Q&A: Why did 1.12 take so long?

On Discord, ExcitedCrawfish asked me why 1.12 took two months to develop.  I answered in the channel, but thought that people following here might be interested in the answer as well.

If any of you guys have other questions about anything please just ask, this project is publicly funded so it's important to be as transparent as possible.

Ah!  This is something I tried to touch on in the last couple of dev reports but obviously I wasn't explicit enough, sorry.  

The quick answer is that decision making is a factor that's time consuming but probably not obviously apparent from the player's perspective.  

For example: as noted in the 1.12 reflections post, in the two months of 1.12's development, for 50% of that time the action was set in Scotland, not Malaysia, and the sex scenes were totally different (involving selecting a partner from Tinder, and having sex with him in a safehouse as part of a training exercise). 

 Like I said...these scenes weren't working for me in testing.  I had to figure out why and also invent a solution (changing the mission spec from "hooker" to "topless barmaid" so the training sequence could be cut; deciding to switch the action to a new country and repurpose the Max scene instead).  

Part of the reason this happened was because at the start of the 1.12 sprint I'd felt under a lot of pressure to get that release out fast so I didn't want to fuck around too much in the planning stages: we had a good idea and I decided to just jump into it and get working, and fix problems as they came up on the ground.  

Ultimately I think this was a bad decision because the time I "saved" in the planning stage ended up costing a lot more in the writing stage, as I laboured to save scenes that ended up being cut.  

When it came to the actual date scene itself: what probably looks like it could be cut-and-pasted straight out of 1.6 actually needed a significant amount of testing, tweaking and editing.  

Again a lot of the time was spent in decision making – the Malaysia sex scene with Max has a different pace and feel than the Dubai scene did. 

 My method for doing this was to rebuild everything scene-by-scene in the new engine.  As I was doing that I'd encounter problems that needed creative thinking time to solve. 

For example: in 1.6, Kate chooses whether or not to date Max before she's aware of the side quest opportunity, which is optional.  That leads to two variations of the date scene in 1.6 – one where she's bugging his phone, one where she isn't.  In 1.12 this was changed around – Kate now gets the side quest first, and the date always now has a sexpionage element, which can be solved in a non-sexual way (by causing a distraction in the restaurant) or a sexual way (by going back to his hotel room afterwards).  

So this solution required a few things: writing changes to the meet scene (at the pool), a new briefing scene with Wheeler at the embassy, some new quest logic including the restaurant distraction scene, and various changes to the date structure itself.  

Absolute best case, all this work gets done in a day (and I defy you to find an actual professional writer who would tell you that's not a solid day's work) – and wow, 5% of your dev month just got used up.  

There are a few other changes like this that probably look like nothing, but take time to solve (for instance and off the top of my head: the "first kiss" scene at the restaurant was tricky to pull off without feeling forced; the decision point in the hotel lobby about going up to Max's room went through several iterations before he stopped coming across like a sex pest; the decision points in the hotel room scene itself were totally changed, which meant totally changing the 1.6 passage structure).  

Basically; it's harder than I make it look.  🤷🏻‍♂️

REFLECTIONS
To learn from my bad decision to rush through the planning stage, I've started a new working practice: when I can feel like a scene isn't working (which is often 😩), I now force myself to get away from the keyboard and go for a walk and think seriously through the problem.  

That helped a few times in 1.12 (particularly solving some problems caused by a mischaracterisation of Max in some of the early drafts).  It's also helped a lot with 1.13's planning, I've made some key changes that were faster to think through than to write through.  I'm sure that new practice will save time overall.  

Secondly I think it's fair to ask does all this extra sweat actually make a difference?  i.e. could I have just cut and pasted in the 1.6 code, and done a find and replace for "Dubai" with "Malaysia"?  

🤷🏻‍♂️ Maybe.  I've just always agonised over the writing.  I know it's just porn, and it's just a video game, and nobody thinks I'm Ian Fleming or Ernest Hemingway.  

But I really give a fuck about the writing, and that the details make sense and that the characters are real and believable – as much as I can make them, anyway, with my limited powers.  

Part of me thinks that agony is part of the game's "secret sauce" – that the audience can somehow detect and appreciate the love that goes into it, and that's partly why this game is played and supported and talked about so much.  But I know I still have a lot of improving to do so maybe this is an area I could improve in, idk.    

Okay, that was a nice break but I'm gonna get back to agonising over the 1.13 storyboard now 😀

 Thanks for this question @ExcitedCrawfish, FA is always my favourite topic of conversation so it was nice to pull back the curtain a little bit, let me know if there's anything more I can clarify on this