February 14th Update
Hi all,
Fortnightly update post (and happy Valentine’s Day to you all!). I can’t decide whether it feels like a long or a short time since my last fortnightly update—I think it feels like Chapter 2 has been out much longer than the ~ 10 days or so it has actually been released for…
- I intentionally paused writing on Pactbinder after launching Chapter 2, so I could focus on any bug fixes or tweaks that people pointed out (plus also just to take a break, writing 167k words or so over the course of 3 months was not easy). I’ve also spent time thinking ahead to the structure of ‘Act 2’, though I won’t elaborate on that for now!
- As such, whilst I have started Chapter 3, I’ve only written a couple of thousand words of it so far. As of today, however, I’m returning to writing-focus mode.
- Chapter 3 will be mainly focused on the Pactbinder’s first term at Hightower, so will primarily consist of classes, the Pactbinder’s choice of Society and the first magic choice lock-in. Oh, and Halloween. My gut feeling is that it will be longer than Chapter 1 (about 56k words) but possibly shorter than Chapter 2 (which was about 97k words). Either way, it’ll get us past 200k total.
- I’m hesitant to commit to a hard timeline just yet - as predicted, work has gotten a lot busier since the start of February. I’m going to keep aiming for my usual 10k words a week target but I suspect I’ll be missing that target more often and overshooting it less often!
- As such, tentatively I want to say that Chapter 3 will be out by mid-May. If I can get it out earlier, I will - as always, I’ll keep you guys updated and I suspect this deadline is going to shift a bit more than the Chapter 2 one did. I’m just not sure if that means earlier or later yet!
As always, feedback and constructive criticism on demo contents continue to be extremely gratefully received. I love hearing about what people like about the story and characters, and what they think has the potential to be improved upon (as well as comments like typos and individual sentence flow points which are also gratefully received!)