SPICY INTERVIEW VENUS NOIRE GAMES

We had a terrific chat with Winter the lead writer of a hit adult game called Seeds of Chaos. We explored how the game is created, how it all started and what the future holds. We invite you to read the in-depth interview and get a look behind the scenes of one of the most epic adult games on the market.

It was around 2019 when I first found out about H-games. Most of the games I played were fun, although too many of them were low-effort step-landlady games with broken English. Then I stumbled upon Seeds of Chaos, and damn, what a departure in quality it was compared to the other games. Everything from the music to the art and writing was extremely professional and goddamn well done. Even now the game is going strong as it gears up for its act 2.

So if you don’t know SoC, imagine an epic fantasy world specifically designed around the idea of sexual depravity. You’re playing as Rowan Blackwell, a renowned hero who defeated the Sauron equivalent of this universe with a team of heroes and is now living a quiet life with his childhood sweetheart. Everything’s going normally until the children of the aforementioned Sauron equivalent, two demon twins attack your homestead and take away your wife in order to force you to work for the in their castle of depravity. Will you and your wife keep adhering to your morals or give into the depravity?

SEEDS OF CHAOS WAS OUR GAME OF THE MONTH APRIL

In this interview, we’re talking about sex, games, sex games, fantasy, sexuality, Jewish guilt and fucking a leprachaun with Winter, the lead writer of Seeds of Chaos.

1. I really enjoyed the writing style of this game, it gives a very old-school epic fantasy vibe. Would you like to tell us about the influences various books/games have had on the game? Also, how long have you been a writer for?

As a teenager I picked up Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and fell in love with the craft of writing.

Beyond comic books, we're influenced by a lot of fantasy authors. JRR Tolkien, George RR Martin, and Neil Gaiman are all common favorites. Many Japanese creators as well. Miura's Beserk is a big draw for us.

Games wise, we frequently cite a number of narrative driven games. Games like Fallout New Vegas, The Witcher, and the first two Mass Effects.

2. Can you speak more about the world where this game takes place?

Sure. Seeds of Chaos takes place in a world where demons and divines are in a tug-of-war over humanity. For centuries the divines have kept the humans locked tight as a nun’s chastity belt. But, at the point the story takes place, demons are making inroads by corrupting humans with lust.

It’s a world of dualities, threatening to fall out of balance. Chaos and Order. Chastity and Lust. Stability and Change.

3. What’s your favorite part of writing for this game? What’s your least favorite part of it?

There’s very few mediums that will let you make an epic story that’s about sex. The genre of smart, deep erotic fantasy is painfully underserved. Working on Seeds of Chaos lets me work on the type of game I wish I got to play more often.

It isn't “least favorite”.But, the hardest part is coordination. It’s challenging to put two talented writers together and get them to agree on everything. When it works out, it produces awe inspiring stuff.

SIDE NOTE MAKE SURE YOU WATCH OUR GAMEPLAY VIDEO OF SEEDS OF CHAOS. PLAYED BY JUICEfromtheBOX

4. George RR Martin describes two types of writers, one is a gardener, the kind of writer who likes to see their story grow organically and the other is an architect, the kind who likes to plan most of the story beats in advance, would you consider yourself a gardener or an architect? Have you mapped out the whole story or do you like to figure things out as the story and characters develop?

I’m an architect. No question. Probably to the extent my incessant need for outlines drives teammates to consider homicide.

5. Are there any characters who manage to surprise you as the story has progressed? By that I mean you had one thing in mind when creating the character and they turned out to be something entirely different.

Not with my personal characters. But, I am frequently amazed by the incredible work of my co-writers who accomplish more with some of their characters then I ever could have expected.

6. Which aspect of writing do you think you’ve improved on the most since starting writing for this game?

Interactivity, no question. If you know how to write a book, you don't know how to write a game. There is a whole new world of player choice and ludonarrative that you have to grasp. SoC is filled with all sorts of variables and insanity that goes on under the surface. If was a real crash course in the medium.

7. Are you like Rowan in real life? If not, which SoC character is like you the most?

To me, Rowan isn’t a fixed character. He has some fixed attributes, but our goal is to write him in a broad enough way to open up lots of ways to play him. Everyone has their "own" Rowan. He’s almost “Schrodinger's Protagonist”. So, there isn’t much point in a direct comparison.

Personally, I don’t think any of the cast directly resemble me, but many do indirectly. When my ex played the game, she kept on finding “elements” of me in all of the cast. Verbal tics. Behavioural tics. Moments where their perspective would match mine.

I imagine someone who knows the other writers would find a lot of the same. We all shed pieces of ourselves and leave them cluttered all over the page.

8.  I know story writing, especially that has sex as one of the primary focuses can result in falling into having too many clichéd scenes or recurrent plot devices, so how do you personally avoid that?

The secret to innovation isn't usually that you have to be entirely original. It can be the art of doing something new with old ideas.

Seeds of Chaos uses and abuses tons of well-worn story beats, ideas, and devices. But, we aim to keep it fresh by combining them with other ideas in novel ways. Many of the familiar tropes of fantasy fiction can be eroticisized, or have some kind of subtle sexuality laced in. But, clever writing that makes good on the strong sides of porn can actually improve some of those tropes.

One example is the way we’ve used Netorare. Not everyone’s cup of tea, which is why it’s optional. But, if we’d just tossed it in thoughtlessly it’d have been pretty derivative. But, we’ve worked hard to introduce it as a potential component into the castle conflict between Rowan and the demons who are overseeing him. Normally it's done in a very self contained way  So this well-worn porn trope gains new context when placed in a more complicated narrative.

9. One thing you’re really good at is creating unique and well-written NPCs, so yeah, where do you get the inspiration? And Who's your favorite (in-game) waifu? I’m saying waify but you can choose a male character as well, of course.

Frankly, the feeling is that players will get attached to, maybe even lust after, well-written characters. That is, characters with clear perspectives, clear conflicts, and who illuminate the rest of the cast through their contrasts.

Years of reading and writing help with that. I learned a lot from games like Mass Effect 2, which so effectively give each member of the cast their own story, shine through as an inspiration. It's just about taking the lessons of non-porn and transferring it.

Personally, I’m always attached to my own little sub-cast. If I had to pick one to bang… probably Helayna, Rowan’s former student. There’s no deeper reason to it than the fact she fits my kinks well. A cultured rationale, I know.

10. Your update cycle is relatively tight compared to your peers, how do you manage to dish out updates regularly without burning out?

Screaming. Fighting. Caffeine. Force of Will. Jewish Guilt. Some mix of the above. On some level, just a sense that we made a promise to the fans. One we want to keep.

11. How much do you pay attention to the feedback from the fans and How do you go about balancing on changes according to feedback and sticking to your original plans? Do player expectations play a huge role in your planning for the next updates?

There’s a balance in game dev between paying attention to the fans, and staying true to yourself. Too little and it becomes unresponsive. Too much and it becomes "game dev by fan comitee".

And at the end of the day, my team needs to trust ourselves enough to make the damn game. There's a reason you hire actual writers. So, we keep expectations and feedback in mind, but we’re making our own game here.

We work under this core rule. “Feedback can point to the location of a problem, but not it's  true cause”. If lots of people are complaining about a certain element, it means that element needs close examination. But, we rarely accept intended solutions, because most fans lack the skillset to turn a negative reaction into an effective solution.

That said, technical feedback is the best kind and the type we search for most. Typos, errors, and coding/design problems are vital points of feedback that we're frankly starved for.

12. IF you were to go back in time, what one thing would you change about the game?

A lot of the planning was ad hoc, especially parts of the narrative. It's created no end of headaches working backwards to fix problems. So if I could time travel, I’d give us a more solid chance for the start.

13. What does the process of creating new characters look like?

Our characters usually emerge from the narrative. As we write, we sometimes find plot beats that are best served with a new character. But, we have to design the character to the plot role. We'll often start with just giving the character whatever attributes to do their story job.

But, characters who blandly fill a plot role are boring.

Once we establish the baseline, we always try to go through an entire process of giving them wants, perspective, quirks. All the stuff that makes them fun and alive. There’s a wild world of connections and ideas that emerges from this process, and we don’t stop until we have a character who is compelling both within the story in themselves.

14. The game has some really well-done gay scenes. Was there a plan to include them since the beginning

Definitely. The game was always meant as offering something to a diversity of players. But, it hasn’t always been easy. The boss decided that would be an element before we had any queer writers on the staff. Hell, none of us even enjoyed MxM. There were a lot of early challenges getting our optional MxM scenes done in that context. But, I was adamant we needed a dedicated MxM writer, and since bringing Exagie on as lead MxM writer, we’re finally where we want to be in terms of making our gay scenes as good as any Yaoi on the market.

15. How many writers do seeds of Chaos have? How do you manage to give the game a consistent voice and not make it look like there are too many proverbial cooks in the kitchen?

At the moment, we have a team of 3 Senior Writers, 2 Junior Writers, and 2 other irregular writing contributors. We have our set rules for voice, but everyone brings elements of their own style. Ultimately, I work together with the rest of the staff, and ensure that every piece added to the game has been read over and edited by a senior writer

16. If you were in this world, would you support Kharos or Solansia?

They’re both horrible. I’d be off in a cave somewhere fucking a leprachaun or something.

17. The magic system of your game reminds me a bit of A song of ice and fire’s, it’s not quasi-scientific like many of Brandon Sanderson’s works but instead is a conduit for wonder and mystery. Would that be a correct way of describing your magic system?

It’s not a matter of how it is, but how it’s experienced. Rowan and Alexia are not great wizards. Rowan may be used to seeing magic, but he is, at heart, still just a rural hunter. Magic will always be big, unknowable, and unclear to his perspective. And the way it’s written in the game should reflect this fact.

If we’re talking authors, I think the better comparison is Tolkien. In Lord of the Rings, magic isn’t scarce or rare like in Martin. It’s all over the place. But, the books often ground themselves in the eyes of hobbits, and to them magic is Grand and Powerful. Inscrutable. It warps everything it touches. When writing magic from Rowan’s perspective, that’s how I like magic to be.

18. The world of Seeds of Chaos seems like a living, breathing world. Do you spend a lot of time world-building for the game?

Oh, a ton. We have long, sometimes hours long discussions about the world. We even have our own loremaster, the former lead writer Darkmaster. We never get so caught up in it that we don’t put “telling a good story” first. But, a fantasy series ought to place somewhere.

19. Which is your favorite race in seeds of chaos?

Of late, I’ve been doing a lot of planning for the goblins, and they are absolutely a blast. 100% scheming, squabbling, and double crossing at all times. And all with a blasé nonchalant about it, like it’s the most normal shit in the world.

But hey. Ask me again in a month, and I might say someone else.  

20. Let’s play a little game, I’m going to give you two options and you’ll pick which race you like more:

Orcs or Goblins

Dragons or Krakens

Dark Elves or High elves

Dwarves or Halflings

Well, a lot of these races (halflings, krakens) don’t even show up in SoC. And without the specific context of the game, there’s no clear answer. In truth, our orcs and Tolkien’s orcs are two entirely different species. But, we use the common shorthand “Orc” to get across their shared characteristics.

I may like our goblins better than our orcs. But, are our orcs even the same thing as Warhammer 40k’s gun-toting orcs?

21. Can you talk more about the upcoming goblin prince content?

No spoilers, because Arioch will kill me to silence me.

We've had a quest where Rowan makes an alliance with a confederation of Orcs for a long time. But, we teased the idea of a goblin alliance quest years ago, and it's finally happening.

The idea is we're building it on this huge Goblin wedding. A new Goblin prince named Tue-Row is getting married to unify the goblin people. But, the goblins are real bastards and everyone has some kind of insane plan. So there's about to be a lot of complications in the way of the wedding.

It's going to have everything. Drama, mystery, sex. But also a contemplative side with a chance to explore a unique culture. Really good stuff.

22. Depending on the choices made, Rowan can become quite evil by the end of this chapter? How evil can Rowan become at the end of the game by your estimate?

You’re asking an ethics graduate that? Ha.

What if I told you that it’s always been my personal take that Rowan is evil from the start of the game?

23. You mentioned that Rowan has been evil from the start which is an interesting take. Assuming we're not entering spoiler territory, would you like to elaborate on that? I mean surely, the popular hero who slew the big baddy cannot be evil from the beginning, right?

1. Oh. I'm not saying that Rowan is evil, as a narrative absolute. I'm saying based on my personal ethics system, I see him that way. One of our actual goals is to provide an element of ethical ambiguity. What is the moral and psychological dimension of someone who doesn't identify as evil being forced to help bad people? And at various points in time through the story, the player is forced to interrogate the ethics of the system Rowan saved. I've seen a lot of debates by players about ethics and folks arrive at conflicting positions. Good. It means it's working.

24.  How long does it take for you to write a scene, broadly speaking? Do you go over it multiple times?

It can take a day or it can take a month. Scenes can balloon in writing time with both length and with interactivity. As a rule, adding interactive elements to a scene increases its writing time cubically. It can be a pain, let me tell you. But, well worth it to make your choices fell like they matter.

25. How has your experience been in the adult gaming industry so far? What are the biggest advantages and disadvantages you’ve come across so far?

It's almost the wild west out here. There isn't the prestige and structures of more developed sub-genres. But, there's also a lot of opportunity that comes from working in a space that's growing fast. All the best parts are that wild sense of "anything is possible".

I would definitely say that system wide low pay is an issue. Not an SoC specific issue (Arioch actually pays well by AVN standards). But, a lot of folks who would make great erotic devs don't because of very real financial concerns.

26. Do you play AVNs often? If so, which ones are your favorites currently?

I was an ex-reviewer for Lewd Gamer. My playtime in the genre has fallen off somewhat since then, but still a ton. Besides some of the bigger ones which need no hawking from me, some lesser known ones:

Princess Tower by Euphemismus

Pervert Action: Timelapse by BBBen

Pale Carnations by Mutt and Jeff

Penlight by Angela

Unholy Arts by Deep Interactivity

Lost in Laminate by Gloss and Glamour

Thrallworks by TDL

Survival of Sarah Rose by HappyDaedalus

27. Oh, I love Pervert Action series as well. In fact, I interviewed BBBen a while back myself. Which brings me to my question, do you get inspired by other H-games every now and then, or maybe you come across something in them and go, "damn I wish I'd thought of that"?

Constantly. I'm jealous of the brilliant ideas of plenty of my peers. There's a lot of great games being made, and fun twists on ideas I wished I considered first.There's that old T.S. Elliot quote. "Good writers borrow. Great writers steal". It's all about finding things that already work and seeing how you can improve it or itirate further.Ben's a good friend of mine and it's great to see him get recognition. In light of my earlier statement, I hope he takes no offense when I say that I'd steal from him any day of the week. I'm in his bushes taking notes.

28. What is/are your advice(s) for the new developers that are just starting out with their games?

I've seen many many projects fail because they started off with vague assumptions and no clear plan for amount of content. So you often end up with sprawling games, often where momentum runs out. It's an impossible way to dev. Even if you stick it out, your later content is just always going to be better because of expirience. But, it's all locked off behind what's essentially the worst content in the game (the stuff you were learning on).

You need to start small. Have a clear idea of the number or characters, sex scenes. Everything. You won't be able to judge the true length, because that's a skill. But, the smaller you plan for it to be, the less dramatically you'll be wrong and the easier a project will be.

That way when you start your second project you'll already know if you have the stamina to work on games. But, also you'll be able to translate the expirience you built up the first time.

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30.  Do you tend to play Seeds of Chaos often? Not for proofreading, just for having fun, that is. What kind of Rowan do you gravitate towards? Corrupted or the good guy?

I haven't played it outside of testing and proof reading for years. I just don't engage with the game on that level, to be honest. I can't scrub my mind of the expirience of being on the other end of the words on the page.

31. Are there any particular fetishes that you're excited to introduce in the game? Do you focus a lot on trying to introduce any particular fetishes in the game?

I was actually originally brought on to the game because Arioch felt we needed more MaleDom content. BDSM and MaleDom are some of my specialties so I handle lots of those characters. We have other team members into stuff like Femdomme, NTR, and Vanilla romance. So when assigning work, we normally play to our individual strengths.

32. Hypothetically, if you were to choose someone to voice-act the characters, who'd you pick?

No idea. I don't really know voice acting. I'd want it to be someone good, whose a pro. Not someone famous. But, I don't really know the discipline.

33. Do personally want a happy ending for Rowan?

If you wait long enough, you may find out.

34. What's next for you as a writer after SoC?

Running Marvel Studios, obviously.

35.. Where are you from (can be a broad answer), What did you do before developing adult games?

I started development right out of college. I was half-time in development before I even graduated. So not a lot of before to talk about.

36. What led you onto the path of creating adult games?

Besides being a sexual deviant?

I'd say "HaremVX" by Ker. Great game, a classic from years past. I asked him for a chance to contribute to the game and he agreed. The project is long dead now, and he's MIA. But, working on it was the moment I became a person who develops, in a categorical way.

SEEDS OF CHAOS

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