October 2023 Newsflash #2 (Patreon)

Good afternoon, everyone! I've mostly been doing the Royal Affairs expanded epilogue this fortnight, with a little smidgeon of Honor Bound.

Here's what I have been listening to on a loop while making this epilogue. When I'm towards the end of a project, I tend to find an album and listen to it ferociously until I'm done... this time the Amarantus soundtrack worked very nicely.

I sent off the epilogue to my editor last Friday, got the notes back in super quick time, and have finished implementing them this afternoon. Hooray! The next stage is that it will go into limited beta testing (the code is very complicated in places and I want to make sure there aren't continuity snags) and will be released as a free update sometime in early 2024, along with the ability to save your game for future import into Honor Bound. I'm thrilled to have done this! It was very joyful to revisit the characters and give them a little adventure.

It is, uh... twice the length I was planning. I have learned a lot about scope estimation on this.

Royal Affairs expanded epilogue wordcount: 48700

Royal Affairs expanded epilogue fortnight's wordcount: 24824

As for Honor Bound, I have not spent a huge amount on it this fortnight, but I have done some planning and coding for Chapter 6 and came to an epiphany about Raffi's plotline. It needed tweaking because it felt a bit all-over-the-place and disconnected to how the PC could interact with it; I hadn't been totally sure about it and wasn't sure how to change it without altering Raffi's personality, but I've come up with an excellent idea that makes it all come together really well - I'm now really looking forward to figuring out how it starts to unfold in Chapter 6! I'll be coding all of that up (and doing some broad-strokes planning for how things move on in Chapters 8-9) next week.

Honor Bound current wordcount: 232280

Honor Bound fortnight's wordcount: 3402

Behind the scenes:

I played Vampire's Kiss by Dash Casey, which I enjoyed a lot although it could have done with more romantic and steamy scenes, and All World Pro Wrestling by David Monster which definitely did not have that problem and probably has the highest sex-scenes-to-playthrough ratio of any game I've played (and I have played a few sexy games), and was also full of joy and good cheer.

I read Uncomfortable Labels by Laura Kate Dale about her teenagerhood/twenties as an autistic trans woman (a candid and interesting memoir, and perhaps more illuminating for trans folks a bit younger than I am?), The Easternmost House by Juliet Blaxland about literally living on the edge of a cliff (I enjoyed it while reading but afterwards it felt unsubstantial, and there were too many digressions about her opinions about other people's opinions on foxhunting and veganism), and The Two Doctors Górski by Isaac Fellman, a novella about academic abuse and brain magic (my favourite of the three, with gorgeous descriptions but a slightly thin ending).

I continue to play Baldur's Gate 3 - it turns out my barber adores it too so we had a great chat about it, so it has officially taken over my life. My wife has finished it. I remain trundling through Act 1, relatively unspoiled for the big plot points. Life is good.

Sneak peek:

This is one of many cases in which I drift into self-indulgent food descriptions:

The sugary taste of the candied flower petal has made you realize how hungry you are. Fabien nods tolerantly.

"You go along," he says. "I have people keeping an eye on everything. Enjoy yourself."

Out of the church you go, into the warm air of the gardens. There's a box hedge maze in which guests are losing and finding themselves; you head past it to a wide open circle entirely paved with a mosaic in bright clashing colors, leading to a tall fountain of some Teranese General atop a horse in the middle. The space is packed with food stalls whose smells combine deliciously as the workers deftly cook on naked flames and hotplates.

You spot Oliver taking a crêpe from a Westerlind-style stall; he turns to wave it at you and hurries over. "Look at this!" he says. "They even got the lemon and sugar proportions right!"

My favourite bit:

I don't want to spoil it because I think it'll be a nice surprise for when it comes out, but I figured out a few things about Teranese and Westerlind wedding ceremonies that I think will be very fun to play!

I hope you've had good Octobers, everyone. I will be posting what's coming up next, along with a bonus story poll, next Wednesday. Have a good weekend!