About Chapter 14 (Dev Diary)

Now that I’ve finally finished Chapter 14, I thought I could share some of the lessons and thoughts that came out of working on this episode. I often hesitate about talking openly about certain things, but I think a large part of the community is interested in seeing a bit behind the scenes and learning more about the game’s development.

And the first conclusion I’ve come to is that I’m done with big multi-part events, at least for now.

Developing this chapter was quite complicated for several reasons, the main one being the sheer range of possibilities the setting offered. I’d had the mansion event in mind since the very beginning of ORS, and I knew I wanted to include it, but without just retracing Tyrone’s pool party from GGGB.

This event brought together quite a few characters, some new and others already established, and besides advancing the main storyline, it also provided the perfect setting for certain interactions and spicier scenes to take place.

I had a lot of potential ideas, others already more clearly defined, and also some segments where I wasn’t quite sure how to give them content that felt interesting, engaging, or meaningful. It was difficult to decide which ideas made the cut and which didn’t, how to structure the ones that did, and how to weave them into the central narrative framework.

A multi-day narrative event where multiple characters interact with each other becomes a real web of possibilities; tangential, sequential, or branching events that all influence one another, and orchestrating the logic behind how they connect and unfold has been quite a challenge. At first, I wasn’t sure whether to include a scene between Lena and Zarina, but after seeing the interest the character generated, I knew I had to add it. Another scene I had in mind, and hesitated about including until the very last moment, was the one with Ivy, Jess, and Lena, which felt perfect for developing Good Jess’s storyline, directly contrasting with her Bad version.

I would have liked to add more content to the party, more scenes at the photocall and on the dance floor, and give Ian and Lena more to do and share, but I had many other routes to handle and coordinate, so I had to prioritize. Those scenes included the long-awaited MMF threesome for Lena, which can be accessed through multiple routes and with different characters, Axel’s unexpected appearance, which brings the tension in that route to a head, and, above all, the scene where Ian finally manages to get closer to Ivy.

I also considered making the whole event skippable, since Lena is quite reluctant about it in some routes, but in the end I decided it would have been too difficult, or rather impossible, to properly develop these storylines and include these scenes through alternative routes. Another aspect that required a huge amount of time and effort was adding all the aesthetic variations to the illustrations: makeup, tattoos, piercings, outfits, alternate characters… all of which, combined with the many animations, made creating and coding the visual side of this chapter a very long and tedious process.

The game’s visual quality has been steadily improving, and I’ve become increasingly ambitious and demanding with the final look, as well as with the complexity and quality of the animations, and that might actually be working against me. I’ve been thinking about trying to stick more closely to the well-known Pareto principle, focusing my efforts on the 20% that truly matters and delivers 80% of the results, so I can shorten production times and move forward more quickly.

Moving forward quickly is one of my main concerns right now, and something I really want to focus on. But the reality is that the sheer tangle of variables makes writing each scene a dense and time-consuming process. I often think of writing ORS as weaving a fabric: you have to thread together all the plotlines, sequences, motivations, and character development into a coherent whole. But it’s not like knitting a scarf, where once you finish one, you start another from scratch; it’s more like weaving a large tapestry, one that has to maintain narrative continuity and cohesion across meters and meters. The cost-benefit balance might be off, but I believe it’s a necessary trade-off, and that complexity and nuance, even if not always executed perfectly, is what gives the game its identity. I’m always working at the edge of what my skills can handle, but so far I’ve been managing to pull it off with varying degrees of success. My goal is to keep doing the same, even if the mental load of the project is overwhelming sometimes.

Another thing that has been really tough in the creation of this chapter (and in the development of ORS in general) is the delayed gratification that comes from taking longer than I’d like to release updates. I set out to put out updates at a faster pace, but that hasn’t been possible with Chapter 14 for several reasons. The main one is the sheer amount and complexity of the scenes, the art, and the animations, and also because chopping the chapter into several chunks just didn’t make sense narratively. For an update to feel satisfying to play, I couldn’t just cut it anywhere; I needed solid narrative blocks before I could release anything.

It’s hard to spend months working on something that doesn’t really take shape until the very end, when you finally assemble all the pieces, and then have to wait so long to share it. What I find truly rewarding about this whole process is the moment I get to publish my work and share it with my audience (as well as the financial compensation for it). People tend to subscribe when there’s new content, so every month that goes by without a new chapter means a significant financial loss. That’s why I’m very motivated to release new updates as quickly as possible, and it’s really frustrating when I can’t.

In any case, I’ve already started working on the new chapter, and I’m really excited to keep developing it and continue growing. In this post I’ve talked about the challenges and difficulties of Chapter 14; in the next one I’ll go over how I’m planning to approach Chapter 15 and address some of the difficulties I’ve experienced with this latest update.

If you’ve made it this far, I hope you found it interesting or insightful, and I really appreciate the interest you show in this project. I hope I can continue to live up to it.