About Chapter 15 (Dev Diary)

Following up on the reflections I shared about the difficulties and challenges involved in creating Chapter 14, I also wanted to write a bit about how I plan to approach Chapter 15. My main concerns are two: increasing the release cadence and moving the plot forward.

As I mentioned, one of the main difficulties in releasing Chapter 14 was delivering a coherent narrative unit within such a large event, with many characters and branching paths intertwined through sequential and alternative events, which made it hard to cut the content at any given point.

The narrative structure I’m planning for Chapter 15, and possibly beyond, is different, focusing on smaller, more self-contained events for each character. Also, given where we are in the story, there can be multiple relationships and plotlines running in parallel that are mutually exclusive. With that in mind, I want to establish a central narrative thread with independent, character-specific scenes orbiting around it. This should allow me to break the chapter up more easily and release smaller chunks, or even standalone scenes.

The main drawback of this approach is that updates will be less meaty, but I don’t want to go back to taking 5–6 months to release new content. As a result, a given update might not include content for the characters someone is particularly interested in, or it might offer a somewhat shorter, more linear narrative experience, one that’s best enjoyed by exploring different paths and scenes across multiple save files.

In the end, my main goal is to make the overall structure of the game and the player experience as solid and enjoyable as possible, even if that means individual releases are a bit lighter. At this point, the branching nature of the game pretty much requires it.

To speed up development, I’ll try to apply some version of the 80/20 rule (more like 70/30), focusing on limiting the elements that add a lot of workload without significantly contributing to the progression of the story. One of the things that took up an enormous amount of time in the last chapter was animations and cosmetic variations, so I’ll try to be more restrained with them whenever possible (of course, I’m writing this while working on several new animations for the next chapter). I’ve been wanting to add cosmetic variations for Ian (beard, tattoos) for a long time, but now I’m actually glad I haven’t done it yet—and I’ll probably implement them later on, retrospectively.

I’m also going to try to make better and more deliberate use of ellipses. I almost always feel compelled to include the ‘mandatory scene’ with this or that character in every new chapter, since I know many of you are looking forward to interacting again with your favorite characters, and I myself have plenty of ideas and illustrations I want to include; after all, it’s an erotic game.

However, the scenes keep becoming more ambitious and complex, and more possibilities keep opening up. The game could go on indefinitely, but I want to move the story forward. So I’m going to focus on scenes that are new or that significantly advance the plot, and give those the time and attention I believe they deserve. I have some ideas in mind that I think will both satisfy and surprise you, and right now it’s more important to reach those and do them justice than to add more casual scenes with characters who have already had their fair share of content, even though it’s quite hard for me to hold back and cut ideas as they come up (this was especially difficult and painful with Chapter 14).

Anyway, I hope that with these general guidelines, development of the next chapter will be faster and more manageable (though I’ve already started writing and I’m already facing the narrative complexity it’s going to require).

I’m really looking forward to continuing to share this experience with you and putting Ian and Lena’s fates in your hands.