Devblog #87 (Patreon)

Hey Wizards! Shady Character One here!

You know how complicated things have a tendency to creep up on you? They definitely like to do that with me. And last week's progress on the game was mostly spent figuring and plotting out Elizabeth's plotline. I mean, her plotline was actually decided long ago, nothing particularly new there. But actually inserting it into the game's timeline turned out to be much more of an issue than I initially anticipated.

You see, Elizabeth's story is very dependent on the school life events in the game like exams and the tournament. And your progress with her will be different depending on the time of the year you are progressing your relationship with her. Starting with your date with her, her next couple of events are very sensitive to when the next exams will take place. The player shouldn't be able to start this part of her story too close to the exams, but I also should give them as much of a chance to progress the story as possible whenever possible. Especially because there is a very big time gap between the winter exams and the spring ones. So if the players just barely miss the winter exams window, they will have to wait a long time for the spring ones. Then again, if they progress her storyline slowly, or just start it a bit later, spring exams would be just perfect for those players.

So I had to sit down and see if I can tweak the dates a bit to get the dates to as comfortable as possible a position for both types of players. I cannot do too much tweaking, because most of said events are themselves tied to certain days of the year. But when all the possible tweaking was done (I did manage to win a couple of extra days for the players). Well, one can only do so much.

But now another part of this puzzle stood in front of me — actually tracking all that. It was not that big of a deal, but it was still something that I needed to add in. Because even though I knew from the start that Elizabeth's storyline would be like that, I didn't consider anything to track these additional variables, so important for her. I also didn't want to add too many variables to track because the more you have, the more chance you give yourself to make a mistake.

All this taken care of, at least so far, I also wrote Elizabeth's seventh event, which brings us almost to her finish line (or maybe it is better to call it a pinnacle). It is also as far as I can implement her storyline anyway, since the earliest you will be able to get her eighth event is after the winter exams results, and the game doesn't go that far yet. We will have to think about that and how well her whole storyline falls into the academic year a bit later.

For now, that's all. I'll see you next week.

Shady Character One, out!