Devblog #75 (Patreon)

Hey Wizards!

Shady Character One here!

I am going to be straight with you all here: I didn't think writing a "choices matter"-type story is this difficult. I'm not saying that it is very difficult, but rather that I expected it to be much easier. This might be my personal problem, and I don't mean that I don't enjoy writing these events and storylines, but whenever I get to the point where I need to take into account something that you have done or didn't do, I get this "uuugh" thought in my head. Not because I don't want to do it, but because there are now two main pathways in front of me.

First one is to write a very different part of the event for every possible situation. I do do this sometimes, but when absolutely necessary - but just think about it. I'll have to write two, three, four, or sometimes even more versions of the text, most of which will never be seen by a casual player. That does have a certain appeal - knowing that your game "has depth," so to speak. But also, it's a lot of effort and time that could be spent elsewhere - writing new events and pushing the story forward instead of going wider.

The second one is to write several short snippets for each possibility, that do cover the basic "yes, I remember you did or have that," but don't really go any deeper. But every time I do that I have the same "ugh" running through my mind. Because... why even bother then? Writing several similar lines (or blocks) of text with very slight variations. Feels like a cop-out and another waste of time.

So every time I come to a situation like that, I have to make the hard choice: which of the "ugh" ways I should go today? I hope that every time I make this choice, I do it with the best intentions in mind, but honestly, I don't know. I guess every one of us has this desire to go the path of lowest resistance. I picked up this topic because as I'm writing the ending to the second Trial, I'm getting a lot of those. Lots of things need to be addressed: How did you do on this trial? How did you perform on the previous one? Are you dating anyone yet? Should I address that at all? Etc., etc.... But the writing is moving forward, and it's really only this final stretch that's left.

I actually gave an early Trial build to a few dedicated players, and their feedback has been quite positive so far, so it seems I likely won't have to hold the Trial release back for reworks. Yay!

Violet's date event got a bit more attention from me too, and now it looks like something I can be happy with, so we can add that to the "done" pile too. Now I just have to code in the sprites and do all the translations. Easy-peasy.

Well, I'd better not waste any more time here and get back to the important stuff. I'll see you in a week.

Shady Character One, out!