The Curse of Updates

The CHYOA format, making the most of it, and how it applies to House Semya. Everybody’s different, so I’m not suggesting that there’s any one ‘best’ way to do it, but there are a couple things that I’ve noticed over time that affect how I’m handling my ongoing stories.

My favorite is to write something with lots of options and interactivity and post it all at once so that when engaging with it the first time, the readers get to hopefully enjoy having the options and getting to actually click things. I would find it frustrating to have to wait days or weeks for options to appear and waiting for a big multi-branch story to be posted piecemeal would be pretty annoying. We saw this in the latter days of FSC.

Writing up all that material with all those choices is a lot of work, but it’s also fun, so that’s not the problem. The problem is getting people to actually see that story. This isn’t just true of CHYOA; it’s true of most similar sites, but stories get bumped to the top when they’re updated and show up on the front page. So even though a fully written interactive story is absolutely a better experience than something simpler being updated daily, the daily one will get way more eyeballs because each day there’s a new chance for a new reader to find it, while the big, interactive story that is ‘complete’ sinks into oblivion.

One solution is to write the big story, then game it by regularly adding something small, or maybe carrying on a branch or something, but I try to avoid that mindset because this is supposed to be a hobby for fun and not structured as a task. It’s weird; I’m not like hungrily trying to seriously grow a brand, but at the same time I can’t make myself do something that’s incredibly inefficient, like posting something huge and watching it vanish.

Bottom line: something that gets updated frequently is going to get more engagement. So, during this sort of unstructured, experimental period with House Semya, I’m just doing “chapter breaks” wherever it feels right with no framework. I think chapters that are any shorter than my dailies can’t really be called chapters, so I don’t want the story advancing at one paragraph a day. For new material that I write going forward, I think I will intentionally portion it at length similar to my current dailies. I think that should be fine until we figure something out.

The main thing is interactivity. Right now, we have an on-rails story with simple interactive lewd scenes. It’s certainly easy to see how we could have readers vote to make choices on consequential, high-stakes, meaningful story stuff. However, I’m not convinced that actually makes for the best reader experience. You know how I talked about people wanting what they want when it comes to smut and genres? Well, smut is a genre. Genre fiction makes a great backdrop for smut, no doubt about that. Story and character development also makes for stronger smut. But does the reader who wants to relax and read a horny story want to participate in the high-stakes, non-smut related content? Lots of people dying in SSS was *not* good for retaining readers, and pressuring readers to keep people alive wasn’t sexy. So, I have to consider the possibility that not all flavors go well together even if at a glance, it seems like they should.

This isn’t the official poll or anything, and nothing is ever set in stone, but let’s start thinking about what format would work best for a story like House Semya. I believe that having some votes/interactive stuff is good instead of keeping it fully on rails, but let’s look at the nuance. Here are some of the variations that I can picture:

1.      House Semya having votes just like SSS and BAE; readers vote on serious stuff that meaningfully affects and creates the story. Save this person or that person; forge this alliance or alienate this person. I think of this is as “Telltale Style”

2.      House Semya with rare, meaningful votes that determine the *direction* of the story: focus on Steph or focus on Helena; go back to the vault or venture out into the wastes. For the rest, we’re on rails. “Casual Style”

3.      House Semya fully on rails for story and only having votes that affect lewd content: flirt with the princess or flirt with the queen. Tenderly kiss her or reach for the whip—with no consequences to the story.

 

Maybe there are options beyond these three, or some mixture of them that might work well. Anyway, “A Diplomatic Mission” will stay on rails with interactive lewd scenes. If we decide to continue it, then we would adopt some kind of structure based on reader feedback—maybe one of these three. If you have strong feelings about this, please feel welcome to speak up. I know I’m weird, so I don’t want to assume that people like the same stuff that I like.

 

And on a completely unrelated note, I’ve finished the first draft of one of the full routes for FSCR. Four more to go.