Thank you for playing my game and commenting on it, FUTURE RUINS. I'm happy you had fun with it!
I spent most time on plotting and writing the story. The actual script took me about 5 days (I was worried whether I could even finish it in time since I had a shorter personal deadline at 18 April, and I didn't have any art at the beginning). There are some extra edits over the days when I had to rephrase parts differently when they didn't flow well within the VN code.
Sometimes I wonder if other devs count it differently. 🤔 Either way I used Googledoc and colour markers to tag sentences to a character. I worked with pre-calculated min and max word count targets for each section, and eventually moved parts around to balance out the route lengths.
The 'Separate' ending is a last-minute addition since I originally planned out 4 routes, but I felt that it must be a bummer for the player to see 'Ghost' ending (which kind of is the default fail route ending) once again after reaching so far. Luckily I still had a buffer of open space to fit yet another ending, so that there's a follow-up to your choice. It was this or the final mindread is forced action to finish the story, but it felt strange to me since it has always been optional.