Okay let's see this week. Back to work on the twine game; here's the list of things accomplished for that.
- Added a post-siege scene with Zhalk where you fuck if you got the humans out with a high enough score
- Wrote basic description for piercing assistant, and outlined some interactions with him and the piercing guy
- Restructured the city a little, moved the piercing studio down to the docks and used the now-empty market street by the palace for three new locations
- Outlined and did some very basic coding for progressive stages of a docks encounter
- Did some outlining for scenes for all the city locations, mostly worm monastery, palace gardens, and baths
- Wrote up the random scene selector for the baths in the city
- Started up the grand process of standardizing all the sex variables, so I can output a big list of What Kind Of Sex Did You Have And With Who at the end of the game (and have that influence endings etc)
So that's all progressing at a pretty reasonable pace, which is nice.
In terms of hell game news... I think for the moment what I'm going to do is focus on doing quest design? From working on the twine game, and thinking about restructuring, I think I'm gonna draw the scope in and focus on one major location and its storylines, instead of trying to thinly smear the entire map with encounters, since that... didn't seem to be working out very well. To that end I'll be putting together an actual set of story quests, and working out how they fit together.
I've mentioned before, but the quest design for hell game is/will be inspired a lot by games like Legend of Mana or Radiata Stories, where you're basically expected to be doing at most one quest at a time, which is a fairly linear sequence of events, and then in between quests there's a more freeform exploratory section where you can get materials and gear and eventually stumble into your next quest.
So the goal here is to concretely draft out roughly ten quests, where some of them will be oneshots with specific characters, and others will be things that will link into a progressing questline, and which will all hopefully meaningfully unlock some new character or location in the game. And also written to be fairly self-contained, so that when somebody would be playing them in the game they could come across them in all different orders, just based on map generation and where they go or who they talk to first. That'll be posted on the Patreon when it's done, whenever that is -- I'm not gonna say I'll get that done this week precisely, but sometime in the next month probably.
But in the mean time, also, steady work on the twine game. At this point I'm starting to really reign in feature creep and I'm starting to think about starting actually writing some of the early-game sequences, you know, in actual prose vs. abbreviated summaries of scenes.