Should My life in a Voraphile's Future stay an interactive?

[TheVoreEngineer]

To everyone who has no clue what I'm talking about, please check out this thread to see what is being discussed here. If you are going to input your opinion on this subject, I would at least like to request that you are aware of the content being discussed before inputting an opinion.

With that out of the way, only around 80 pages in and it's still taking forever for much to get done. While writing the story passage by passage, I constantly see the enormity of the task, but the issue is not the writing, that part is ok, but as I keep writing, I notice that a lot of choices feel meaningless, as eventually, all paths might combine, removing any possibility for extremely structured storytelling or progression, as notes to previous encounters cannot exist without breaking other pathways.

Enter, visual novels. They are able to hold variables, meaning that the storytelling becomes more structured, certain situations can be expanded upon and more. But each option has their pros, so I'll list what I can personally see in each, and I would like to put it up to you guys. Should "My life in a Voraphile's Future" stay an Eka's interactive, or should it progress into a Visual Novel made in Ren'py?

Interactive
- It is accessible to any device as long as a connection to the internet and Eka's is available
- Updating is constant (as constant as I make the pages anyway)
- Most likely draws in a bigger audience as no downloads required

Visual Novel
- Can be downloaded to any PC or Android phone (Unsure about mac, probably not on iPhone)
- Allows much more creative freedom and ability to personalise the story
- Can include elements impossible in an interactive such as randomization and other things.

Again these are just some of the things that can be achieved with each, but I'd like to hear the public's opinions on this too.

[Aleph-Null]

Hello,

I voted that I don't mind either, but I did want to clarify.

When you started My life in a Voraphile's future, you had a goal to re-write a rather large interactive adding in structure, consistency, and fleshing some aspects out. That is a huge undertaking, and it sounded like you didn't want others to add to your story until you hit a certain point where enough world info was in to keep everything consistent.

Moving to a visual novel system will eliminate most people's contributions, so the question is, do you want this to be a solo project (others may still contribute, but it is less likely). If you were looking forward to others' contributions, then leave it as an interactive. But if the collaborative writing aspect of the story is not terribly important to you, then the visual novel approach would be better.

From the perspective of a reader, I don't think it will mater much. The group of people here that like interactives seems to be rather small, and I think that community would not mind the shift in format.

[Assimilation]

Realistically, I will probably not re-read it if it's not a few simple links from this site. Requiring the user to download a program immediately cuts down on your audience size.

Remember that your vore content is competing against all vore content on this site; your potential audience has a limited pool of attention that they have come here to spend to help gratify a sexual release. As you increase the effort that is required to experience your content, the number of people who will decide it isn't worth their time will also rise.

That being said, I think it is reasonable for you to say that your goal is not to keep your audience large but to instead create something rich with storytelling value. If you feel that Ren'py will enrich your vore content with its added features, you need to decide what is more important to you: that you make a work that impresses a large audience, or that you make an impressive work to a limited audience?

And in case you think I'm making some rhetorical quality-over-quantity intrinsic-value-trumps-popularity statement with an obvious answer, I tell you that I would personally go for trying to impress the large audience. I derive great satisfaction from widespread recognition and I don't think it's bad to feel that way.

[ryanshowseason3]

There are web based visual novel options as well such as twine.

But yes I think the idea lends itself well to a novel and the linking around may be easier to do within that format by just doing a simple call routine.

FYI one of the more popular formats renpy can do mac distributions on top of linux, windows and android.

Randomization and being able to "remember" past decisions is great though. You aren't "forced" into awkward moments when your page is too long and you have to make an arbitrary choice just because the interactive page feels too long.

As a writer I find the visual novel format lets me wax on as much or as little as I like.
Interactives let you write a few paragraphs but viewership dwindles when interactive pages are incredibly long.
Conversely I've also done skyrim dialog which is basically telling a vore story in 81 character bits.
I've made content on the whisper app as well which is pretty character restrictive.

My favorite by far is the visual novel. Some presentation elements are second to none there and you can get far more impact with a line of dialog there than in anything else. Interactives are a not so distant second though.

[Pinhead2212]

I vote both

[Pyrod]

VN please

[Twister88]

I vote for visual novel if that opens up for more possibilities within the story

[Redatheart]

If this was to become a VN, who would do the illustrations? Would it end up costing money?

[TheVoreEngineer]

Hello,

I voted that I don't mind either, but I did want to clarify.

When you started My life in a Voraphile's future, you had a goal to re-write a rather large interactive adding in structure, consistency, and fleshing some aspects out. That is a huge undertaking, and it sounded like you didn't want others to add to your story until you hit a certain point where enough world info was in to keep everything consistent.

Moving to a visual novel system will eliminate most people's contributions, so the question is, do you want this to be a solo project (others may still contribute, but it is less likely). If you were looking forward to others' contributions, then leave it as an interactive. But if the collaborative writing aspect of the story is not terribly important to you, then the visual novel approach would be better.

From the perspective of a reader, I don't think it will mater much. The group of people here that like interactives seems to be rather small, and I think that community would not mind the shift in format.

I guess to an extent this does mean that it'll be more work for me, however, my intention was always to write the interactive personally, with a singular arc being fan input, and eventually making adding new pages free for all once I decide that I can no longer feasibly continue working on the project (which is far far away don't worry.) However, something for sure to consider, thank you!

Realistically, I will probably not re-read it if it's not a few simple links from this site. Requiring the user to download a program immediately cuts down on your audience size.

Remember that your vore content is competing against all vore content on this site; your potential audience has a limited pool of attention that they have come here to spend to help gratify a sexual release. As you increase the effort that is required to experience your content, the number of people who will decide it isn't worth their time will also rise.

That being said, I think it is reasonable for you to say that your goal is not to keep your audience large but to instead create something rich with storytelling value. If you feel that Ren'py will enrich your vore content with its added features, you need to decide what is more important to you: that you make a work that impresses a large audience, or that you make an impressive work to a limited audience?

And in case you think I'm making some rhetorical quality-over-quantity intrinsic-value-trumps-popularity statement with an obvious answer, I tell you that I would personally go for trying to impress the large audience. I derive great satisfaction from widespread recognition and I don't think it's bad to feel that way.

Well, I am writing a vore interactive, my goal here in no way is recognition. I just want to give back to a community that I've personally enjoyed being part of. However, more readers would be something I would consider nice. In regards to content changes, well while for the first few arcs it wouldn't change much, it could affect later arcs by being able to create fleshed out characters that change dialouge and choices depending on previous choices with them, but that would take a large amount of time to develop however.

There are web based visual novel options as well such as twine.

But yes I think the idea lends itself well to a novel and the linking around may be easier to do within that format by just doing a simple call routine.

FYI one of the more popular formats renpy can do mac distributions on top of linux, windows and android.

Randomization and being able to "remember" past decisions is great though. You aren't "forced" into awkward moments when your page is too long and you have to make an arbitrary choice just because the interactive page feels too long.

As a writer I find the visual novel format lets me wax on as much or as little as I like.
Interactives let you write a few paragraphs but viewership dwindles when interactive pages are incredibly long.
Conversely I've also done skyrim dialog which is basically telling a vore story in 81 character bits.
I've made content on the whisper app as well which is pretty character restrictive.

My favorite by far is the visual novel. Some presentation elements are second to none there and you can get far more impact with a line of dialog there than in anything else. Interactives are a not so distant second though.

Ah, Ryan show, don't worry, if I were to go VN I would be without a doubt using Ren'py, hell I have a few visual less demos I made to test mechanics with it. Other systems have always been a little too "not me" for me to use, but I feel at home with ren'py. Thanks for the input with the options however!

If this was to become a VN, who would do the illustrations? Would it end up costing money?

First off, let me clear that I intend to keep this content Forever free as the premise isn't mine, to begin with, it would be extremely rude to even consider making money off it. In terms of images, I would not be commissioning any images, and it would stay text only UNLESS people are willing to donate sprites (I am happy enough to find backgrounds.)

Thanks for all the responses guys. I have a slight idea in the direction I want to go in, but I'm not quite ready to put it out there yet, so keep on voting, I'd love to see everyone's opinions!