Guest writers and Extended Content

Hello all. Happy spring! Unless you're going into winter, in which case still happy spring, but ironically.

I'm trundling away on build 0.5, but today I want to discuss two aspects of the game that I've not brought up here before: guest writers and Extended Content. Related, but different.

Guest writers

This is pretty much what it says on the tin. While I am of course writing the vast majority of the content, I know a lot of other great writers. In the early days I considered collaborating with some of them to make the entire project, but I have a certain style that is not that straightforward to emulate (not to mention the complexities that arise from having to start coordinating a team, etc etc). So while that didn't happen, I still wanted to involve them somehow.

So I've lined some up to write stories for Paardenrust that use the same characters, but explore additional aspects of them that I may not plan on touching on in the main routes. They'll write them as regular stories, and I'll then translate them into VN format, maintaining as much of their stylistic idiosyncracies as possible. The idea is simply to give you guys more content to explore in the world :)

Guest writers are free to choose what they'd like to write about, but I'll have suggestions for each one based on their preferred content and style. I'm not going to say yet who the guest writers are, because things change and it'll be a while, but something to look out for after build 0.5 :)

Extended Content

Extended Content (EC), broadly, has the same goals as the guest writers: putting more content into the world for you to explore. The main difference with EC is that it will involve characters that don't show up anywhere else in the game, and aren't mentioned by any characters outside of that piece of EC. It might also stray from the core art style and even the core gameplay loop. In a way, it can be thought of as free DLC, though I hasten to stress that it will not be paid content. It's just a way for me to involve creators or characters I'd like to write sexy interactive stories about, but who do not fit into the main narrative of Paardenrust.

As an example, I'm delighted to tell you about a piece of EC I'm doing in collaboration with my friend Dream & Nightmare. We'd agreed to do a trade, until I had a better idea: I'd write the story into LOTM instead as a piece of EC, and he could do spritework for it :) We're still discussing the specifics, but the general plot is that Flax can visit Dream and his dad Asyr on their guest farm somewhere on the edges of the valley, and have a little sub-holiday on his holiday.

If you're still curious, I can tell you that this piece of art by Dream has been extremely inspirational for what the EC might be about:

It will of course be possible to disable Extended Content if you're not interested in stories that edge out of canonicity, and you can independently control what content the game serves up to you if some fetishes aren't to your liking. For more information on that (although with spoilers), you can read this past post.

Conclusion

So that's that. The last thing I want to mention is to perhaps assuage any fears of effort-splitting. Because EC content does not have to fit into the main narrative or even use existing characters, it is going to be much easier to write. Far more like a standalone porn story. I will absolutely not devote all my time to EC content, but rather use it as a palate cleanser between the more complex story pieces.

And now back to work on 0.5 :) Cheers.

Zaggy