An Open Letter from Turning Tricks

I wanted to make this post to try and explain my work flow and hopefully clear things up for some people who are unhappy with my progress. I’ve lost a few subs recently because they felt I wasn’t doing updates fast enough. After Part 1 came out, I also received some feedback that the content seemed “light”. And finally, there was a few complaints about not enough lewd images/animations and/or the lewd images weren’t explicit enough.

So I want to address these points. That way, everyone can make their own decisions with the most accurate information.

I addressed the perceived lack of content in Part 1 before. Basically, because of previous path choices with the characters, Part 1 had several versions of each scene. For example, depending on your choices with Maddie and Olivia, you might get a scene where Maddie and Olivia get spanked by the principle at their school. Or instead, you won’t see that scene and instead get a scene where Maddie gets spanked at home. So, to see all the content and unlock any gallery images, you’d need to save often and replay with different choices. That will also be applicable in Part 2. There’s a few scenes with multiple variations. I’m kind of locked in to having to do this, if I don’t want to make the previous decisions meaningless. I’ve learned my lesson though and my future projects will be much better mapped out, in what paths players can go.

As for the time between updates; most players understand that these type of VN’s take a long time to make for an indie solo dev like myself. It’s painstaking work to set up, pose and then render each image. And I have to emphasize that I am not only developing these two stories, but I am also teaching myself how to make a better story, better images and better animations. I included a screenshot of my main production document below. This is for scene 56 of Whoremonger and it will be the first scene players see when Part 2 gets released. This is a beast of a scene. It’s very important – story wise – and there’s a few variations depending on path choices. I also took the feedback to heart, that I needed to up my game in regards to the lewd images and animations. Which is most of the reason why Part 2 didn’t get released by the end of January. I was 75% done already but then I decided to add a metric shit ton of animations. Not only to increase the amount of content for all of you, but also to get experience and skill making them. I am nowhere near perfect making them yet, but I have definitely gotten better and now understand how to best use my tools to construct these animations.

Just look at the screencap below. There’s almost 4000 animation frames for this scene alone! And not a single one is a 1-second loop. Most of them are between 8-11 seconds and I started using some morphs and premade animation scripts to make the character motion more “real”. These animations take a lot of time though. Typically, I spend about 3-4 hours posing and tweaking the animation timeline in DAZ. And then it’s between 8-10 hours to render out those 240+ frames. In fact, I lost a whole 10 hours the other day when a ripple effect I added to one animation ended up being reversed. I was tired when I set the queue up though and I missed doing a low-res render test to see how it looked playing. Took me about 4 hours to fix that the next morning and then another 10 hours to re-render.

So, I hope this informs everyone a little better about why these things take so long. I promise that I will finish both of these stories. And I have a new (big!) project in the planning stages. I also promise that I will never be one of those devs who milks their patrons with tiny and nonsensical updates. I want to finish both these stories as fast as I can, without sacrificing quality, and then I want to start the new project with full focus.

However, after I release Part 2, I am going to sit down with my planning document and I will try and reshape my release schedule to better carve up the updates so I can get them out faster. I originally was shooting for 6 weeks between updates in the past and I will try to get closer to that, moving forward.

There’s another thing many people may not realize. This isn’t just a hobby for me. Nor is it just something I am doing to make money. LOL! If I calculated the hours I put in and then added the money I make from subs and sales on Itch, my hourly wage would be about the same as a coal miner from the 18th century! 😊 I spend 6-8 hours almost every single day on this. And even when I am not sitting in front of my PC, I am thinking about the story and making notes.

This is important to me. I retired from the career I worked at for almost 3 decades in and this is something I just kind of stumbled into and then I found out that I am good at it and that I enjoy doing it immensely. I had to retire before I planned because of my health, and doing these stories is immensely satisfying for me and fills my days.

So anyhow, I hope that sheds some light on how I work. I’m not a big social media person and that’s why I am not sitting on Discord everyday chatting. When I work, I put the music on, make some coffee and then plug away at it for the day. But I check my pages and Discord every morning, usually while I am brewing my coffee. And I am on F95 almost every afternoon while I am waiting for DAZ or Photoshop to finish processing stuff. I try and answer every legit question or concern and I will always answer DM’s on SubscribeStar and Discord.

Anyhow, I just wanted to get this out there. I’m going to continue to try and make the best stories I can and it will get done… when it’s done!

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