Happy birthday, Royal Affairs! It’s been a year since it came out and I’ve been over the moon about how it’s been received. It’s meant that I’ve been able to write full-time, make Honor Bound as rich and detailed at high speed, and do a lot of physical and mental health recovery after various periods of burnout. I’m really grateful for everyone’s support, here and elsewhere, and it really makes a huge difference.
I had so much fun returning to the characters after a while away for the epilogue - if you enjoyed the game at release and haven’t replayed for the epilogue, I very much recommend giving it a go!
After beta testing, I wrote up a retrospective about what came up and how I organised my work. I thought I’d share it for some insight into my process, for players and authors. Here it is:
Beta testing retrospective
In Crème de la Crème I ended up adding large branches to the plot during beta, but I was fortunate not to have to do it this time around. Mostly it was building on what was there or bringing certain things to the forefront, or adding a few different ways of navigating situations.
As feedback came in, I was lucky enough to have so much that it became unwieldy to act on it in one go, so I made a priority list.
Highest priority was game breaking bugs or large continuity problems like Dominique’s final game scene switching to Beaumont’s.
High priority was smaller continuity bugs like the game confusing who you were romancing or whether you had or hadn’t done a particular action earlier.
Medium priority was things like small scene additions or multi romance responses, or tweaking first impressions of characters, and so on.
Low priority was nice-to-haves like allowing a character to be romanced only late on.
Alongside this, I fixed typos and made small adjustments - easy wins that added polished. There were also some major sweeps that I did: a stat test clarity sweep, a stat change sweep, a reduction of tests in casual conversations, and repetitive words or phrases.
Stat test clarity:
I picked 3-4 stat tests at random from each chapter, copied their text into a separate document, and highlighted words that reflected the stats. For example: for Authoritative I had things like “I order them to…” “I tell them what to do”, “I stay aloof to maintain my authority…” and so on. I edited testing choices to include these keywords, and also edited the stat guide to include them.
Checking all this had the side effect of helping me spot unnecessary tests or points where the stat being tested just didn’t match the situation at hand.
Stat changes:
There are a lot of points where stats can change, and not all of them made sense at the start of beta. I did variations of this sweep several times, including the Action Skills, NPC stats, and adding a lot more chances to boost your Powers of Persuasion. Again doing this check helped me spot unnecessary or unintuitive tests and changes.
Tests in casual conversations
This was again something that I iterated several times. Some of the commentary about Crème de la Crème said that the stat tests felt punishing or too difficult, and an early playtest from my wife flagged that some of the tests in Royal Affairs felt unfair. Why should a character’s relationship reduce when you’re trying to be affectionate, if the circumstances aren’t in a state where that makes sense?
So I stripped out a lot of this, generally replacing a success/failure with flavour text (such as a Subtle MC perhaps being, well, more subtle about holding hands with someone). In some cases, where a character needs to be drawn out of themselves to talk more emotionally (Beaumont or Hyacinthe, on occasion), or they see the conversation as a contest or challenge in some way (mostly Javi or Trevelyan), I left them in. But I liked that they were a rarity rather than default.
Repetitive words or phrases
As I was writing, sometimes I noticed that I was overusing phrases, so if I got that feeling I would make a note for the sweep. In the end there wasn’t as much as that as I thought, but there were a lot of qualifier-type words that reduce the impact of a sentence - “a little” was one, or “really”, usually in dialogue - or filler words like “down” in sentences like “you sit down beside them”. I also looked for phrases like “you know” or “you suspect” to spot places where I could express whatever it was that the MC knows more elegantly. (This is a tip a former colleague told me once that I’ve never forgotten!)
More involved edits
With some major things that I did change, I’d put them on my to-do list before beta but they were either unwieldy and I wanted to start testing sooner rather than later, or I wanted to check whether other people agreed. It was great to have more opinions and mostly they confirmed what I’d thought. With others, I studied the feedback to gauge whether the effort of making the changes would be worth the payoff. In most cases, I decided to go for it.
In general, this stage involved adding things, including:
- more worldbuilding details to give more context to the plot
- more teacher interactions throughout; added scenes as well as offhand references to other classes; more about Clemence and Vere and expanded outcomes to their storyline
- romanceable characters responding to players romancing other people: in the moment, checking in about where your relationship was at, and a set of final breakup conversations if it was left until the very last minute (this was a very big undertaking and would have been better to do earlier - a lesson I’ve taken to Honor Bound)
- lengthening the main suffrage debate
- adding slow-paced romance dynamics for two characters (I was really keen to do this but was disciplined about making it low priority - it was a lovely idea and I knew I’d enjoy doing it, but it was very much a nice-to-have compared to other things. I was delighted to be able to do it!)
- more communal scenes with classmates to give more of a sense of living in each other’s pockets
- adding an option to confide in Asher about a particular plot point and for them to assist with it if wanted (I was so happy about adding this: it’s one of my favourite Asher moments, even if few people see it!)
- tweaking some of the friendship/romance conversations to add more emotional chat (mostly this applied to Javi and Hyacinthe; there was a bit added to Asher and Dominique at Verdancy)
- more pet time
- more narrative and conversational responsiveness about whether an imperilled character was romanced
- more Javi asexuality chat
- more detailed outfit descriptions throughout with more choices about what to wear
- generally expanding some scenes to give more breathing room to important moments
In the end I added 45000 words to the game after the first draft, thanks to feedback from editor review, continuity testing, copyediting, and beta playtesters. Testing took place during late December 2022 and January 2023, and I massively appreciate everyone who contributed to make this big game as polished as it is!
