Writing the meat

Hello all! So, the upcoming 0.2 build advances the story to a point where some character branches are going to become available quite soon. I'm not going to go into detail yet about how that will all play out, but there is an important decision that needs to be made about that: how the meat of the game will be written.

Basically, I see two options. One is to work on things in lockstep: working on all events and characters that trigger during a given slice of time until they are all complete, before advancing to the next slice of time. Slices of time won't have identical sizes, necessarily, depending on the density of events that occur. They could vary from an afternoon to a week. This option lets you see the story unfold in faux-realtime, with the impact of decisions and events happening to all possible characters in each build, letting you try them all and then wait for the next build to see everyone's next step.

The other option is to work on only a single route to near-completion at a time. This will mean only seeing events and impacts from one character's perspective for a long time; probably many months of work. It will also mean learning about most of the game's core story early on, since the first route done in this way will necessarily touch on all of it. I would end the route before the very end of the game to preserve a little bit of mystery about how it ends, but that's all. So this would be the "spoiler-heavy" option, if that designation even makes sense in a game of this nature.

This also ties into how much time I should spend on builds. My ideal is to put out a build every month, but that means I can only do half as many words compared to releasing an build every 2 months, naturally. Fitting all the stuff for a given time slice into one month might not always be possible, so then it'd have to be split across two months, which means I'd have to potentially rush some things or leave them unfinished in order for the build to be playable at the halfway point.

Having worked on the current build for 2 months now, I'm uncertain if I prefer it over a monthly cadence. Mini-goals are important: it gives structure to a huge project like this, and gives me achievable things to aim for. It also gives you guys tangible outputs to enjoy on a regular basis. Monthly builds are excellent mini-goals, but they also restrict the amount of writing I can fit into a month. Apart from there obviously being less time than a 2 month period, there's the time it takes to plan the build out, and the time spent editing when it's close to release. These fixed overheads (4-5 days in total) consume proportionately less time in a 2 month sprint than a 1 month one. And now that I do weekly builds for the upper tiers, which I don't have to QA nearly as intensely, I feel that can substitute for mini-goals quite well. It's very satisfying to release a new build every Sunday evening after a full weekend of work. So I *guess* I'm leaning towards 2-monthly releases? With at least 30,000 new words in each release?

So yeah. I have my preferences, but I want to hear what you guys would ideally prefer. Then I can make an informed decision :)