[Ep 1.16 “Girls Night Out”] Last week sucked

Hey guys.  Sorry for the late report; I wanted to finish what I was working on yesterday so I could give you a clearer update.

I spent most of last week in agony because, as much as I wanted to draw a line under it and move on, story scene 6 just still wasn't fucking working.  Everything I was trying just sucked – the scene that's supposed to be wild and fun and crazy felt boring and wrong.

If you're going through hell, keep going
On Saturday night, just before bed, a solution that might work popped into my head.  I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget it, and experimented with it yesterday and today.

It's just a simple narrative device (although one I've never used before).  I've re-storyboarded the scene using the new technique and – thank the gods – it works.

To give you some idea of the scale of the changes, I created 129 new storyboard slides for this scene alone.  The previous number of storyboard slides for the whole episode was 137, so this has turned into a much bigger chunk of gameplay than I anticipated!

I feel like I did when, after a lot of creative struggle, I finally hit on the way to structure the heroine's first barmaiding shift at the club.  I'm now happy that this scene is going to be as hot as that one, but in a new location with a totally different flavour.

Next steps
This week I'll be able to do what I planned to do last week – get the draft of this scene working in the game engine.  I'm very sorry for the delay on this, it's been a really tough thing to get right, but I'm confident now that it's looking like it should.

Okay, that's it for last week's report.  I'm going to carry on with this tomorrow, and report success at the weekend.  Thank you so much for your ongoing patience, faith and support, everybody, you are the reason I push myself through these difficult taskings even when I don't think I can do it 😔