Weekly Update - 25 December 2023

Hello everyone!

I am pleased to report that I got everything done this week that I was planning to and then some. I have a new outline for FoA, including several new scenes with various characters that I'm going to write as I create the second draft, and a list of things to be changing as I go through the rest. Which means that (after I take the day off on Christmas and maybe Boxing Day), I may actually be able to rewrite the prologue in time for the BIP release this month. In any event I'm going to try, because I think it would be cool to have something besides the new character creator for all of you to see.

Because of the complexity of coding new variables into the same document with old ones, I'm going to be using a fresh document (and therefore a fresh Dashingdon upload) for all this. I don't think this will affect anything too much on your end, except of course for the fact that this month's BIP will once again be very short! But hopefully it will show off some of the new changes, and give you an idea where I'm going with them. 

At this point I'm fairly sure the game will not be losing much content. The only scenes really at risk of being cut are the ones that were previously used explicitly to raise stats, and I'm still going to see if I can/should salvage them for some other purpose. There are going to be at least two more individual scenes with each RO (one that is open to all PCs and one that occurs on that RO's route specifically) as well as probably five or so new pair or small group scenes, where you interact with a subset of the ROs doing something which will hopefully be interesting. Hopefully this will help mitigate the fact that some people weren't getting a lot of scenes with characters other than their ROs; it should come out to three new unmissable scenes for each character (two of them shared with other characters). There's also a new scene with Makaria, and several other scenes that were previously missable due to choosing alternative options will now be playable without that restriction. I'm not making it so that everyone will be able to see everything on all playthroughs, but I am loosening the exclusivity requirements quite a bit in the name of character development haha.

This will obviously take some time to do, and may extend editing time a bit, but I'm optimistic about what they'll do for the story, and hopeful that, since I'm getting started in this phase sooner than I anticipated, it will turn out to still be done by my aspirational deadline of March 1.

Anyway, I'll be back with another update on the 1st of the year. In the meantime, I hope everyone enjoys the end of 2023 as much as possible. After the kind of year this has been, we deserve to!