Meet me tomorrow ...

Another quick update for you. Excited to say that - while its still kinda buggy - I have all the basic elements of Claire's hookup encounter now working, meaning the next time you visit the nightclub, it won't feel quite so empty! 

I'm switching gears today, turning my attention back to the second Heather and Jennifer quests. If you played the last iteration of Girl Games, then you'll know that I already have the second Heather scene written - it's the part where she takes you shopping at the mall for a wig and underwear, and where you learn how to tuck. 

Now, I know one of the criticisms I've been getting in forums is that I seem to be removing content with each new 'version' of Girl Games, and yeah, that's totally valid, I get it. After all, in 0.5.1 we do now only have one encounter with Heather, even though I'd written out all her scenes up to and including the Games itself in 0.4.1. 

So I figured now might be a good chance to explain why I've taken all her stuff out of the game and am slowly putting it back in! You see, in this current (and hope-to-god final) iteration of Girl Games I don't want the events to feel quite so railroaded as they did last time around. 

Even now, Heather tells you to meet her at the mall on Saturday and you have another X many days to wait until that happens. But I'm going to rework that so that instead she'll tell you "Meet me at the mall tomorrow". It's only a tiny change, but it demands a totally different kind of logic - a small extra function to check what in-game day it currently is, then dynamically add in the new Heather quest which is set to trigger on the following day, plus more logic in the quest listener function to check for these kinds of quests. 

Same with Jennifer's second quest. I'm planning to rewrite the end of quest one to have her say "Here's my number. Call me when you've got hold of a pair of panties." 

They're both only small tweaks, but things like this should make the game feel a bit more like the story is moving at a pace set by you, the player, rather than you're just killing time on campus, waiting for the next set-in-stone event to happen on X day. 

And its these small tweaks that mean I want to really look at what I wrote last time with Heather's scenes (and with the new Jennifer ones I put in), making sure that this way of thinking continues through the rest of the game, and why I haven't just dropped the as-it-is version of Heather's storyline back into the game and added "more content" around it, as everyone is so desperate to tell me to do on the forums! 

Trust me, I more than anyone want this game to have a shit ton of content. But I want that content to feel dynamic and fun and like something that you the player discover at your own pace, rather than it just triggering on X day or whatever. 

I hope all this makes sense! And if it doesn't, just rest assured that I'm going to be working super hard all of today on the stuff set out above, and as soon as I have Heather and Jennifer's scenes up and running - even if they're a little scrappy - I'll be sharing a private Test Build so you can take a peek the new stuff. x