Looking at The Greatus Hiatus!

(pixel art by @aishiteneko on tumblr!)

One of the most fun things about doing the Greatus Hiatus this year has been mapping out and keeping up with a shifting storyline as readers voted on their route through this imaginary "dating sim" game. Although there were routes for a more or less conventional dating game in place, I had a feeling that readers would take it off the rails and choose sillier options, and I planned out alternatives for those too. Today's post answers a few popular questions people have asked about the Greatus Hiatus project, and shows a quick peek at some of the alternate routes that could have been chosen by readers!



The main routes were originally one romantic route for each member of the student council...Deacon, Buddy and Chase...as well as a friendship route, an anarchy route, and more!

The readers, apparently swayed by their desire to see Chase and Buddy end up together, chose the friendship route.

We can see that if we chose Chase to be our campus tour guide on the first day, Cashley would have proclaimed her territorial crush on him instead:







If we chose Deacon as a tour guide, Cashley declares she has a crush on him instead...but she's a little less confident on what they have in common.











I don't want to show the full other routes, just in case I want to use this stuff to make an actual playable game someday. But who knows when that would be...a visual novel game is a lot of work!

But it's fun to see what would have happened if different choices were made...sadly, since this is a comic and not an actual game, we only got to vote on one choice at the end of each episode, and the others were automatically made for us. If not, we might have seen some alternate dialogue.

The janitor has a few interesting things to say about himself:






And even though all three members of the student council are regulars at Sammy's Cafe, only Buddy initially pretends not to be:















 

There are definitely no "right" or "wrong" paths, and no bad endings! I didn't want anyone to accidentally run into a bad ending for the hiatus, so I just didn't write any!















 
No, Silver did NOT throw the cup at Y.N. outside of Sammy's cafe. But since we didn't choose the option to try and chase down whoever did, we didn't find out who was the culprit and why! We may never know.

Yes, there was one secret route! But the readers didn't uncover it. Maybe next time!


(gifs by @aishiteneko on tumblr!)






I spent a few weeks drawing all the art assets that would be needed (including ones we didn't end up using during our chosen route!) and then each week, I'd spend a full day putting together the episode. That left me six other days to work on Season 2 episodes, while still providing everyone with fun weekly content during the hiatus!

I also used a mix of free and paid-for music to give it more of a game feel! I hope that helped.







Why not? Everything should be magical boys once in a while.


(pixel art by @aishiteneko on tumblr!)








Nothing in the hiatus is canon at all..but with that said, there might be one or two very small hints in the hiatus content, both on Webtoon and in the exclusive patrons-only content here on patreon, that you could see pop up in season 2!

Thanks for being here today and be on the lookout for more FREE content on my patreon from now until Season 2, including videos!

See you guys at end of April/beginning of May for season 2 of Cinderella Boy! Thanks for reading!

(pixel art by @aishiteneko on tumblr!)