Weekly Progress Update [4/JAN] (Patreon)

Hey all!!

Sorry for the scarcity of updates, holiday season took over my life and the lack of sun is wreaking havoc on my will to live 💔 I hope 2026 has started off well for you, on a personal level!! 🥂

I do have positive progress to report: I started writing for CH15 this week! Still lots of things to iron out for the rest of the story in terms of structure, but I've felt inspired to write certain scenes you'll get in this chapter and figured I might as well get started on it. Pre-planning every single detail before starting to write it isn't really my style anyway.

I can't tell you much about what part of the chapter I'm writing yet, however, since that's heavily spoiler-territory. I'll try and describe it as best as possible without giving away what it'll be, though. Let's just say it'll be a massive, climactic moment in the entire story where you as the player can essentially hit the nuclear button and fuck your Crown's whole life up if you're so inclined.

It'll absolutely be heavily signposted, too. Other characters will explicitly tell your Crown NOT to do this. They'll be begging them to come to their senses. The fun part about this being a game, however, is that you can choose to ignore them and commit to making the absolute worst decisions. And it won't lead to a bad ending/game over, either! It's something that will affect your Crown for the rest of the entire game 👀

And if you're worried that it will fuck up the romance: depending on who your LI is, it will cause at least some conflict, but it won't actually mess up the romance either. I'm framing it in such a way where the Crown's decision here can be understandable enough to the LI that they won't immediately get the ick and dump them lol, kinda like... let's say it was made under extreme mental duress and desperation, combined with a bit of poor judgment.

Some LIs will react worse to it than others, though, but that's for my angst lovers out there: if you are a fan of hurt/comfort (or hurt/no comfort, depending on the LI) you should give this choice a go once you come across it :)

That aside, now that we've arrived at the ending of Act 1, I'm having to recalibrate exactly how the rest of the LI/romance arcs are going to play out throughout the rest of the story. The divergences are going to be huge. Each LI's subplot ties into the main plot in some way, so the challenge for me is to try and figure out what happens in the story with the other LIs that you aren't romancing.

For example, A's got a whole family thing going on that will play a huge role later on in the story. But if you're not romancing A, that subplot never comes up. So I can either just push that aside as a "this will resolve itself post-game" thing, or try and deal with it as an aside in the story.

Considering how many plot threads I'm already having to balance, however, I'm leaning towards the approach of "the subplot of the LI who you don't main will resolve their issues after the game has ended". I just don't have the space to deal with all 4 LI subplots at the same time. Plus, this way, it'll encourage players to play each route, as each LI will reveal new sides of the main plot and the history/conflicts in Arsur 🤯

I'm still going to try and work in hints to the non-main LIs' subplots in each route, though. Kinda like how you find out D is half-peri a little later if you're not romancing them, whereas those who are on their romance route find out several chapters earlier because of the (spoiler) incident.

That's all I've got for you this week! I'm hoping my winter depression gets a little better as the days start getting a little bit longer, and I'm looking forward to writing many parts of CH15. It's going to be a big one. Oh, and of course, tier 2/3 members can look forward to R (tier 2) and A's (tier 3) CH14 POVs 🫶🏼

See you next week! 💖