Progress Report

Greetings, everyone!

Exciting stuff is happening this week for both Long Live the Princess and Supermodel.

Long Live the Princess

All the bugs, issues, and minor balance issues I had made notes of over the past few years have now been resolved. It's a lengthy list of fixes and adjustments, and I will post it with the final release once it's out. With this out of the way, I can move on to other things.

First on the agenda is the long-awaited achievement system. Most of it is already implemented, and the achievements (more than 60 of them) are in place. These achievements will be a lot of fun. Some are straightforward rewards for reaching specific points in the story or with some of the characters, while others encourage you to explore lesser-known paths through this game. A lot of the achievements also serve as additional punchlines that should (hopefully) elicit a few chuckles from players. I had a lot of fun inventing them, at least. Many of these achievements have been in my giant design bible for years now, so this feature has been in the planning for a while.

The most time-consuming part of the achievement system, and the part I'm working on right now, is getting the triggers right. It's one thing creating an achievement that says, for example, "sleep with everyone," and another to have the game actually understand what that means and when to award the achievement for it. I have already started on these things, but it's a lot of work.

One downside of the achievement system is that it's making it clearer and clearer that I'm probably going to have to reset everyone's saves and game progress, forcing you to start over. This has been in the cards for a while, but I'm feeling more confident about it now that I've seen what the latest update requires. Existing saves would not play well with the achievement system, and I'd rather start over with a blank slate with version 1.0 anyway. Among other things, it ensures that any bug reports I receive (if any) won't result from issues from previous versions.

In other words, if you want to wrap up anything in your existing saves, do it now. They most likely won't work in version 1.0.

Anyway, I expect to continue working on the achievements for most of the coming week.

Supermodel

In a change of pace, I spent a lot of time writing the game's prologue this week. As I have been tossing scenes and concepts back and forth in my mind, the prologue has grown until it has become this big, serious thing that I'm really excited to see in action later. From what I have written so far, the writing style is taking a significant turn from that of LLtP. Supermodel's style will be much closer to traditional, serious visual novels, and the tone will veer into very dark territory from time to time. And unlike with LLtP, I'm really going to flesh out the world and its history so that you can truly immerse yourself in this story when you get to play it.

And that's it for this week. Lots of things to do, and hopefully, LLtP version 1.0 will be out in November. In fact, I feel quite confident about that. Back to work!

Until next time!