Famous last words (;
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In Tea and Scones, you will have the opportunity to sack Fitzie if you desire. Not until towards the end, but you will be able to.
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Meanwhile Starling can’t be trusted to stay when you need them the most. Guess it boils down to what kind of betrayal the MC prefers to put up with. 
Not everyone has Rory’s luck to snatch The Perfect Servant TM…
I really do hope that Starling returns with an explanation and apology, and they better be good ones. Would be a shame indeed if it came down to a broken nose; I don’t think the MC’s reputation would survive another scandal.
(I may be a bad person, but if the MC can (try to) punch an annoying ex-neighbour, I say let ‘em have a go at Starling too. Even if it backfired as per usual, it’d be so worth it. 
)
Sorry if this has been asked before, but I’m just curious, can we meet our Tally Ho! MC in this book? :0
wait, what?! Fitzie gambles?! have i missed a crucial clue/hint/situation? when and how can we encounter this in the story?
Spoiler for chapter 5!
In chapter 5, Fitzie will ask us where do we want them to be. Ask Fitzie to go to the arena. When we meet them later in the next chapter, if Fitizie got the upperhand, they’ll bet your money to Chef Beauregard (I forgot the exact amount but it was quite a lot, if I recall). If you have the upperhand, that will not happen.
I personally don’t think Fitzie cannot be trusted with employer’s money, it’s just when they have the upperhand, we’ve unconsciously given them control. Well… I mean, we’re still their employer regardless, sooo I’m not sure-
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ahh thanks, really appreciated! i always send Fitzie to the opera to keep Matilda happy or to keep an eye out for the criminals XD
It’s a stat, if I’m not mistaken. If your MC let Fitzie does whatever they please, allow them to ‘control’ your MC, so to speak, Fitzie has upperhand. If your MC doesn’t allow Fitzie to decide and basically put them in place, your MC has upperhand.
I let Fitzie has upperhand in my ‘airhead’ MC, it was hilarious.
Not in Cakes and Ale, and it is to be determined for future books.
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Same, I literally can’t handle Aunt Matilda alone. Still one of my favorite characters though XD
I see, thank you for the answer =D
Oh gosh. This is a level of realism regarding employee/employer interaction that I did not anticipate. I’ve no doubt I’d find it supremely difficult to do such a thing, but I admit to wondering how sacking Fitzie would impact one’s relationship with them… negatively, no doubt, but will they become un-friendable, un-romanceable, or - worst come to worst - irrelevant to the story?!
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It’ll be interesting, no doubt, to figure that stuff out. But I can promise, Fitzie will be in the story for the long haul. We’ll see how it goes! But unfriendable and unromanceable–very possibly!
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Don’t you meet the previous MC of they are still working or romancing rory and you get the end with rory?
I’ve spent the last week or so revising the prologues and Chapter One based on my editor’s excellent comments, and I’m happy to say that they are done! Now I’m going to get back to writing Chapter Two!
This is going to be slower going for a while, because I have to fit writing in between teaching and grading and advising, but little by little we’ll get there. Then, when the summer comes, I hope to zoom again. The key for me is to not feel like I have to be as fast during the semester, because that’s impossible.
Onward then, to Merryweather Manor!
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Congrats on finishing Chapter 1!
I’d just like to mention this briefly because I’ve been watching Jeeves and Wooster by Fry and Laurie and it’s a wonderful show and I can see how much these characters influenced Jolly Good, and reading this series and Tally Ho has made me seek it out.
I’ve made it to Series 3 where Wooster arrives in New York, and now I can’t help but wonder, considering our MC is a born and bred aristocratic Englishman/woman, how they’d react to meeting an American or a visit to New York or the US.
Not that it needs to happen, but it’d be fun to speculate on what they might do? Have you thought about what the ROs and other characters might do in New York?
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I think about it all the time, actually. In the future, when Jolly Good is done, I really want to write something in that setting. In my fondest imagining, the final game in the Tally Ho–Jolly Good series is a fifth game to bookend everything, and in which you play an uncle/aunt/aged relative. I picture it partly set on a cruise ship and in Long Island, New York where you are vacationing.
But I can barely think about that with these games on my desk! Remind me of this in a few years…
Anyhow, not one word of Tea and Scones written this week, but I did grade 50 essays.
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Wahhh!!! That sounds like an incredibly enjoyable game too! I can just imagine how disastrous and funny it would be to watch the Rorry and Marmaduke from the perspective of the older relative and to be able to complain about my own indirect offspring to Aunt Matilda and Aunt Primrose. Only to be distracted by Uncle Cholmondy who has found a way to paint his toy soldiers far more efficiently and accidentally setting something on fire. Which is just the distraction Haze (and Fitzie?) needed to do something they shouldn’t but definitely do. Yes, I am definitely looking forward to it! Though I can’t help but feel a sadness at the prospect of the Tally Ho-Jolly Good series ever coming to an end! Still a far way off, luckily! I will just pretend to forget that part.
And thanks for the hard work! Even though it’s not for Tea and Scones! It’s important work (: Hope you stay safe and healthy! 
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I’m not sure whether I’d be like Aunt Primrose or Uncle Cholomondley (haha, I don’t believe I spelled that right), but it would be lovely experience to berate our nephews and nieces and what not. Maybe we can annoy them with old stories from before the Great War, in a elaborate tale that lectures them so they won’t go off and marry that eccentric fellow from another country, or pester them for letters of affection as they dwindle our fortunes and ask us for more money, and convince them to come with us on trips that will obviously teach them good manners and worldly things because young people today!
Maybe we can scheme with their trusty servant to sort out their messes all while oblivious to the fact we’re making things worse for them. I’d love it if my nephew hatched a scheme that inadvertently meant to spare us harm yet we discover it anyway, and somehow the servant makes it all better. What if we get ourselves into a scandal and our niece comes to save us, yet are too stubborn to notice that we have caused a scandal in the first place? I’m old, life is short, why can’t I marry the lower class barkeep from Brooklyn? There is also a consideration of what kind of niece or nephew we have that would either want to help us be happy or save our reputation in society first and foremost.
This would be a fun read, but I can only assume it won’t be some years till you ever consider writing it, not that you will not ever make it there. Jolly Good is jolly good so I’m sure all of us readers have confidence you’ll make your vision shine through in the end. Hip hip hooray and all that.
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I continue to try to sneak in work every now and then during the semester, biding my time until I can go full throttle again! Today was my first major writing day in a while, and I spent the time totally reworking the flow of the chapter to make sure that every path through is fun and varied and reflect the big choices. Today was a coding and revising day, rather than a straight-up writing day.
If you are interested in how the game design angle works, here’s what I was working on, without spoilers, but also probably not very interesting to the vast majority of people:
Summary
Early in the chapter you make a big choice that branches the chapter out in two. In route 1, you have the choice of adventure A, B, or C; in route 2, you have the choice of adventure D, E, or F. These aren’t huge things, but they are significant vignettes.
However, I was mulling this over and realized that I wanted more return on my writing investment. So I decided that in fact, I wanted the player to experience two adventures, not just one.
So I had to choose: do I have the player one of A,B, or C, and then one of D, E, or F? Or do I have the player pick two from A, B, and C or two from D, E, and F? Or do I just trash D, E, and F altogether and have the player pick two from A, B, and C, to make it easier to write? Do I let everyone pick B and C, but A is only available if you made the first big branching choice, and D is only available if you made the second big branching choice?
In short, it was the classic dilemma of making the choices matter a lot v. having finite time in this life to write.
This morning over breakfast I was making all kinds of flowcharts. Anyway, I eventually opted for having the player pick two from A, B, and C or two from D, E, and F. This has the advantage of more content for the player (two adventures instead of one); it honors the first big branching choice (you are either on the ABC path or the DEF path); and I can put in the option to skip the second choice if you want to get on with it. It has the disadvantage of taking a long time to write, since I have to write six interesting vignettes, but I think I’ll make up the time elsewhere as I trim out some less interesting stuff in favor of keeping the action tightly focused on the characters.
I’m also explicitly making this chapter have some thematic and structural symmetry with Chapter Two of Tally Ho, so this change helps me reflect that a bit.
And so, in short, I’m biding my time, grading essays and finishing out the last month of the semester, before I can devote myself to this full-time! As always, I’ll update the first post of this thread whenever I write, with a sentence or two to let you know what I’m up to.
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Sorry, I know the conversation has moved on since then, but I just replayed the game a few times and am curious about this:
@lynossa or @Gower (or whoever knows this) Can you even romance Fitzie when you put them in place and try to keep the upper hand in the relationship? Or at least have a balanced relationship? I feel like I lose points with them or simply don’t gain any whenever my MC says “no” to their ideas. It almost started to feel restricting, how much I had to tiptoe around them (or thought that I had to!) due to their often unpredictable nature and reactions. And everytime I wasn’t on board with an idea, they gave me the cold shoulder or a big dose of sarcasm. …Which also often happened when I was trying to be nice, admittedly. 
Another question, involving Fitzie and MC in a cab:
Is it possible to play through the kissing / no kissing cab scene without losing relationship points? I’ve played this part today over and over, I always went in with 92 points and lost 9 points. I don’t know how to look into the code and wouldn’t even want to. Just a yes / no would be appreciated. 
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