Weekly Progress Update [12/JUN]

Hey all, hope you had a good week!! It's technically the 13th in my timezone now but it's fine don't mention it 🙈

I've gotten back to working on AToC a bit. I didn't write much, just 3k words, but at this point any progress is better than no progress lol

A fun idea I had this week and that I started working on was yet another ✨Dream Sequence✨ influenced by the state of mind of your MC as well as the outcome of the opening scene based on earlier decisions. This scene doesn't affect anything plot-related in the larger scheme of things, it's purely for your own MC's development, so I thought it'd be safe to talk about and give a little spoilers! 

Basically, your MC's state of mind has been tracked based on a small choice made during another dream sequence back in CH6 with the water spirits, where you were given 3 choices on how your MC is dealing with their trauma, if you remember.

These choices correlate to your MC:

• holding onto the pain and accepting the suffering that comes with it
• holding onto the pain, realizing that they're hurting but too afraid to move on 
• holding onto the pain in order to process it and heal in a healthy way, rather than let the water spirits take it from them

This decision will subsequently impact what kind of dream sequence you get in CH9 depending on how well the opening sequence went for you. Since there's 3 different outcomes (roughly speaking; there's lots of varying details but those won't be relevant here) and 3 different mind-states, the dream sequence has about 12 different variations.

Here's a taste of the variation for an MC that has both the worst mind-state as well as got the worst outcome in the opening sequence:

So... yeah. Maybe it's more accurate to call this particular variation a nightmare sequence lmao. You definitely want to try to avoid that outcome. Or, hell, maybe you don't if you want to do a particularly tragic/angst-filled run for your poor MC 😭

In other news, I've also been chipping away at the main scenes involving the Imperial Court. The introduction to it has been especially fun to write, slipping in a few new background characters here and there to fill up the Royal Palace. I think I'll probably add a list of Imperial Court positions to the codex so that the player can keep track of all these characters haha.

That was it for this week! I'll see you all again next Saturday for X's character snippet 👀

Until then 💖