Weekly Progress Update [11/SEP]

Hey everyone, hope your week is going well!!

It was certainly a busy one for me lol. I finally got to release Chapter 9 for Tier 3 patrons, and Tier 2 and 1 patrons will be getting access either tomorrow or later this week, with the public release right around the corner 👀 

To start things off with, I wanted to thank all the new pledges for helping me get past my 1k goal for the Patreon!! Based on this I've decided to release a bonus romantic snippet for Tier 3, as that was one of my promises for making my goal. I think the influx will be temporary, but for every month that I've reached 1k, I'll release an additional romantic snippet for that month 💖

I'll be posting a poll for Tier 3 half an hour after this post for you to vote on which LI you want to see featured first, so keep an eye out for that!! The voting will be a one-time thing, so use it wisely; I'll determine the rest of the order for any future romantic snippets ;)

Also, starting from October, both character snippets will be made available for Tier 2 regardless of whether I make 1k for the coming months or not ✨

Onto the Actual Progress Report

In between bug report fixes for CH9, I've already started planning the scenes for CH10 and will get started on the writing for it the coming week. While I have the outline for ACT I fully planned out, I haven't divided it up yet into chapters if that makes sense, so I need to see how many events will be able to fit into CH10 🤔

One major thing I can tell you with certainty is that you can expect CH10 to be sort of a come down moment from the Shitstorm that has been CH7-9 lmao. It's a chance for the Crown to become accustomed to their new life, where the drama mellows out a bit, and the focus shifts more fully on relationship development for the time being. 

In that vein, there will also be a sizeable timeskip (you can probably guess how long if you play through X and D's routes in CH9). As cool as the political scenes were to write, I'm sure you don't all want to live out every single day of the Crown's life, or every single candidate they interview for the court, or every single meal they have. Well, maybe some of you do (you're so valid for that), but I do need to get the story going haha.

There will also still be subplots that were set up in earlier chapters progressing in the background, but they're not the focus for CH10! I actually had a major breakthrough earlier this week about an important subplot that I'm super excited to get working on hehe.

AToC's overall story structure

Roughly, my story planning so far has been split up into 3 acts, excluding ACT 0 at the start which is essentially the common route. 

Each act has its own story arc, with a Major Choice to make at the end of the arc that will count directly towards which ending your Crown will get. The availability of the Major Choices, however, depends on previous political choices made during the story arc. You get a taste of that in CH9 already, with the third choice during the court meeting which may or may not have been locked off for some of you.

Basically, if you sided against a specific faction a lot during the story arc, when it comes time to make the Major Choice for the arc, the choice relating to that faction may not be available to you.

For ACT 1, we're currently in what I call The Nobility Arc in my notes. I'm expecting this arc to culminate somewhere in CH13-14, depending on how I divide up the events. ACT 1 will probably be the longest act of the story with 9/10 chapters counting from CH5, because it has involved a lot of set-up in terms of plot and worldbuilding, future acts will probably be slightly shorter around 7 chapters.

Overall, I hope I can wrap the story up by CH30 haha.

Relationship progression

As mentioned before, CH10 will be an important one in terms of romance and relationships for the Crown. You can expect another relationship check in this one, so if you started with a low variation in CH9 but corrected it by picking the right choice in your LIs romance scene, you should be able to get the high variation this time. The game will also acknowledge in the narrative that you course-corrected from low to high!

Unless your points were too low to be compensated. In which case, RIP, you'll probably get the low variation again lol.

However, if you get the high variation again, you can expect a lot of progression to occur in this chapter!! Even with D and X who, while they might not be physically present, still stay in touch 👀

That was it for this week!! 

Hope you've enjoyed (or will soon enjoy) the CH9 release, until next time 💖