#queen of thieves

Lovestruck: Once again teasing us with the threesome that could have been!

It’s heartbreaking seeing how she beats herself up!

JUST LET ME LOVE HER AND SHOW HER SHE’S WORTH IT

Fuck Zoe… tell us how you really feel

Man alive this breaks my heart… can we chop of the hands of anyone who touches her without her consent??

Man I’ve missed these two !

Oh I see how it is, Lovestruck

outofcontextlovestruck:

I haven’t opened the Lovestruck app in a while and I’m literally so disappointed in what I’ve been seeing and reading over the past few weeks

I had the TINIEST bit of hope and they just crushed it huh!

I loved a lot of the old routes. Fantastic! There isn’t much content for lesbians out there so anything I can get is a blessing!

ALL THE RECENT SHIT YOU PULLING IS GETTING ON MY NERVES!!!!!

Liora could have been great! Ruined it completely and I don’t want to experience the disappointment myself! Reacting from a distance is enough!! I’m done!!!!

I’m gonna be honest I was 50/50 on the new series and now I’m just disinterested completely

You have shit to fix!!

BIG ISSUES TO FIX!!

Best post up bcs all you doing in taking up space on my damn phone.

Call me when you get your writting together and then I’ll consider

As it stands now? A bitch gone!!!!!

if you follow the dating sim world at all, you already know that voltage usa, maker of lovestruck, is closing up shop. in december, they announced that they would stop production on the app. tomorrow is the last day before the servers go offline. to be honest, before this week, i hadn’t paid much attention to it. i had so many plates to spin, it’d gone to the back of my mind. then @arthoure​ mentioned feeling melancholy about it on twitter, and i realized that it was kind of bittersweet for me, too. i wrote 25 seasons of voltage content. if i can trust my math, that’s somewhere between 750 and 800,000 words. linkedin says it was three years and ten months of my life. still, i had mixed feelings about the work i’d done for them. i shrugged it off.

lovestruck fans didn’t do that. within hours of learning that the app’s days were numbered, they set out to archive everything. i haven’t checked the numbers, but i’ve heard that with their combined effort, they managed to record almost every route. that’s astonishing. see, preservation casts a long shadow over the video game world. few studios care about it, and even fewer know what to do. a lot of old games are just gone. others don’t run on modern hardware. that’s especially true of mobile games, which often have to fight for respect. amid all that, lovestruck’s readers went, “we love these stories so much, we’re going to stare obsolescence down and find a way to save them.” when you’ve written for a project that people say that about, you have to be pretty jaded to not feel touched by it.

as a first industry gig, voltage had two things going for it. it taught me discipline, and it gave me a community. i learned how to power through writing when i didn’t feel like it. i got to work in genres that i might not have otherwise. i got to know the people who would become the VOW writers, who are some of the most talented friends and colleagues i’ve ever had. i never would’ve written “anniversary” without them. i never would’ve tried to stick up for myself as a worker, either. and for all the nights i worried about where my life was going, voltage ended up being exactly what i hoped it’d be: a foot in the door. you can draw a direct line between @sailorscooby​ giving me a chance to take reiner’s route and obsidian giving me a chance five years later. seriously, i met my current boss when they read a statement i’d given to the gaming press about the strike. networking, huh?

i would be lying if i said all of it was positive. you know me, i try to frame things in a flattering light, but it was hard work, and the writers organized for a reason. during the strike, it became public that voltage usa’s writers were paid less than half of a professional per-word rate. the deadline turnarounds meant i had to work seven days a week, even on vacation and from my mother’s hospital room. on top of that, the amount of agency that writers had over their routes could vary wildly depending on the project’s vision. i wrote some scenes that i got to pour my whole heart into. i also had to write some scenes that i try not to think about. i needed the job. it happens all the time in the working world, and at the risk of sounding mealy-mouthed, it wasn’t one person’s fault. all of the producers i worked with were sweet, generous people. from things i observed, i could tell their jobs weren’t that hot, either. that’s just how it goes when a company doesn’t leave room for departments to collaborate and play to each other’s strengths.

despite it all, we managed - slouching and largely burned out - to put together stories that the fanbase looked forward to. many of lovestruck’s most enduring, resonant moments happened because one of the writers wedged in a shard of themselves. some routes carried the weight of moral complexity, trauma, grief. others brought fresh, challenging new attitudes to genre tropes. in general, the producers tried to offer writers routes based on their personal interests, and that enthusiasm was contagious. i’ve seen the fanart. i’ve read the emotional posts and in-app reviews. i haven’t read the fanfic - our NDAs didn’t let us - but i bet it’s great. i’ve also heard that some fans made meaningful discoveries about their gender or sexuality from reading certain routes. as the village het, i couldn’t tell you anything about that, but i know it mattered a lot to the people who wrote those characters.

i think i was always a funny choice to write for lovestruck. if you’ve read my other work, you’ll know i prefer love stories that don’t feel like romance. between the breakneck schedule and not being their target audience, i don’t know that i sold the routes’ intended breathlessness. i have to admit, i’m not too broken-up about that. i had my fun tweaking expectations and digging into the action plots. in reiner’s route, that bore out in the politics and strategy, and the heroine growing into her enormous responsibility. even in leon’s route, i appreciated the detail work of planning the heists and delving into different types of organized crime. and diego’s route - well, it’s not a competition, but mystery? old guilt? an MC coming into her bossy side? it was an almost-perfect match.

and the wedding outfits, of course. at voltage, writers weren’t allowed to communicate with the art team, so we were the last to find out what characters’ designs would look like. when diego proposed, i threw a pile of photos in my producer’s lap, and thankfully, i think they were too busy to put up a fight. you can imagine my joy when they showed me the roughs of the sprite art. it had all the elements of transformation i wanted from his route. it was also a preview for some of the interdisciplinary teamwork that i’d be encouraged to do at bigger studios. i would’ve loved to get more art design ownership of certain characters. i had some ideas, let’s put it that way! at least i got that one.

but now i’m just telling war stories. thank you for reading my routes, and the routes that my dear friends wrote. i hope you got something from them. in fact, if lovestruck’s narrative decisions ever frustrated you, and that pushed you in a creative direction, that’s the biggest win of all. if you’re sad about the app going down, don’t worry. people have archived it, and you’ll find something else to love. besides, the VOW writers are working on new writing all the time. we’re not going anywhere. we’re just doing it our own way now.

nihilnovisubsole:

if you follow the dating sim world at all, you already know that voltage usa, maker of lovestruck, is closing up shop. in december, they announced that they would stop production on the app. tomorrow is the last day before the servers go offline. to be honest, before this week, i hadn’t paid much attention to it. i had so many plates to spin, it’d gone to the back of my mind. then @arthoure​ mentioned feeling melancholy about it on twitter, and i realized that it was kind of bittersweet for me, too. i wrote 25 seasons of voltage content. if i can trust my math, that’s somewhere between 750 and 800,000 words. linkedin says it was three years and ten months of my life. still, i had mixed feelings about the work i’d done for them. i shrugged it off.

lovestruck fans didn’t do that. within hours of learning that the app’s days were numbered, they set out to archive everything. i haven’t checked the numbers, but i’ve heard that with their combined effort, they managed to record almost every route. that’s astonishing. see, preservation casts a long shadow over the video game world. few studios care about it, and even fewer know what to do. a lot of old games are just gone. others don’t run on modern hardware. that’s especially true of mobile games, which often have to fight for respect. amid all that, lovestruck’s readers went, “we love these stories so much, we’re going to stare obsolescence down and find a way to save them.” when you’ve written for a project that people say that about, you have to be pretty jaded to not feel touched by it.

as a first industry gig, voltage had two things going for it. it taught me discipline, and it gave me a community. i learned how to power through writing when i didn’t feel like it. i got to work in genres that i might not have otherwise. i got to know the people who would become the VOW writers, who are some of the most talented friends and colleagues i’ve ever had. i never would’ve written “anniversary” without them. i never would’ve tried to stick up for myself as a worker, either. and for all the nights i worried about where my life was going, voltage ended up being exactly what i hoped it’d be: a foot in the door. you can draw a direct line between @sailorscooby​ giving me a chance to take reiner’s route and obsidian giving me a chance five years later. seriously, i met my current boss when they read a statement i’d given to the gaming press about the strike. networking, huh?

Keep reading