Edit 4/2/2023

Happy April Fool's! I know this is a bit of a rehash of a few years ago but I liked this idea and it's probably good to let folks know I'm still alive.
I do kind of like the idea of writing my own game book though. Maybe I'll draft up something like that for Gineb...

---

Hey guys. I've been sitting and musing on what to do with Gineb. There's just something missing, I think. So I've been taking the last *checks calendar* three years to sit and think about what that might be. And I think I'm onto something.

So, when I originally sat down to start making Gineb, one of the first things I did was sit down and decide "what form do I want this to take." I didn't have the budget to hire an entire hundred man team to make a big AAA game from this simple idea, I didn't have the artistic talent or patience to paint gorgeous artwork with which to assemble a comic out of, and my previous projects, the stories I wrote, didn't feel quite... interactive enough. So I looked at the state of what games people were creating, and I rewound the clock.
Pixelized games, GBA games, old computer RPGs, hardware limited sprite games. That seemed more doable, right? But it was just out of my reach, I felt, so I went further back in time.
And then I found it.

Zork. Colossal Cave Adventure, Hitchhiker's Guide. Kyle is Famous. All famous games that had an element of interactivity, and were entirely composed of text, a thing I can work with by myself. It was perfect. So I sat down and drew inspiration from those games, puzzles, NPCs, exploration, and I started work on Gineb. I'm sure you know the rest.

So I was thinking today, running a thought experiment, and I decided to rewind the clock one more time. Back to the age of books, and radio plays, and... And then it hit me.
Choose your own adventure game books. Those were a thing, books like The Cave of Time and The Forbidden Castle and the Fighting Fantasy series.

I know what I must now do. Gineb is going to be reworked in order to fit as a choose your own story gamebook. Complete with player-maintained stats and inventory and esoteric dice rolls. Probably a d5 or something. I'll do some calling around about some kind of self publishing too. This is going to make hotcakes, I just know it.

Edit 4/2/2020

Happy April Fool's Day! Yeah, Gineb is staying as a text adventure. I'm a writer, not an artist, and I've grown to appreciate the interactive medium that is video games.
One of these days I might make a choose your own adventure visual novel though. Always liked those kind of gamebooks. The art is the only stumbling block there.

---

It's been a while, and I've been thinking. People don't really want to read anymore. A text-based game is never going to market well in today's society. I'm gonna need to adapt Gineb to fit, aren't I.
A full on VR setup for Gineb is a bit too much work though, and turning it into a first person battle royale really wouldn't make much sense, as profitable as that might be. I could make it into a movie, but then it would stray away from it being a "vore game."
That's when it hit me: A visual novel.
So that's what I'm going to be doing with Gineb next. Unfortunately, I can't draw, but I'm not about to let that stop me. So, this coming year, I shall transform Gineb into a textless visual novel. You'll get to see your favorite characters in glorious, stick figure visual. Your favorite scenes, PowerPoint animated with motion lines and no antialiasing. There won't even be any dialog, since I can't afford voice actors, so dialog would have to be through text and I'm not having that.
I'm gonna have to cut out all the interactivity though. It'll be a linear experience from start to finish, and if the visual novel goes through some scene you don't like, you might just have to close your eyes until it's over and blindly click the next scene arrow as it pops up.
I hope this shall be a glorious future for Gineb. Trust me, everyone will love it.

tl;dr 🖼📕

Another year, another time around the sun. I'm a quarter done with my life now.
That thought doesn't really scare me, honestly. I feel like I've done pretty good with my life thus far. Really shouldn't be expected to have made it all in the first quarter of your life.
I've got good friends, hobbies, and life goals I'm working towards. Sometimes, you just need to stop and reflect on the good things in life.

Edit 4/2/2018

Happy Easter Fools day. Yeah, I'm not morally bankrupt enough to seriously think about adding lootbox gambling to my games.
Maybe I'll put up a journal talking a bit more about my serious thoughts on monetizing Gineb, but this is definitely not how I'd handle it, if I do at all.

My favorite part of this entire journal has got to be the fact that Egg Hammers have a chance of breaking without cracking open the egg though. That is just so devilishly evil.

---

So I've been thinking. Gineb's been sitting around here for a couple years now, and it's made me no money. Nothing, zip, zilch. I don't know how crazy I was thinking I could put up something for free for people to enjoy without thinking of some way to make money off of it. I've done some research into the usual ways to make money off of gullible customers. The easiest ways seem to be with microtransactions, DLC, and lootcrates.

Microtransactions might be a nice way to do it, and DLC would definitely get people coming back. But... why don't I just tie them both into lootcrates? It's Easter too, so in the spirit of that:
Introducing the Treasure Egg.

These little round goodie boxes will drop off of enemies randomly. I'm thinking maybe a 2% chance per battle. There will be three tiers of them: Mundane, Unique, and Exclusive.
Mundane Treasure Eggs will be a muddy brown color, and will have basic loot in them. Weapons, colored costumes, armor, magic spells. Maybe I'll throw in a special scene or two. These will be the most common drop.
Unique Treasure Eggs will be a golden, shiny color, and will have rare loot in them. Powerful weapons, unique costumes, companions, and characters, and these will be the way to get most of the unique vore scenes and even sex scenes in the game. I'll probably even lock a few of the old scenes behind it, like Leera. Gotta get lucky to unlock her!
And Exclusive Treasure Eggs will be a special deal. You won't be able to find these in the game, beyond maybe one or two specific locations. There will be really, really good things in these, like super rare characters, scenes, superpowerful weapons and armors, companion specific moves... There's even a move you'll be able to unlock for Yoshi that allows them to turn foes into Treasure Eggs!

But how do you get Exclusive Treasure Eggs otherwise, you ask? How do you get more Treasure Eggs? And most importantly, how do you open treasure eggs? They're tough shelled boxes. Well, the answer to all of those will soon be the Vuril Industries Electronic Store. You'll be able to spend real money to buy Vore Credits, and you can spend those Vore Credits on many things. There will be purchasable scenes and companions, though not all of them will be buyable. Need a reason to have folks buy the joy that is the Treasure Eggs, after all.
But most importantly, you can buy Treasure Eggs and Egg Hammers.
You need an Egg Hammer to smash open a Treasure Egg. Makes sense, right? The eggs are really tough, so each time you crack open a Treasure Egg, you'll break your hammer. There's even a chance that the egg won't crack all the way open when the hammer breaks. The rarer the egg, the harder it'll be to crack!



Admittedly, this is all in the idea form. I'm working on getting a web server up that people can start buying things from. I'm even thinking of setting up a Patreon for this. People love this game, right? They'll just give me money for it, and maybe I'll be able to hand out monthly free Egg Hammers for every $10 people pay--I mean pledge.
There are definitely bugs to iron out. I'm working on implementing Yoshi's ability right now, but for some reason they always lay a mundane Treasure Egg. That's hardly worth the reward of unlocking, is it?

Thoughts? What are some improvements I could make to this system?

 thunderstrike23 has been having problems with an asshole landlord not taking any care of his building, and he might be forced to move out soon. Check out the journal if you can, and donate if you can help.

http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/8627748/

Those of you who know me are probably aware that I have both a Skype and a Discord account. I use both pretty regularly. But what folks might not be aware of is that I also have a Telegram account that I use practically never.
This journal will mostly be a rant about Telegram, but stick with me.

Lately, last year, it's been my experience that folks have been moving away from Skype. Skype had a good run, but honestly, it's been dead in the water ever since Microsoft bought it and started hiking stupid things like banner ads over conversations. Since then, people have been sort of splitting between two new IM options: Discord and Telegram.
I like Discord. I used to have a font size issue with it, but they resolved that a few months back, and I can't really think of many complaints I have left with it, beyond a few features that Skype had that it's missing. Which I'm fine with, really. Discord needs to do it's own unique thing and it's happily embracing anyone that wants to jump to their platform.

Telegram, though. I have a serious problem with Telegram. Not the program itself, it works fine, it has some unique, fun quirks like stickers, and it doesn't drop my connection fairly frequently like Skype. My issue with Telegram is moral.
You see, in order to sign up with Telegram, you need to give them a phone number. You might think, oh, that's not a big deal, just put in your cell phone number. But you see, that's where my issue is.

I don't have a cell phone.

This resulted in me having to circumvent the entire system by using a texting site that I was lucky to even know about. (textnow.com in case anyone else needs it). Okay, your next thought is, alright, you found a way around the system. Congratulations, now you can enjoy Telegram to its fullest.
But that's only the first issue. Once I logged into my account, I immediately discovered that it'd flagged my account as spam. Which, fair enough, I circumvented the intended system.
In case you don't know, when your account is flagged as spam, it means you can't send message to anyone that isn't a phone number contact to your account. That means, if I want to use Telegram to talk to someone, I need to contact them on another IM to get their phone number and contact details so I can actually message them on Telegram. In that situation, what is really even the point of using Telegram?

That brings me to the main point of this journal: exclusivity. My problem with Telegram is not that I had to jump through hoops just to sign up for it, only to get a fraction of the potential use out of it. My problem is that I can't possibly be the only person who would face this situation. I refused to believe that of all the furs in this site, I am the only person who wouldn't be able to sign up for Telegram, and thus I believe that anyone who joins Telegram exclusively is literally shutting off from those people who can't join it.

I don't use Telegram for any technical issues. I have no issue with the UI, or chat messages. I have a moral issue with Telegram that I do not have with Discord.
I strongly encourage folks to leave Skype sometime in the future, but when you're deciding between dedicating your time between Discord and Telegram, think of who you'd be restricting your access to in either situation.

Edit: 4/2/2017
Bad news, they got back to me and told me that this was all an April Fools joke. Shame.

---

So I recently got contacted by a games company that wishes to stay anonymous. They're from quite a few years back, competed with Nintendo and such, and recently they've wanted to reemerge into the games market. They told me themselves: they're planning to focus on marketing to a retro audience, what with the releases of things like the NES Classic and the success of nostalgia-driven kickstarted projects.
So their board members got together and brainstormed what the most 'retro' style of games is. One of them brought up text adventures, and so they went looking on the internet for prospective text adventure designers. They got in contact with me and told me to port Gineb to their console. They said it was okay for it to be half-finished, they'd market it as a Game In Progress, so I guess I can't complain.
I've looked over the paperwork they sent me and some of the other folks they've contacted, they're being pretty generous with how much they're taking out of the profits from every game. 30% to them, 70% split evenly among all content creators. I'm certainly looking forward to this, and I hope you all are as well.
Unfortunately, I'm under contract that I can't reveal when the console will come out, or even what console it'll come out on, but I'll be sure to post information once the embargo is lifted. Until then, keep an eye on the news.

Edit: 4/2/2016
As a few people have pointed out, this was pretty obviously an April Fool's joke. And it was blatant on purpose, I have no intention of actually tricking people with such blatant jokes, hehe.

---

You know, games have been on a steady pace away from the simple, one-time purchase and play. And so many game companies are getting away with being able to charge money for a free game, so I thought, why not jump onto the band wagon? But charging just to play the game doesn't seem like today's world, does it?

I'm going to make Gineb Free to Play. The biggest change are going to be battles. Instead of an attack command, I'm going to replace it with a "Bribe" command. When you select that, it'll ask you for your credit card number, and once it verifies that the number is correct, it'll ask how much money you want to spend to convince the enemy to go away. Depending on the enemy, you may have to pay more or less, and if you pay too much, the enemy will realize that you're "loaded" and will continue to fight you in hopes of you paying them more.

I have yet to decide how I wish to implement this pay to win system in regards to the vore. A simple paywall seems rather blunt, perhaps you'll be able to pay the predator to get special situations with them. Perhaps I'll keep a tally of which predators are paid for more and those are the predators I'll give special attention too.

I look forward to seeing how this fares in the future, but mostly look forward to seeing all the money.

4/2 Update
April Fools! Nah, I don't have any intention of trying to market this to a broader audience, hehe. The vore options option is in fact programmed to end the game when you turn it off.

Nothing else about this was april fools, everything else was 100% pure new update.



So it's becoming a trend now, I think. Half a year per update? Life gets in the way and all that. But I've got some scraps for you at least!

And like last year, I think today's a good day to think about the future of Gineb. I'm thinking... I should probably make it appeal to a broader demographic. I love vore, but I know some folks out there don't. So I decided, "Hey, why not add an option to disable vore scenes entirely in a Vore Text Adventure?"
The option might be a little buggy though, I have it set to disable vore broadly. Could just shut the game off for all I know.

Anyway, links are here!
https://dl.dropbox.com/s/xwdvwmexaf......6.41.zip?dl=0
https://dl.dropbox.com/s/uypn994u3v.....ource.zip?dl=0

This is a journal I decided to start keeping of folks who've made their own branch to Gineb!
By ArmageddonDoom: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/15712505/
By WorldInThe: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/18017379/

My friend  hunter_foxclaw is having some serious financial issues right now. His lazy brother isn't paying rent, and right now they're having trouble making ends meet, they might have to move out soon.

If you can, there's more information here: http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/6240204/

is having some money issues currently, like extremely. She's selling off whatever she can to make up some cash.

If you can help,
https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/6192675/

Another new version out! Lots of little bug fixes in this one. Such classics as:
-The direwolf now recovers from battles.
and
-Fixed Beasty's attachment issues.

Oh also I updated it so it uses Quest 5.5.1. Kinda important to note.

Download here or on the Gineb Submission!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ibpwk6f5.....ineb_0.6.2.zip

Source!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qbhlsk6d4.....6.2_source.zip

Birthday's coming up on October 9th! Another year older, another year I've been with the fandom.

Anyway, in other news, things in my life have improved since I last put up that journal. I managed to get a job a while back, been flipping burgers. Not the most glorious thing to be doing, but it sure as hell beats living out on the street right now. Gives me a little spending money too, which is always nice. Should help me pay off some of the debts I've accumulated. My folks have let off on me, but I can't really say how long this peace will last. Hopefully nothing comes to a head.

Gineb's being slowly worked on, and as you may have seen I uploaded another story earlier, so my time's not completely taken over yet. Hopefully it stays that way, though work has some fluctuating hours to it.

I found a couple bugs that I felt needed to be fully fixed. Including one that could corrupt a save password. I fixed them, but since I had some time on my hands, I added some things to the macro fox north of Gineb, hehe.

Download here or on the Gineb Submission!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pgt10nr9l.....ineb_0.6.1.zip

Source!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7ghelee0i.....6.1_source.zip

This is just to fix a couple bugs I've had reported to me.
-The Innkeeper no longer spams "BellyTimer" errors.
-Voxren will now take passwords with experience properly.

Download from the Gineb submission, the link there updates automatically.

This isn't easy for me to write, but I feel like I'm going to owe everyone an explanation for a lot of absence later. Things aren't going so well in my life. Folks gave me a job deadline or else I'd have to sign up for the military, and that didn't go so well. They completely backstabbed me today and drove me down to the Navy Recruiter despite me still having a week until the deadline, and now they're pressuring me to join the military, starting to hammer it down with things like internet restrictions and curfew.
Consider this a forewarning that I'm probably going away for a long time. I think I'll be joining the US Air Force. Believe me, I don't want to. I am not cut out of the right cloth for being in the military, and I've heard horror stories about boot camp and how it will change you. But my parents are absolutely insane. On the way home, my mother threatened to change the locks on me while I'm outside. Earlier she was talking about how she has a tent in the garage I can use to live outside.
Frankly, I'm screwed either way right now. I can either go into the military unwillingly or live on the streets. And the latter prospect is even worse considering I live hours away from any civilization. This is not a happy outcome for me, and if I had any other choices I'd jump at them.

As for all the people watching me solely for Gineb, well, I'll try to be active for a week or so, but after that, there's no guarantee. I might drop off the face of the planet, I might give into the little part of my brain that just wants to end it all right now. Or I might find a job at the last second that'd be my saving grace right now. But all in all, I don't want to see Gineb abandoned. That's why I've released the source code for it. I encourage any of you that are interested in seeing how the game ticks, download the source code and play around with it.

Thanks for reading, if you did.

He's at a friend's house right now, but he's not sure how much longer he'll be able to stay there. If you're anywhere near Chicago, Illinois, please get in contact with him. Even if you're not, it'd really help to spread the word somehow, even if you just tell a friend about this.

His Skype is CulexInfinity, as is his FA (), but he doesn't check his FA so don't send him notes on there.

 yuuyako's grandmother is in surgery in the east coast and she needs some cash to help pay for some air fare for her mother to fly down to visit the grandmother.

She's willing to take commissions and she's the one who drew Raketaur. If you can help her out somehow,, she'd really appreciate that.

http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/5675779/

 koekoek19 has some request slots open and no one's claiming them. Have an idea for something you want drawn?

http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/5669073/

EDIT 4/2/2014:
So yeah, April Fools. I totally got you with this one.
In all seriousness, 0.6 is coming along well! No promises on when it'll be released though.


Here's the original post in all it's hyperbolic glory:

---

I've given this a lot of thought, and I've decided. RPGs just aren't the right thing for Gineb. It's too simple and overdone, I mean just look at how many Final Fantasy games there are. Do you know what's not overdone yet?

Dance games!

So I'm changing Gineb into a dance-based RPG. Instead of the usual turn based battle system, every battle will consist of a danceoff, where you have to press buttons properly timed to music. As you get higher levels, the music will be faster and have more beats to hit, as well as enemies will be more on-time to the music as well.

I hope this new direction for my game will result in it being quite successful. I'm currently in the process of contacting all of the major game companies. All of them.

I expect to hear thumbs up from every one of them by the end of tomorrow, for this idea is revolutionary and no one else has ever done a DDRPG before.

I'll be sure to include blackjack and hookers inside as well. I'm currently working on the former, and the latter is on a low priority, even lower than putting grass textures in.

This is something that's been on my mind lately, and I thought it might be best for me to just put up a journal about this topic so I can get my thoughts into a more coherant form. I like new things. New ideas, new topics, new experiences. So you'd think I'd jump at the chance to meet a new person and experience something entirely new.
Yet I don't. I avoid those sorts of situations, I'm reluctant to introduce myself to someone.

It's not a reasonable thing to fear. Meeting new people is a fact of life. Yet I have to force myself to. Why? I'm not entirely certain what the roots are, but I suspect it has to do with more than just a general "shyness". Because I'm not that shy, in reality.
I believe it has more to do with rejection. I suppose even that is something that's going to happen from time to time, and I have faced situations like that before. Fear of rejection is why I hide behind excuses such as, "I don't want to bother them." and, "They don't have the time to talk to me." or even, "I bring nothing unique to the table."
A friend told me that I have myself to bring to the table. I told him that I'm nothing special, but he refused to believe me. I suppose he's partially right. Everyone is a unique individual, but in saying that, one generalizes everyone into having the same unique-ness.
This is especially bad when I want to introduce myself to someone who I perceive as popular. Everyone I've met who I've perceived as popular has been friendly, if not more. Yet, in a situation where they no nothing about me, me appearing out of nowhere to say hello to them is just strange in my mind.
I know one friend who has no problem with this. I envy him. I put too much weight into the first message. It's the first thing that they're likely to have ever seen of you, so just a simple 'Hello.' doesn't tell them much about you. The more popular they are, the more likely they'll have other people to talk to and so getting your name to stick out just... isn't possible.
It's something I want to work on. I shouldn't be afraid to say hello to someone, and I shouldn't be afraid of them saying that they're busy. Hell, I went to about ten popular artists asking for a free request, and none of them cursed me out. That should be enough evidence that people are reasonable.
But I just can't get that through my thick skull.

Thank you for reading through this if you took the time to. I know my thoughts can be rambling at times but sometimes I just want to get them out. If you have an opinion on this, I'd really like to hear it. Tips on how I can stop being so worried about rejection would be nice.

is having some money issues currently. If you've got $100, consider buying this GPU from her!

More details here:
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/5376007/

Merry Christmas to all! And to all, a new requests policy. Covering an important topic I'd be thinking about for a while: Text adventures!

I've been playing around with Quest for the longest time, it's a text adventure engine. I posted a journal about this earlier and got minimal responses, and a few on Skype that were negative about downloading Quest to try them. Earlier I tried using a method that'd make it unnecessary to download Quest, but it caused an issue with a few parts of the games there were fairly vital for the games to be experienced properly. As of yet, I see no nice way to get around making people download Quest to play their games.

But onto lighter topics, you can now request that I make you a text adventure! There's a few parts to this. Right now, I'm working on two games, one that covers the area around Rake's burrow, and another time-travel-esque game that covers a bunch of time periods. If you want a cameo of your character in either one of them, or if you want to request that I make a text adventure of your own, send me a PM with some details, (because I hope you don't expect me to come up with everything but your character on my own, do you?)

Text Adventures take a notably longer time to produce than stories, since you need to program every little interaction as opposed to writing a single plotline, but I hope the finished project is worth playing around with. I'll update my earlier journal, or probably just make a Mark 2 of it.

Been thinking about this more. Probably won't start up commissions, since I'm not in the mood to memorize the legalese behind Paypal, but do you think that this commission system is fair?

You give me:
-$1 for every 200 words, rounded up (1700 words = 1800 words = $9).
-Detailed story idea that I'm okay with writing
-A time limit I can agree upon

I promise:
-If I can't write enough, then the price is changed to what the current word length reflects based on my count and I refund the excess cash. (Commission price: $20, 1700 words, refund $11)
-If I write over requested length, extra words are free of charge.

If you can think of any loopholes, tell me as well.