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[barbwritesstuff]

So I share a flat with two of my best friends I know since 8th grade.

With one of them I have a lecture together since we have the same major.

In when we graduated high school she won best laugh, in our graduation book.

Her laugh is like really really funny, she literally sound like a seagull (in a good way, love her).

During one of our lectures together in a room with like 80-90 other people I was bored and decided to check out Thicker Than again.

I wanted to get motivation for my own IF and reading interactive fiction from others always helps me with that.

When I started reading she was looking at my Ipad here and there reading too.

We whispered a bit and then I ended up right before Tracy’s intimate scene.

My friend guessed that and we chuckled a bit. She is new to IFs and has read one or two.

Then I clicked to skip Tracy’s intimate scene because we were in a room full of people and well we expected it to be over completely.

Then we both looked up to the lecturer for a second and then down again and read the first sentence after we skipped the intimate scene, expecting it to be like completely over.

„You came.“ Just those words if I remember correctly, separated from the rest on the top of the page.

We really had to hold ourselves back from laughing too loud.

We sat there like 5 minutes laughing, holing ourselves back, because we were obviously still in a lecture.

We couldn’t look at each other, I was crying and hiding my face, my stomach hurt.

My friends laugh also made it only worse.

Never in my life have I laughed this hard during a lecture or in class.

So yeah, thank you for that it really made our day.

My friend wasn’t feeling well but that made both of us laugh.

She also asked me if Thicker Than is free and I said yes but that it’s a wip, so maybe she will play it in the future. :)

Oh my gosh. I just checked it and that label is 100% in the wrong spot. I'm so sorry. It should've skipped the sex scene entirely, not include the orgasm.

Thanks so much for letting me know. Again, I'm sorry, but I'm really glad you both had such fun. Your friend sounds amazing. I'll fix that up for the next update.

[barbwritesstuff]

💙

I totally understand 😭😭😭 I was balling my eyes out thinking bout my kid, crushed my heart 🥺 barbs knows how to ruin us from within

😭😭 I will never again choose the option of having a child in an IF ever again. It's horribly awesome. It just proves how talented @barbwritesstuff is.

Of course immortality has consequences.

[barbwritesstuff]

The chances may me slim , but still I must ask:

Is there any route where we can have Ilya AND marcel 🥺????

I love them both so much and I can't choose LMAO😭😭🙏 (Also, my Mc is just BARELY skirting the consequences of two-timing ros LOL)

I'm sorry. There's no polyamorous routes in Thicker Than. Those routes take a lot of time and effort to code and I didn't want to overwhelm myself. I hope that's okay.

[barbwritesstuff]

Barb. BARB.

I just realized.

Is Spaghetti ok?! Please tell me he's not dead 🥺

Spaghetti isn't dead. He's an old boy now though.

[barbwritesstuff]

Pls don't feel bad about the time skips! I read ppl complaining on the forum but I think they miss the point of TT.

It's meant to show how much of a curse vampirism actually is. Like no matter how much you try to keep your humanity, you are functioning on a completely different wavelength as humans and one thing that encapsulates it are the time skips. You can't have a non vampire partner or child and expect a happy ending, one distraction or something gone wrong and you lose a decent chunk out of their lives without realizing. It's a story meant to lack agency! Being a vampire in your world is only meant to end three ways: being hunted, starved, or walking into the sun. And most probably utterly alone.

Writing is a learning curve that never stops curvin'. And, to be clear, that's something I really like about writing. I really enjoy trying new things and getting feedback on readers on whether or not those things worked.

I didn't expect the time skips to be contentious, but I can understand why some people don't like them.

They feel like they remove agency in a choice based game. That's a very real critique that I totally understand.

Unfortunately, they've been baked into the narrative from the start. I always planned on Thicker Than to take place over a decade (actually, originally it was 13 years, but I shortened it to a decade to show a tiny wee bit of mercy to the human ROs) and the time skips are the only real way to do that.

The time skips make sense for me because they show how vampires change over time. The player gets to level up their powers and becomes more a part of the undead world.

A just resurrected fledgling is not going to be the same creature as a ten-years-dead vampire. And while you're still very young, it makes the final showdowns a little more probable.

The player's character isn't a total noob by the end of the game.

I've tried to brainstorm some ways to smooth over the transitions, but the truth is, they're already pretty much as good as I can make them. So I hope those that don't like the time skips aren't too put off by them.

[barbwritesstuff]

Forgive the jumble as I'm coming out of a migraine but I had just enough consciousness to make my bed into a blanket fort and dim my screen and play in the dark and I had SO much fun with Ch 10 - and it's not even done! Also I picked the "make me your enemy" line just because it sounded the least lord-y and then I was in a hurry to replay so I didn't hang out with anyone and saw Gaius instead and it just clicked that OH. Oh I'm not just being petty. Oh I picked the most direct callout possible. I'm not picking a fight with the establishment. I'm picking a fight with HIM. Oh I'm calling down the hurricane. Whoopsy.

I hope you feel better soon.

I don't know if this helps at all... but:

He likes it when people want to kill him. I only hope you know what you're getting into.

[barbwritesstuff]

A copy/paste of a post I made on the CS forum in regards to Thicker Than:

-------------

I’m just popping back to post a quick update about my plan/process going forward.

My current plan is to continue drafting this story as it is. Once I have first draft, then I’ll go back and fix some of the issues that have been brought up here.

Top of the list:

*Fix confusing navigation in chapters 3-4.

*Add more opportunities to interact with allies in non romantic contexts. (Perhaps in groups so people don’t worry about losing romance routes but can still spend time and get to know various characters).

*Add more choice and variation to the trial scene (plus a potential aquital for vampires loyal to the Night Court).

I hope that’s okay. I think it’ll be easier to edit once I have the whole thing more or less together. That way I’m not going back and forth quite as much and it’ll be easier to know exactly where any jumps/skips need to go.

The latter half of Chapter Ten is very romance focused. Chapter Eleven is going to be very big and busy (depending on the playthrough) and I may end up splitting it into two, but I’m not sure yet. The game is already starting to fork towards the various endings (of which there will be five with variations in each). Some will be more involved than others, but I want to try and make them all rewarding in their own way.

I know it feels like choices that were made in part two are a little redundant, but I’m hoping later chapters might change some minds.

The tribute choice is still one of the biggest in the game (and whether or not it was actually paid) and the outcomes and consequences of that will start to come out more soon.

Not all consequences will be good. Again, I hope that’s okay.

I’m also hoping it’s not too frustrating waiting a little longer for the above mentioned fixes.

Thank you everyone for your honest feedback. This game is much more complicated than my last and it’s been a steep learning curve all the way (I’m never doing timeskips ever again 😅). But, with your help, I’m hoping the final product will be a really fun. 💙

[barbwritesstuff]

unreachable itches? that's what friends are for

[barbwritesstuff]

I am obsessed! I had so much fun writing this scene. It's wonderful seeing it brought to life. 💙

ditch the vampire court, go to your kid's play

ch5 of thicker than if /// @barbwritesstuff

[barbwritesstuff]

Hide and seek is an extreme sport with werewolves. 💙

Hidden Hounds.

[barbwritesstuff]

I love this.

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

[barbwritesstuff]

This is getting ridiculous.

So we all know that Tumblr is US-centric. But to what degree? (and can we skew the results of this poll by posting it at a time where they should be asleep?)

Reblog to increase sample size!

[barbwritesstuff]

idk why "julius ceasar haircut" has always translated bowlcut in my brain but i refuse to reimagine it (please don't apologize im not upset i just think it's funny)

Anything can be a bowl cut if you get a weird enough shaped bowl.

[barbwritesstuff]

idk why I always imagined gaius with a lil three piece suit, like a lil kid going to lil prom or something 😐

😅 He's wearing pink crocs in Blood Moon.

[barbwritesstuff]

Could you please give a description of Gaius' appearance and usual clothes? I'd like to try to draw him🙃

When I first pictured Gaius I imagined him as looking something like a young Emperor Augustus.

He looks like he's in his early teens, has pale blonde hair, very pale skin, blue eyes, and wears modern casual clothing (hoodies, sweatpants, etc). He doesn't dress up for court (he doesn't care enough about the Night Court to do that) and is constantly drinking blood (so is always holding a glass, bottle, jug, or human).

When he's vamping out his eyes go all black and all of his teeth go sharp.

I hope that was helpful. 💙

[barbwritesstuff]

with full acknowledgment of just how much of a piece of shit the previous blackwell was it’s also so funny thinking about blood moon from his perspective given what we learn about the vampire court and vampire politics?

the werewolves: we just wanted to move to the city for a better life for us and our children but this awful vampire won’t leave us alone and keeps doing horrific things to our pack and those we love

blackwell, whose domain is suddenly 90% werewolf land and whose primary “in” with the court and the mad king ran away to join said wolves: fuck fuck shit fuck what the fuck

This is honestly why I wanted to write Thicker Than. Vampires aren't good guys, but seeing them from the wolves' perspective paints them in a very particular (and very negative) light. Their society is more brutal and complex then the werewolves know, and a vampire lord may very quickly become very desperate in a situation like that of Blood Moon.

Unlike werewolves, vampires eat their own.

[barbwritesstuff]

Can I assume from the Peter Pan references you also like the movie Hook? Because from "to die would be a great adventure" to "It's the only one you have left" to "I want my war!" I'm getting some Gaius vibes. 👀

This ask has really just proven to me exactly how millennial I am... and it's a lot.