Welcome back, Mythies! Or, for those of you who are only now discovering the world of Mythos: Welcome! You are now one of the Mythies. No takebacks.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted an update, and there’s so much to cover that I had to organise my thoughts a bit. I wanted to have this posted last night, but it became so long and rambly that I decided to start over with a more clearly defined outline of things I need to cover. It’s still gonna be long, but at least it’s organised! Let’s start with…

Book One Postmortem

What I learned, and how I’ll be applying it to Book Two

Mythos, Book One was my first game. While I’m satisfied with how the story shook out, there are quite a few things I learned that are going to shape how I’m going to develop future games.

Bear in mind that I haven’t even begun work on Book Two yet. Yes, I have the general plot knocking around in my head, but I haven’t even sat down to work out an outline of how things specifically go. Unlike with Book One, I don’t have a base novel to work off of, so this outline is going to be more thorough as I’m not reworking an existing story. On the other hand, since this is being planned as a game (rather than a novel), it may adapt better to the player experience.

There are a few minor adjustments I’ll be making, such as never using “Investigation Mode” again, possibly making the achievements a bit easier, and reducing some of the music’s repetitiveness. In fact, I’m already looking to redo the Diner/Nine’s Theme so it’s a little less grating on the ears. I also learned not to make so many images that contain text, because that becomes an absolute nightmare when the time comes for translations.

So now come the big things I need to talk about as we head into Book Two:

– “Relationships felt like an afterthought!”

Even amongst Mythos’ biggest fans, the number one complaint by far is that there was very little substance to the relationship/romance aspects. I’d argue that only Tara’s “path” felt logical. This is one of the side effects of the game being adapted from a novel where the main character was asexual. I had to shove relationships into a story that was originally not meant to accommodate them.

Book Two is different. Being built from the ground up as a visual novel, I can have relationships be a stronger focus, though I still want the story to be enough to stand on its own, even if you want to forgo any sort of dating. The first chapter (which I’ll be releasing as the demo version) isn’t even going to have any adult content in it; just introductions to the story and the characters, and perhaps giving you an idea of who you may want to set your sights on as the story progresses.

While I don’t plan on forcing monogamy, I also don’t plan on having any of the girls outright state how cool they are with you banging everyone. That’s not really how real relationships evolve, so I’m probably going to frame it more like you’re just starting your relationships with these girls, and while there may be sex, there isn’t going to be “the talk” about the future until very near the end of the game.

– Payment Processors are prudes.

Most of you have probably already seen something about this, since the news has blown up pretty much everywhere. Payment Processors are trying to be the moral police and “crack down” on what they allow people to spend their money on. You’d think that they would be required by law to accommodate any legal purchases, but apparently not! In an age where so much commerce is done online, for some reason the payment processors required for that online commerce are allowed to be the arbiters of what you can buy. There are plenty of movements to fight against this (I’m doing my best to push for them, as well), but so far the future of adult games being legitimately purchasable is still kinda up in the air.

As such, I have to really think about how I want to distribute Mythos, Book Two. Naturally, I want to have it on Steam and itch.io as before, but if things keep going this way, that could be difficult. I could remove the adult content and provide an “NSFW patch” on my website, but that feels clunky, and I also don’t know if players would want to go through that extra hassle. Then again, if all adult games are forced to go this route, it’s probably going to be just the “accepted norm” that if you wanna see naughty stuff, you gotta get a patch separately.

This has also hindered any plans I have had for releasing Book Two in “early access” on Steam, because it seems Steam will no longer support early access for NSFW games. That’s not such a big deal, since Book One wasn’t on Steam until it was finished, but it means that I don’t even have the option of distributing it chapter-by-chapter on Steam like I had been doing on Patreon, SubscribeStar, and itch.io.

That leads me to…

– Changes to Patreon/SubscribeStar Tiers.

This isn’t going to really be a huge change, but I didn’t want anybody caught by surprise. Right now, a lot of the tiers are superfluous, so I’m going to be reducing the number of tiers available. I think you can even set your pledge amount to whatever you want, anyway!

A bigger change I’m making is how I’m sending out the game to backers on those platforms. Instead of making a post with a download link that only certain tiers will see, I’m going to be sending out those download links through a group message to everyone whose lifetime contributions hit a certain threshold (probably $10, which is the cost of the game at a discount price). That way, if you’ve given enough to buy the game, you’ll get it – even if you did so $1 a month for 10 months. If you give more, you’ll get it sooner. I haven’t finalised these ideas yet.

I also am going to be making changes to the wallpaper tiers, though I don’t think most of y’all cared about those, anyway.

– I need a PC Upgrade!

My current PC (Sombra) was purchased five years ago specifically to make Mythos, Book One. She’s starting to show her age, so I really want to get a new one before I start doing the heavy stuff in Mythos, Book Two.

That can be a problem, though. Daz (the software I use for the visual elements of Mythos) still doesn’t support the NVIDIA 5000 series video cards, and every off-the-shelf PC I’ve seen so far comes with a 5000 series card. I may have to go a custom route to have one built with a 4000 series card, or wait for Daz to update and work with the 5000 series. I really don’t wanna start doing renders until I have this new rig in place, since I don’t want to have to switch PCs in the middle of production.

Ask the Cast/Ask the Dev

This one’s always a fun time!

This isn’t the formal announcement, so don’t start hurling questions at me! This is my warning announcement, so you know to get your questions ready and not miss the submission window (you know who you are). This is also a preview for those of you new to being Mythies and don’t know about this fun little perk.

Periodically (usually once per chapter update), I will open up questions for an article called “Ask the Cast” or “Ask the Dev”. “Ask the Dev” is basically an “Ask Me Anything” segment where you ask questions and… I… answer them. These questions don’t even have to be about Mythos or game development at all! 

“Ask the Cast” is kind of the same thing, only you’re talking to the characters. If you’ve read the character interviews posted for Book One, it’s a similar concept. Basically, the characters will fully break the fourth wall to talk about their experiences in the game world, with the questions coming directly from the players.

This time around, the two articles are going to be the same: Ask the Cast and Ask the Dev are going to be done at the same time. God help me.

Because we’re currently between games, the questions are probably going to have an even wider range than before! Keep an eye out next week for the announcement that questions are open!

Personal Life Happenings

Since some of y’all care about me.

All this time without game updates has meant an equal amount of time without any “Nine’s Personal Life” updates! Generally speaking, I’ve been enjoying this month of lessened stress (despite my wanting so badly to start working more on Book Two). During this time, I got to dip my toes into different things.

– “Hey Nine, Whatcha Playin’?”

I got to play a whole bunch of games during my downtime! I was already starting to get into Genshin Impact before Book One was done, but I dove much harder into it when I had nothing to keep me away. I played a fair bit of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (I really need to finish that) and a lot of Slay the Spire and Hades.

My Genshin playing has tapered off a bit since I discovered Honkai Star Rail, which is what I love about Genshin, but turn-based (I greatly prefer turn-based games to action-based ones).

My time in Final Fantasy XIV has been lessened of late; I’m still three story patches behind, even. I don’t dislike the game or the direction it’s gone or anything like that. I think I just wanted to do other things for a while. I’m still playing it, just not as much right now.

I’ve also gotten back into Magic: the Gathering, partially thanks to the Final Fantasy expansion, but also because a group of friends and I are doing weekly Commander nights. It means I can play Magic with more than just Morgana without having to play with strangers.

– I’ve been reading, too!

In addition to the stuff I’ve been reading as research for Book Two (that doesn’t count as violating my break!), I’ve gotten into the Locked Tomb series. I finished Gideon the Ninth, and I’m 22% of the way into Harrow the Ninth.

While the actual storyline can be pretty confusing and complicated, the writing style is what really keeps me going. Tamsyn Muir seems to have a similar sense of humour to mine, but she tells a darker story.

– We got a new cat.

This wasn’t planned or anything, but we’ve expanded our little family. We had swung by PetSmart in hopes of finding some hydrophobic cat litter for our current cat when we discovered they were having a special adoption event. Many people were cooing and signing up to take kittens home, but there was one sad orange boy that nobody was really paying attention to. He made eye contact with Morgana and me, and so we asked if we could spend some time with him. The lady running the event was thrilled that someone was interested, and he was just the sweetest thing, so we decided to take him home.

He’s a seven-year-old orange tabby (with one arm being completely white), and we’ve named him Cecil Perpetua. The name Cecil was chosen because I wanted to have a Mythos reference in his name, as well as a Final Fantasy reference (Cecil Turner in Mythos was named after Cecil Harvey from Final Fantasy IV), while Morgana is happy that Cecil is also a reference to “Welcome to Nightvale”. The name Perpetua is his middle name because of the current Papa Emeritus in the lore of the band Ghost.

He and Gulliver (the cat we already had) had a little friction at first, but now they’ve gotten to the part of their relationship where they just outright ignore each other. We also discovered, a week into owning him, that Cecil is deaf. For a cat, that’s really not a big deal; it’s just kind of amusing that he’s always startled because he never knows when someone is approaching.

While we’re talking about cats, you may remember that Gulliver was diabetic. We were at PetSmart in the first place because we needed special litter to try to get a urine sample and make sure his kidneys were okay. Well, his kidneys are just fine (they wanted to test, since he’s so old), and it looks like his diabetes has gone into remission! We’re going to do a glucose test this weekend to verify, but this may be the end of me having to inject him with insulin twice a day!

In Conclusion…

This is probably the longest update I’ve ever written, holy hell. I’m not sure if I’m going to be doing the “weekly updates” again just yet, since I’m still in the planning stages. I also need to learn a few things to better work on the next game (like more musical stuff, some deeper understanding of code, etc).

So until next time, Mythies…

Keep the legends alive!
– Nine