Hello Readers,

Time for an update on my current project, Theriomorphos: The Huntress 2: Pack Mother.

Over the past few weekends, I've made more progress toward completing Act I of the story and started several new passages for Acts II and III.

Current state: Act I 26%. Act II 12%. Act III 3%. Other 0%. Total: 41% done.

Goal: Act I 30%. Act II 30%. Act III 30%. Other 10%. Total: 100% done.

I realized one of the reasons I keep skipping ahead is because of the nature of choice in my writing.

Fallout 3 was the first game that I ever played that gave the player lots of choices. There were so many small stories within the larger narrative, and the Lone Wanderer was affecting people's lives all over the place. I loved it! Going back to games without choice was painful, and I generally avoid it. To me, a game without choice is basically a book or a movie, depending on the balance of text to animation.

However, I thought the ending of Fallout 3 made no sense given the choices made up to that point. It didn't matter what friends you had or what skills or stats you had. You could convince a sentient supercomputer to destroy itself with a simple speech check an hour before; you could make friends with ghouls, a super mutant, and robots who would be immune to the radiation; you may have had no problem killing and eating people; you may have nuked a town; you may have sold people into slavery. But now, it's down to you or your friend committing suicide, and if you don't kill yourself, the game will basically call you a coward before it ends. (Admittedly, they gave you an out with DLC later.)

What I am trying to avoid in this game is that by the time the planned narrative arc is complete, I don't want your choices up to that point to have no affect on the outcome, even if you get to choose the outcome. And that has meant adding variables to the completed passages of Act I and working on passages for Acts II and III that remind me to check those variables so they affect later outcomes. Hopefully, I will be successful, and the ending won't feel disconnected.

Anyhoo, back at it. Here are some mage.space images for Wolfman Valentine's Day:

In this one, the Wolfman appears to have made himself a girlfriend out of wood, right before he had his nipples tattooed with hearts.

This next one is my favorite because we get to see the Wolfman's "O" face:

The last one is surprisingly normal for AI art. Kinda Picasso-esque.

Xasqinq