my own adventure across the internet to find a writer. Now, this may sound easy, but again, most people won't respond to a random dude asking for a novel's worth of writing out of the blue. Most of them are already working on their own project or - worse - after making a deal and receiving a promise of payment, will leave since the project doesn't make them within a few weeks/months.

I somewhat believe in faith, so I contacted several people casually over a month or so... Xo Mo was one out of a few who responded positively. At first, after playing version 0.5, he was willing to just do proofreading and make typo corrections, fix punctuation and phrasing... which I was very grateful for since what he gave me went well beyond that and made the game way better.

After that, I offered Xo Mo a job to join my team and write actual scenes for this game. Little known fact: doing this became sort of a miracle... Without him investing time and talent, I would have quit creating games and abandoned LTA at version 0.6 to focus on other things in my life.

In the 6-7 months since Xo Mo joined, I can only say the help he has given me has been an absolute godsend. He has great talent, even if it's a tad different style than I have but that's fine.

Speaking of Xo Mo, Here's what he has to say about our current progress in 0.9:
Hello everyone…

Xo Mo here this week with a fascinating look into what's going on in the Jamleng Games Studios…

First off, we'd love to thank everyone for continuing to support us in these trying times. We know some of our players may be struggling with finances, health, or dealing with unfortunate tragedies. Our hearts truly do go out to those who have endured loss…

As the writer of about 75% of the new dialog (edited to 65% by Jamleng - who is holding his own with awesome new scenes and many funny lines), I wanted to say it has been a thrill to bring these characters to life. Sometimes I write too much, add too many references, or challenge Jamleng with scenes that he has a difficult time editing down or are so detailed, intricate, and lengthy (like this sentence) that posing, animating, and rendering takes up to a week for a single scene...

We've been watching the comments, the feedback, the suggestions online and in discord and – while many are good – a few may never be able to happen and a few are not even close to possible. I mean, we already pissed off so many players with the way the MC starts out in the prologue, so while we want to open ourselves (and Lewd Town) to as many fetishes as we can, we have to be sensitive to players who have zero interest in such "kinks" or "fetishes" or "terminology"…

What am I talking about? 
Well, imagine something you have heard of that totally grosses you out... Now imagine you’re playing along and it's shoved in your face with no way around it… Yeah, we don’t want to force anyone to endure that (like a few other visual novels tend to do). Well, outside of the occasional reproductive 'accident'…

I could write like this for hours, but I'll just say this…

What we're doing for 0.9 is amazing. If you've played the prologue before, we are revamping a significant portion of it. Not a huge change, but making it less stale and repetitive. Less stale and repetitive… Less stale… wait, have I said that before? lol…

We've got the new GUI in the works, a new starting message underway, new intro screens in development, fresh renders here and there, more referential dialogue… Say what? I mean… You know when a girl is standing in her room and MC approaches her? How she answers the same way every time? Well, she will have new lines referring to what the player has experienced recently, as long as it relates to that particular character in some way. These will replace and supplement existing lines you probably have memorized by now...

There will be some new characters, both female and male… We will have a lot of intimate activities for those hoping to fap to new stuff, and some deep conversations for the players focused on literacy over licking pu**y. Relationships will grow, things may get out of control, and maybe even get quite 'explosive' in a handful of moments…

I have actually written so many new scenes that will not be included in 0.9 simply for volume of renders needed (as well as significant photoshop post-processing work) that I sometimes lose track of what twists, surprises, references, and character moments have been chosen for this update and which will be saved for later.

We seriously want to give it all to you (that's what he said), but delaying the update even longer will surely frustrate several fans. Suffice it to say, we are nearing the home stretch. Still a lot of little things to do, not to mention writing code and assembling all of it, but we're rolling quickly toward a test release for Jam and me to run through to isolate and correct any pre-beta-test errors.

Special request... If you're enjoying the newest scenes and improved written content, please consider checking out my own Subscribestar page... https://subscribestar.adult/242publishing where I have details on my 10 books and you can keep up to date on my future projects outside the Jamleng Games Studio.

Now back to Jamleng:

More behind the scenes... About the GUI:
LTA has always had a pretty basic interface. This is mostly because I worked with stock images; my focus from the start was primarily on creating new content. Some players pointed out that the overall look was sort of basic. I agree. Thus I set out again on an adventure to find someone that was an actual professional at graphical interface design for games. I wanted to hire someone who could do a full one-and-done refit to the interface. (To clarify, the team is still just me and Xo Mo.)

Now, while some players may think it's easy to drop some images in and run with it, before I started on this quest I already knew it was going to be a hassle from my earlier life experiences.

The first thing I did after the last update was checking out and contact many artists that are way better at that stuff than I am. People who have websites and patreons focused solely on developing unique and cool looks for RenPy and other game engines.

Like when I set out to find a writer, many of my queries received no replies. Those that did - once I checked them out - didn't have enough experience/examples or didn't have the time to fit LTA into their busy production schedule... A few others said they would put me on a waiting list and I counted on that. But after 2 months, the designer said that his "internet broke" for 2 weeks. Sure. Yeah. I believe that...

In this, the second decade of the 21st century, no one will believe shit like that! It pisses me off but then again, I suppose it's nothing to really be surprised about.

Luckily I found someone  - by pure coincidence - who has great skills and I'm grateful for that. This guy has some awesome talent for sure.
I took the leap and paid him in advance. He's now working on the 0.9 LTA GUI as we speak. I am very curious to see how it will end up... I really hope I didn't get scammed, lol.

Note: How this new interface will turn out is not by chance. I've easily spent 10+ hours on just looking for examples, downloading images, dropping them in the GUI image directory to test them out in the game, hoping to see what would fit the best. It has to be right. It has to be worth the invested time and money.

Generally, things like these are too close for comfort but I'm glad it seems to be turning out well. *knock on wood*

Long story short, always contact many people and work with the ones that actually reply/are available within a decent time frame. If possible, check their reviews and comments sections for how others have responded to their work... If you don't do your diligence, deadlines will get lost in the void leaving you with nothing. Everything is basically a challenge combined with a stroke of luck.

The same goes for writing. If you wish to hire someone like Xo Mo, check their published or publicly available content. Ask for samples, review them and see if it fits your style or hoped-for content. If a writer, designer, or artist declines such requests, just drop them and find someone who won't waste your time or scam you. Especially with the world in such chaos, millions of talented people are eager to find work.

Behind the scenes... Creating environments/images:
This is by far the most time-consuming part of the whole process.

I've easily spent over a thousand hours just tweaking stuff, controlling stuff: messing around with cameras, lighting, characters, poses, props in the background of a scene, animations... the list goes on.

Depending on the complexity of a scene and on how many characters are involved, it will sometimes take days to complete a single event that will show up in the game. I'm talking about how developers can spend 30+ hours for a few minutes of playable content.

It's not technically that difficult; it's just a lot of work. Basically, they're all puppets that have to be controlled and made to look natural. Fine-tuning an elbow position, a facial expression, or shifting environmental lights and camera angles for a render or animation just takes a lot of experimentation and time.

I often have to render multiple different poses and angles and check them, then make changes and re-render so it doesn't look weird. Animations are the most time consuming of them all: I can basically mess around with them for hours upon hours for days at a time but - in the end - I have to keep the poses and movements sort of simple and cut myself off, accepting what I see as perhaps not quite as perfect as I'd like - but acceptable... Because there wouldn't be that much content if I spent all the time I need to make each image and animation perfect.

Maybe it sounds weird but the whole process is mostly just a lot of focusing, giving special attention to details, shifting the light angle or camera a few centimeters in a scene, and making sure everything comes out looking good. And making sure that it matches existing content.

Other than that... What did I do this week?
Code and Renders. Sending suggestions to Xo Mo and reviewing what he's written. I've only rendered a few new events since I was mostly busy with the code itself. I've made many (hundreds of) small improvements to the game overall, of which some you'll definitely notice.

Here are some examples:
A new font has been added to the game to differentiate it from other RenPy games.

The reason for this is to make everything more readable; also because LTA has been using the most standard font of them all for the whole year. It is long overdue, in my opinion.

A new font will also be added for the menus and stuff. At the moment, this is a work in progress. Basically for the same reason as above. It just makes things stand out a bit better and makes it look more professional.

Another thing that I've changed is the NARRATOR of the game. Normally he would show up as normal dialogue like when a character is speaking to describe something or as a transitionary moment. Since we're using the narrator to make super-long dialog scenes a bit more playable brief, I felt a change was critical at this point.
From now on, "Narrator" is almost completely gone, replaced by a black screen that will say when there's a bit of a time-skip/change.

If you'd ask why? Mostly because I think it looks better, also I somewhat borrowed the idea from a very popular sfw game and I thought it would fit this game perfectly.

I've added some regular flashes to the code that will replace the ejaculation "cum flash" in some cases. For instance, there was a scene in the church where Angelica is talking to God. The joke is that God answered with a lightning strike. It sort of looked weird because it shared the same code with the "cum flash".

I've switched it up now, so we have extra code that makes the screen shake. For instance if you get hit in some fight, or by a car. It's not special but enhances a few scenes a little bit. It won't be as overused as a few games out there that quite literally shake the screen every other line of text.

Early-Game tweaks/fixes:
The plan was to remake a bunch of earlier scenes and a part of the prologue.

But... After playing through the prologue and the rest of the game I sort of think they're awesome/fine, mostly. My original intention was to make lots of changes to earlier scenes; instead I've only redone a few scenes for better render quality.
Some scenes were outdated though, for instance Nani at the bar. They were done 14-15 months ago or so and were a bit messy.

I've learned a lot since that time so I've redone some of the images and animations so they look better.

There are many other examples of small changes/redone scenes but I didn't go overboard with it because - if I really want to get very critical - I'd probably have to redo 30% of the game to make it as perfect as I want it to be. This would be a loooooot of work so I only changed stuff that annoyed me on a personal level.

Here's an example of things that annoyed me:

Once again, I've replaced the old intro with a new one that's quite a bit better and will hopefully bring new and existing players into the story early on. I think the quality of the new stuff is pretty good and I'm happy with how it turned out.

Other stuff:
The "train a girl" scene will now have some random girls show up instead of having the same sequence... for some extra added variation.
Xo Mo has been improving all of the characters that you're able to talk to so they have way more dialogue and will actually comment on things happening in Lewd Town (if it's relevant to their character or something they will have heard about or witnessed personally).

This was already in the game to some extent but has been enhanced x 10.
This is actually amazing because there are not many other games that go this far (delving into previous content and altering it as much as we have this time) just to insert extra optional dialog that keeps all of the characters up to date on "live events."

Some of the dialogue is really cool but made casual conversations epic. Instead, I am separating some of the more fun moments to turn them into mini-events.

Audio/Sound Effects:
I've been messing around with this for quite a bit in the past week. Dropping in an audio file, playing vocal sounds over animations...
My original plan was to add hundreds of sound effects to LTA... but - having seen the end result of most of these ideas - I've changed my mind on it.
There will be quite a few new sound effects where they best fit correctly within the moment portrayed, but overdoing it becomes very distracting for the player.
It will probably be the "Being A Dick"-style approach: just a couple of them, up to 50-ish? scattered throughout a bunch of scenes.

To be honest, I vastly underestimated the challenge of adding sound to a game.

Even though I have loads of sound examples at my disposal, many of those became obviously unusable due to bad quality. Some audio files I could have used needed to be edited, slowed down, sped up, have the volume altered, and a bunch of other stuff.
For regular scenes, this is not that big a deal but for the naughty scenes, it makes things really difficult.

There simply aren't many good-quality sound effects available for adult stuff. Matching moans and grunts to the rhythm of the girl is even more time-consuming. And if the player 'rolls back' dialog mid-audio-playback, it becomes completely messy.
Although I did have quite a few options, most just sort of sucked; the ones I could use will get boring/repetitive VERY fast with the amount of naughty stuff that's in the game.
It's just very challenging and time-consuming to make it actually look and sound sort of professional over the whole spectrum.

For this reason, audio will be improved a bit but not added to sex scenes (sorry if you were hoping for that). It's better to leave it up to players' imaginations unless you really love squeaky, squirty sounds with some high-pitched Japanese girl moaning the same shit over and over again in every. single. scene.

I truly am sorry about it; I might make a cheat code scene for it or something so you can at least understand where I'm coming from. 

New wallpapers:
I've made a bunch of them this time. They're just for fun and as an extra reward kind of thing.

Higher tiers will receive for the first time some extra NSWF stuff; in the past 12 months I've never done so, mostly because of Patreon rules at the time and also since I prefer to keep things SFW so subscribers can also casually read this stuff on the bus/train/work/home or whatever. So this will be an exception.

New animations:
Some insane new animations have been in the works that will be coming to LTA, some will be in the coming update, others will be in certain reworked scenes, while several will be saved for later updates.
These are insane and you won't be able to find them in other games.
It's all part of the quest to bring Lewd Town Adventures to higher heights.

I wanted to show them off but this post is already way longer than I thought it would be.
Creating accounts on naughty websites, uploading and seeing if they could work on Subscriber Star is a hassle.

Subscribestar:
A small side note: Subscribestar is going alright and we're very thankful for every single penny that enters the project. It helps us a lot.
We've had quite a few people backing us and we're very grateful but there have been easily over 100k plays over the past year.

Based on those numbers, the people that chipped in on development is less than 0.1%. I wasn't expecting anything else but with over 16 months of intensive work, it's not as much as we need to make LTA at all profitable. Basically, we can buy a bunch of groceries or something and that's about it. Maybe upgrade our hardware or get a faster modem and it's gone... (both Xo Mo and I have done these in the past couple of weeks IRL)...

For that reason I've decided to have a one-month early release instead of the usual two weeks.

Higher tiers get 1 full month earlier access, then two weeks later $5 dollar pledges will get early access and after that I will make the game publicly available.
I know it may upset those who hate the idea of a paywall or delayed releases, but this is precisely a model that quite a few of the top-earning game devs have used for years. To be honest I don't like doing it like this at all but it's been proven to work, so we'll see how it affects update 0.9. (For everyone that's currently subscribed, <bold>nothing will change </bold> for the first few days after the release.)

Lewd Town Adventures has always been a labor of love and I'm very fortunate and happy to be able to work on this game. (Me too -- Xo Mo)
Sadly, in the end it doesn't feed my family. It barely makes it worth the time and energy this 'hobby' has developed into... Frankly, if things don't improve soon, I'm probably better off doing literally anything else, even a part time job will take less energy and focus while paying a better salary.

In any case, the worst case scenario is just slower updates than usual. Instead of working on the game full time I'll go back to really treating it as a hobby. This means 10-20 hours of work a week max and 6-month release schedules.

Note: This is in no way intended to be a threat or complaint by any means. It's just reality. We all have to pay bills, eat, and live a life of comfort... It's fun to have a hobby, but when the "hobby" becomes an obsession that takes time away from earning enough for basic needs, one must question the value of dedicating so much time and effort into that hobby.

I must decide which to sacrifice: my well-being and livelihood or the speedy release of new updates... I'm not asking everyone to subscribe. But if you love this game's content, these characters and story, please consider it. (especially once you see 0.9's new stuff... it's amazing, more than ever before)

Closing words:
Thank you very much for reading, everyone.
I hope you've enjoyed this week's extra large Lewd Town Adventures special.

The Lewd Town Adventures update 0.9 will come out sometime next month. It's already way bigger than last update but there's still plenty of stuff to do to improve the game and to make it as good as we can within the coming month.

Have a great week like always and see you guys next Sunday.