Weekend Update: Pacing and Previews (Patreon)

Hey, everyone! 

The images of Ashley above are from an art share challenge.
I tried giving her a 2D look and set her against flat backgrounds. 

I may have mentioned it before, but I saw some solid advice about writing flashbacks recently: they should be used to answer a question. 

A lot of TV shows or movies I’ve seen lately will cut to flashbacks that feel like they’re slowing the story down and pulling you out of the action and only feeling like a detour from the main story.

The reason for this is there wasn’t any setup. The audience is confused why we’re being shown something from the past when we have no idea how (or even if) it relates to the present story. Even worse, there have been quite a few shows lately where they don't even give any indication you’re watching a flashback, you’re simply watching a scene with different actors meant to be playing younger versions of the main cast.

In writing the next episode of Hypnosis, I’m using a few flashbacks for the first time, and I’m trying to do it deliberately, using them to answer questions. I generally try to avoid using them as I feel like they are often used lazily, and I’m tired of seeing stories told out of order for no damned reason. 

Someone re-edited The Book Of Boba Fett by putting it back in chronological order, and it made the show far better, at least in my opinion. The moment you see him take over Jabba's palace in the first episode, why do you care about what it took to get him there? Every flashback over the next three episodes made you ask the question, "why do I care?" Even with the edit, the show was still not great. But it was almost watchable.

But flashbacks aren’t the only thing this lesson applies to. One mistake I’ve realized I’ve been making has been not setting certain things up correctly. I haven’t been explaining different paths and what their intention are from the game itself. For example, in Endowed, I jumped right into “what happens if you go home and turn down the Yakuza” first, without taking enough time to set up a desire to do so. Most players wanted to see what happens next, not to take a side journey first.

Was me saying, “this ending is meant to give the chance to skip ahead and show both breast expansion and pregnancy” enough to get people interested? Not quite, because I didn’t give enough time to get to know Allison or Kat yet. Sure, they’d been introduced, but ending up with them wasn’t as fun when we hadn’t really got to know them yet. 

I thought I could build that interest in the ending itself, not realizing I'd already left a bad taste in some player's mouths by taking the detour in the first place. Did I mention there are 8 different possible endings on that path? No, I was hoping people would notice. But the result was the majority of players playing one or two endings and saying, “huh.”

In the next update of Endowed I’ll label each ending for anyone who wants to see the difference, and I hope once Kat and Allison become bigger parts of the game, the ending will become more fun on its own merit.

Up until now, I’ve written side endings attempting to compliment the main plot. Going off on a cruise with Laura and Grace, for example, was subtly meant to show both how Laura had been the one to steal the watch and how ending up with her wouldn’t be all terrible. I wanted to humanize her a bit despite her still being the main antagonist. 

Did this work? I thought so. I didn’t think anyone would want to play a Laura ending after Episode 10, and looking back, I think I was right. Hopefully there was enough in that ending to enjoy in its own merits, although I’m sure some people hate her enough to skip it.

So my lesson altogether is to give the side endings a clearer purpose. It shouldn’t only be something I think is interesting because I know where it’s going, I should be spending more effort making sure you, my favorite fans, are at the very least intrigued about before jumping into it. 

Me writing about it in a post isn’t enough to count as trying to get you excited, the game itself should be able to build up a question we want answered and a reason to justify a detour’s existence.

The splitting paths with multiple endings format is great, but I’m only one person, and spending too much time on side paths risks losing momentum on the main game. Obviously we saw that with the broken watch branch, where I simply couldn’t seem to finish it without turning it into three separate endings, each one with a full update dedicated to it. Sure, I’m proud of it, but taking over a year on it was too much.

One of the reasons I’ve been against clarifying things too much is in attempting to maintain a level of mystery. I had a coworker named Anthony who enjoyed a lot of the same media I did, but he hated for anything to be spoiled and refused to have a conversation about something before seeing it. If I were to even say, “hey, did you see this actor was signed on for this movie coming out next year” he’d glare at me and tell me to shut up.

I’m not the same way, as I tend to enjoy knowing a few facts about something before I see it. I like to know what I’m getting into, like checking to see if an episode is the season finale before starting it. But at the same time, I can appreciate not wanting things to be ruined for me, like when you are scrolling through your phone and see a headline like “the movie that came out last night had a surprise cameo but we won’t tell you who!” and put the actor in the stupid thumbnail. Sigh.

So when I give summaries and previews, I've kept Anthony in mind. I figure some people absolutely hate spoilers, so I try to give a quick summary in posts before throwing up a spoiler warning. But lately I’ve been thinking I’ve gone too far. I sometimes don’t give enough context, both within the stories and games and in my descriptions of them.

I’d been posting my stories on sites like DeviantArt without listing out the fetishes in the beginning (that’s what tags are for, right?) and wondering why the stories weren’t getting many views. Then, only recently did I start adding “This story contains breast expansion, pregnancy, lactation…” and getting a lot more readers. People want to know what’s going to happen in a story before they commit to it, and this is something I seem to forget.

Hypnosis has you helping Leah grow her boobs in the first three minutes. We don’t see evidence of BE in Endowed until the fourth chapter. Sure, my reputation helped some people to know where things were going, but a mystery isn’t always needed.

My point is, and yes, this is the TL;DR:

I’ll be putting more effort with both setting expectations and in better pacing. Instead of spending too much focus on trying to keep content a surprise, I’ll be giving better previews and setup. I think breaking up content into smaller chunks will help with this as well, but I’ll also attempt to keep spoiler warnings on things for people who don’t want to see them.

In a future post I’ll attempt to clarify more about how the games and stories relate to each other, both now and down the road. Saving the character’s relation to the game for the last page of my Bad Influences story was a good idea in my mind, but looking back feels like I was trying too hard to make it a “twist”. Not every story needs one. Sometimes it’s more enjoyable when you actually know where something is going. Plus, did I ever mention that story was finished?

As always, thanks for reading, and thanks for your support and allowing me to work on these projects I love as my day job.

See you next week!