Chapter 4 preview #2 and narrative challenges

Dear patrons,

It’s been a while since the last preview… Sorry.

Last time I talked a bit of the challenges of this chapter regarding the visual side, but the writing bit is also bringing their own challenges:

1. Size of the update.

I like to finish each chapter at a reasonable point for the story to stop. This updated is all about the spring vacation and the right point to finish is at the end of the holidays. Turns out that there are a lot of event during this week which is making the chapter bigger than what I’d naturally like it. This is not a problem per se, but it does mess a little bit with the pacing of the story, increases development time and screws up my predictions of when the chapter will be ready. It definitely won’t be in May, but I still think it should be somewhere in June.

2. Conversations

The writing so far was mostly one-on-one conversations, with only a few scenes with 2 to 4 people. In this episode there is a lot of group chats and activities, which brings with them their own writing and gameplay challenges.  These scenes are considerably different to write.

Gameplaywise, on one hand, the Player still needs to be able to make enough choices to gather a reasonable number of points to buy the required skills to keep progressing on the skill tree. On the other, with a lot more people participating in the conversation, there’s less room for choices and more constrains when they may happen. Which is an interesting challenge, but does make the writing harder.

3. Pacing

While the previous chapters took place during a period of several weeks, the story of this one is all in one week, which makes it harder to balance the pacing and give the story the require space to breath. In a way, this makes sense. We can go by weeks or months without remembering a single meaning full event (especially some times of lockdown last year because of a certain pandemic…), and still remember lots of things from a previous holiday because we did so much in a single week.

The hard part is to balance all of what that is happening in a short period of time, with the myriad of paths the player can take. Between the group activities, the one-on-one talks, the lewd scenes, the girls that were rejected or not, will every player find the majority of the scenes interesting? Will they find some of them boring? Will the suspension of disbelief start to fall if the Player continue to go after all the girls in a group of friends while they are all on holidays on the same house? Will it get boring for those that are only after a single girl?

4. Significance

Another change is the nature of the struggles the characters go by. At least for me, a story is more interesting when the characters want something, go through a series of challenges to get it, pay a price for it, and then change as a result of their journey (basically Joseph Campbell’s the hero’s journey). This could be things like overcome depression, be better at your job, get a chess norm, overcome fear of public speaking, save your current relationship, etc. Turns out, it’s harder to create these struggles when everyone is having fun on holiday. There is always the goal of getting into the pants of the girl(s) you like, but I find that even that gets boring if there isn’t a proper narrative behind.

But it’s not like a simple slice of life plot is bad… it’s just harder for me do it well when there is a lack of plot development and conflict in the story. I am finding it more difficult to write scenes that aren’t boring… without risking going to the other extreme, overdo it, and bring too much drama out of nowhere just to spice things up.

The idea is just to have people chilling… without making it boring. Easy right?

With all that being said, with me being aware of all of these pitfalls and challenges, I still think it’ll be a chapter of similar quality of the previous ones.

It’s funny, I’ve read reviews saying the game keeps getting better after each chapter, other saying that is getting worse… sometimes is even difficult for me to judge. I think the quality is being more or less at the same level between all the previous chapters, and I don’t intend to jump the shark in this one.

This just means it's getting a bit harder to write good scenes, and it’s taking me a bit longer than usual to write and find the best way to pace the story. But it’s getting there.

Apologies for this chapter taking longer than usual/promised.

Cheers!