Games by JimD Newsletter – ZE:SH Part 3 Release Set

Welcome to my 53rd newsletter!  I am in the midst of a home renovation which had me lose about a week of work as I spent five days in a hotel waiting for pipes under my house to be repaired. That slowed me down a bit, but I still made considerable progress on Safe Havenand Out for Blood. The biggest news is that Part 3 of ZE:SH will be published on March 3, 2022. The final version is in to Hosted Games, and a price has been set at $4.99 USD. I will actually explain a bit about how pricing works below, but there will also be a sale for the first week it’s available. I’m just excited for the release and can’t wait to see how everyone enjoys the continuation of the story with the characters that you’ve been saving.

In this newsletter, I will talk about ZE: Safe Haven, Parts 3 and 4 and the True Faith patch for Vampire: The Masquerade - Out for Blood

Let’s get started.

Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven, Part 3 & 4

Part 3 is now at 680,000 words, an increase of 8,000 more words since this time last month. I mostly worked on bug fixes and additions that people requested from beta testing. There are still other things I would like to add, but it’s always a balance on revisiting old chapters or continuing to progress the story.

Turning to Part 4. It’s at 40,000 words so far, which is not as far as I would like it to be. However, my focus has been to make Part 3 as polished as possible. I had extra time to work on it after I received my files back from the editor and so I worked until the absolute deadline. I think it was worth the extra time I spent.

I’m going to turn to a controversial topic now, and it relates to romantic options. I had considered making a change to the game in which there would be no age-based restrictions on the character you could romance. For example, you cannot enter into a relationship with Brody or Madison if your character is a soldier or police officer or other adult background. I don’t generally like restricting players in my games, so I considered eliminating such limitations and allowing players to have more freedom in their possible romantic interests. Much of the restriction is based on American law that states that people under the age of eighteen cannot have intimate relationships with those eighteen or older. This isn’t true everywhere. In some states, that age is sixteen. When we get outside of America, that age can go even lower.

But the truth is that the age of consent is not really the only issue here. There is an age of maturity at which point people can evaluate the difference between a healthy relationship and one that is manipulative or abusive. I’m no expert in this subject, but my biggest concern with loosening the age-based romantic restriction is to normalize relationships with large age gaps. Most readers have no problem with a teen MC (16ish) romancing Bailey (19ish) for example. But how about Rachel, who is in her thirties? The age gap is far wider. What about a commander MC dating Brody or Madison?

Instead of eliminating restrictions entirely, I am considering alternatives to give players the most choice while minimizing the roleplay of potentially abusive relationships. One idea is to add age as a customized stat during character development. Therefore you can choose an age range for your MC and not age range will be used to determine the characters you can romance. This will actually be a significant change, since I want characters to address your age in game and also allow you to age up as the story progresses.

As I have more information, I will let you all know.

Let’s turn to another matter — the price of Part 3. Hosted Games usually sets price at around $1 per 100,000 words. That would mean that Part 3 should be priced at around $7. I suggested that we keep the price at around $5 to keep it in line with earlier parts. Hosted Games agreed and will also provide a discount (most likely $1, so the price will be $4) if purchased in the first week of release. They also want to raise the price of Part 2. Originally it was priced at around $3. This price was set when the word count was around 300,000. I happened to add around 200,000 words in the release we called Part 2.5. Therefore, Part 2 now sits at around 500,000 words, and therefore, the price was raised.

Since Part 3 is an extremely long story with lots of content to experience during replays, I feel it is worth $5 and hope you do too.

Vampire: The Masquerade — Out for Blood

I continue to work on the True Faith patch for Out for Blood. I actually decided to add more to the patch, which is why it’s still not sent to Choice of Games for review. Most of my attention this month was on ZE:SH Part 3, but I will get back to Out for Blood very soon.

That’s all for this month. Until next time, stay safe and thank you for all of your support!