Progress Report 2024.11.15: 64 Lines to a Bottleneck

Hi all, 

I hope you have been having a good month! 

Writing is motoring along this month. I am mostly recovered from Covid and I’ve been pushing to finish off these last few sections. It’s been a lot of work and it has taken a very long time, but I can finally set this one aside and work my way back up the tree. It’s hard to express exactly how entangled the Episode 3 finale will be—this is a case where the boss fight and final conflict is much more in the words you say rather than in the actions you take. Depending on your faction approval (with both Solarath and Lethalis) and your MC’s approach, you the scene will shift and you will discover new lore. This is definitely a scene where you have to pay close attention to what both your character and the other characters are saying. 

Everything is working towards a massive bottleneck, which at this point is getting maybe a tad out of control: 

I realize 64 entry points looks nuts, but there are definitely parts where I can combine more passages into one. There are many instances of the same goto to keep the document legible when I code it. The idea with these very complex dialogue branches is to pinpoint the moment where the conversation either ends or gets interrupted by the same event so I can tie everything back together and move forwards. If you don’t have bottlenecks like this the story fractures into too many competing continuities. There always have to be moments where events are set in stone (for example, the Episode 2 fight with Aeran is another major bottleneck—the scene always happens, you can’t avoid it because having that fight vs not having that fight would split the game in two).

I’m hoping to get as much work as I can done on the rest of Section 2 in the last two weeks of November. Then I need to back up and add flavour text and some alt conversations. The bulk of what I am working on right now will remain the same regardless of whether the MC was fired by Lethalis or not—essentially the difference here will be that many of the references to and discussions of Umbria will need to be replaced with ones of Zenaida. I was originally going to take this text and separate it for the Zenaida version of things, but I think I will be able to weave both world states in the same document. 

For other Patreon things, I have the December shorts outlined and in progress (both are Zenaida pieces!).

To Do List

Thank you all so much for your support! If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to let me know below. 💖