Progress continues slow but steady. Finally nailed down the code for a rather cumbersome-to-implement feature that had a lot of writing attached to it, so that’s one big feature I can call 90% complete.
Also polished off half of another sex scene I realized would have to happen only once I reached a certain point in the game. Normally, the writing setup for a sex scene involves answering the question “Why are these characters having sex?”, but given the particular place this story takes place in, the problem becomes more of “Why are these characters NOT having sex?” As I keep running into this question over and over and the answer keeps being “I can’t imagine why,” this ends up translating into quite a few more interactive scenes than I had originally planned.
With that done, I finally began working on the third quarter of this phase, starting with designing and furbishing the relevant rooms as I often do first. I like locations to look and sound like places people actually live and work in, rather than empty bare-bones rooms only meant to serve as stages for scenes, yet this inevitably means I spend way too much time describing and implementing things that don’t serve any immediate purpose except being things that you’d expect to find there. For example, I spent a while creating one door that gets locked at one point and seven others that do absolutely nothing except be there, because it’d look odd if only one of those doorways had an actual door in it. Then I made a glass cylinder that does nothing except be present and have something inside it (that you can’t touch), then spent another thirty minutes customizing the responses to all the ways in which you’d TRY to do something with it but can’t.
In short, I’ve spent a great deal of work creating things that aren’t supposed to do anything and then making sure you can’t do anything with them. All be for the sake of atmosphere. If you ever wondered why both castles in TLH were trashed, the honest and simple answer is: rubble is EASY!
Also polished off half of another sex scene I realized would have to happen only once I reached a certain point in the game. Normally, the writing setup for a sex scene involves answering the question “Why are these characters having sex?”, but given the particular place this story takes place in, the problem becomes more of “Why are these characters NOT having sex?” As I keep running into this question over and over and the answer keeps being “I can’t imagine why,” this ends up translating into quite a few more interactive scenes than I had originally planned.
With that done, I finally began working on the third quarter of this phase, starting with designing and furbishing the relevant rooms as I often do first. I like locations to look and sound like places people actually live and work in, rather than empty bare-bones rooms only meant to serve as stages for scenes, yet this inevitably means I spend way too much time describing and implementing things that don’t serve any immediate purpose except being things that you’d expect to find there. For example, I spent a while creating one door that gets locked at one point and seven others that do absolutely nothing except be there, because it’d look odd if only one of those doorways had an actual door in it. Then I made a glass cylinder that does nothing except be present and have something inside it (that you can’t touch), then spent another thirty minutes customizing the responses to all the ways in which you’d TRY to do something with it but can’t.
In short, I’ve spent a great deal of work creating things that aren’t supposed to do anything and then making sure you can’t do anything with them. All be for the sake of atmosphere. If you ever wondered why both castles in TLH were trashed, the honest and simple answer is: rubble is EASY!