Let's shine some light behind the creative process of creating one of the chat scenarios you can play in game and detail how much goes into making one. The length and difficulty of this varies depending on the chat in question, but the steps to get to the finish line are always the same. This is the first post in the series, starting from the very beginning: a blank page with nothing on it.
As the very first thing to do, before being able to write or create anything for the chat, we need to plan ahead and set the base line for what we want from it. Generally speaking, there are three main questions we need to answer:
What is the goal of this chat scenario?
What is happening?
How branching do we want it to be?
The Goal
This can be as simple as "show the player some naughty pics" although it never just stops at that. Even if this were the goal, pictures never stand alone and are always accompanied by an intention (either from me, or from the character). Sure, in the end the player just "gets" the picture, but it is also relevant to decide on the how and the why.
How?Should the player meet an elegance threshhold to unlock it? Should they have performed well in the chat itself? Should they sacrifice attraction to get it? Did they have to unlock some previous knowledge?
Why?As in: why is the girl sharing this picture and how plainly do we want this information to be visible. This question serves to give the characters a... character. They never just send something, say "here you go" and move on. Every picture comes with an emotional attachment and some even personalize the girl further, either making her shy, outgoing, desperate or naughty.
And to that end, there are plenty of goals other than "show spicy pics". Is the intention for a specific story beat to start happening? Or to further deepen the relationship between the MC and the girl? Or maybe to develop her emotional state? In either case: it is essential to have this goal not only in mind, but to have planned it out in detail.
The What
This one is easy: what is happening in this scenario? This does not need all the details, those will get added when the writing process begins. But it's important to scetch out a rough start to finish map of key points that will happen in order.
This is so we can plan not only the rough shape of the chat, but also how long we want it to be. Generally speaking, chats without spice are kept much shorter than their counter parts. This of course also has to plan out any special events that might occur during the chat, like Megra showing up all of a sudden.
The Branching
Well, even though it might not be quite apparent to someone playing the game one time through: The decisions you get to make during the chats have rather impactful outcomes and can drastically change the outcome of both the current chat being played right now as well as future chats. So it's a good idea to plan this branching ahead, before we get tangled up in writing and write outselves into a rabbit hole too deep to ever get out of.
This is a dumbed down example of Lydia's detention scene. As a quick reminder: It's the scene where she sends you a document for you to act with her. There are several failure states in this chat scenario, either by the player actively chosing not to help her or by performing too poorly during the acting sequence. The latter simply leads to the end of the chat without any positive outcome, as it's the direct result of the player making bad choices.
The former however is more complicated: Lydia, unlike other girls, does not have a secondary objective and serves as the "vanilla" dating experience, so you either "get the girl" or you don't. Technically speaking, actively choosing not to help could lead to this other objective, but with Lydia it also ends the chat with no positive outcome as there is no such objective.
And finally (the "success" at the top) the player can choose which decision to make: Encourage Lydia to keep practicing acting or find an alternate approach on how to get her interested in the play... or rather her acting partner. As most players probably know: The alternate approach leads to Lydias "Wet Actress" spicy scene. You get immediate gratification but Lydia will not pursue acting and fail the audition when it comes up (the reason why she got this detention in the first place).
If the player enourages her to keep practising, she will do so and ultimately win the audition, leading to her "A Star in Porn" scene, thusly having a much delayed reward. And as we are in active development with content coming in every two weeks: It is very important to have this planned out beforehand, so that we know where things are and more importantly where they are going.
The final caveat to note: This scene is locked behind Lydia getting detention in the first place, which is avoidable depending on the players choices. So for future planning, we now have to keep in mind that Lydia either kept practicing in her free time (and thusly should mention so in future chats), got detention and hates acting or never got this assignment in the first place. So what she says and what information she can even talk about in future chats is dictated by this (hence the "very simplified" image).
This is plenty for now, hope it gave a good insight into the first step of creating a new chat: the planning phase. Next time, we'll look at step number 2: Creating the art.