HELLGAME

Still working on the side project. Stuff I did this week:

• Coded the leader talk scenes, made his talk siege point available
• Coded up a stub for a fifth human squad member
• Coded up the scene skeleton (+ pregnancy) for the wandering human/beast encounter (+ did some bugfixing so that the encounter should be reachable)
• Wrote stubs for misc. pitstop sex scenes in the city
• Added variable tracking for the Zhalk sex scenes, including some better branching for the Zhalk/Jinn pregnancy sex scene
• Coded up stubs with tracking variables for all the Khru camp sex scenes + Brulvundojn and Astau threesomes
• Added some workshop repair actions, with no real goal as of yet
• Coded up stubs with tracking variables for all the Pthuul camp sex scenes

The plan at this point is: one more week of working on this, and then back to hell game. I want to (finally) finish up the current update (with all the stuff mentioned here). This break has had me thinking a bunch about how to make hell game more, you know, compelling, and ultimately come to the conclusion that I need to contract the scope some and try to get a small slice of content fully fleshed-out, work on that for a while, and then slowly expand out once I have a better base. Previously I had been working on a more lateral spread, with plans to sequence or gate content later on, which is part of why there are like a dozen encounters that have one sex scene only and nothing else. A lot of the hell game development was pretty ad-hoc, since I was writing the game engine code first and only after it was done trying to find a use for it -- not really the best decision in hindsight. Turns out game design is important and you can't just have a code-centered development cycle.

I'd still like hell game to be very multilinear and open, but now I don't think there's a way to really get to that point without writing it one linear sequence at a time and then slowly building up branches.

So basically the immediate future of development is gonna look like this: working on the twine game for another week, followed by another patreon draft of the twine game in a week; then (several weeks, probably) of working on the hell game update, with less intense work on the twine game; then the hell game update; then a bit of a lull as I go back to the drawing board with hell game and work on properly turning my scattered scribbled notes into a single early-game plotline.