The Moirae's Mirror - August

Hello, everyone! (Or, well, all two of you anyway haha.)

I thought I'd do something a little different with the Mirror this month. Basically I'm going to show you what passes for my "outline" and talk about how stuff has gone so far. It's really not much of an outline—consider chapter 1 here:

I generally use "Seph" to refer to a gender-neutral player character for whatever reason. I guess that's just how I thought of them, though I've never adopted the convention on the blog because obviously everyone has their own name for the PC. 

Mostly, I stuck to this one. Discussion of the Blesséd Isles was deferred, as was seeing them (I... still need to figure out "where" they even are, but let's pretend I know what I'm doing, shall we?) And the "I have no expectations" speech got moved to the beginning of chapter two. Also Hades hasn't been that scary yet. He can be, but I'm kinda saving that for a better moment. 

Chapters 2 and 3 already show a decline in uh... precision:

Some of the stuff slated for chapter two actually appears there, including Pyri and Hekate, though the judgement bit got moved. I also decided the chapter really needed a scene with the whole group, to get that dynamic more established. I'm pretty happy with that decision; as I'd had it I think it might have seemed a little too choppy and not involved anyone quite enough. 

Of course, doing that scene meant I needed to provide something alternative for Sephs who were still firmly in "screw this" mode, so I did that, too, and ended up introing some other characters a little earlier than I thought I would, which was interesting to me at least. 

A lot of what is listed here for chapter three actually appears in chapter four now. Some of it is even going to get pushed to chapter five. Incidentally, I plan for that free evening to really be perhaps the first overtly (possibly) romantic thing in the game. Still sorta early stages of course, but hopefully it'll have that mood. 

Speaking of chapters four and five:

The meeting of course was moved to the end of chapter three; I felt the plot needed a kickstart. And the bit about visiting Lethe became a choice with three big branches naturally. Scope creep: it's constant. The letter from Demeter (or someone else with some inclusions from Demeter) will be happening as planned though; it's in the proper code outline and everything. 

The Chapter five dinner scene wound up all the way back in chapter two, with some modifications. I think some of these ideas, also modified, may end up being free evening activities with the respective people. Not all of them, though haha. Pyri might fight Seph on a "date" but Charon certainly wouldn't.

So yeah. My outlines are terrible, but generally most of the things I plan to do end up in the story somewhere. Just rarely where I think they're going to. Once I get to the level of actually writing/coding a chapter, things just kinda happen, and I'm not in control of them. At least not really. :)

Anyhow, I hope that was a bit interesting. I may break out chapters 6-10 in outline for the next installment, but that's even more speculative!