In Her Own Hands update - Mar. 2024 (Patreon)

Just a quick note to let you know that I was able to spend some of the time in between the alpha and public releases of In Their Own Hands and while the content polls were running to continue the revamp of In Her Own Hands.

Back in January, I reorganized all of the story variables into a much more streamlined hierarchy. There is still some work to do on this front, but I am switching focus to reorganizing the passage hierarchy. As I was developing this game, I changed how I did things, but it was too late to go back and fix all of the earlier content. As I started working on what has now become ITOH, I refined this method even more, to where I have a good modular system that seems to be able to handle everything I throw at it with relative ease. This will work even better in IHOH because there's only a single POV to keep track of. I just need to basically dismantle everything and reassemble it. So that's what I'm working on now. I'm going to work room by room, though, so that I can make sure that I can spread this part of the process out over several weeks, for as long as it takes to finish.

I am hoping that by the end of April I will have all of the tasks associated with the passages and variables finished and can start testing all of the content to be sure that it all works the way it is supposed to. Giving myself some of April and all of May to test everything and fix what needs to be fixed means that by June I should be able to start creating new content for In Her Own Hands.

So, quick question (respond in comments): Would you prefer the two games to have the same update schedule but alternate months or compress the update schedule but push out very small updates for both games every month? Or something else? When I say "very small updates," I mean possibly only one scene per game, every month. With the alternating schedule, the updates would be approximately as big as the updates have been these last two months. I am not making any decisions yet, but as I progress I want to keep checking in to gauge preferences to help me make the decision when it's time to do so.

Also, did you know . . . ? You probably recognize the image in this message. It was one of the earliest scenes I put in the very first release of the game. What's on the other side of the door? Most of you have probably seen the couple. In Their Own Hands was originally going to be about them! I started to play around with the idea of multiple protagonists when I was trying to figure out how to have Shaun and Bobby (and Abby and Scarlet when either of them spends the night) move around the apartment independently in a way that makes sense. You can see I kinda figured that out, and it will be implemented in the next update of IHOH.

The next development came when I realized that I couldn't just ignore the pandemic. I ignored it in IHOH because, well, we started making the game in April 2020 when the pandemic first started and we thought it would be over soon. When it went on for as long as it did, I realized that I should say something in the new game. So I made it take place after the end of the pandemic. The other option would have been to make it take place earlier, but then I couldn't use some of the characters. That's when I decided to just start it in 2023 with a younger couple.

You can see some of the original idea in the game content though, with Jenny's exhibitionist bent, with Christian's encouragement. Who knows, maybe when a slightly older Becca goes onto the roof deck, in 2024, she sees Christian and Jenny Cox out there fucking?