Posted October 19, 2025 by theroyaljiggle
As I've mentioned before, Reality Pen is on indefinite hiatus. As some of you might have guessed, I don't really plan on working on it again any time soon. This isn't me saying that I'll never work on it again; I enjoyed coming up with new ideas for the story. That being said, don't expect any new updates within the next year or anything like that.
Now for my excuses reasons for not continuing the game.
1. The wordcount was getting out of control.
This is probably the central reason as to why I stopped. When I started the game, I was intending on turning it into a sandbox-style adventure where every change you made would change the world in unexpected ways. It's one of my favorite tropes in erotica, and there weren't enough games out there like that.
There's a very good reason for that, turns out. Giving the player the power to make a large number of changes drastically increases the amount of content needed to fill out even a small story update. Including interactions boosts that number exponentially. My update to the dominant wife path would have needed 32 separate routes based solely on what changes you made to your wife's and Maria's respective purchases. If you include the fact that you could alter whether she was dominant or submissive, that increases to 64. If you then factor in the changes that you made to yourself, and the fact that a scene with a 12-foot-tall woman would be decidedly different than one with a 6-foot tall woman, which would be different than one with a 5-foot tall woman, and the possibilities become astronomical in number.
I ran some calculations shortly after going on hiatus, and even the incomplete dominant-wife route that I had written up was somewhere in the realm of 100,000 words. For the record, War and Peace was 500,000. Now, some of that is repeated text, sure, but it was still an absurd amount of text for a very small amount of plot development. This was on top of the 100,000 words I had written for day 1 and the boytoy route. Any future projects I have will need to be far less ambitious. This leads me into my next point.
2. Twine was becoming unwieldy.
Keeping track of changes was difficult. Additionally, it turns out that Twine's GUI does not like showing a large number of conditional, and should you do so, it'll lag when you type. This made writing (and, worse yet, coding) an absolute slog. The more sensible answer would be to edit the code/text directly in something like Notepad++, but that would have the disadvantage of me not being able to coordinate my chapters. I suspect that there are better ways of handling this sort of thing than what I did, but I would need to devote more time to figuring out how to go about doing that. I'm working on a better computer now, which mitigates things slightly, but...
3. My old computer basically melted.
This is a bit of a lame excuse, but it's still what happened. My old computer's hard drive got corrupted in a way that meant that whenever I turned it on, I ran the risk of the whole thing turning into a paperweight. It took me a while to find a way to recover my data and back it up. It's backed up now, but for a couple of months I didn't know if I could even get my incomplete update recovered.
4. Life happened.
I started this project when I was in a bit of a transitional (read: unemployed) period of my life and had more time to work on my hobbies. I've since gone back to grad school, which is eating up a lot of my time.
As I mentioned in the main page, I'm aware the Itch took the game down. I suspect that they threw the book a bit harder at me because I included some mind-control themes, which I'm pretty sure are still verboten by the site's TOS. I've uploaded the stuff to Mega. You can find the link in the main page, or you can go here.
Going forward, I'd like to make a new (far less ambitious) Twine game. I dunno if and when I'll get time for that, but I'll certainly try.
Thank you all for your support--
TRJ.