Quick Edit: I wrote all this out on the 25th so I could post it on the 26th. Between then and now, there was a catastrophe in which a major bridge in Baltimore collapsed. Morgana and I are fine and we don’t know anybody who was directly involved in the disaster, but I did get a few questions about it overnight so I wanted to address that real quick. Now, on to the main article:
Hey, hey, hey! Y’all had a bunch of questions for me, yay! So now, Nine answers!
… There’s going to be more than nine answers, I was just saying the questions are being answered by me: Nine. Not that there’s only nine answers… yeah, you get it.
I actually had to delete a few sadly… not because I didn’t want to answer them, but because I got several versions of “who is your favourite character”. I got several more of “what future ideas do you have?”, but this one is answered in the Book Two Survey (still ongoing, so take a gander)!
Well, I hope you weren’t hoping for a bunch of ado, because the ado goes no further! In other words, without further ado… the answers!
Development
Q – Knowing what you know now, if you get a time machine that allows you to go back in time and make Mythos again from scratch. Would you change a thing? If yes, what would you change?
A – Oh gosh, so much. First, I’d never have attempted “Investigation Mode”. At this point it’d be harder for me to strip it out of the game than to just leave it in and have it never revisited. Other things I would have done differently from the start are things like never including the stat/relationship points (which are no longer in the game), never setting my variables as classes (which I only did in hopes of making the aforementioned points more manageable), and making side images for every possible expression instead of just the ones I thought were going to be used. Thankfully, all of these are going to be applied to Book Two!
Q – Do you need more proofreaders for Mythos?
A – With this being the final chapter, I whittled my list of proofreaders down to just two people. When beta testing comes around, however, I’ll be putting out my normal call for those.
Q – Have you thought about involving other people in game development, or is it just a one-man project?
A – Standard Lord of the Rings “I am no man!” response. But anyway, I’ve considered having other people as part of development, but I dunno how well it’d work. If I could manage it, I’d be quite happy writing the scripts and letting someone else handle renders and/or coding, but I don’t know who would wanna do all that for me.
Q – Have you ever thought about a “shared world”? I mean, if another developer wanted to write a story/game for the Mythos world, would you agree? (I’m not a writer/developer, I just know that some writers’ fictional worlds have sometimes been used by others to create stories, with author’s permission.)
A – Kind of, yes! There’s the canonical crossovers with Come Home and Bare Witness, as well as background cameos that hint at other games’ existence in Mythos. I’d like to have a “Mythos Universe” with other games and such taking place in the same world, but I don’t know if other writers would want to operate in the same mystical framework with how some things go (like werewolves not existing).
Q – Do you ever plant questions into Ask the Cast or Ask the Dev that nobody actually asked, just to give hints to the players?
A – Other than this one? I sure have! In every one there’s one question that is actually me asking myself something for the benefit of the audience.
Q – What’s the hardest scene you’ve had to render?
A – It’s not one you’d think would be that difficult! In Chapter Two, it’s the shot from Tara’s front porch looking in. To make that work, I had to first render the front of the house just for the door frame. Then, since that asset doesn’t have doors that open (like wtf?), I had to photoshop out the door. Behind that shot I had to line up the hallway and the kitchen sets together so you could get a clear idea of how the first floor of the house was laid out. I could have gone way lazier with it, in hindsight, but I really wanted to have some good scene-setting so you’d have an idea of what some spaces look like.
Q – Now that Book One is wrapping up, how do you feel about the final product? Is it everything you envisioned when you started on this path?
A – I’m actually pretty happy with how it all worked out. I knew the game was going to deviate greatly from the novel, but then the game evolved as I was still making it to become something I would have never thought of when I started out. I wouldn’t say the game is everything I envisioned, but I’m not at all disappointed by it.
Q – Was there anything you wanted for Book One that you weren’t able to realize?
A – When I was still planning before the first chapter I had ideas about how Kylie (or Kyle) could actually change by the end of the story. I had this crazy idea that you could choose to have Kylie become a Mage, Vampire, or Bureau Agent over the course of the game. I scrapped this idea because it’d not only be hell to implement, but I think Kylie should just stay as a Beacon so that she would have a perspective closer to the player (ie – “What the fuck is even going on?!”). I also wanted to have at least two sex scenes for each love interest, but it was hard enough for me to stuff in the sex scenes that do exist!
Q – How do you feel about the choice of the Visual Novel medium to tell your story? Did it allow you to accomplish what you set out to?
A – To be totally fair, I would love to have all my stories just be done in novel format, but I don’t think that’d have as broad an appeal. It’s harder to break into the literary world with any measure of success, I think. While it did let me accomplish what I wanted (people getting interested in my stories), if I were able to do Mythos as a novel series instead of Visual Novels, we’d probably be on Book 4 by now!
Q – What is the most important learning you’ve taken away from this project?
A – It’s really one I’m still learning! I have to stop being afraid to ask for help. There’s so many people in the community (devs and otherwise) who are more than happy to provide assistance. I always feel like a burden when asking for help, but usually it turns out that the thing I spent hours struggling with can be solved in three minutes by another dev who just knows how to do the one thing I was trying to do. And likewise, I’ve helped out some other devs with things they struggled with (which is bizarre, because I still consider myself new and very bad at this).
Q – Now that it’s coming to a close, in hindsight, do you have any thoughts or conclusions about your decision to add adult themes to the story?
A – It’s a bit of a double-edged sword. Yes, it did sort of increase the potential audience for the story. But I’m not sure if there’s people who would enjoy Mythos that passed it by because they didn’t want adult themes in the game. I’ll find out more concretely when I put Mythos on Steam as a non-adult version (with an optional adult version as an add-on perhaps, or just a separate game).
Q – What is the one most significant thing you will do differently as you start designing Book Two?
A – I should go smaller. Not necessarily making a shorter game, but maybe have fewer characters or a less convoluted plot. I can tell a story with a pretty big scope without having to make a big cast.
Q – how drunk *were* you when you decided it would be a good idea to make a VN with two separate main characters? Because, y’know, it’s not like making a single MC visual novel isn’t work intensive enough! 🙂 I kid. I tease. And I extend my sincere sympathies. 🙂
A – Haha… what’s actually kind of amusing is that the dual main characters isn’t nearly the most challenging part of making Mythos! I just have variables for gender-specific stuff so as I’m writing I can just have a line like “what is [she] doing here?”, and the game will automatically change the “she” to “he” if the player picked Kyle over Kylie. It makes me add a few extra renders fo when the main character is seen on screen, but it’s not too big of an imposition in most cases.
Q – About how much time a day do you spend on the game development?
A – This is a tough question! If you’re talking about just directly working on Mythos (renders, writing, coding, making music, etc), I’d say it’d probably average out to around something like 3 hours a day on the days I can work on it. But that’s not counting all the tangential things I gotta do, like researching real-world things that are put in the game, learning how to work with certain software, finding assets for the scenes, putting together the weekly updates, interacting with the community. In a way, I’m almost always working on Mythos…
Q – If you had one piece of advice to give to new adult game developers what would it be?
A – A lot of devs will tell you to start small, and I agree with that. But something I personally would wanna add is “don’t be afraid to tell people ‘no’.” Only you know what your story is all about, and you aren’t ever going to make everybody happy. Back in the early Mythos days I would kinda waffle on things, like “oh, maybe I’ll include [niche fetish] someday.” But now I’m not afraid to say “there will never be pregnancy sex in a game I make.” This goes for non-sexual stuff as well, of course, but it seems most prevalent amongst people who think they’re entitled to have their particular sexual proclivities included (or excluded) in every game that exists.
Q – Do you have plans for a game after Mythos?
A – Well… technically, no. All the games I have planned are other games in the Mythos world. However, after Mythos, Book One comes Book Two, Three, Four, etc.
Q – Do you have any idea how many books the finished story will run?
A – I have no idea. I think I already have enough ideas to keep me making Mythos games until I die, so the question is really “how much longer is Nine going to live?”
Q – How’s development been on your end, Nine? – Asia.
A – Hi, Asia! It’s been going pretty well, lately. I haven’t had any major motivation slumps like the one that delayed Chapter Four for so long.
Q – If I wanted to make a game like this with no game dev background, where would you recommend I start?
A – Ren’Py, the coding platform used for most of these games, is pretty easy to learn. There’s a tutorial that comes with the software that was actually helpful to me when I started out, but I have had prior programming experience. As I mentioned above, use other devs as your resources. For the most part, we don’t consider each other competitors, so much as we’re allies in all this.
Q – Have you thought about trying your hand at animated scenes again?
A – Not really. I don’t feel like they added much, because I’m not terribly good at them. They’re insanely time-consuming, and frustrating, and I don’t think there’s enough of a focus on sex in Mythos to make them worth my time. If I could outsource them somehow, maybe; but that’s going back to my “working with a team”, which always seems to go wrong in the AVN world.
Writing
Q – Have you ever tried to write a story using AI?
A – Oh, definitely not. I have enough stories in my head, I don’t think I need any AI assistance.
Q – Will you experiment with different genres in the next parts of the Mythos or will you stick to crime comedy?
A – There was another question asking if there was a genre I’d like to write, so I figured I could smush them both into this question. I do want to generally try to stick to the “lighter” side on my stories. Too many stories are heavy and dark and I kinda feel like whole “grimdark” thing is really overdone. I’ve actually kinda-sorta been debating horror, but I dunno if I could pull off “horror comedy”. Other than Shaun of the Dead I don’t even know what that would look like. A full-on heist story is certainly in the future for Mythos (kinda like the Gala bit, but bigger), as well as something more adventure-like. There’s probably always going to be a mystery element to the stories, but I kinda think every story has to have some element of mystery.
Q – Do you do research on the subjects you write about, or do you just use your own imagination to write adult scenes?
A – Are you asking if I watch porn?! Is that “research” for adult scenes? Kidding, kidding (though I do). I do research on things that have real-world grounding, though most of that is just stuff I already know, like all the Baltimore “lore” I put in. When it comes to the supernatural stuff, I do look at some bits, but I want things about my world to be different and surprising, so I don’t want the lore of my supernatural stuff to be adhering to anybody else’s. For example, I don’t want my vampires to function like Anne Rice’s or Stephanie Meyer’s, I don’t want my wizards to be like Jim Butcher’s, etc. Even with the mythological characters, I put an emphasis on how wrong humanity got the legends so that nobody fully knows what to expect.
Q – Who’s your favorite character to write, and who’s your favorite character in general?
A – I know you haven’t seen much of her, but my favourite character to write as is Jodi. She’s got a very “chill big sister” vibe that I really like. My favourite character overall though would probably be Tara, which is amusing considering she wasn’t even really a character in the novel.
Mythos Story
Q – What romance relationship (besides Tara x Ky) do you like the most and why is it B x Sophia? 🙂
A – Haha… someone shipping B and Sophia together. That seems to be a popular non-canon pairing. Maybe it will become canon, sometime… who knows? Though a relationship I hope to show more of in the future is Anna and Echo in Area 42. They have such polar opposite personalities, I’m kinda sad I didn’t have more room to show more of the band’s dynamic in this book.
Q – What sex scene in Mythos is your favorite and why?
A – B’s! She stays the same even during a sexual situation, and I love that about her.
Q – Do you already have a main plot/guideline for the complete story of Mythos? And how it’s going to end?
A – I don’t have an actual idea for the end of it all, but I do have an idea of how I want to end the arc that started in Book One; let’s call it “The Cult of the Void Arc”. Let’s see if I can get there!
Q – Can you expect rough, non-sexual content in your games in the future? Like a bloody showdown with the killer?
A – I’m not really much for violence, honestly. Also, Patreon has been cracking down on a lot of things, and they have some rules about “glorification of violence”, which is wonderfully vague (like all their guidelines). Regardless, I feel like that kind of thing is a little darker than the kind of storyteller I am.
Q – Is Nine likely to show up again?
A – Hm. Do you mean how my digital avatar shows up at the start of the game? Yes. I put that in as a sort of “writer’s forward” like you see in many books, it’s just done visually because… visual novel. You’ll also be seeing Nine at the end of the game! There’s also a waitress who looks a lot like Nine that will also keep showing up, but that’s surely a coincidence.
Q – Aside from fae, celestials, mages of various sorts, beacons, vampires, and werewolves, are we likely to see new types of supernaturals in the near future?
A – Oh, yes, there are more things out there than Fae, Celestials, Mages, Beacons, Vampires, and… what was that last thing on the list? Hm, weird, I thought there was one more. Anyway!
There’s actually a few more “supernatural types” that haven’t been brought up, though they have been seen in the game. I don’t wanna give too much away, but there’s other types of “special humans” other than Beacons that just haven’t been named. There’s also other mythological creatures that exist.
Also, “Fae” is a large umbrella term (Rain hinted at that much), but not every supernatural type that falls in that category believes themselves to be part of it… like dragons!
Q – Do you currently plan to introduce many new characters in later books?
A – Other than the ones you see in the Book Two survey, I have quite a few more characters in store. Also, in reading some of the conversations people are having about the proposed new characters in that survey, I may have to introduce them regardless of which one becomes Book Two, just because there’s some excitement around the characters if not the story they’d be featured in.
Personal
Q – Have you read Gideon the Ninth? (by Tamsyn Muir)
A – I’ve never heard of these! They seem interesting, so if I ever get time I could check them out! The third book has a doggie on the cover, so that’s a nice bonus.
Q – From some combination of your posts and online statements, it seems you dislike the sex / sexy parts of Mythos. Do you look down on the fans who like that stuff? Do you want to focus on what you are comfortable with? Would you be willing to sacrifice fans who DO like the sexy stuff to attain that comfort level?
A – Well, I’m Asexual, so the whole sex part isn’t really appealing to me. I definitely don’t look down on people who enjoy it, though! Hell, I wish sexual things weren’t so stigmatized in modern society so that adult content creators (of all types) wouldn’t have such a hard time in life. I wouldn’t say I’m uncomfortable writing the sex scenes, so much as I’m full of self-doubt on if they’re even good enough. Even in my horniest of moods I’m pretty vanilla.
Q – How did you meet Morgana?
A – In what seems like a weird series of events based on the last question, Morgana and I met on an erotic fiction/roleplay forum. At the time, we were both in relationships, but for completely independent reasons our relationships fell apart. We decided to meet each other and things went wonderfully from there.
Q – How does it feel to have a extraordinary, with an incredible sense of humor and exceptional culinary tastes, smart, wonderful amphibian in your fanbase? What?! What do you mean I’ve just blew-up my anonymity?
A – … well, at least you managed to get a question in, this time!
Q – Nine its been months, have you played that game yet?
A – God dammit. I’m pretty sure I know who this is and what game they’re talking about, but just in case…
I’m extreeeeeemely behind in my playing of other AVNs. It’s tough for me to play them these days, because I’m always looking at them from a developer perspective, so it just feels like work.
If this is regarding non-adult games, I’d need some more specifics. I still do a little Disney Dreamlight Valley every day, and of course I’ve never stopped playing Final Fantasy XIV (though lately it’s just twenty minutes a day to do my daily checks/weekly challenge log, with some Palace of the Dead runs on weekends). I mentioned in some Friday Updates the other games I’ve played, like Baldur’s Gate 3, Midnight Suns, Danganronpa (1 and 2), and right now I’m playing through Final Fantasy IX.
Q – Why this dislike about Coldplay?
A – Generally speaking, I want my music to have energy. Coldplay feels like… whiney, droney, and chill. A good rule of thumb for my kind of music is “if you can fall asleep to it, Nine won’t like it”.
Q – If the answer at THE question isn’t 42, what is it?
A – If not 42, then it could be 4, 8, 15, 16, or 23. Don’t get Lost trying to figure that out, though.
Q – As an asexual, isn’t it psychologically taxing for you to deal with things you’re not interested in? (I’m thinking specifically of writing about sexuality, so forgive me if this is too personal and don’t answer.)
A – Not really. I’m not repulsed by sex, so much as that I kinda look at it from a detached viewpoint. I’ve had sex, I know what feels good, it’s just not for me, anymore.
Q – What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
A – I… think I get this question every time I do “Ask the Dev”. I’ve gotten it at least once before… the answer is 42.
Q – How emotionally attached are you to your characters?
A – I’d say I’m attached to some more than others. For example, the two characters in Mythos I’ve “known” the longest are B and Becki (With an I), whom I’ve had ideas with and even done some roleplaying as before Mythos was even a thing. Jodi is another character that’s been around since before Mythos, and she was actually the protagonist in my novel that Mythos was based on. There’s also a few that I won’t mind getting rid of, at all…
Q – Are you OK (You, Morgana, and the cat)?
A – Um, well… regarding myself: Not completely? My body is still adjusting to this whole “diabetes medication” stuff. Gulliver is getting old, but he seems to be in pretty good health (other than his own diabetes). Morgana’s doing pretty well, though! Liking her new job far better than the last.
Q – What is/was your favorite TV series?
A – I haven’t been a big series watcher for a long time. Every now and then something will watch my interest and absorb me, but it’s hard for me to sit and watch things, when I could be doing something interacted. In recent memory, I’d have to say shows I’ved like are Ghosts, Our Flag Means Death, and The Righteous Gemstones. I keep up with RuPaul’s Drag Race, too, but I don’t think that’s the kind of TV you were asking about.
Q – What AVNs do you enjoy?
A – I haven’t gotten into any new AVNs in a long time, since (as stated above) when I play them it kinda feels like work. However, I obviously love Come Home and Bare Witness, but also really like Single Again, Power Vacuum, Light of my Life, Tales from the Unending Void… I know I’m missing some.
And that’s that for this round! Thank you to everyone who got your questions in on time! If your question was submitted, but not directly answered, that’s because I believed it was answered well enough by another similar question (or was answered elsewhere, like the survey). It’s also possible that I accidentally deleted an entry off the spreadsheet as I was sorting it – if that’s the case, I’m very sorry!!!
Keep the legends alive!
– Nine