In the lead-up to the release of Honor Bound I'm sharing posts about some of the Honor Bound characters, my thoughts when I was starting to create them, and the writing process.
Here's the one for Denario Vecoli a week before it goes public. I hope you enjoy!
2024-10-24 16:00:14 +0000 UTC View PostIn the lead-up to the release of Honor Bound I'm sharing posts about some of the Honor Bound characters, my thoughts when I was starting to create them, and the writing process.
Here's the first one, a week before everyone else gets to see it. I hope you enjoy!
2024-10-17 16:00:13 +0000 UTC View PostIf you'd like to have a sneak peek at a blog post a couple of days before everyone else gets to see, please take a look! It's about how you can shape your Honor Bound character, in terms of personality, appearance, and skills, and my thoughts about the writing process for all of them.
I hope you enjoy!
https://hpowellsmith.com/building-your-honor-bound-character/
2024-10-14 15:00:13 +0000 UTC View PostYou may already have heard about the price increase on Patreon's iOS app and the switch to first-of-the-month payments only.
Patreon recommends that I increase prices on the iOS app which I'm not going to do. Instead, I'm delaying the switch for the foreseeable future (Patreon says it'll force the switch at the end of 2025).
This means if you're an iOS user i...
2024-10-09 11:00:11 +0000 UTC View PostI’m delighted to let you know that I’ve sent the full draft of Honor Bound to my editor Abby!
Beta testing started in mid-August and since then I’ve added around 50,000 words to the game. Some of this was expanding things throughout the game, and most of it was expanding the epilogue sequence to include LOTS more detail about where the PC is living at the end, their career ...
2024-10-01 16:00:21 +0000 UTC View PostHello all, and happy September! At this stage of a project, things start getting a bit all over the place, and so I've been less disciplined about letting you know what's going on than I'd have liked - apologies for that, and I hope to keep on track better!
I've spent the month so far responding to beta tester feedback, which has been extraordinarily helpful. Every time I go through this process, I'm floored again by how thoughtful and detailed the notes I get are. So I've been busy!
Afternoon, everyone! I hope you're doing well. September is flying by for me, and I'll be putting up more of a detailed update about what I've been up to later today, but for now...
Here's early access to a Honor Bound mini prequel game! It's called Recruitment Day, and in it the Honor Bound PC is 17 years old. It's around 8000 words long.
Link to play: Honor Bound: Recruitment Day
Pa...
2024-09-20 14:00:15 +0000 UTC View PostI've been on holiday for the last couple of weeks and had a truly lovely time with family in the countryside. That two weeks coincided with the first fortnight of beta testing, for which you can see here the changes and fixes I've been making. So far I've been getting really thoughtful, helpful feedback and I appreciate it hugely!
The changes I've been making have been r...
2024-08-30 19:42:53 +0000 UTC View PostDrumroll... it's that time... time for beta testing!
For almost a week, I've been going through feedback from six randomised playthroughs from continuity readers, fixing many typos and sorting out little (and medium-sized) errors. And now the full game is ready for private testing!
If you'd like, you can sign up to test the whole game here.
In the meantime: I've...
2024-08-14 19:02:12 +0000 UTC View PostI guess it doesn't really count as NaNoWriMo if the month's finished, does it?
Anyway, since the 26th July when I finished the Honor Bound draft, I've been doing some various edits in response to playtester feedback - some expansions and tweaks, and some fixes. I've also pretty much done the cheats and hints, though I'll be checking through them again after beta testing and any other revisions are done in case the achievement guides are out of date.
Here's some of what I did:
<... 2024-08-05 14:37:35 +0000 UTC View PostI'm absolutely delighted to let you know that I've finished the Honor Bound draft and sent it off!
The next thing I need to do is finish off the cheats and hints, then sort through any editorial notes that come in, and then beta testing.
The public Chapter 1-7 demo is still up until the beta testing begins when I'll be taking it down. (I've made quite a few changes sin...
2024-07-26 19:00:06 +0000 UTC View PostThis week was brilliant because I finished the first Honor Bound draft, and also challenging because everyone in my household except me had various stomach bugs. So it was a tiring one for a number of reasons.
I've done a bunch of playtesting, and my wife played through the whole game which was immensely helpful and flagged up a lot of things I hadn't realised.
She is a big Savarel f...
2024-07-21 19:53:10 +0000 UTC View PostWell... my initial first Honor Bound draft is done!
That's 525000 words that I've written for Honor Bound in 15 months.
The work isn't over yet though by any means.
Tomorrow I'm going to start playtesting... a lot. I've already playtested the first two-thirds fairly thoroughly, and have done some work on Chapters 9 and 10, but I very much need to test Chapters 11 and 12 because they branch a lot and there's bound to be some wonky continuity going on there that I need to find...
2024-07-15 18:00:36 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 12 is nearly done. It's nearly done!! This week I was mostly drafting that part of the game, though I also moved some things around - there's a scene I was going to have in the final chapter and then moved elsewhere because it worked better there.
Right now I'm ahead of where I wanted to be - which is great for obvious reasons, and also because every so often I realise there's something I need to edit, either earlier in the chapter or earlier in the game. And I've got an ongoing...
2024-07-12 20:05:07 +0000 UTC View PostI'm doing a little NaNoWriMo to keep my momentum, so I'm going to do these public posts weekly until I've finished my draft.
I've been working on the Chapter 12 first draft, which I'd already coded. I'm pleased I did it that way - it's the first time I've done it - as it meant that I could sweep from Chapter 11 to 12 and continue the writing mood.
It's mostly gone really well. The amount of words I've got down on the page is great: I tend to get excited and write a lot more when I...
2024-07-05 17:53:07 +0000 UTC View PostHappy Pride, everyone!
As you've probably gathered, I'm having a bit of a busy time of it but here is a very small, belated progress update...
I've finished drafting Chapter 11! It's been a long haul and some of it has definitely had me reminding myself "perfection is the enemy of done", but it's down on the page which I'm delighted about.
July will be my time to get on with writing Chapter 12... and then, bizarrely, I'll be done until I get my editorial notes back!
2024-06-28 16:01:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello all, I hope you're having a good week! I have been deep in a combination of busy writing, a heatwave, and some unpleasantly dramatic insomnia, so didn't end up doing a news update last Friday - but I have been doing a lot of edits on Chapters 4-7, and thought I'd share it here before the public update goes up on the 2nd.
Here's the most up-to-date early access demo...
2024-06-26 16:43:46 +0000 UTC View PostIt's been a funny, busy couple of weeks. I'm sorry for the lateness of this progress update - the end of last week was a bit hectic.
I'm moving towards the finish line. Not sprinting, yet, because I was on holiday in Portugal for one of the weeks this fortnight, but I've coded Chapter 12 and have almost finished coding Chapter 11. My freelance client has asked me for some extra work over the next few days so I'll be prioritising that, but I hope to finish that pesky Chapter 11 section a...
2024-06-10 15:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm delighted to share Honor Bound Chapter 7! You can skip any number of chapters to start at the chapter of your choice, or you can play through the whole thing. You can try loading an old save, but you may need to start a fresh one.
If you have a minute, I'd love to hear your feedba...
2024-06-04 14:00:11 +0000 UTC View PostI can't believe it's just over a year since I announced Honor Bound!
And we're getting towards the end!
Sort of.
In a roundabout kind of way.
This fortnight I got my Chapter 10 notes back from my editor and did my revisions, some of which involved tweaking things so that [certain plot things] are more accessible to a wider number of players. In the meantime I started planning and coding Chapter 12.
Yes that's right, I coded Chapter 12 before the detailed plan for...
2024-05-24 15:20:39 +0000 UTC View PostI'm so pleased that this is the first newsflash in quite some time where I've not been saying something like "I've not done as much as I'd have liked..."
I've had improvements in energy, focus, and back pain - hooray! Yesterday I finished drafting Chapter 10 of Honor Bound - double hooray! And today I playtested Chapters 8-10 more times than I can count - triple hooray!
I've been listening to the 2024-05-10 18:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Here's the readable Chapter 7 excerpt!
A few notes about what the randomiser chose for this excerpt:
The MC is called Specialist Tanse
I think the MC is romancing Korzha, or hinting at it, based on one of the interactions they have (the randomiser must have been feeling romantic!)
Korzha is nonbinary, Savarel is female, Raffi and Matia are male
The starred options are the choices that the randomiser has "chosen" for this playth...
2024-05-07 16:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostHappy April, everyone! Just a reminder that I won't be adding new stories to the Bonus Supplement archive until further notice as I'm focusing my writing time on finishing the Honor Bound first draft.
If you want to access the stories, I recommend making a one-off subscription and then downgrading to a lower tier so you're not paying extra on an ongoing basis without receiving new stories (unless you spe...
2024-04-30 15:00:13 +0000 UTC View PostI'm being a bit of a broken record on this at the moment, but April has been a lot! I'm getting back into my rhythm but the first week of this fortnight involved back pain that meant I couldn't write for most of the week, which was not great (for writing or for general comfort and happiness).
I really appreciated everyone's warm wishes about my name change - I'd been nervous about it but it really means a lot to know that I didn't have to be.
I'm continuing to work on Chapter 10, ...
2024-04-26 15:00:13 +0000 UTC View PostIn this character study set two years before Honor Bound, Raffi encounters some new friends.
Content note: alcohol
Password: amatothecat
The Bonus Supplement master list with the rest of the bonus stories is here!
Important Note: On 30th April, I will put the Bonus Supplement...
2024-04-17 15:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostSo! April continues to be quite a lot between life and medical stuff going on. I have been making more progress with writing Chapter 10, though, which I'm really pleased about. It's a lot of fun putting together these dramatic points, and also drawing out the climactic plot a bit more than in Creme or Royal Affairs - the climax is more like two chapters than one, and I'm doing part 1 at the moment.
I really enjoy writing PCs and NPCs as they're put under more strain and seeing how they ...
2024-04-12 16:00:19 +0000 UTC View PostHello! Just a little short post today, due to the last couple of weeks having been a lot. I'm sorry I missed Friday's usual news slot - a variety of life things ran away with me a bit.
I finished drafting Chapter 9 and started on Chapter 10 this fortnight! I haven't done as much writing as I'd have liked to, but I have been planning and coding which is a good feeling, and I anticipate I'll get more of that done by the end of this week.
Current wordcount: 386510 wo...
2024-04-02 19:16:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Here's Honor Bound Chapter 6! As before, you can skip any number of the earlier chapters to start with the chapter you'd like. You can play it over here.
If you have the time and energy, it's always great to 2024-04-02 19:10:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Florin welcomes a newcomer to the trench.
Florin never used to be this sentimental, but people change.
Content note: trench warfare, references to death; just everyone having a bad time
Password: amatothecat
The Bonus Supplement master list with the rest of the bonus stories is her...
2024-03-20 19:30:13 +0000 UTC View PostLast fortnight involved a stupendous amount of writing in the second week, and this fortnight has been... less so thanks to some medical stuff and general disruption of my usual routines. (Still, I managed to go to a city I've never visited before for a boring admin reason which happened to also be useful for some research for a potential upcoming game, so that was good!)
This Monday I discovered 2024-03-15 14:05:01 +0000 UTC View Post