This week: mostly just more writing. Now I'm working on the slime guy and minotaur miner encounters, so those have been partially coded and I've been writing up the scenes. If you're a $7+ backer on patreon you'll be able to see the scene excerpts I've posted from both of those.
Currently they're both around 6k words long, and the slime scene has been fully indexed (so it's just a matter of writing the missing scenes) and looking at them... given how long the hellhound encounter ended up being, to get these done in any kind of reasonable time I'm gonna have to keep the sex scenes short.
My original goal for HELL GAME was "very branchy but short sex scenes, with each full scene in the 1-2k range", since while working on, uh, DEEP WITHIN THE FOREST, an unfinished twine game that was in a few ways the precursor to this, I realized that if you're playing a game that's all about short passages and fast transitions and you get smacked in the face with a 3k word sex scene that's kind of... too much? too long? it really breaks the sequence of gameplay. So I wanted to keep the hell game sex scenes pretty short and have them broken up a lot with choices. But I haven't held to that goal very well -- "the entire branch should be 1-2k" rapidly turned into "each text chunk between choices should be 1-2k", and even then I end up going over frequently for the longer scenes.
Basically all that is to say I'm probably gonna try to cut down on longer sex scenes, and go back to writing like, two or three paragraph chunks, since otherwise it'll take me forever to finish all this, and yknow I'd kinda like to have the next dev poll before, like, March.
Anyway next week: more writing! These encounters aren't gonna be done by next week, but they might be the week after that? No promises though.
Do, uh
do you need other writers to help?
Hm, nah, the thought is appreciated but for a few reasons I'm not really looking for writing help at this point.
(I don't think the game has really come together enough yet for there to be a solid stylistic base and I really wanna avoid the scattershot mood & theming a bunch of other games have ended up with due to different authors all doing their own thing. Also uh b/c I'd feel ethically obligated to pay people for their work and the money just isn't there yet. And maybe a little out of the stubborn desire for all the writing to remain 'mine' :V)
(Also my event-writing setup is a huge mess and I'd have to streamline it a lot before I'd feel okay with subjecting anybody else to it.)
Tragically that means everybody is gonna have to deal with my moderately-glacial writing pace for the time being.
Xax, do you test your scenes afterwards with different bodies? I'd recommend you do so, there are bugs in new hellhound scenes. About half of them end without finishing dialogue, for instance.
Also, I, personally, think that very short scenes wouldn't work as well. Do as you will, but there's that.
@Nox: yeah, but kind of in a half-assed way. I have automated tests for scene _errors_, but it's kind of prohibitively difficult to figure out every meaningful variation of every scene branch and then read over them (this is part of why getting an editor would be difficult, since their job would basically be "read over several hundred scene variations, some of which only vary by a few lines, and somehow still pay enough attention to notice bad blocking or missing scenes when they come up")
That being said, "missing closing scene entirely" is kind of a bigger issue that I probablyyyy should've caught. Could you name some specific scenes+bodies that cause the problem?
and then after checking the scene code: oh yeah, the shared centaur/quadruped "mount it" branch didn't have the jump to the closing scene; that should be fixed next update.
sorry about that; the current dev plan is basically "write as much stuff as possible and get it into the game as rapidly as i can", and so sometimes some things fall through the cracks. ultimately i'm depending on people telling me when things are busted, just because of the sheer variety of bodies already in the game, so thanks for the heads up.