Devblog #63

In my previous week's devblog I was pretty proud of myself. Wrote the intro to the second Trial and all. Not a big piece of narrative, but an important one, that allowed me to move to the meatier part of the Trial. But that was before I remembered that I actually wanted to add the girls coming to give you a little pep talk before the Trial. And that threw a wrench in the works. Of course, I could just wave these things off and omit these visits, but I really felt that by this point the player should have at least one or two girls close enough, so that they would expect one of them to want to visit the MC before the big event. So, I decided that I would return to the Trial's intro and add in the girls' visits.

This opened a whole other can of worms though - deciding on which of the girls will have to visit the player. Of course, the idea of all eligible girls coming to wish the player good luck was out of the question. Firstly, because it would look really strange, funny, but strange, if a line of girls were to just form and the player would have to listen to each one of them in turn. Secondly, because it would just inflate the intro way too much. Even if each event was short by itself. So now I had to decide on how to choose the girl to visit. The most straightforward solution would be to just pick a random girl from the pool of girls whose storylines have passed a certain threshold. That would not be ideal though, since the player might have progressed one of the girls' stories more, and would understandably expect to see that girl.

The next obvious solution would be to just have the girl with the highest storyline progress come to say hi. That idea had a pitfall of its own. Even though the girls all have the same number of events, not all of the relationships progress at the same pace, and even if they do, not all of the girls would be likely to show their affection (not talking about anyone in particular. cough Aisling). And some relationships are not progressing linearly, for example, Gwen is mad at you after her fifth event.

So after some consideration, and weighing a couple of other options I ended up adding another value in the game that would reflect a girl's willingness to visit you before the Trial and choose the visitor based on that.

After that I still needed to both edit the intro to the Trial that I have already written to fit in the visits and write the visits themselves (which I did a couple). I will finish the rest of the visit and move to the Trial proper then. I also hope to start writing Violet's sixth story even this week, since she was chosen by our supporters as our focus. I will also dedicate some time to our runner-ups - Elizabeth and Lily, but I am not sure if they will get their sixth even in the next update or not.

Also last week Shady Two, getting a bit of rest from drawing girls' underwear for the last update, finally finished the sprite for Ryan O'Neil, so I added that into the game two, and you will be able to finally put a face to the guy. And also, Gwen would someone to actually talk to in her fourth event.

Well, I guess that's it for now. Hopefully, this week will bring a few more good tidings.

Shady Character One, out!