INTRO
Lots of stuff happened revolving around The Smoke Room this week, as well as some other more fun stuff. Today I will be ranting about TSR's project lead getting fired, some progress on personal projects, and a little neat thing I found when I was traversing the interwebs.
PROJECT LEAD FOR THE SMOKE ROOM GETS KICKED OFF
WARNING: This section pertains to the 18+ romance psychological horror visual novel The Smoke Room, and as such, may contain minor spoilers for certain scenes. While I have taken care to not spoil any major plot points, I may end up spoiling certain non-important scenes in the process. If you wish to not be spoiled in anyway, please click here. to go to the next segment.
I've been following the Echo Project series since June of this year when I decided to play the first game, Echo, after rewatching Patricia Taxxon's Marble Blast Retrospective. It absolutely blew me away with it's interesting setting, harrowing plots, and genuinely some of the best endings I've ever had the pleasure of reading. After playing that, this series became (and still is) a huge hyperfixation of mine, leading me to play and finish Adastra and Arches in the next month. To really set my expectations of this series, I fully believe that Echo completely changed the outlook on my life. It really made me appreciate being in so many niche communities, and gave me the confidence that I deeply needed to really just enjoy living life to the fullest. With that being said, I went into The Smoke Room with incredibly high expectations (maybe higher than what was expectable). A visual novel set 100 years before 2015 in the town of Echo that supposedly would answer some questions left unanswered in the original game? Fucking sign me up! So, with my expectations abnormally high, I started playing it.
Disappointment Through Boredom
Reading through this game was hard. Not because it was horrendously bad at any one thing, but mainly because it was just so unequivocally boring. You play as Samuel Ayers, who is a prostitute at a local brothel in the city of Echo called the Hip. Now none of this is bad, hell it's an interesting premise considering this is early 1900s America where you play as a gay man simply trying to scrape by and escape the city. But, shortly after the beginning, some cracks begin to show. The entire main cast is really into Samuel. Like, really into him so much so that we literally get 2 sex scenes (one with William and one with 1 of the 4 romancible characters on route split) within the first 30 minutes to an hour in the game. What makes it even more distracting is the fact that this feeling never goes away. It always feels like the main story being told is being held back by the fact that the author really wants yout to find the characters really hot. Not that that would be bad (I mean, I literally like Adastra), it's just that often times it feels as if these are forced for fan-service rather than being needed or earned and serving a purpose within the story. I could go more into detail, but this is my main problem with the game. Good premise, but just hyperfocuses on something that I don't believe is interesting, or needed for the story it is trying to tell.
"Oh so THAT'S why it's written like that"
While reading Nik's route I found a peculiar tweet that was supposedly from the main project lead of The Smoke Room, George Squares, outwardly disliking and calling out another visual novel for not having any NSFW. The reason for this (at least to my knowledge) was that this said visual novel had some 16+ art on their official twitter account, but the resulting novel did not share these themes, nor this kind of art. It is an SFW work through and through. While I do think that these tweets would be a bad look for Echo Project, I'm personally not too bothered by what he did. What the whole drama really revealed for me was why the game felt so... different compared to the previous ones. It was just that NSFW is just one of his interests and what he most enjoys writing about. I'm not gonna get into whatever else he did because, quite frankly, thats not something I should be giving opinions on, but all I really need to say is that his interests really clash with the setting a themes that Echo first portrayed. With this I think that it's the main reason why I believe that The Smoke Room feels like such a downgrade compared to its predaccesors, and I'm glad the team over at Echo Project are finally finding someone more fit for the job.
I HAVE ETHERNET AGAIN WOOHOO!!!!
After returning to college, I have been STRUGGLING. No ethernet when I first got here, so I had to deal with the measly 1-5mbps download speeds thanks to both my Wi-Fi card being ass, AND the Wi-Fi itself being meh. But now, ohohohohoh... it's BACK! 700mbps download speeds just like that, playing online games have never felt so smooth, downloading large games is absurdly quick, it feels like a whole new world has been unlocked and ready to explore!
DUMB PROJECTS THAT HAVE BEEN COOKING UP
Considering I'm at college living with a roommate and currently can't really fill up most of my time looking at gay furry art (shocker), I really need to put some of my time towards actual projects rather than just waste away looking at social media. Currently I have 2 projects in mind:
- Building a discord bot
- For the love of god, JUST make a fursona
Making a Discord Bot
Not a whole lot, but it's some goals to work toward, and I think I could probably make a proof of concept for this discord bot I wanna make fairly quickly. I really wanna try making a discord bot that just returns pictures of snow leapords, just so I can put it in my personal servers so me and my friends can just use the commands whenever. Only problem is that I have almost zero knowledge when it comes to JavaScript, and therefore, no real knowledge of any of the techniques and terminology the library I wanna use, discord.js, do or mean. I do wanna try learning it though, so I should probably just start picking up the W3Schools course whenever I have time between classes. It's small, but the project I wanna do is also small, so I don't think it'll be too tough to handle.
Make That Damn Fursona Already!
This has been something my mind has thought of since this summer. I already kind of have an idea of what I want, too. It's gonna be a purple dragon with droopy, pointy ears that have ear piercings in them (kind of inspired by Kamex's fursona). I don't have much for the body, but I think just having a little bit planned out is already a LOT better than having, well, no idea at all. Problem: I have ZERO idea how to draw furries (surprisingly). I'm not the best when it comes to drawing, but I feel as though I'm competent enough with the medium to at least draw some things well (i.e. simple bodies, simple, stylized objects, you know, stuff like that). But when it comes to anything else, I get really stumped at trying to draw what I want. It always comes just a bit different from what I want and always doesn't feel like enough. I just need to practice, but it feels like such a far away accomplishment for something that feels weirdly intrinsic to me and who I am. I'll think of some way to make it though, mark my words.
WHAT IS YASHA: LEGENDS OF THE DEMON BLADE AND WHY IS TAKETORA HOT
Got a video recommendation from Sony about a new game (indie I presume?) called Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade where it was an announcement for a new character called Taketora. He's a big buff tiger samurai who wields a bow and deals damage with projectiles, it's like the game SPECIFICALLY made this character for me. No idea what the game is outside of that though. Apparently it's a roguelike, but I don't know how it plays or the story around it other than it looks like it plays like Hades (maybe possibly, idk I never played Hades). I will definitely be awaiting patiently for its release date, however. :3
CONCLUSION
Anyways that should be it! Next week won't have a huge focus on furry drama I promise, and I hope to update you guys on my projects as soon as possible! Also note, that I have a Bluesky and a Tumblr now! I will probably only keep one, but I'm trying both out to see which one is a better alternative to Twitter (right now I'm thinking its bsky), I'll be sure to update you guys on the status of that (don't be afraid to DM me on either platform btw, I'll be sure to respond)! Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you again next week.