Progress Report 2022.02.21

Hi friends,

I should not be surprised at this point that February is a short month, but… ahh February is a short month. While I’m happy with what I have accomplished so far, there still is a lot of work to be done on the end of Episode 2. At this point, I think it’s safe to say that the rest of the Order of Lethalis scene is going to take me to the end of February and into March, and then March will be spent wrapping up the Episode with a few unique moments that hinge on the player character’s decisions throughout the episode.

Game Updates

Currently, the next scene is around 25,000 words. When I started working on it at the beginning of the month, my plan was to keep it as linear as possible, but I found this strategy did the scene a disservice. For one, it was turning it into a major lore info dump without any space to breathe. For another, by keeping it so linear, it was taking away player agency, which is rather counterintuitive for a game with choice-based gameplay. And finally, I was missing a lot of moments for character growth and depth, and the characters and subject matter introduced in the scene was becoming inherently uninteresting.

So I scraped some of the sections I was focusing on and the scene has been re-structured around a dialogue tree. This keeps the player engaged in what’s going on, rather than simply delivering information to them. In the words of my partner, “I’m a lot more excited for this scene now, it seemed kind of boring before.” 😂

While I am hoping the wrap this dialogue tree up at the end of the month, February hasn’t given me a lot of time to breathe. I’m used to writing between 40k and 50k a month, but I’ve been writing a lot slower since the January updates. I have a hard time focusing on writing new content since I keep wanting to fix issues with both the public and alpha builds.

Additionally, I reopened the public bug report after I had a few folks ask about it. I had previously closed it because it was too difficult to keep my focus on writing new content when I was also fielding bug reports from the playtester and patron bug report channels in the Discord server. While the public form is helpful in the long term, there are also a lot of useless reports that come through the form (either people trolling, sending me hate mail, or submitting reports that are so unclear that I can’t understand the problem they encountered, let alone how to replicate and fix it).

I think the ideal solution is to find a volunteer I trust (probably my partner) to check the form for me and delete anything that isn’t actually helpful so I don’t get sidetracked worrying about the next thing that ends up in the form.

Other Updates

For the non-Wayfarer-related things, Part 2 of my article on Romance in Gaming will come out later this week. Next month I’ll be starting work on some of the Twine guide/template things, so I am looking forward to that.

I’m hashing out a few ideas for my interactive fiction compendium and I’m taking a bit of an analytical approach to it. I figure that if I want to write about common narrative structures and gameplay in IF gamebooks, then I should play as wide a range of games as possible. I already have a list of suggestions, but if you’re into IF gamebooks and have a game you think I should play, let me know!

I am looking for:

• Completed and published games (no WIPs)
• Ideally standalones. If they are part of a series, then the series should be complete.
• Interactive fiction gamebooks only. This means they are text adventures, delivered through some type of prose. I am not looking at visual novels (interactive fiction with static sprites and backgrounds) for this project.
• Any engine/platform. A lot of suggestions that have been given to me are ChoiceScript games (either Choice of Games titles or Hosted Games titles), but I’d like to move outside of COG, too.
• Any genre (though I tend to stay clear of paranormal romance and urban fantasy since they’re not my cup of tea)

Wayhaven Chronicles, Fallen Hero, Sabres of Infinity, Soul Stone War, and Superstition have already been suggested to me, so no need to repeat them.

As always, thank you all so much for your support! 💕