i just finished Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale it was the best CoG game i ever played. i am so excited for tea and scones!
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Well, that’s just the sort of thing one wants to see after a hard day of grading! Thank you (and thank you, incidentally, for the ko-fi support)!
I’m still pretty much on track, with lots of Tabby stuff in a notebook ready to be transcribed and coded and stuff, and tons of the Gilberto and Vyv paths in ridiculous notes and flowcharts ready to be spun into gold, Rumplestiltskin-style. It’s all a big jumblety-jumble to the outside eye, but it is in fact exceedingly well organized, I assure you, and I am hurtling to the very end of the Tabby path, which is exciting, because it will shortly mean that I have a playable path through to the near-end of Chapter Seven (as long as you hang with Tabby).
Update: The notebook stuff is now fully transcribed, and I am about to finish Tabby in a day or so, and then move on to either Gilberto or Vyv (I cannot decide who to spend the next month or so with). I’ve been writing a long post every day so far on my Ko-Fi about precisely what I write each day if you are interested in the tiny little details, but suffice to say that progress is happening–it was a 6k words day today!
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Poly paths! Yay~
Cakes was amazing and I’m happy to know that this will be longer. Can’t believe it’s been 4 years and I didn’t even know there’s a sequel.
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The intention–we’ll see about the reality–is that the two poly paths will start to be established in chapter eight in preparation for full blossoming in the third and final game. Five romantic options is already a lot and I don’t know precisely how I want to implement poly paths down the road. But the ideas I have for them are amusing (to me) and I don’t want to drop them, so I suspect I’ll end up doing something with them.
And, yes, I can’t believe it’s been four years either. I was writing this bit in Chapter Six a while back and I wanted to bring in some element from Chapter Two as a callback, and I sat for a second, stunned in my chair, and I said, aloud, to myself, “is that from this game?” Chapter Two felt like I had written it so long ago, because I had. It was uncanny feeling.
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Remember, talking to oneself is a cardinal sign of insanity, now we all know where the absurdity with your games comes from
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The Tabby adventure path through Chapter 7 is now written, and the chapter comes to 264,000 words at present, with four more paths to go. That’s slightly misleading, because a hearty chunk of that is the rival encounter if you are on the Firesnuff sponsor route. But still! It’s big.
Next, I’ll be writing Gilberto’s adventure path, and for those of you who don’t mind light spoilers, I have put the outline of Gilberto vignettes in the first post of this thread under the cut.
This path will be for serious adventurers with a lot of physical obstacles and deadly traps; but at the same time, it is also for people who care about Gilberto, and who want to ensure that this adventure is not only done but done in a way that doesn’t hurt Gilberto or what he values, and that’s why this adventure works with characters who are not necessarily physical characters, because a lot of it – really, the bulk of it – is about the relationship/friendship/romance/friction between you and Gilberto.
It is also an adventure for people who want to get closer to Juniper–although getting closer to Juniper here will be a challenge if you also want to get closer to Gilberto here.
Finally, it is also an adventure for people who are really bad at physical stuff and will fall into things, drown, starve, walk into stalagmites, etc., etc., and would like to be rescued, carried, given first aid, and told that they probably shouldn’t eat that mushroom. Because you’ll have fun on this adventure even if you are the least Bold character ever. You may have to choose some slightly different objectives, if so, but you’ll still have a blast.
I am updating on my Ko-fi with more fine grained info for each writing session on weekdays immediately after I finish writing for the day. That’s where I put more of a developer diary, but fair warning that I do get a touch more into spoilers there.
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I am absolutely tempted to do this now, just to see how many snarks and facepalms I can get out of Fitzie.
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Is juniper goint to be a RO?
I never know what’s going to happen later on, but she is not a fully-fledged RO in Tea and Scones. However, you’ll have some opportunities to get closer to her. Is there a category between “not an RO” and “RO”?
Happily for your dignity, Fitzie is not in the catacombs with you, so any snarks and facepalms will have to be afterwards, when you relate the story to them. If you leave those parts in.
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Bold of you to assume I have any.
Suboptimal choice. 
ROish.
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Amazing work and one of the best out there. I am glad to look forward to Tea and Scones.
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You are such a good author, congratulations on the great work.
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If you are interested in detailed musing about some of the macro-level chapter structures I’m working on, I posted a blog post (it’s free) at https://ko-fi.com/gower9932 called “Falling Down a Mountain Cliff Hitting Things Along the Way”; it talks a bit about some of the differences in chapter flow between Midsummer and Tally Ho and the Jolly Good games!
The short update is that I am really close to finishing Gilberto’s path through Chapter Seven–I bet I have about 7-8 writing days to go on that. I was going to do Fitzie’s path next, but then I thought of a really good idea for how I wanted to do Vyv’s path, so I’m going to tackle that one next. I will post an update here when I start Vyv’s path; it’s going to be a departure from Tabby’s and Gilberto’s both of which are pretty high adventure. Vyv’s should be more elegant and low-key with slowly mounting problems rather than being tossed right into the action, and it will be very much for fans of Trina, Figs, and Mopsie, as well as, of course, Vyv, who you will be escorting to a lovely party where some serious negotiations will take place. I hope you packed your spats and know how to twirl gracefully on the dance floor which also perusing the fine print of a contract.
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The article was delightful! I love reading about structure and the process of writing, both from being a massive nerd about this stuff and for sparking off ideas - thank you so much for sharing.
Best of luck with finishing off Chapter 7!
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I’m always taken aback by the massive workload when reading about the writing process. You folks are seriously committed 
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You might be interested in this, then:
His other book is about game design which may or may not interest you, and you might want to give the blog posts a read - they touch on a LOT of things concerning their game design and whatnot, including the occasional thought on writing (and, unlike the books, the blog posts are free).
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This is a really interesting read! When I’m thinking about Tally Ho! and Cakes in relation to other choice games, I felt like they “solved” the optimization problem (“Oh, are readers just gonna make builds and create the most optimal path through the game?”) by making the ‘optimal’ route feel kind of irrelevant: since it’s a very comical setting, you don’t really fail as much as you just add a different wrinkle into the story.
And the stats change so quickly, and there are so many small things that the game keeps track of that it’s just kind of impossible to do everything in one playthrough. So, as a reader, you’re kind of encouraged to think of the game less in terms of ‘best path’ and more in terms of ‘Oh, this is what I liked the most’ or ‘This is what my character would do’, etc. I feel like what you wrote about the use of time and the different chapter splits are an expansion of this philosophy 
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At last the Gilberto path of Chapter Seven is completely done! I’m very happy with how it came out, and now I have three more paths through to write in this chapter. I can’t believe I thought, back on 7/30, that I only had 7-8 writing days to go in Gilberto’s path. Oh, well. It got long and detailed, and I think it was worth the time I spent embellishing it. Each path is definitely the size of a full chapter at this point, which I didn’t quite expect when I decided to do these five paths.
Next up is Vyv’s path, which I’ll be working for at least a few months. The structure of this path is going to be much simpler, coding-wise, so at least that. Tomorrow I will break out the sub-vignettes in the first post in the thread for those interested in seeing what sort of things there will be to do in this path.
I also need to figure out if I should bite the bullet and just make five distinct chapter files for the five paths–so that this one file doesn’t get too enormous and choke ChoiceScript. Annoying, but possibly a good idea.
Edit: I have updated the first post in this topic to show the flow of vignettes in Vyv’s path for Chapter Seven, under the cut for “Lair Adventure.” There’s a lot of vignettes. I’m really, really excited to write Vyv’s path. I think it will be a lot of fun because it has tons of callbacks to earlier decisions, including a big one in Tally Ho, and some smaller ones for people who happened to take Haze’s path in Chapter Six, or who went with Vyv to the gallery in Cakes and Ale, or who make friends with some particular animals earlier in this game, or who are close to Col. Firesnuff…there’s a lot.
Classes have started up again, alas, and that means teaching, grading, meetings, advising, and all of that, so unfortunately, writing slows down a bit now. I still intend to write every weekday, but this is the nature of the beast. I still am hoping to finish writing this game some time in 2025–I’m still pretty much on target there. But we’ll see.
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All of these diverging paths sound delicious, it’s gonna be impossible to pick one RO to be my canon one. At least I can make one more playable character 
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It will be delicious in the end once the cake is baked; I’m still in the stage where I’m in the kitchen with flour all over my face and three pots boiling and timers going off.
Edit: Oh, also, in case it wasn’t clear, these paths in which you follow one of the ROs are not tied to the person with whom you have a romantic link–it may well work better for your character’s personality or goals to follow, say, Tabby’s path if you are in love with Gilberto, because Gilberto needs you to do something for him on Tabby’s path.
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