Reports of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Greetings! The good news is that I'm not dead (if you're one of my exes, that could be bad news.) The bad news is that the release isn't yet done. The okay news is that I've finished the first draft of the script for the date scene with Ana, which is the last major part of the release. There's still a lot of minor stuff, and I'll still need to go back and edit the date quest dialogue, but the heavy lifting is done.

I apologize for not posting for so long - I know you folks have the patience of saints and just want to know generally how things are going with development - even if it's slow going. I just found it really difficult to sit down and write another "I'm still writing the date quest!" post. It's kind of depressing, to be honest. I know that's not a good excuse, but it's true.

The Date Quest

Anyway, one reason it took so long was that I found it really difficult to write this quest. An Alex-Ana romantic relationship is something that's always been teased at and flirted with, but not something that's ever been dealt with in a direct way. Part of that is preference; writing romance-y stuff doesn't come naturally to me. Part of it is also to make the story more interesting - after all, the really interesting parts of a romance are the beginning and the end. No matter how interesting a couple is, there's only so many scenes of them happily watching a movie or cooking pancakes together you can take before getting bored. There's a reason movies end when the hero and heroine get together! Because of this, I felt it was really important to get the quest right. And by "get it right" I mean walking a fine line between advancing the relationship and maintaining the player's interest in it.

The original plan for the date quest, in fact, was just more teasing and flirting with the idea of a relationship. There's still a big element of that and - fair warning - they won't end the date holding hands and whispering sweet nothings into one another's ears. But in the course of writing it, I found I wasn't able to avoid them dealing explicitly with the issue and still remain true to their characters.

In dealing with the question of a relationship explicitly, I was also forced to think about another issue - H-scenes. Most relationships are roughly monogamous, and I don't see either Alex or Ana as the sort who would enjoy sharing their SO, except perhaps on rare occasions. What does that do to H-scene variety?

I always bill this as "A game, with porn" rather than a porn game, but - well, I still have to think about these things. While Ana is popular in the H-scene polls, I expect even her biggest fans would get bored if all the scenes from here on out only involved her and Alex. (I know I would get bored of making them!) I expect most players will have messed around a bit with Val and Sami; one might argue that's a little crappy of Alex, but it was also kind of okay, since Alex and Ana weren't officially in a relationship. But if they are in one, in order to maintain variety Alex would either have to cheat, or else those scenes could only be available when you're not dating Ana.

In other words, in order to have your Alex not be a complete asshole, there would have to be a hard fork, and it would no longer be possible to see the majority of scenes in a single playthrough. Given how long this game is, that's really not something I want to do to players.

So how did I solve this dilemma? Well... you'll have to wait for 10.4 to find out. I just wanted to illustrate one of the big complications in writing this scene, and that I had to put some thought into how to resolve it.

What Remains for 10.4

What's left to do in 10.4? A fair bit, but it's all small stuff at this point. In no particular order:

• Write random Commercial District NPC dialogue (keep in mind I do try to make these interesting. And there are a lot of them.)

• Tweak a few maps

• Create shop items (and their art. It's a commercial district, so you'd feel kinda ripped off if there was nothing to buy, wouldn't you?)

• Write a few skits and minor scenes

• Make a few changes to the Relationship Plugin

• Populate Relationship Plugin with info and implement it in game

• Find way to ask you about relationship events that weren't properly recorded in earlier saves

• Make the release promo image

• Do eventing (movement) for Ana date quest

• Edit Date Quest dialogue

• Other minor things

Editing Date Quest dialogue will be a bit of work, but far less than writing it in the first place. I've mentioned before that it was long; well, as of now the "romance path" is over 23,000 words, and that's way too long. That's basically a novella. People would probably be inclined to be patient with a long Ana conversation, but I'd still like to avoid testing readers' patience too much.

I've found editing usually works better when you're away from the thing you've written for a bit, so I'll get to work on some of that other stuff first.

Conclusion

I hope you like the picture! I guess it's similar in theme to the last one, but I thought it might be fun to give Alex the whip (paddle) this time. There was actually another image I wanted to do, but I was spending too long getting the environment set up and just decided to go with this one. I'm going to get to work on some of the NPC dialogue, probably followed by making the promo image. I apologize again for the long delay in posting. Thank you for your patience and support!