Monday transparency report

Hey guys!  Since last week’s report, I have:

Finished the remaining art specs
I finished speccing out the remaining outfits required.  Our illustrator lovely Victoria is working hard on making them beautiful for you 🥰

Wrote the unwritten small scene
I wrote the scene I wanted to add, where the heroine can voluntarily get in touch with the Malaysia station chief if she accidentally left nudes on Max’s phone.

It’s a small scene – just 240 lines of code – but there are a few different dialogue choices and I’m actually kind of pleased with the execution and characterisation.  I feel like the station chief isn’t a pushover, the heroine isn’t a doormat, and the outcome is kind of clever – or, at least, not what I thought would happen when I sat down to write it.  It’s okay!

Added the quest log
I’ve always wanted a quest log, and all CRPGs have them.  This week I added it!  I know nobody is playing Female Agent for the UI, but I did my best to make it not annoying to use (e.g. there are tastefully animated quest update alerts, a notification dot on the character sheet reminding you where to click, and the character sheet opens automatically to the quest log in this context – saved u a click).

When I populated it with actual quests and played through, it really did seem to add something?  It was satisfying ticking off quest objectives, and the log itself felt like a “story so far” reminding me of key events.  It’s also another place to execute (pithy) storytelling – I can use it to restate or summarise complex plots in tighter language.  (I know this sounds really boring, but think of it this way, it means characters on screen can now spend more time dicking down the heroine instead of explaining the story.)

Worked on scene edits
People say I spend too much time on this, but it’s the hardest work and it’s what makes it good?  (Or, at least, as good as it is, I wish I wrote better. ☹️)  Anyway I’ve been doing some good work punching up multiple scenes, and making them a bit sharper and better IMHO.

Sometimes it’s not obvious to me why a scene isn’t working the way I feel like it needs to.  For fun I asked ChatGPT to help me, but specified it had to do it in the style of a disappointed memo from David Mamet.

😭 Harsh but fair 

(I just did this for a joke to amuse myself one evening, but it actually was pretty helpful.  Thanks robot, not everything you produce is useless skibidi brainrot, just most of it 🤖)

Okay, that’s the weekly transparency report!  I’m frazzled now, but I will get straight back to work tomorrow morning.  ☕🦀