I may have gone too far in a few places. - Update 04/01/2022

All good news at last! (And not an April Fools joke!)

Apologies for the lapse in updates, but wanted to hold off on saying anything till I had something to show but by god, do I ever have something now.

First thing's first, the rough draft script for The Marble Nest, For Those Who Will Never Play It is officially complete! There will be some revisions, some polishing, some additions, etc. but the foundation is now very thoroughly laid. Took a bit longer than expected for a myriad of reasons. Most notably, I was originally planning on splitting the one day into 2 days. As there are 4 endings to cover and 1 of them leads into replaying the day from the beginning again, it felt like a very natural choice to make in order to comfortably cover everything. It is a game that's clearly meant to be played at least twice, so I figured doing just that would be the best call. Even had a great tagline for it too, 'A one-act play, performed in two acts', was gonna screw up a bunch of questlines on the first day for drama and then get them right on the second, probably make a bunch of Waiting for Gadot jokes about this being a show where nothing happens twice, it was gonna be great!

Alas though, despite my best efforts, I just could not find a way to make the second day feel as substantial and content heavy as the first. Dear god did I try to make it work and I still think I could have made it watchable, but after a certain point when writing, you just have to ask yourself 'Am I doing this because it's the best choice I could make for the story I'm trying to tell, or am I just doing this because it makes me feel clever?' After a certain point, we need to, as the old adage goes, kill our darlings. Sometimes it's vital to accept that just because we love an idea, that does not inherently mean it's the right idea for the thing we're making. Much to my chagrin, this was one of those times. As such, I've had to spend a LOT of time rewriting and reformatting to figure out new ways to present certain stories that I thought I had figured out and condense everything down into a single day. Well, I say 'condense', but as you can see from that 25k+ word count above, there will still be plenty to work through. This project may have gotten a bit bigger than originally planned.

Either way though, after a lot of tweaking and experimentation, I think it's safe to say that the script is finally where it needs to be for production to begin in earnest. Pivotally, this means that I can begin to contact actors and get the ball rolling on filling all the roles the show calls for. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, this is an especially important point to hit for these project as I do my best to give my collaborators all the time they need to put together their contributions, whatever that may be. Once I have all the resources in hand, these things tend to come together fairly fast, particularly now that I have so much practice at these kinds of projects, so making sure I can make that happen as soon as possible has been my absolute top priority. As such, I'll be spending this week contacting all the various people who we'll need to make this show as special as it deserves~

Additionally, I'm happy to say that the script for the Director's Cut of the Bachelor's Route is also officially squared away. This was a considerably easier undertaking without a doubt as much of the script will be remaining the same, but was still an essential step in making it happen and did require going through the script with a fine tooth comb for places I could polish things (and places where I misgender myself shhh don't tell anyone how do i spoiler text on patreon posts ), as well as a pretty thorough deep dive back into the game's actual dialogue to figure out what conversations would most benefit the story as I'm retelling it while still holding on to the mood and pacing that I was so proud of in the original upload. At this point, there's 13 new conversations I'm planning to add spread out across the whole script to add roughly 1 new dialogue exchange per day. Some small, some dense, some with lore exposition, some with valuable character moments, some that are just fucking funny, all of which I regret not putting in the first time around.

Last but not least, all of this also means that I'm also gonna be able to spend a bit more time on setting the foundation for the next couple non-Pathologic related projects I'm looking to put together this year (more on that later) and, most relevantly to you, some in-depth blogs and side material on what goes into these projects. As such, later this week I'll be putting together kind of a Making Of for the animatic finale of Act 2 for all of you fine people ✨

How it was conceived, how I went about storyboarding it, why I felt it was so important that it was there in the first place, etc. Once I have that out there, I'll also be putting together a bit more of a compressive Behind the Scenes/Making Of blog post for Act 1 & 2 at large later this month. I've been really eager to share what went into all the different parts of these projects, and now that the gears are in motion for the next one, I think this would be the perfect time to share some details about production that I know some have been curious about.

That'll be for next time though. For now, we'll leave it at that so I can go start firing off a slurry of DMs to everyone. Hope ya'll have a great April Fools day and don't get pranked too hard~

See ya'll again real soon ✨

Ruby 💖