Just on a hiatus from writing. Hope to get back into it soon when life stuff settles down!

Stay well, you funky animals :)

If you're a fan of my work (or gay furry hypno generally) and haven't played   Bitshift 's new game yet, what are you doing!? Stop reading and go play it!

Absolutely phenomenal piece of work, with killer writing, art, and game design coming together for a super enjoyable experience. I'm especially impressed by how Bitshift was able to stimulate that feeling of loss of control us hypnokinksters know and love so much just through clever game design. I'm certainly taking notes for my own future work.

If you're reading this and still haven't played, go do it! And if you liked the game as much as I did, consider throwing the creator a few dollars on itch.io! For all the hard work Bitshift has put into this (and has made available for FREE), it's the least we can do!

Hello! Just wanted to post a quick update after so long.

I think I've mentioned this elsewhere, but Enter the Underdim is effectively on hiatus for the time being. I have a lot of ideas for where I'd like the story to go, but actually putting those ideas into writing has been a slog, and I honestly just haven't really been feeling up to it. So if you're waiting for ETU updates, don't give up hope! But also, don't hold your breath.

What I am actively working on is a new game, working title "Sublustris." I envision it as a sort of dungeon-crawler, RPG sorta thing with stats and inventory and turn-based combat (and, of course, plenty of smut). Because I refuse to learn any real programming, I'm still working in Twine, which recently led to a pretty demoralizing setback that halted development for some time. Basically, the Twine format I used for ETU (Harlowe) isn't great at handling frequent array updates and more complex functions. I only learned this after pretty much coding all the game systems in Harlowe, only to find that extended playtimes almost always resulted in game-breaking freezes. I concluded the only way to salvage my game was to port all my progress into a new, more flexible Twine format (SugarCube), which has a completely different and (for me at least) more complicated syntax. I've spent the past few days learning how to code in SugarCube and essentially reprogramming my entire game from scratch. It's been a good learning experience, if not a good time, but I'm satisfied with the results.

The upshot of all this is that, after all this work, I'm now more motivated than ever to get my shit together and wrap this up into a releasable product, even if it's just a demo to start with. I can't really offer any exact ETA (sorry), but I think if I can keep working at a semi-reasonable pace, I should be able to get something out within the next few weeks, so keep an eye out. If anyone's interested in helping test the game before release, feel free to shoot me a message!

That's it for now! Thanks for reading and for following my work :)

-Ich

tldr: ETU not abandoned but on hiatus; new game on horizon o.o

Hope you all had/are having a great day!

Sometimes it comes like a clear mountain stream, sometimes it comes like sludge.

Lately I've been struggling with constantly second-guessing the admittedly-little I've been writing. There have been times I've loved writing and felt good about what I was doing, but sadly that has not been the case as of late. Now I just keep thinking how incredibly egotistical you need to be to be a writer, thinking anyone gives a shit about how you can string words and sentences together. It's hard to keep up passion when every few paragraphs you read back and just think "wow, this is shit." I keep telling myself that Enter the Underdim is just a writing exercise — a low-stakes way to explore different interests and just practice putting together a coherent and enjoyable narrative. In this light, I shouldn't be too worried about quality — the whole point is mainly to improve. And yet, I **do** care about quality! I don't want to write badly, and this aversion to writing badly has been strangling my output.

Oddly enough, my takeaway from this has been a newfound respect for the many beginner artists on this website. Browsing FA, you see lots of beautiful, polished pieces of art from seasoned artists. Perfect lineart, shading, colors, etc. But alongside these, you find a whole host of... let's say **less-impressive** art. The quality spectrum of art on this site is quite wide.

While it's easy to see less-good art or read less-good writing and scoff, this is a mindset I've been finding less and less viable as my estimation of my own work drops. Every piece of creative output, no matter how "amateur," someone somewhere spent time and effort to bring from the mind into existence, and then had the courage to post here, alongside the likes of Hun and Maquenda and Trigaroo and other incredible artists. I respect that!

Comparing one's work to that of others can be a valuable source of inspiration and motivation, but it can also be choking. So here's to all the beginner artists out there, moved by inspiration (or, especially on a site like this, horniness) to create, and brave enough to share their work, unconcerned with its comparative quality.

Hopefully soon I'll feel good about what I'm writing again, but until then, all there is to do is keep writing.

Thanks for reading my rant on writing furry porn lol. Regarding Enter the Underdim, I've been making slow but sure progress. I don't have an ETA for the next update, but it will come.

How am I just learning about Twine now? This program's incredible.

I can't believe how awkward and tedious my .doc hyperlink system was — this is just so much better for writing interactive fiction.

Protip to CYOA writers: use Twine.