Progress Report 2022.02.07.

Hi friends,

Another February has rolled around! A year ago, I launched my Patreon and started the process of taking making this game from a hobby project to a full-time job. I’m so grateful for all of you and your support of this project; Wayfarer wouldn’t even be close to the kind of game it is without you. I am so blown away by how far it’s come since then. This time last year, I was just starting Episode 1 Route B and spent most of my time worrying about the Twine editor lag and figuring out how to merge multiple story files into one.

(As a side note, that problem got solved ages ago (phew 😅), but I did recently put together a little tutorial on my development blog on how that process actually works. So, if you’re interested in Twine things, you can find that here!)

Games Updates

I have started work on the next section of Episode 2, which sees the MC through the meeting with the Order of Lethalis. I have about 5000 words of new content down and the base dialogue tree is shaping up nicely. While there are some variations involved based on your choices, most of it is structurally the same. This is because regardless of how things happen, this scene delivers important lore and information to the player, so they always need to walk away knowing the same things. I am hoping that once I get the base version fleshed out, I can copy it over to the other variations and tweak/edit from there to fit differing circumstances. This is a much easier process than the crossing continuity progression in the gala scene.

I have started to post snippets/previews from WIP parts of new content. I don’t have a set schedule yet (I may end up choosing a day of the week later down the line and always posting a WIP snippet on that day), but you can find them under the sneak peaks tag. I’ve left the wip-snippet channel in the Patreon Discord up, so if you want to discuss any WIP content, that’s the channel to go to.

Finally, if you missed it, I shared the 2022 roadmap last week. You can check it out here!

Bonus Content

For Patrons with access to bonus content, I am changing up how I am approaching it. Because I want to create both a Twine guide and an interactive fiction guide this year, bonus content is going to shift away from Wayfarer-specific things (lore posts, process stuff, character profiles, etc.) to focus on Twine and interactive fiction development things. I’ll be using bonus content as an opportunity to write articles, early chapters, and templates for both guides. I would like to still do occasional Wayfarer-specific bonus content, but since I don’t want to overwork myself, it will likely be one-off things when I have something interesting to share.

While I want to keep the monthly bonus content vote available, I’m not sure how I am going to approach that yet. February will not have a bonus content vote as I will be publishing Pt 2 of my article on Romance in Gaming.

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