No Author Is Immune To Rewrites

Hey all!

So I took a couple of weeks off of working on the WCA story and just spent time reviewing feedback. With Season 1 having been my first ever game, there were a TON of mistakes I made, some of which are specific to the Adult Games community, some of which were simply due to learning my software and establishing my style. 

The framework for the first WCA was built by a friend of mine over the span of half a year while I worked on the story. Unfortunately, he had to stop to focus on college, and I had to pick up and learn Ren'Py from scratch. Anyone who has tried to do this knows how notoriously unhelpful the Ren'Py Discord is ("Go LoOk At ThE dOcUmEnTaTiOn") and how horribly unexplanatory the documentation is. So when doing the first five chapters, I only knew the Jump command. Had no idea how to use Call. 

With all that said, I started thinking back to my own original fantasy series, The Riftkey Chronicles. I rewrote the prologue and first few chapters SEVEN times before I felt it was good enough for publishing. Tolkien himself was constantly rewriting and revising The Fellowship of the Ring, deciding how the rings worked and what the Nazgul were halfway through one particular edition, then going back and rewriting everything before that to match what he'd settled on.  No first draft is ever perfect, and all of your favorite authors have rewritten their works time and time again before finally releasing the version they, or in some cases their publishers, feel is worthy of publication.

With that in mind, WCA Season 1 is definitely that first draft. And it's stupid of me to expect it to hold up against all these great games by established AVN devs who have YEARS of experience and know how to both tell the story they want to tell AND keep the gameplay within the bounds of what the community at large enjoys. I've been having a ton of trouble writing for this story as of late, and I remember when that happened to me in The Riftkey Chronicles, it was because I had written myself into a corner and didn't like something I'd written previously. I needed to go back and revise. I have hit that point in WCA now, and likely will again one or two more times in the future as we flesh out this story.

Now that I know what I'm doing, I know exactly how I would clean up all of that code, using Call statements and variables to make this more of a game, which is what people have been asking for. So I'm going to be working on that while I work on Season 2's content, side by side. So what will I be doing?

• Sexual or intimate interactions will be moved into each character's Free Time/Side Story content
• Fix Rukah's face/skin tone
• Free Time will become available in Season 1 instead of 2
• Any sexual interactions in the main story that can't be moved to side content will be made optional to view, and will include the option to not view the scene but get the story bits in text format
• Intimate interactions that were previously not optional will become optional (the goblins, Gillie, River, Chiara + Eshtel, etc)
• Some prewritten story paths (Chiara + Eshtel) will instead become story branches that will give you a choice as to whether or not you're going to help, giving you the power to change SOME of the stories.
• Some story/writing criticisms will be addressed and fleshed out
• Reshooting all earlier scenes with better lighting
• H-scene gallery will be separated from the main game and become a separate download because it's a pain in the ass
• More that I can't think of off the top of my head because it's 5am and I still have more paperwork to do on my shift

The end goal will be one big, cohesive game that contains all seasons of the game. I saw that Light of My Life was able to have a 7gb PC and MAC download, and only have a 1gb Android download. If I can figure out how to do that, I won't have to split the game each season and make y'all do more work downloading and all that crap. 

Now, I ALSO don't want this taking forever like the Ecchi Sensei Month 1 conversion has. We're not doing that. Nope. Content will continue to release for Season 2 while I'm working on the WCA Rework with most likely an update every 2 months to Season 2's content, give or take a couple weeks in either direction. I have someone trying out for my Poser position, which will speed things up TREMENDOUSLY. 

What kinds of things would you like to see in this rework? 

- Vic