A Detailed Look At Altered Bloodlines (Patreon)

Altered Bloodlines grew from a different story idea I had called Bountiful Passions, a title that will be familiar to those of you who’ve played Unexpected Consequences and dated Kat, as I ended up using it as the title of one of Freya Amour’s books. Bountiful Passions was quite a bit different from Altered Bloodlines. Although Luci didn’t change much, she was always a Freshman photography major at MassArt. She wasn’t originally from the Boston area, though, which was how she and James originally met. The original James was a professional photographer, and he rescued her from the side of the road on his way back to the city from a shoot. Sarah was originally James’ mechanic friend, and Luke and Hannah were dating and both worked at Lux, Luke as a bouncer and Hannah as a bartender. The biggest change for Hayleigh is her mom being an Army Ranger and teaching her to shoot, and the only change for Kelly is the story of how she originally met James.

I ended up hitting a bit of a dead end on my original story, but by then, I’d already locked in the Syndicate and NewGen story lines for Unexpected Consequences, and I’d already decided to place both games in the same universe by having Luci and Hayleigh’s friend Charity in Ocean City and working for Lillian Stuart. That gave me the idea to scrap the Bountiful Passions story and rework the existing characters into Altered Bloodlines. Some elements of Bountiful Passions have survived into Altered Bloodlines beyond mere character names, but I’m going to refrain from going into any details on those to avoid potential spoilers.

Now that you know a bit about how Altered Bloodlines came to be, I’d like to talk about its future. First, Altered Bloodlines was always intended to be a shorter game than Unexpected Consequences. While I originally planned it to be a prologue, five chapters, and an epilogue, each of the chapters was going to be very short. Over time, I’ve been refining my outline and have cut some of the filler content I wasn’t happy with, as well as the paths where James and Luci break up. I really wasn’t happy with those; in fact, I hated them. Chapter 2 is now much larger than it was originally and will include some spicy scenes with all five of the love interests; Kelly no longer has to wait for Chapter 3. Chapter 3 will also be much bigger than originally planned, containing all of the main story content originally planned for Chapters 4 and 5, as Chapter 2 now includes all of Chapter 3’s original content. This means Chapter 3 will be the final chapter of Altered Bloodlines before the epilogue.

This tighter focus will allow me to make the final chapters of Altered Bloodlines even better, and get them to you more quickly. Ideally, I would like to complete Altered Bloolines by the end of next year. I’ve been making pretty good progress lately, even with only working on it one day a week, so I don’t think this will be a difficult goal to achieve. I expect to finish work on the current scene today and will begin on the first scene of the next day next week.

As an aside, while I may be narrowing the focus of Altered Bloodlines, Unexpected Case Files will be going in the opposite direction. The first of the Unexpected Case Files will have meaningful choices that completely change how the story progresses, new gameplay elements, and I plan to allow you to transfer saves from one game in the series to the next to keep the consequences of those choices alive. I will go into more detail in my next behind-the-scenes post, which will focus on the development of Unexpected Consequences, including showing some early prototyping renders for Love & Lust (Unexpected Consequences’ original title), as well as discussing where the story will be going in Unexpected Case Files.