Progress Report

Greetings, everyone!

This week has been all about writing, and boy, am I getting into the swing of things. Seeing all my ideas go from mere concepts to actual dialogue and narration is incredibly rewarding. For the first time, Supermodel's story is starting to feel real to me. 

So far, I have written six whole chapters for the first version of the game. Most of them are pretty long and yet short enough that you shouldn't miss the save function. I have discussed this before, but it bears repeating: You won't actively save and load games in Supermodel. Instead, the game autosaves your progression whenever you are on the character selection menu. You can replay any chapter, card game match, or sex scene in the game at any point without having to manage half a million saved games. The downside is that you have to finish a chapter before your progress gets saved, so you can't stop playing midway through one (well, you can, but it means having to restart that chapter later). Supermodel will be divided into bite-sized chunks in a way that Long Live the Princess wasn't. Hopefully, this should lead to players playing "just one more chapter" again and again, but that comes down to the strength of the writing.

And I have to say, I'm delighted with the writing so far. One of the main inspirations for Supermodel's storytelling is the Science Adventure series of graphic novels (such as Steins;Gate and Chaos;Head), and the chapters I've written this week certainly show the telltale signs of that legacy. The pacing is relentless, while the events are fantastic yet plausible, and the technobabble actually makes scientific sense. A lot of this comes from Sybil Hawkins, one of the main characters in the cast. Writing a character who is more intelligent than me (by far) has been interesting, but I feel like I've carried it off here. I can't wait to introduce you to her (and vice-versa).

But what does it mean that I've written six chapters? Where does that put the overall progress? To answer those questions, I need to give you a simplified overview of the scope of the game's first release.

The primary concerns of this version will be to introduce you to the main cast, set up a threat to push events along and get all the individual pieces into place so that the photography card game becomes playable and makes sense within the context of the plot. In other words, this first version will get the plot to the point where Michael Sharpe is taking pictures of at least some of the female superheroes at STALWART, a giant leap from the start of the story where he's never even met any of them. By the time you get to the final scene of this release, you will also have a decent understanding of how the porn will fit into the story, even if there won't be any actual sex scenes just yet. We will work ourselves up to those and tease them a bit without spoiling the tension by going the full mile immediately. Expect to start with suggestive scenes, move into nudity, and finally, sex. 

To reach these goals, I estimate that I'll need somewhere between 10 and 14 chapters, depending on how I structure the final sections. That might make it sound like I'm only halfway through the script, but that's not entirely accurate. The first four chapters, which I have already finished writing, were by far the most challenging of the whole bunch. The remaining chapters are a breeze to write in comparison. This means I should be able to keep a steady pace and reach the end of the first draft in record time. I will need that, too, for the year is quickly starting to run out of months.

Until next time!