Post from iksanabot

Hi everyone, this is iksanabot.

I know I’ve been silent for a while. Mortze and I made quite a bit of progress on SOL episode 1 in the weeks after the introduction came out, but then as summer ended I became completely swamped with my regular work, and progress ground to a halt. It’s not dead. I’m still very motivated to tell this story, and I love Mortze’s images and can’t wait to see them embedded in this game. I usually work on this stuff in spurts, and I fully expect to have another spurt soon. Especially with American Thanksgiving and Christmas Break coming up. But right now I’m overwhelmed with all my real-life work. I’m a professor of neuroscience (I know most of you will assume this is a lie, but it’s the truth and my purpose is to tell the truth here, so believe it or not, that’s what I’m telling you). As a professor, September through to December is bananas: balls-to-the-wall work work work. December is a little relaxed, then January to April is bananas again. And then summer slows down, except that you spend the whole summer knowing you could be doing more work, and that alone stresses you out. Academia is like a marathon, you succeed by setting a good pace, and falling off the pace costs you. Whenever I work on these games, I fall off the pace.

I want to make my situation with Mortze understood. I love Mortze’s work, and Tlaero’s. When Tlaero retired, I was a little bit devastated, and sad for Mortze, and I jumped into the gap. I told Mortze I wanted to work with him, and he asked my about compensation. As emotional as I was about the whole thing, I told him I did not need any compensation up front, and not at all until we passed a high threshold in his Patreon earnings. That is, I told him I did not need to be paid until he exceeded $3200 in monthly earnings. At that point, anything over $3200 would go to me, until we reached $6400, and then we would continue to split it down the middle. This was partly generous, and partly arrogance. I thought we could hit $6000. So for a month I completely ignored my regular work and learned to code in renpy and and I wrote the intro to Science of Lust. If we had exceeded $3200/month by that point, I could have justified keeping the game my top priority, but we didn’t even come close. I had worked for about 120 hours for free. There were some positives: I helped keep Mortze from losing as many Patreons as he might have. I had fun discussing the ideas with Mortze and seeing his art. I actually like coding and so I had fun learning renpy. But in the end, I could make a ton of money writing for 120 hours for Lesson of Passion (Leo pays me up front for scripts), and in my regular job, if I spent 120 hours working on a grant application, I can make up to $24,000-$30,000 extra per year. No shit. Grant money pays what is called “summer salary” so that a researcher can add up to 30% of their salary by winning a grant. So working with Mortze is fun, and I want to help, but the monetary incentives are miniscule. I guess that is what I’m trying to tell you. I will keep doing it, but I have to do it at a pretty slow pace to justify doing it at all, when the hours could be so much more lucrative to me spent elsewhere.

So to sum up, I am still working on this. I’m working on it for Mortze, for Tlaero, and for the Patreons. SOL episode 1 is coming. Please be patient.