Can confirm all the ones I’d pointed out are working now.
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Okay I like all the RO’s except for Trevelyan now…so much choice stress. 
Although Ash is still my fave boy though not by that much. Also unlike the others we cannot yet be openly together with Ash as publicly dating. But the cutie did finally let me touch his hair…so yay! 
The kind of “equality” champion who owns like 15 houses/mansions himself. I have met more than one of his type during my time as a political worker…I was never much impressed by any of the ones I met. The fictional Trev is no exception thus far. 
Though props to Hannah for writing this kind of character so well too.
Also at the Kayaking thing did Trev seem to be a bit of a bully to anyone else? Though we can’t know for sure since we don’t play an impoverished (relatively speaking) Gallatin student ourselves this time. 
May be some of my real life biases creeping into it here, but I am very weary of this type of politician as they come closest to embodying the whole “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” thing. 
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@JBento so glad to hear it!
@idonotlikeusernames hooray, that’s great that you’re enjoying the characters!
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How do you not like bold and outspoken equality champion Trev? You monster!
Ash IS great. “I, uh, should check with the hotel staff. Yes. That’s what I should do. And I’m doing it because that is what I should do and not because if I don’t remove myself from this situation RIGHT NOW I’ll get so red I’ll give myself sunburn. Not at all.”
You can actually make this EXACT argument to Trev. Her response is basically to shrug, “Can’t help how I was born, but I CAN try to use that privilege to change things.” On the flipside, she can chastise you for not having bothered to even find out if Ash can vote or not. Ash’s comment in that situation might actually be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard, on the level of a thousand dead puppies worth of sad.
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So, I’ve just finished playing through Relics of the Lost Age. I absolutely love it and you get to punch Nazis for bonus points. It also has pretty steep personality checks: you need a 70% dominance in that personality aspect to pass.
So I just wanted to say that I appreciate the fact that Royal Affairs, if the Javi sparring is any indication, not only merely requires a 55% dominance for checks but it also gives options for balanced personalities (50/50). It allows for more roleplaying over min/max gamifying of the character, an aspect it relegates to skills.
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That’s really good to know! I’ve been difficulty balancing using Randomtest each chapter - the way I balance makes it fairly easy to toggle how hard tests are, but it’s nice that it’s in the right general area. Sometimes difficulty drifts and things need more balancing - for a while it was way harder to get high Calm than other personality stats, and I’m keeping a close eye on the clubs in particular as it’s inexplicably harder to get high Athletics Following than the others - but I’m glad things are feeling reasonable right now.
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I mean, it makes sense that the Athletics club people would be the most competitive ones. Also, they include Beaumont, who’s the game’s Driven, so that probably doesn’t help in making them fall in line behind you.
Also, Beaumont, honey, I love you, but maybe you should not have picked the exact club that involves more water? 
Like, I’m already not picking gondolas as a ball theme because of you, work with me here.
EDIT:
This is, regrettably, a common trait of the Driven. 
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Beaumont is… not the best at self care
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Hi! I think I might’ve bumped into a bug when answering the CdlC startup questions. I was creating a character who romanced Blaise, but when it came to picking their gender this came up:
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Either that or it’s an commentary on the metaphysical nature of composition–along with every other possible combination of matter, Blaise and Delacroix constitute a composite object that happens to also be called Blaise.
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Thank you, that’s fixed! A slip of the copypaste hand… but I like @FabricSeat’s theory very much 
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So, being Blaise is a transitive property, then?
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Wait, does this give us a hint of the author’s secret favorite?
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I chose that the previous MC married Rosario, but I got this scene:
There is a bug in this paragraph:
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Thank you so much! I haven’t been able to replicate the first one, so I’ll keep an eye on it; the second one is now fixed.
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The first one is caused by choosing to romance someone else then Rosario, but choosing to marry Rosario later.
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Ooh, OK - that’s really useful thank you! I’m pretty sure I know what the problem is in that case, I’m away from the computer at the moment but I’ll check it (and likely fix) soon.
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At this point, I seem to only be getting the ‘friend’ option even though I already started romancing Javi. I think it may be related to the fact that I chose to be unsure about romantic or sexual connections in the beginning (although, maybe even an unsure character without any preexisting romances should get a chance to decide they’re interested?).
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@Urban That should now be fixed - it was a result of my not accounting for romancing someone else plus getting engaged to Rosario.
@FabricSeat fixed, thank you! It was a typo in my gating off romantic stuff for aromantic protagonists, which meant the game was overzealous in shuffling MCs to the friendship option.
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I’ve never really done a big post-mortem of a project because honestly once I’m at that point I don’t want to look at it again, but I thought while I’m about halfway through Royal Affairs, I’d do a big progress report on it - a pre-mortem if you will - to share some thoughts about its creation and how it’s going. My hope is that it’ll be useful for me to record it for myself, and maybe it’ll be interesting for players and other authors too!
Massive essay incoming
Mentions of pandemic and stress below
The elephant in the room: the P word
As with everyone, 2020 and 2021 have been hideously difficult. I started Royal Affairs in April or so, and was fortunate enough to sustain new-project-momentum for the first couple of chapters, though I was a week late for Chapter 2.
However, I fell off the grid for several months because life was so stressful; the Chapter 3-4 milestone was almost six months late, which was painful for me - I take a lot of pride in Getting Things Done but spring 2021 was an exercise in burnout (I should add that Abby, my editor, was never anything but immensely supportive!). Over the summer, I was laid off from my day job which also made being creative…challenging to say the least (I’m OK - I have another one until at least spring 2022, and creating two projects with CoG plus my Patreon is keeping me afloat).
All of which is to say that it’s been A Journey and honestly I’m glad to have managed to write anything at all.
Making a Crème de la Crème sequel
A lot of people asked about this, but I knew from the outset that I didn’t want to do a direct sequel. The Crème MC can be in incredibly varied situations and trying to cater to all of them would be difficult to make sense of; I also didn’t want to have only a selection of endings be “canonical”.
So, I decided to go for something in the same setting, with a similar shape, but with different aspects and focus.
It’s been very interesting applying what I learned making Crème and figuring out what to do with it. A lot of Royal Affairs is me noodling around in dialogue with the story and technique of Crème. I’m often thinking about how to call back to the tone and themes of Crème, so it feels like it’s in the same world while keeping things fresh.
What I really didn’t want to do is totally rehash things and do the same kind of game all over again. I’ll be interested to see how successful I am; it’s definitely been a challenge fitting the story into the shape of a school year, keeping the school concept fresh, and such. I don’t feel like I want to do a school story again anytime soon - or at least not one like this. Perhaps something based in another country? Or learning completely different things? Or being a university student? Who knows where it might go next…
Royalty
I wanted to show Archambault from the inside, as it’s quite remote in Creme. I also wanted more politics - Creme was deliberately insulated from current events. And I’d already established that royals attend, so it seemed reasonable to do that. I didn’t fancy going into crown heir territory so a middle child felt right. Being royal immediately pushes family into the foreground, and I wanted to give the royal family more screentime than the parents in Crème. There will be whole chapters devoted to Hearthlight and Verdancy school holidays, and while school characters will appear in those chapters, your family will have more of a role throughout the story.
It’s been very interesting writing a royal, and very different. I’m always thinking about how the world can challenge the MC while also representing society, in general, being deferential and wanting the MC to have a good time.
I had some early feedback suggesting that a player felt there was less tension in Royal Affairs because of the MC having less pressure on them; I’ve therefore tended to push the MC into more responsibility, taking decisions that they may not be ready for, and most importantly being under scrutiny all the time. Everyone has an opinion about the Royal Affairs MC, and a picture in their mind about who they are and what they’re about, whether or not it’s based on anything close to reality. At the same time with some characters there’s distance you need to cross in order to get closer to them, because they have such fixed opinions about you (Javi, Trevelyan) or are intimidated by how powerful you are (Asher to a degree, Hyacinthe).
Streamlining
The best decision I made at the start was to have six major friends/love interests (still a very high number!) rather than ten (outrageous, I do not recommend this). Six is a lot even so, but I’m really happy that I stuck to that rather than any higher - the one on one scenes, romance dates/friend dates, etc… take such a long time with more characters and sometimes development can slip.
In this game I feel more solid writing every character; this is due to experience as well, but I can generally envisage how they’ll all react to something, or their line of dialogue, more confidently. Peer characters will also have more impact on the plot, as you’ll see as the game progresses.
A smaller pool of characters means a smaller pool of clubs to choose from, which means I can bring the clubs more into the plot! In Crème I had planned to do that more in the later game, but it just got too complicated and the workload was major at that stage. But In Royal Affairs since there are three rather than five, I’ve got room to go into more depth! Hence things like the Chapter 3 school trip being very different depending on your club. The clubs become more in the forefront in Royal Affairs, which I’m very happy about.
In general I’ve tried to be mindful about scope. This is partly because of it being my third project, partly because of having more work commitments (when writing Creme I was freelancing 4 days a week, hence releasing two games in two years), and partly because of learning from my former day job. Wherever I can work smarter, I do. I try to pinpoint what’s important and prioritise it. I feel rather too much in the trees rather than the forest to assess success accurately in that area, but I’ll have a better idea once I’m further through the game.
Personalising
That said… I’m using a more complicated relationship system than I’ve done in a CoG game before. Each character’s one on one conversations are stored outside of the main chapter files, so when you choose “I’m going on a date with Dominique” the game checks how far you are through your Dominique romance and goes to the next conversation on the list. The idea is for the relationship to more organic - for example, Asher’s romance starts with them saying “we shouldn’t” and leaving. If this interaction only happened in Chapter 1, you’d miss out on that progression. So if you start a romance with Asher in Chapter 2, you still get that “we shouldn’t” moment and then the romance continues onwards.
There’s also a similar system for kisses and intimacy, so that there’s an overall kiss arc (what a phrase). This is so that it feels like a progression if you kiss a character ten times in a game rather than twice, and a tenth kiss will feel more familiar than a second one.
I like that I’ve done this, I feel proud of it, and I’m using something similar for another project (likely just with kisses and intimacy, as the conversations are less flexible for Reasons). I hope that it feels good when playing! In theory it should feel invisible and natural… in practice it is quite complicated to implement and has not played great with the save plugin and has resulted in some weird bugs. But we’ll see!
Stats
I mentioned elsewhere that I’ve tended to make this game less difficult than Crème in general. It’s always a challenge to signpost stat tests clearly; I believe I’ve improved over time, and have reduced overlap in stats, but that’s very much something I refine on every project and haven’t found the perfect setup, if it exists, just yet.
Sharing
I’m enjoying sharing more of the game than I did for Crème! Partly because it’s taken longer, I like to reward people for staying interested and it’s been very helpful to have feedback and bugfixing earlier on than the main big beta. It will hopefully make that part (when it eventually comes) more streamlined.
Hugest thanks for everyone who’s played, posted, told me about bugs, made suggestions, and everything else. I always consider suggestions carefully, and often implement them if it feels right. I hope you enjoy it once more is done!
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