Hey guys! This week I did something that wasn’t actually planned, but ended up fixing something really important (that I didn’t know needed fixing).
It started when I wrote the cheerleader scene (which is an optional Lifepath beat for US heroines). Everything about it just felt weirdly right?
I realised I’d done something tonally with it that was a bit more positive, lighthearted and fun than I normally write? It’s weird because I’m normally a pretty upbeat and positive guy! But from my writing you might think me a total Eeyore. Everything comes across as so grim and existential sometimes. 😭
This is fine if I’m writing a battle scene in a Syrian firebase, but it’s not exactly capturing the Hot Girl Summer vibe that will actually make the Lifepath hot and fun and authentic. The cheerleader scene felt like the first time I’d bottled that feeling. Youth, beauty, that kind of wistful nostalgia – and also exploring the game’s broader themes of agency, sexualisation, commodification of women and male/female power dynamics in a kind of different way from Bangkok. (This was the big realisation, I was trying to “do Bangkok” but in Boston and it wasn’t really landing.)
Once I’d realised that, a lot of things clicked into place in my head – multiple gnawing problems with pacing and characterisation that I didn’t know exactly how to solve suddenly seemed like they had clear solutions.
With this in mind, I spent 1.5 days restructuring and reorganising the scenes. A few beats got cut, a few got restored, and some scenes got moved around.
All the major beats in this improved structure have already been written. Quite a lot of it needs editing, especially to sprinkle in the Hot Girl Summer vibe that I now realise was the missing ingredient in the previous drafts, but this can be done in parallel with artwork production.
Next steps
I’m currently building out the new passage structure in the game engine – this involves basically cutting and pasting from other parts of the source code (and resisting the urge to edit as I go 😬, but making notes about what to go back and edit). There are 134 passages in the new structure and I’m currently working on building that up so it’s a playable framework in the game engine. (I’ll get back onto this after publishing this report, I took a break from it to write this because this task is fucking tedious and I’ve been doing it all day ).
I’ll aim to get this completed this week. Once it’s done, our illustrator lovely Victoria is going to need to create a fucking lot of art based on the new structure and new scenes (and, crucially, new vibe to some of the scenes). Lots of this can be adapted from existing assets, but many things are new. Even just specifying all the new art required is going to take a day or so (it’s more complex than it probably seems when you consider different hairstyles, clothing states, undressing stages, etc), but I’ll get onto this once the framework is coded into the engine (since the specific number of story passages between certain beats can affect the art requirements, and plans in a flowchart don’t always exactly work when you make them in the engine).
Okay, break time is over, I gotta get back to copy & paste! More detailed metrics should be available in the next report. 🦀❤️🔥
I finally feel like a real intelligence analyst