Production week 8

Hey guys! It’s been a busy week getting things ready for the 1.13 release. We’re aiming for the early access release (to $5+ supporters) on Tuesday 14th Sep, with the general release on Tue 28 Sep.

Right now the main focus is on implementation tasks. These are often more detailed and time consuming than one might expect.

For example, converting the new improved facial expressions from layers in an Illustrator file into working Female Agent art assets requires lots of careful planning. Here’s a screen grab of the documentation for it:

It's straightforward, just complex.  The to-do list is now full of tedious and intricate work like this. 😩

Rewriting
From time to time I play through the whole game from scratch, just to remind myself of the overall pacing and flow (when you’re working for a long time on a single scene, it’s easy to lose perspective). I did this on Friday and the experience was quite reassuring: even though the sex scene was hard to write, it feels good and “right” in a way that it didn’t previously. I’m nervously excited about community feedback on this one. I hope you like it. 😬

Rewriting was also a problem in 1.12 (see Q&A: Why did 1.12 take so long?). There was an interesting talk on Discord last week about perfectionism, but I don’t think that’s exactly the problem. I think I just have an inefficient writing process.

The way I write is to start producing content, then rely on my intuition to figure out why it doesn't work and how to fix it.

For 1.14, I’m going to try to spend a little more time in scene planning right at the start. Maybe I can think my way to the problems faster than I can write my way there? 🤔

I know that lots of people in the community are writers, so if anybody has some wisdom to share please do, here or on Discord.

Okay that’s all for today. Next week will be implementation, implementation, implementation, and I’ll report here on Sunday if we’ll make the Sep 14th target date (if not, it’ll be shortly after). Have a lovely Sunday afternoon everyone! See you next week!