Posted September 07, 2022 by Small Gray Games
I've finished a full draft of the game! Everything from the prologue to the end, including all of the different epilogues depending on player choices, is complete and functional for a current total of 267,969 words. The basic draft was actually finished a couple of weeks ago, but there were a few holes I needed to go back and fill in after playing through the ending, and now I have what I'd consider a complete draft. It's been a long time coming, as you can see from this word count chart that I use to motivate and/or torture myself:
The next step is to go deep into editing. I generally do a lot of editing while I'm writing, playing through and adjusting individual scenes as I work on them, so it's not quite as daunting a task as it might seem. A big part of the process will just be cutting things out and trimming bloat, as well as behind the scenes stuff that isn't needed anymore. For example, early sections have death scenes written from before I changed injuries over to a fail-forward style and, like some kind of ancient lich, eliminated death altogether. There isn't currently any way to trigger those scenes, so all they're doing right now is weighing down that word count. That will be a solid chunk cut right there.
I also expect to update on here much more regularly in these final months as I add the last few features I'm planning. For example:
Most of these are half-implemented already, so it's just a matter of cleaning them up and testing. Then it'll be on to a beta test, and if things go smoothly enough, I'm thinking a release around the end of the year seems feasible. There are enough things still up in the air that I don't feel comfortable putting a concrete date on it yet -- both the app store processes I just haven't done before, and the "unknown unknowns," in Rumsfeldian terms -- and I'd rather not make any promises I can't keep. That said, I think it won't be long before I can put a date on it.