Chrysanthemum Games

Weekly Update - 25 December 2023

Hello everyone!

I am pleased to report that I got everything done this week that I was planning to and then some. I have a new outline for FoA, including several new scenes with various characters that I'm going to write as I create the second draft, and a list of things to be changing as I go through the rest. Which means that (after I take the day off on Christmas and maybe Boxing Day), I may actually be able to rewrite the prologue in time for the BIP release this month. In any event...

Bonus Content - Alekto POV

Hey all!

In line with the results of the poll last month, here's a little something of Alekto during Chapter Nine, this time featuring Meg and Tis, too. (Naturally, this vignette assumes they were both safely rescued earlier.)

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“You know, it would be okay. If this had rattled you.” Megaira runs the edge of her reed pen along her chin, the soft feather she’s attached to the end of it for no good reason brushing back and forth under he...

Art Commission - Lethe

Hey all!

Here we are with the final piece of the River Deities series by @gncrezan; this is Lethe! She's definitely a little bit more hale and healthy here than she is in the majority of the story. I really loved the color palette we ended up with, here.

Next Tuesday I'll post a little bonus, in the form of the four river pieces combined. :)

Weekly Update - 18 December 2023

Hey everyone!

This week has been kind of a weird one. On the personal side of things, my holiday travel was delayed after I spent over ten hours on a train on Saturday (on what was meant to be a five-hour trip, but stopped partway through for some rain to pass and then had to go back because the storm dropped a tree on the tracks and they outright broke apparently). So now I'm back at my place, and the trip has been rescheduled for Wednesday, this time by car with a friend. Here's hopin...

Art Commission - Kokytos

Hey everyone!

I'm not sure how I forgot to post this, but it turns out I now have a slight backlog of commissioned art from the amazing @gnerezan, so... I'll be posting one of these excellent pieces a week for a little while, now.

You may remember the River Deity series from earlier this year with Styx and Acheron; well, here's Kokytos. It's hard to pick my favorite of these characters, because I've actually come...

Weekly Update - 11 December 2023

Hey everyone!

This week was a pretty good one for progress, if I do say so myself. I got the rest of the way through the character creator, including filling in all the descriptive text and implementing the new trait system in it. Additionally, I got the majority of the planning work for the new personality/romance system done. How exactly I'm going to implement all of these things in the rest of the game is, of course, the big question, and one it'll still take some time to handle.

Bonus Content - The Trait System

Hey everyone!

I promised that the first bonus content this month would cover some changes I’m making to the skill system. So, I’ve given something of an overview for those changes below, including my rationale for departing from a traditional numbers-and-checks system, the basics of what I’m doing instead, and how I expect these changes to influence the game.

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Rationale

Generally-speaking, stories of this nature have some ...

Weekly Update - 4 December 2023

Hello everyone!

I hope you're all doing well as we round out the year. 

As some of you have seen, I have a fifteen-item 'editing list' that I want to get through before submitting the game for publication. Having completed steps one and two for now, I'm now hard at work on step three: making a proper character creator. This covers both traits (the way I'm redoing the skill system so no one has to worry about checking math or percentages, which I think will be an improvement),...

The First Draft is Live

Hey everyone!

Just to let you know, the public demo has now been released. You've all had access to it for at least a little while now, but with this, I take the actual step forward of having the whole game out there in the vast sea of the internet.

Or at least, the whole first draft. 

As I've probably said enough times to be annoying, at this point, there's plenty more change to come before the game is submitted for publication, and I hope you'll stick around to see th...

Bonus Content Poll - November

Hey everyone! The poll is pretty straightforward this month. I just need to know if you want me to continue my current series of "post chapter nine" bonus contents with something from Alekto, or if you'd rather see something else from her instead!

BIP(ish) - The Editing Queue

Hey all! 

As one might expect, I don't have anything new I can show off as a BIP right now, having just finished the draft and now being in that part of the editing stage where I'm mostly figuring out what I need to do and in what order. But the spirit of the BIP is previewing what's going on, so in that spirit I present to you a tidied-up version of my editing queue, along with some explanations of what each of the steps actually amounts to. I hope you're excited for what's to com...

Weekly Update - 27 November 2023

Hello again, all!

The early access version of the game's end should now be there for all of you; I hope those of you just getting around to it (or who do so in the next little while) enjoy it!

Meanwhile, I'm beginning the editing phase. The first step has been to make a sort of 'reverse outline,' where I go through the whole game and map out what scenes happen where and what's important about them and all of that. This helps me get the 'zoomed out' view of the whole game, as you w...

Early Access - Chapter Ten and the Epilogue

Hello, everyone!

Here we are, on the appointed day, and here it is, the last part of FoA's first draft. I hope the ending satisfies, whichever one you choose, and that those of you who end up with the "Underworld Epilogue" are looking forward to the sequel!

Thank you so much for sticking with me, especially to those of you who've been following the game since the beginning. Your feedback has been invaluable, and everyone's support is very much the reason I was able to get here, to...

Early Access - Chapter Ten and the Epilogue

Hello, everyone!

Here we are, on the appointed day, and here it is, the last part of FoA's first draft. I hope the ending satisfies, whichever one you choose, and that those of you who end up with the "Underworld Epilogue" are looking forward to the sequel!

Thank you so much for sticking with me, especially to those of you who've been following the game since the beginning. Your feedback has been invaluable, and everyone's support is very much the reason I was able to get here, to...

Weekly Update - 20 November 2023

Hey all!

It’s been quite the week. Long story short, I’ve finally finished editing the epilogue, and so it and Chapter Ten begin the Early Access cycle as of right now. If you’re in the Everbloom Tier, you can see it now; Blossoms and Buds, it’ll appear for you on Thursday at noon (AEST). And Seedlings, next Monday is your day. 

For some stats, Chapter Ten and the Epilogue together add 158,868 new words to the game’s total, bring the final number to a 1,269,990-word...

Bonus Content - Charon POV

Hey all! This month's RO POV features Charon in the aftermath of Dionysus's disappearance back to Olympus, with some Hades and a little bit of Lethe, but mostly just a lot of wallowing.

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When Charon is stressed, they exert themself physically.

This is certainly a holdover from much earlier days, when true serenity was impossible, and the best he could hope for was to sublimate less desirable expressions of frustration and emotion into something th...

Weekly Update - 13 November 2023

Hey everyone!

It's been quite a successful week for writing over here—16,000 words later, the epilogue is now at 61k in total. More importantly, I'm done with everyone's epilogue versions except Hekate, and I'm about halfway through hers. This means I can safely give you all a release date for both early access and the public drop of the Chapter Ten/Epilogue chunk, the final part of FoA's first draft!

So! I'm giving myself about the next week to finish up and do edits and tests ...

Weekly Update - 6 November 2023

Hey everyone! 

I'm back again. Things have been going pretty smoothly so far with this last part of the epilogue; I wrote 10,000 new words this week (after the BIP went out), and I've as of now finished the Hades and Hermes route versions of it, and am now working my way through the Charon one. After that, of course, there's Pyri, Alekto, and Hekate to go, but then I'll finally be done! 

I think I'll be most of the way to accomplishing that goal by this time next week, a...

Q&A - Hekate

Hey all!

The last Q&A with this set of questions goes to Hekate! I'm hoping that this slot will be used for a different sort of bonus content related to the editing process next month, but I can't promise that, yet. For now, please enjoy some insight into the Goddess of Magic. :)

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1. What is your greatest desire?

To be the kind of person I can be proud of. Vague and without a definitive point of achievement, I know, but you didn’t ...

BIP - October

Hey everyone!

As promised, this month's BIP includes a brand-new 35,000 words of epilogue, which is not done yet, but is definitely in its last stage. (The trick, you see, is all the variations, but I'm getting through them!)

I hope you enjoy what we've got, anyway. You can find the BIP here. 

Thanks as always for reading!

Bonus Content Poll - October

Hello all!

Before I release the WIP out into the wild in about an hour from now, I'm curious to know what you want to see from next month's bonus content. I'm going to go ahead and guess that something from Charon when the PC was away would be welcome, so instead I'll ask: who would you like to see them processing their feelings with? 

Weekly Update - 30 October 2023

Hey everyone!

It's the last Monday of the month, so this is sort of my summation of the month's progress as well as this last week's. Right now, the epilogue comes in at 35k words (a number some of you might recognize as my most recent estimate of how long it would be) and... well, there's still more to go. I feel like the shocked pikachu meme sometimes.

Anyway, 35k isn't too bad for a month, and I definitely don't have another 35k to go (I'm going to try estimating again...

Weekly Update - 23 October 2023

Hello everyone!

This week was a pretty good one for progress—I wrote another 11,000 words on the epilogue. Less fortunately, perhaps, it's turning out to be considerably longer than I anticipated. At the beginning of the month, I thought it might come out to 15,000 words in total, but right now it's sitting at 22k and definitely still going. I'd say I'm about halfway through the last scene, and I now expect it to hit around 35k words in total. 

All to say, I may not quite f...

Bonus Content - Hades POV

Hello everyone!

I realized thanks to a message on tumblr that I've inadvertently fallen out of my usual schedule with updates; somehow I've moved to posting things on weeks 1 and 3 of the month, rather than 2 and 4. But, honestly, this kind of works better for me, because now I'm not trying to write a bonus content at the same time as I'm prepping the BIP, so for now we'll go with it and see how well it works over time. 

I've adjusted the pinned post accordingly. To clarify, ...

Weekly Update - 16 October 2023

Hello all!

The epilogue continues apace. I wrote about the same amount as last week, and I am now past the group part of the Underworld epilogue and into the individual parts that vary with route. These will have more variation than any other part of the epilogue, not unexpectedly, but I'm planning to try and keep it short and sweet. For now, the estimate is still that I'll be done by the end of the month, but I am going to try and pick up the pace a bit next week, in spite of some appo...

Weely Update - 9 October 2023

Hello, all!

As you may have noticed, Patreon has a new look. My feelings about this are mixed, but the most annoying thing is definitely that all the italics on my previous posts seem to be gone, so that's... a thing that happened. Apologies if you're reading through something and aren't sure of tone due to missing emphasis.

In better news, I've gotten stuck into the writing on the epilogue this week. I was traveling for a couple of days, so I only managed about 5,000 words, but f...

Q&A - Hermes

Hey everyone!

Hermes is up in the questionnaire rotation this month, so here's his take on the latest set of questions. I do think this one is quite influenced by the things I've just been writing, in which Hermes is definitely giving some insight on his own recent character development to the PC. So some of these answers are quite different from what they might have been a few chapters ago!

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1. What is your greatest desire?

Uhh, h...

Weekly Update - 2 October 2023

Hello everyone, and welcome to October! Hard to believe she's here already, but at this point I've given up on feeling 'current' and must accept that things are always here before I'm ready for them, I think. 

Anyway, as many of you know, the BIP went out just a couple of days ago, and Chapter 10 is in a state of 'finished first draft.' That means it's time to get going on the epilogue, and to that end, I have outlined the first of the 2 1/2 scenes that will be included in that. I ...

BIP - September

Hello everyone!

Here it is, this month's BIP. This one contains Chapter Ten in its entirety, which is now just a little less than 96k. It was more than that, but my editing process trimmed a few things and outright chopped a large option I'd written out for a scenario that turned out to be impossible (two variables being the case at the same time). I did ...

Bonus Content Poll - September

Hey everyone!

Hades is up for the RO POV this month, so let me know what you'd like to see from him!

BIP to follow in an hour. :)