The Rest of Our Lives - A Look Back - Part 1

It's around the one year anniversary for the game so I'm going to take a moment a look back at the development and release of a game that proved to be a big changing point for me creatively.

Part 1: Pre-production to the first release

The original idea for the game came in 2018. I was sitting down and working on what was going to be the Uncle Artie Project.

Originally, Uncle Artie was meant to be a virtual 18+ studio. The games it released were like cheesy movies that “actors” appear in and then you’d get the real story in their day to day lives. I was going to do interviews, one shot scenes, cam shows, etc, all centered around a core group of characters that would appear in every game/movie.

I came up with three projects for this idea to start. A sci-fi/comedy that was supposed to feel like a low budget movie with improvised lines. A, 18+ parody based on Pride and Prejudice but made to like a soap opera. And a western/sci-fi that was going to revolve around the player trying to direct the characters out of a city that’s being overrun with aliens. It was supposed to be 3:10 to Yuma but Cowboys vs Aliens happened to be shooting on the same day haha

With this, the bigger narrative of the growth of the studio from characters that don’t know what they're doing in low budget flicks to bigger, higher budget flicks with better “acting” so set.

It didn’t work out that way haha A very common theme you’ll notice as you go through this.

So the first project went off unluckily correct. It became Annie Needs an A and featured weird dialogue, a really low budget feeling to it. (I made the backgrounds and the CG and Sprite artists only did the line art with me colouring them. It looks really cheaply made because it was haha). In a weird twist of fate, I was using tyranobuilder and it just kept having weird problems where as soon as you fix one thing, another completely unrelated thing broke. The game had a 50/50 chance of actually playing. So in terms of the meta I was creating… it really felt like a low budget studio that was struggling to get their shit together.

Reception for it was obviously poor. I’ve never been good at marketing and trying to explain what I’m trying to do probably made the whole thing feel too “modern artsy”. Like I nailed a sock to the wall and tried to sell it for a million dollars because it “breaks convention” or some bullshit.

Nevertheless, I moved forward, thinking just more examples will help set the tone better and develop more of what I was trying to do. It was time for Project #2 and that became The Rest of Our Lives.

I needed to approach this project completely differently than the first. After all, this was supposed to be one where the studio was trying to make something seriously. Obviously it couldn’t be too serious as it needed to feel like an actual “first movie” but it still needed to feel like it was trying to be the source material. This obviously creates massive tonal inconsistencies haha

So the Annie Needs an A cast makes their return. I condensed the Pride and Prejudice’s characters list into the minimum I can get away with, slid the old cast in and made two new cast members to fill the roles of Liz and George. 

It was around this time that I made The Rest of Our Lives’ main fetish interracial. Why? 2 reasons. 1… I like interracial pron. It’s hard to create something you don’t like afterall haha 2… I was playing a narrative where the “actors” that played Liz and Derby were old rivals in acting school and they were going to fall in love on the set of this production and it was going to be a weird on again off again relationship that caused drama in future games.

With that sorted out, the next step was getting some artists together. My friend, Big Jose (Sprites for Annie Needs an A), couldn’t return as he had some other projects he was working on so I asked Dreadful Enchanted, who had done the CGs for Annie Needs an A, if they wanted to take over and they agreed to do both Sprites and CGs. 

To help improve the art quality, Dread was to colour all the sprites and CGs themselves. I returned to do the background art and did my best to improve. Juries out on that one haha

Writing the story was fun. I normally don’t write dramas and if you have read the story, you know my craziness leaks into it every once in a while. But still, it was fun to try to write a story based on a group of people trying their best to put on a good adaptation of a book while still making a porno.

My plan was to release the game in 4 updates so the first update came around after the first two sex scenes. To set up the soap operay feeling I did back to back sex scenes where everyone was fucking everyone haha No spoilers but it was meant to be the “-gasp- duh duh duuuhhhhhh” scene at the end of the first update haha

I released the first game and it… well, Mixed reviews is another theme you’ll notice going forward too.

The biggest complaint was the lack of choices. Now, I like to play the long VNs. Like the 30-60hrs one. In these stories, choices are few and far between, used to determine which route you’re going to go on. That was my plan for choices in the game. The first choice was going to be a 1½ to 2 hours in and would determine if you got an ending or opened a whole new route into the game. 

The first update only had 30 minutes of content. It was much too soon for a choice in my mind to really be doing anything to the plot because it still needed to set stuff up. But still, a flood of “There’s no choices in the first 30 secs. This is boring.” comments came in.

Within the comments, you can find the occasional person that had some constructive criticism or a compliment here and there but it was starting to become obvious to me that the Uncle Artie Project was not going to be something people bought into.

After a lot of thinking and talking things out with Margo, my wife/editor. The decision was made to cancel the virtual studio idea and wrap up The Rest of Our Lives so we weren’t sinking all our money into it. (The second update was nearly done at that point. Just waiting for some art.)

More on that in Part 2. Thanks for reading.