Update 1/26

Hey guys!

Your girl is writing, and writing, and writing. After a bit of a push through, I was able to get over my little slump last week, and get all of the Saturday Morning complete, and I'm about 3/4 of the way through Saturday Afternoon. I'm up to 3778 lines of code so far and feeling good about it. I think this time around writing has been a little easier because I'm not too concerned with having to draw a whole cast of new characters and venues etc. I'm working with the bulk of what I'll need to for coming releases, so its nice to not have to worry about the building blocks and just tell the story I need to tell.

In other news, I attended the Visual Novel Conference this past weekend and learned a lot of cool stuff from fellow visual novel creators. It was nice hearing from seasoned pros, and learning about their wins and losses while they built their games. One person in particular spoke about how they did 8 game jams over the course of 2 years. I hadn't even thought of game jams before, but hearing them talk about their experience with it made me want to at least check one out some time. The idea of completing a game in such a short time sounds crazy to me (considering the beast I am in the middle of making now) but I think later on down the road it would be cool to challenge myself to do a short and sweet game, to show what I can do with those constraints and to flex my creative muscle a little differently.

A lot of the "creative flexing" I'm doing now with College Craze requires referencing and recognizing patterns, arcs and stereotypes I often see in other games or movies/tv shows. In recognizing them, I get to play the fun game of "well what if...?" It leads me to fun places, but I have my guardrails in with my overall game plot, so I don't go too crazy with it, haha. I think fleshing out my characters has also helped me keep things contained, because for the most part, every character has their motives and personality strongly established. So if I pose a crazy "What if" scenario and get excited by the prospect of it, the character's personality can ultimately dictate whether or not that'll even happen. Like, sure, it would be cool to see Bryce whisk our main character away on a romantic spontaneous road trip to run away from his collegiate duties and discover himself outside of the rigid confines of frat life.... but also Bryce would never do that because we all know how Bryce treats the women in his life.

But I'll pass the question on to you, do you have any cool "What if" scenarios that come to mind when thinking of the characters or plots in the game? (regardless of their characterization, lol) I'd love to hear your thoughts :)