August 27 Newsflash

I've been working on Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 of Royal Affairs and have been making superfast progress!

Current wordcount: 125837 words

Current average playthrough length: 37862 words

In Chapter 5 I've written the entrance of a character you'll recognise from Creme de la Creme and there are some dodgy dealings going on! You'll have some time in your leadership class, sorting out some Student Council business, practising for your play, or training for the Athletics tournament. You'll also get to spend some quality time with Asher, Dominique, or Trevelyan for friendship or romance. There's potential kisses with each of them! And... under some circumstances Asher hulks out.

In Chapter 6, I've written up an outline for the plot. I usually do this in a notebook first, in a pretty chaotic way that's funny to look back on. For example: "Ask someone out: intro scene. If romantic, they're into t. This may be the last point you can initiate romance? or maybe that can be Ch 8." Thank you, Hannah, for those very cogent notes, no doubt Future Hannah will love them.

Right now I'm working on coding Chapter 6. That's where I do all the ChoiceScript scripting with placeholder notes like "Do a bit of Athletics team stuff. A practice match. Everyone's tense. Give a pep talk. Do your best / Break the tension / Get them fired up". Over the years I've found it very useful to get the code down first, test that it all works as I go, and then do the writing.

I've also been working on an outline for a secret thing for Choice of Games. It hasn't been greenlit yet so I'm keeping it secret for now, but I'm really excited to share more when I can!

I got most of my Chapter 5 draft down in less than two weeks - really, it was more like a week - which is extraordinarily fast for me. Certainly when I was last fulltime freelancing, I wasn't going nearly so fast! I think it's a combination of being in the zone of working to tough deadlines (which I was doing at my day job), and acting like my own producer, setting up detailed time estimates in Jira and getting into a pomodoro routine, and all that juicy time management stuff.


Other things:

Crème de la Crème was featured on Smart Podcast Trashy Books! I was so thrilled to hear that they liked it, and for my game to be mentioned in company like Dream Daddy, Hatoful Boyfriend, and Ladykiller in a Bind!!! SWOON.


Behind the scenes:

The summer has been very weird and difficult for a lot of reasons, including getting laid off from my day job under circumstances that, this fortnight, ended up making national news. I have nothing but awesome things to say about my fellow laid-off colleagues, they're absolutely amazing and deserve the best. As for the rest, I'm not in a position to comment but it has been absolutely wild and very stressful.

In other news I've been playing Disco Elysium for the first time and let me tell you, it's incredible and also A Lot. I can't play it for longer than about an hour at time because of it being So Much but I like it a great deal. It's immensely confident - more so than any game I've played in a long time. And it's all immensely overpowering. Just really, really good.

On a totally different topic I went out to the forest this fortnight, and swam in a river! It was really lovely to get away from the screen and have some fresh outdoor air.


Sneak peaks: this screenshot's from the start of Chapter 5, when you're returning to school at the start of the new term. During the Hearthlight holiday (which happen in Chapter 4), Asher's been staying with their parents so you haven't seen them in a little while.


Cutting room floor: this is some of the code skeleton I made for Chapter 5 before writing the actual content. This is what the pre-writing chapters look like before I do the words, like I mentioned about Chapter 6 above. In this case, Dominique was going to have a problem that the MC could help them with, but I realised I wanted Dominique to be a bit more empowered in this chapter. They're a bit bad at life, but not that bad at life, so I trimmed this when writing.

Thanks for reading and I'll see the Sneak Preview pledgers on Wednesday September 1st for some early access Royal Affairs and a question post! Catch you later!