Development Update August 21st

Why hello there! It’s time for the next development update, and this time it’ll be about the progress of chapter 5. Exciting, right?

I hope you have all been enjoying chapter 4. I’m happy with the way it turned out, mostly. It’s difficult to judge a chapter like that on its own, since a lot of what’s happening is still just build-up. Although you’ve been able to make some choices, you haven’t really gotten to see the consequences of them yet, right? That’s something that will change soon, since I feel like by now the characters, the world, and the conflict are established enough.

In regards to chapter 5, I have finished writing the first few scenes, around 5k words or so. Writing is getting a little bit more complicated since certain variables can vary greatly from playthrough to playthrough. Someone might have Maeve at 0 affection, someone might have her at 80 affection, and everything in between is possible too of course. Now that we’re starting to get into possible extremes of MCs, I’ll have to account for every possibility, which means writing certain scenes over and over again with slight variations. For instance, a MC who often lies and tells jokes, gets along great with Vynn and Az’Lean but doesn’t care about the fae at all will have to be clearly distinguishable from a MC who is very serious and open but wants to help the fae and get closer to Maeve.

This all means we’re also slowly approaching the point where your character can be locked into or out of certain choices. You’ve already encountered one in chapter 4: agreeing to meet up with Maeve again or not. Chapter 5 will have a bunch more of these kinds of big variables. As always, I will try to keep this post mostly free of spoilers, but I think you can imagine what sort of decisions I mean.

At the end of the day though, this all means a lot of work for me and writing similar scenes over and over again. No reason to worry, however, I’m planning to stick to the pace I’ve been able to keep up during the creation of chapter 4. That is to say, no promises, but I estimate chapter 5 will take a similar amount of time to write.

Aside from working on chapter 5, I’ve also done a few other things. If you’re following me on tumblr, you might have seen that I’ve been thinking about tarot cards, and which characters would fit which major arcana. I was just having fun with it at first, but now I’m thinking it would be really cool to be able to actually code something like your character getting a random tarot card reading. I’m not sure at which point in the story I would include, though.

Actually, maybe I should keep it somewhat separate from the main story. Since which cards you get would be random, it might not fit with the story and the themes or be misleading. Maybe I could make it into a patreon-exclusive mini-game or something. This could just not work at all but I think it would be a fun little addition. If I never mention it again, assume I’ve scrapped the idea, haha.

Speaking of patreon though, I’ve also been thinking about changing up the tiers at some point. Clearly, the biggest selling points are the early-access to the next chapter and the monthly short story. The lowest tier is kind of obsolete at this point, so I might reduce the options down to two. Or I’ll think of some new perks. A discord server might be nice to have, but I don’t know if we have enough members yet to really warrant it. Something for the future perhaps.

As always, let me thank you all so much for your support! Feel free to let me know if you have any feedback in regards to chapter 4. I haven’t heard anything yet, so I assume there at least aren’t any game-breaking bugs. No news is good news, as they say!

I hope you all have a wonderful day!