He’s cute and playful and doing the mock play with Max in class is the greatest scene thus far, imho.
That said I am going to do a Blaise playthrough (the whole “rivals” to lovers and belligerent sexual tension thing is exciting too) once this is out and probably a Hartmann one too, as that kid really needs to be let his inner “bad boy” out. [ And I must admit I am intrigued by the royal too, should I really like him I’ll probably do yet another playthrough focused on him as well. But in this game Max will always remain my first love.
Hooray! I’m hoping with all the characters to interact with/befriend/romance/sabotage it’ll be lots of fun to replay, not to mention plenty of different ways of resolving plots.
@lokidemon007 - No they’re openly there and royal - interestingly, in an early version of the outline they were incognito, but I adjusted it on a later draft because of changing the Gallatin/Archambault social dynamics. Maybe in a future game I’ll use that idea!
Wow, OK, I don’t know where March went but apparently it happened. March was the month for writing Chapter 9, hooray! I’ve coded Chapter 10 and while I’m sitting around waiting for my RandomTest to finish so I can make sure the difficulty is properly balanced, I’m writing it.
There are going to be 12 chapters in total, so I’m now in the final quarter. I can’t quite believe it! I’m working on a couple of other projects too at the moment, so I don’t want to say beta dates or anything, but I’m feeling pretty good about how it’s going. Thank you all for your support and feedback - working on something for so long is a hefty endeavour, and comments and enthusiasm are always hugely appreciated!
Week’s Wordcount: 8770 words Total Wordcount: 264175 words
I’ve got out of sync with these weekly updates…but never mind. This week has been a lot of fun because not only have I made progress, I also headed to London on Saturday for an IF meetup. Played a game, saw two talks about game design which gave me a lot to think about, and caught up with a bunch of awesome people. (If London is accessible to you and you’re interested, I recommend joining - I attend sporadically but every time I do it’s thought-provoking, and just generally nice to chat with people offline about this stuff).
What I’ve been doing: Now that coding for Chapter 10 is done, I’m well on the way writing it, which has involved Proposal Scenes. Oh gosh I’ve been enjoying these a lot.
We have a plethora of proposals (mild very general spoilers)
We have:
romantic proposals, whether you’ve been serious or casual with a romance interest
proposals where you’ve never been romantic with them before but you’re such good friends that you ask them out and propose all at once and then they say yes (they’ll have to like you a LOT for this to work and/or they’ll need to be quite flighty for this, just saying)
proposals where you’re good nonromantic friends and decide to get engaged for security
proposals where you don’t necessarily like someone very much but you’ll marry them for prestige
…and possibly more that I’ve forgotten. I feel like a greengrocer shouting about produce, there are so many! You can do other things if you don’t want to get involved in any proposing, also, though your parents may not be happy about that.
Oh, and do you like fancasting? I love it, and do it a lot for digital and tabletop games, so here are my current picks for the teachers:
I know you probably can’t make what I am about to say. But could it be possible hate a character deeply but acting like best friends ever even make that character rot for you and then destroy xhis heart in a proposal moment. Because i am totally portraying a Mara faking be best friend ever with Max for instance use xhim to make my dirty stuff and then NOPE ROMANCE YOUR HAND… Mara is a Power couple Mean girls … no way ended with goodies…
That and a thing is just minor flavour thing could we choose a goal or something we want to achieving in Game and appear in stats. Like find a lover or Be best in school… I think people loves that flavour texts and is a way to refresh replay
Will we be able to invite Karson for the coming ball? Or that would be very scandalous? (personally I don’t mind taking the risk and put my head in the guillotine )
I think so! Certainly you can do things like pretend to help them with school work but actually sabotage them, I think there will be some chances to betray a close friend in a major way during the climactic chapters. I don’t want to promise anything too specific but there are also some characters that you can pretend to like romantically but be spending time with them solely for the prestige.
That sounds interesting! There are a bunch of achievements to do with goals but it could be fun to give the main character a chance to state what their major goal is. I’ll have a think about how to set it out - thank you for the suggestion!
Definitely, it’ll go through the usual CoG beta process and I will yell about it once the time comes!
Alas, too scandalous - for that stage anyway. BUT at that particular ball there is a nice Karson hangout you can do, and there are plenty of opportunities to do romance/friendship building at other points!
This makes me wonder since the prince is from a rival school would something like rivals to lovers thing be possible with him or is that just limited to Blaise in this game?
Not that anybody can compete with Max for me and Max will always be my first love in this game.
Oh no your fancasting is exacerbating my crush on Miss Dalca (Jameela ).
I’m really excited about the possibility of platonic proposals. Is there space to propose to a friend and continue dating an RO (maybe if they’re lower status than you’re aiming for, marriage-wise, or you like them a lot but are not 100% sold on your long-term viability)?
Probably not - will keep you all posted when testing o’ clock comes around
There isn’t so much of that dynamic with that character, because of their personality (you can try to sabotage them though for sure) but a couple of the other Archambault students can have a bit of that vibe.
For some characters who are OK with it, yes I think that would work! So say if you were in a friendship with Gonzalez and decided to get married for security/fanciness reasons, and you wanted to keep seeing Freddie, that would be possible. It’s quite dependent on the characters’ disposition, and whether or not they’re available (because I’m a maniac and put in some NPC-NPC romances that can happen independently of you) but there are combinations (like the one in the spoiler tags there) where it would be doable!
Wordcount since the last update: 17030 words Total Wordcount: 281205 words
What I’ve been doing: Writing Chapter 10! It’s in the bag now, waiting for editing. Right now, I’m taking a brief breather to work on other projects.
Can. You. Believe that this draft is now officially over the wordcount of Blood Money? This was in part thanks to me taking a writing retreat last week (AKA staying with my parents) during which I spent a glorious few days being cooked for, doing yoga, and working. Coming back home was a bit of a drop back down to earth (household maintenance and parenting are hard work, who knew?) but I’m charging onward neverthleless.
I can’t quite believe that a) this project’s longer than Blood Money, which was huge, and b) I only have two chapters to go till the draft is done. It’s very close to my heart, and I’ve learned a lot doing a second long game.
Oh man, I’m so glad we’re getting the chance to meet the Archambault students in the demo! I really admire your ability to somehow get me to care about all these characters the instant I meet them–some stories don’t manage it at all with half as many.
Also, for a game with objectively fairly low stakes–no risk of anyone dying or the world ending–this is genuinely terrifying. I accidentally embarrassed Freddie in public and nearly closed the game in a panic.
That’s such a lovely comment, thank you so much! I’m really pleased that you’re feeling the characters, I’ve loved writing them (poor Freddie!!). It’s also a lot of fun making the stakes mostly relatively low but super high for the characters - after having lots of death and mayhem in Blood Money it’s an interesting challenge to make people gnash their teeth over things like their clothing choices
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