The Rest of Our Lives - A Look Back - Part 2

Part 2 of the series to celebrate the story's one year-ish anniversary.

 Part 2: Cancelling the project and releasing it on Steam

Cancelling the project sucked. Margo and I were having a blast trying to figure out what we could do with Pride and Prejudice’s story and how weird we could make the characters.

For shits and giggles, I didn’t actually watch the movie or read some of the book until after the first release. When I started it, I read a bunch of synopsis and character sheets and then just tried to recreate it based on how I interpreted it. 

It made the most sense to do that considering what I was trying to make, but Margo was, understandably, not convinced that it was going to work at all but after editing through a bit, she saw how it was coming together and we watched the movie, taking notes on what we could do.

She bought in hard so “cancelling the project sucked” is a bit of an understatement. Especially considering what I had planned to do for updates 3 and 4 (more of that in Part 3)

Wrapping up this story required two things. Some minor changes to some art and writing and pretty much ignoring the whole virtual studio thing and trying to move it forward like it was a normal project.

Considering Update 2 was 95% done at that point, it would have been a ton of work to rewrite everything so a lot of the themes and elements I was going to work with later in the story were left in. So now, stuff gets talked about but doesn’t feel like it goes anywhere or is generally forgotten about. You know, fantastic writing haha

We did put a lot of work into making sure it felt like a natural conclusion to the story of Liz and Derby though. Even if the project was cancelled, there were still people out there that were enjoying what we were doing and we didn’t want to leave them hanging.

We wrapped everything up romance wise, Dread delivered a beautiful, full CG image of Derby and Liz kissing to end the game and we called it complete, releasing it on newgrounds and itch to the same general reception as before.

See, by canceling the project and the other routes, there were a grand total of 0 choices now. So you can guess how excited people were by that. I did my best to advertise it as a kinetic novel so that people would know there were no choices but we’re all guilty of clicking on stuff without checking the description from time to time so there were always people that slipped through the cracks.

Feeling that newgrounds and itch were the wrong crowd, I started looking into how to get on Steam as kinetic novels were more well known there and we can get away from the “boring no choices” comment and get a general feel of what went right and what went wrong with the project.

Hahaha 

Umm… if you haven’t been on The Rest of Our Lives Steam page, check it out. It’s a treat.

The biggest issue I took away from Steam was that nobody knows what a pron parody is.

Like seriously, what the fuck is up with the Steam crowd? Hahaha Everyday was a new “huh? WTF” for me. 

Highlights include: Being surprised there was sex in it. People thinking it was supposed to be serious and getting upset that black people were in it. One person was even angry because it wasn’t an open world game.

Steam is a special place where dreams go to be confused.

Now, you’ve been reading along here and from everything I’ve said, you get a general idea of what went wrong with the project and why it fails to connect with some people.

So listen to your Uncle Artie when he says this: don’t go to Steam trying to get constructive criticism about a pron parody haha

The most constructive takeaway I got out of everything was add more choices and be more professional with art. As we’ve seen in My Catgirl Maid… those two things were pretty easy things to fix.

Everything else… Well, that just takes time and a little self reflection.

Tune in for Part 3 where I talk about what The Rest of Our Lives could have been like if it went the distance. Thanks for reading.