Chapter 10 weekly status report (5)

Time for this week's progress update.

I don't have much to say other than I've been keeping up with drawing and writing. We also have the fan art contest ongoing and I'm running other minor tasks in the background, mostly boring organisational stuff that I away end up putting off. 

So I thought I could share with you some insights on what writing ORS is like at this stage. It seemed interesting describing how I've structured one of the small scenes I've written recently. There's nothing explicitly spoilery here, but just in case, read at your own discretion:

In this scene Ian goes to the office, either to start at his new job at Hierofant, or to continue working at Minerva's magazine, so the scene starting point had 2 completely different premises. In this scene, Ian encounters and interacts with various characters, one of them being Minerva herself. This little interaction can happen in a total of 5 different ways, each one taking into account the previous player choices. Furthermore, this is a VN, not a novel, so I want to make the player feel involved in the action. That means adding some choice menus to break up the pace and avoid having the player passively reading text. And rather than adding pointless conversations, it would be ideal that those choices had some direct tie with the theme of the scene, in this case, Ian's standing in the workplace. All of this makes it impossible to write a scene in a straightforward way, but I think the result is well worth the effort.

Finally being able to advance the plot instead of re-structuring all the previous threads is pretty refreshing, though. I'm spending time with the new scenes, trying to make them as interesting and meaningful as possible, so I don't have to go back and polish them in the future after dwelling too much into the untapped potential. 

Anyway, enough rambling, I'll keep you posted as usual. Cheers!