Just got the news on wake-up. This was bound to come after what happened last week. But the worst is how itch.io acted: without warning and with an inconsiderate blanket-ban.

Needless to say that I will not patronize their website any longer.

A petition is currently running on change.org. Please consider giving your support: Link

In the meantime, here is a direct link to a handful of games/devs that are worth a boost, in these trying times:

GroveDev
Grove (MM)
Prowler (MF)
SnakeByte (MF, FF)

TrapKnight
Renamon Vs Creatures (various)

Pyksies
Mercanoid (MF, FF)
Hazard Heroines - The Maverick Manor (MF, FF)

Hello, everyone.

Just a very short information: as FA (finally) allows display name changes, I have changed it to the one I usually use on every site in the fandom.

Have a great Easter week-end.

Well, it's been quite a while. I figured I should write a little something, for myself and to give others some news.

This new year has been much more merciful on me and my mental state. I finally managed to pull out of that stressful job I kept rambling about. Reading the previous entries again, I still wonder how I managed to pull it through without going into burn out. I am now into a much friendlier work environment, with much friendler people, and in the end I am happy where I am.
Anyway, lessons learned: to be happy with what you have, and the value of a day spent without an anxiety attack.

The good news is that, writing-wise, I will now have the opportunity to try and redirect my attention to my own production. I have been maintaining my writing chops thanks to roleplaying with a couple of very good and very affable roleplayers, and I am now considering what new project to tackle on.
I'll probably start from zero. I have a general idea of the story. As for the type of content, it will probably be a Twine project, albeit one with more streamlined, more narrative mechanics.

I've also tried to be more social over the past few months. With mixed results, albeit they were positive where they counted. I figured I might start with what I do best. I wonder if there's a community of fellow kinky horror/fantasy/sci-fi writers hanging around, for sharing ideas and stories. F-list seems to be slowly fizzling out in that regard. If anyone knows a forum or a Discord server to recommend, I'm interested.

Anyway, that's it for now.
Have a nice February.

Hey there. Here is your not-so-monthly journal from your favourite(?) ape.

I'm not sure if anyone reads these, but for reasons I will explain below, I will keep writing them.

So, where to begin...
Things have been... Not so good for the past two months. I fell ill a couple times, including a nasty bit of food poisoning on Easter. I will mercifully spare you the description of the mess, both physical and mental, I was in. Just know that it was not a pretty Easter week-end. At all.

Then, the next two months went, and my anxiety issues at work flared up as I was finding myself working alone, for long periods of times, due to vacations, sick days, and other. Nasty stuff like waking up at 5am, or even 4 am, intestinal cramps, and all the circus, including big bouts of imposter syndrome.
Feelings of inadequation which, if I talk to management, are apparently completely unwarranted. Client is satisfied, wants to keep me at hand, even when I leave the projet (which can't be soon enough to be honest), etc. And yet, many mornings, I wake up and think "what if..." until I turn my work computer on.

In the end, this and the fear of being on the verge of a burn out motivated me to consult a psychologist, for the first time in almost twenty years. It was today, and I felt like it was a good time as any to write this journal.

My feelings, after this visit, are... Mixed.
On one hand, being able to talk to a professional, to confide in matters I would keep to myself in front of family (like my love life), someone able to put words on feelings and give me leads, is a very good thing. Something that I desperately needed.
On the other hand, I feel like what she said is nothing new to me. To my total lack of surprise, I was told that I suffer from crippling self-confidence issues and light depression, which both lead to me working myself up in regards to anxiety and work. I should "try to live in the present" and "find social activities, like clubs, related to my hobbies" to help me work out these issues, she advised. I understand where she is coming from, but it also feels a little like the psychologist's equivalent of "You should smile more." Perhaps, while not going all the way to medication, I expected a more "clinical" diagnostic.

However, One message did go through: I should not be afraid to share things with others, and not let the fear of boring/bothering others restrain me from doing, writing, or saying things. So, I guess I will start with that, including this journal (and the next ones).

On that topic: I welcome interactivity, in my current state so do not hesitate to comment this journal, if you feel like you want to tell something about it.

On the "funnier" side of things, I will post a couple commissions waiting to be added to my gallery. Then, I will attempt to return to writing. Short stories at first, to get back into business. Then, I will reconsider my longer projects. Perhaps taking what I feel was the best part of each and restart with a clearer mind.

I wish all of you well.

Hey everyone. I hope you are all doing well.

As for me, it's the same old. Thankfully, I spent one week with my family. It was a very welcome and nice break from work, and it felt nice to see my brother and his family more relaxed compared to last year.

Chapter 2 of The Hunter's Apprentice is done. Time to start working on the next one.

January went by like a flash. Dear God. Is this part of getting older? I'm not sure I want that part of midlife.

As I hoped, things have slowly gotten into place at work. I'm seeing the first usual managerial shenanigans you see in IT, but I start this month with renewed confidence, after the last two months have seen me airdropped, so to speak, on a project in crisis, on my first day in the company. I expect things to keep getting better, no small thanks to being through the worst of winter (for this year), and progressively getting more time for my own things.

As promised, here is the first chapter/story of my current project, The Hunter's Apprentice (which got renamed in the process). I hope you will enjoy it.

The plan for this month is to continue with the next chapter, among other tidbits.

Hello, everyone.

First of all, Happy New Year to anyone reading this journal. One year older gorilla here, with his usual inconsequential monthly news.

As I wrote in my previous journal, I started my new job in early December. It has been a very busy month, for several reasons which I will spare you, but that I will sum up as: longer commute time + placed on a struggling project = much more time devoted to IRL work. This, plus my administrative woes to replace my stolen papers, have struck me down with the flu for the holidays, so not a really nice end of year, health-wise.

On the positive side, things have been slowly improving at this new job, as I managed to recover and to gradually get used to the new project. Things are getting slowly better, although I am still a little anxious about the end of the month, when the person whom I replace will leave the team. Hopefully, things will have stabilized enough by that point. The new job being more active also woke me up from my usual funk, and I also started losing weight, which is always a good thing when you have too much of it.

With all this, it means that my hobby work has slowed down considerably. I did manage to write some pages over the month, so December was not a total negative on that end as well.

Today: I'll post a short series of commissions made by  Jaeger_Wunderkind
Next month: hopefully, the prologue and the first chapter of my new fantasy story, as well as some more art by  HarryBCD and  Munsu89

Stay warm and stay safe.

Well... If there was a word to describe November, it would be... Chaotic. And unsatisfying.

This was my last month working for my former employer. What I planned to be a slow vacation-filled month turned out to be a mess because of management. I ended up waiting for a replacement, then coaching him until the very next day of the month.

Learning the news, I thought. "Hey, I have a handful of days before my new job starts. How about I do that week-end in Rome I always thought about." Said journey was quite eventful itself, with my wallet being stolen in the subway. The most annoying loss was my ID card. This meant waiting three hours at a police station, for an officer to stamp a paper that I filled myself, then rushing to the french consulate to learn that it was closed on week-ends! Fortunately, the theft report was good enough for me to fly back home, but I ended up starting my new job not so relaxed.

Said new job looks okay. The people working there are nice, and I was immediately integrated into a project team. I have some catching up to do knowledge wise but I do not feel like it is something insurmountable. A little on the fence about the team leader himself though, but I hope that the next weeks will brush that bad impression away. Sadly, this job's remote work is only partial. This means that I will probably have much less time to give to my current project. And I need to make choices. After thinking about it, I decided to focus entirely on writing for the time being. Game making requires more work, having to take care of each story branch, and testing, and I simply do not have the time to work on that alone.

Silver lining, however: my decision to focus on reigniting my inspiration paid off, and I have came up with a new idea to work on alongside my sci-fi one. I also have one new art series by Jaeger coming up, and one by Munsu about to be done, so fantasy and monster enthusiasts will be pleased.

I will write the next journal at the very start of January, and use the opportunity to post the next chapter of A Moan in Space, as well as the work I'll manage to do on that new fantasy story, The Human Apprentice.

Stay safe and Happy Holidays to all of you.

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Tl;dr: Chaotic month, much busier at the moment. Carnal Palace is put on hold while I focus on stories, until I either have more time or find some help. More stuff incoming by the start of next year.

Here's your mensual interestingly uninteresting news from your favourite primate.

If I had a word to qualify October, it would be "weird". I have been productive in areas I did not plan, and unproductive in others. Some IRL stuff blew up into unexpected proportions while others went better than expected. Mostly, I had to battle with the mood swings which happen to me every Fall season. So far so good, but getting out of bed is definitely harder some mornings than others.

On the hobby side of things, I have mostly worked on A Moan to Space. I published chapter 4 and the reworked first chapters a couple weeks ago. Chapter 5 is mostly done and I have begun work on Chapter 6. So far so good, but my old self-confidence demons are coming back full force because of what I described in the above paragraph. Which I shouldn't, considering that this story is almost reaching 60 pages and more than 21 000 words. The way the story would go, I think a good stop for a "book 1" would be either chapter 8 or 9. So I will consider this a first target to reach. From there, I will take a big step back, and see where to go from here.

Comparatively, I have barely worked on Carnal Palace. I will probably come back to it once I am in a better state of mind. I am not letting it go completely, but right now I need to get my inspiration and my self-confidence back.

I am considering writing a couple of short stories, in order to "restart the engine". Something equivalent to one or two chapters of MiS. I have a lot of ideas that I hold close to my chest, and I figure that I could use a couple of them or one of the drawings I commissioned. If you have any idea that would fit what you see in my gallery, and the length of a short story, feel free to give me suggestions.

Hey, folks. Time for a bit of news.

After a slow month of September due to work, I'm back on Carnal Palace. I have taken a fresh look at the demo, which allowed me to make several decisions, including story-wise. The most important is that, in retrospect, I feel that the demo goes into the thick of the plot too fast, and that might be detrimental to the story in the long term. So that part of the game will go into an extensive rewrite.

Gameplay-wise, I have also decided to make a couple of drastic changes. While I will keep the "momentum" aspect of battle, I wanted to make it more simple, and as a side-effect more open to evolutions. I did a little brainstorming and research, and may have found a system that would fit what I have in mind. I am a little on the fence due to the fact that it is not "my" system, but I concluded that I should not reinvent the wheel. For now at least.

On the technical side, I have played with the sound modules of Twine/Sugarcube. Results are promising, so I might add some (optional) elements of sound design into the game.

Hello. :-3

I hope everyone is doing okay. A couple of news about what I'm doing and where I'm heading.

I took the opportunity of my vacations to work on two personal projects: the fourth chapter of A Moan in Space and the Twine game I already mentioned in the previous journals. The game has gone through a lot of changes, but I think that I found a game system that is both original and simple to use. I am waiting for a few character portraits from an artist, and once this is done I will be able to share the game's first demo, then collect the first feedback.
As for AMiS Chapter 4, it's about 50% done. It will be similar to Chapter 3 in length (~ 12 pages). The story is starting to look more and more like a short novel, and that is something I am rather happy to see.

Unfortunately, last week has not been very productive. I started the week with a bout of anxiety, and that kind of thing is the worst kind of productivity killer. Because with it come blank page syndrome and self-confidence issues. The source of that anxiety ended up having solved itself and being way overblown by my nevrosed brain. So I'm in a better place right now, but I am still really annoyed at myself for letting things sit around for a full week. Hopefully, I will manage to get back into the groove.

So my objective for next week is to do something. Even if it is a single paragraph of AMiS or some coding stuff for Carnal Project, I need to restart the machine in some way. Hopefully, writing it will help me achieve doing it.

First of all, be sure to check out the first three chapters of my story, A Moan in Space. :-3
I plan to work on new chapters later, but so far I am very satisfied by what I produced, in terms of quantity and quality.

On the end of the Twine project, several things happened in the meantime.
Firstly, I found this game, Mercanoid. I strongly encourage you to give it a test, as it is a good game, both in writing and in gameplay. It also pushes all my buttons in regards to the kinks I enjoy, so if you follow me then it should push yours as well: lots of monsters and tentacles.
I hanged around the author's Discord server. He ended up sharing with me the link of a website hosting a large number of Twine libraries. Including libraries that, until now, I had made my own custom implementations.

This renewed my motivation to work on the "Carnal Project", but I also realized that I need to review what I made so far, and change the scope of a few things. Make some stuff less complicated, perhaps rewrite some parts of the story to make it fit more an interactive game format, where the player wants something faster-paced. Change the battle system to something perhaps less "pretty", but simpler to use for the player and to maintain for me in the long run. Use the ressources of the community instead of losing time reinventing the wheel. Etc.

Fortunately, I have a long vacation ahead of me. Which means that I will be able to focus on the game (and on some self-care) without having to think about work and the anxiety that comes with it. And perhaps some Baldur's Gate 3 too.

BG3 seems enormous and very promising, but I did not have the time or motivation to do more than replay the first couple hours with different classes, to see which one fits my playstyle (verdict: it's paladin). Now, time to leave that goddamn druid grove and check out what lies beyond. I'll definitely take it slow, however, considering Larian's track record of finishing their game and releasing a "definitive edition" some time after the initial release.

Hello everyone. I hope that you're doing okay.

As for myself, progress has been slow on my Twine project, but for (somewhat) good reasons. I have had a lot of ideas recently, and started writing a couple of stories to put them on paper. I should publish at least one of them this week-end, after I give it a round of proofreading.

With that being said, productivity has been slower than expected, due to me falling (back) into the Skyrim mod rabbit hole. The number and complexity of the mods available never ceases to surprise me. The latest ones I installed are overhauls of several of the many sidequests of the game and mods that expand the Civil War part of the game. And if you accept the inevitable jank that comes from being mods of a 12 year old game, there's a lot of interesting and diverse adult content as well.

I also started playing the pixel remasters of the Final Fantasy games. 1 was a great experience; a short, straightforward, in-and-out 10 hours adventure. 2 is... Special. The story is surprisingly engaging for an NES game and you can see in the game the good ideas that would make the spine of Romancing Saga and Last Remnant. But it's weirdly implemented, in a way that allows you to completely break the game with a little grinding. All in all, a fun experience.

I managed to pull through the French Translation patch for the current version of Grove. Go get it HERE if you are interested or were waiting for a french translation of the game.

J'ai enfin terminé le patch de Traduction Française pour la version actuelle de Grove. Récupérez-le ICI si vous souhaitez (re)parcourir le jeu dans la langue de Molière.

---

Now that this is done, I can move, like I planned beforehand, on my own personal projects. At the moment, I have a set of jigsaw puzzle pieces. Pretty pieces, I might add. But now I need to put them together, and that means going (back) to the design stage.

I have a lot of possible ideas in mind for the game's story, content and characters. So now I need to put everything into order and into written form: story, characters, flow of the story, etc.
I will post a few more screenshots in my scraps as I go along. Both to keep you updated, and to keep myself motivated.

However, I now find myself hesitating, with the recent events regarding this website. Was this a one-time drama caused by the current times, or was this the foreshadowing of a progressive clamp down on such things as the ones I am about to write about? My adventure game would play a lot on the "ravishing" fetish, which means non-consensual scenes or dubiously consensual scenes. There's also other kinks that I am into or plan to include, and find myself wondering if they will be the subject of new "rule updates": will feral creatures be okay? Hypnosis/Mind control/Mind break? Age difference between adult characters? Petite/Shortstack characters?

I will keep an eye on things. If need be, I have an alternate account on Inkbunny, and an old unused account on SoFurry that I might reactivate if Furaffinity goes down the slippery slope, so I know I have alternatives.

Hello everyone.

Just a little update on what I am currently doing.

For the past two weeks, I decided to focus on completing the french translation patch for Grove, which I have been left on the backburner for a few months for a couple of reasons. My reasoning is that once I manage to push this off of the "to-do" pile, I can fully commit myself to my CYOA project.

I have made a lot of progress on the translation patch, so I am optimistic (for once) that I can get it done before the end of the month. After which I'll be able to use the ordinarily slow month of July to switch back to Depraved Project. On that end, there is not much to do either for me to publish a first demo: a few "pages" of story content to write, then some "prettying up" and test play, so expect more news on that end as well.

I would like to thank the fifteen people who took the time to answer my questionnaire, as the answers were quite informative.
I have started working on this project, and I will propably post screenshots in my scraps, to show you how it goes.

As some of the people I chat with now, I occasionally dabble into the realm of interactive fictions. That is to say stories with a few gameplay elements, such as player choices, or basic RPG mechanics like dice rolls.
I played with Twine in the past few weeks, and managed to implement some systems who work relatively well: a battle system, a multiple-choice dialog system, tooltips, etc. And now, I want to start working on a story that would make use of these systems, and be shared with other people here, or on itch.io, as a long-term project.

However, writing a story is not the same kind of endeavour as working on the technical side of things. Technical work is solving a problem, which has an immediate answer and reward. Writing for an audience is a long-term endeavour that requires planning, and may be a resounding failure before it even started. So, this morning, I figured: maybe I should ask the audience.

HERE IS A FORM with a few questions related to my project.

I would be very, very thankful if you would grant me five minutes of your time, and give your honest answers to my queries.

(Edit: I realized that I forgot to limit some questions to 1 answer by column. My bad, it's fixed)