An update on the general progress

Overall progress:

Satisfactory.  Things are generally going according to schedule which actually is pretty surprising.  The project is stable and there is enough money to keep things going at a reasonable pace.  I'm still interested in the project and have not lost willpower.  It's growing at a decent pace given where the project is currently at.  Some important early supporters have left, which had caused a temporary downspike, but it didn't slow progress.

I'd like to thank everyone who has supported this project and is currently supporting this project.  You helped take it from a choose your own adventure story to where it is now.

Writing:

I've been reading a bunch of Tabico's stuff and comparing it to other authors.  I've noticed that swear words are extremely distracting - they jump out at you and reduce the importance of the rest of the story.  I'm going to try changing the pacing and clean up the swearing.  This should elevate the writing a little bit.

Some interesting observations about having a story in a game format - when I play through it myself, I end up skipping through vast sections really quickly.  Games tend to reuse the same scenes over and over, and quickly leads to memorization and 'dismissal' of large swaths of writing.

I think what I should be doing is removing as much writing as possible from the cycled portions and adding writing to the 'you only read this once' portions.  I'm trying to do this by using art and voiceovers for the game portion.  We'll see how it turns out.  I'm not planning on doing voiceovers for any kind of plot dialogue - it's more for the effect, rather than to transmit actual information.

Art:

Everything ModeSeven is doing is absolutely fantastic.  My only fear is that they are going to get too busy to finish the artwork, or that something will come up and I'll be left out in the cold.  They only produce a few pieces per month because they are more interested in their other projects, which is fine but it makes progress very slow.  ModeSeven is doing the art for part 1 and is about halfway done.

I'm getting a different artist for part 2, although similar quality of work.  Hopefully this speeds up the overall art improvement.

Music:

All the music has been completed, although I might find a reason to get more in the future.  The current set of music is good enough for the final version.

Voice:

I posted about using voiceovers on 4chan and got a highly negative response, although I think it's because they thought I was using it for dialogue.  There is not going to be any voiceover dialogue.  I found a hypno thread referencing some sound engineer called Bambi who does bimboification videos.  I listened to a few, they are pretty good and so I want to include that kind of stimulation in the game.  I'll try to refine the audio a bit to figure out how to make the hypno better, but really as with any hypno 90% of the effect comes down to the person desiring to 'believe' in it rather than the quality of the sound.

The only purpose of the voiceovers is for hypno effect.  It would help if I got feedback on parts of the voiceovers that are distracting.  Anything that breaks immersion.  If I can't get it right, I'll just remove them entirely.  It hasn't been very expensive to get the voices so far.