Weekly Writing Update - 1/6/20 (Patreon)

To start, I'm almost done the night two mini-update. It's taking a little longer than I would've liked just because some scenes required more writing and time spent on images than I originally planned. The good news though is that this mini-update is also beefier than I originally envisioned. It's still only one scene deep, as in you only finish the night off, but there are quite a few things to explore when doing so. You can expect to make good use of the back button when it's finally out. If you were a fan of using the purple light in the mall with Mrs. Maywood, I think you'll definitely be satisfied with this mini-update. 

For the actual end of month release though, let's take a look at the poll results: 

Brittany Maywood - 17 votes  (5 events)

Karen Porter - 10 (3)

Jake Hill - 9 (2)

Heather West - 8 (1)

Sofia Rodriguez - 8 (1)

Kayla Porter - 8 (1)

Kyle Manning - 7 (1)

Librarian Ms. Chang - 4 (1)

Suzie Barberry - 3

Nikki Cross - 3

Rio Nakamura - 3

Lydia Hart - 3

Jill Sinclair - 1

The good news is that no one actually got 0 votes. Way to go, Jill. Since Brittany Maywood clearly won the poll, she's going to get the lion's share of attention this week. And, since we hit the first major goal of $250 (!), that means she's going to get 5 events in this next release that are solely focused on her and and her storyline. 

Karen Porter and Jake Hill both had a respectable showing as well, so they'll each get 2 - 3 interactive events in the next release. Moving down the list, you can expect events for Heather, Sofia, Kayla, Kyle, and Ms. Chang. Some of these events will take place in the classes as they were already described, while others will occur during your off-period when you're just kind of free-roaming the campus. 

Note: When I say free-roaming, I don't want you to get the idea that it'll be pure sandbox mode. You'll just have some options for who you want to visit and then you'll take events from there.

I'm going to be mapping out the new events with the poll winners this week, so I can't give an outline of them right now, but I did want to talk about some ideas I had moving forward. 

When the story opens up a little more and does get more sandbox-y, my idea is to write a bunch of random scenes for your classes that then get rolled and triggered when you go. So when you wake up in the morning, you'll get a seed for your English class, for instance, and then going to class that day means that you'll see -- based on the seed -- orange, green, and purple lights, for instance. I figure that, over time, I can add more random scenes to these seeds so that every time you go to class -- unless it's a narrative day where I have to ignore the seed for story reasons -- you'll have something new to explore. 

If it goes well, I'd like to implement a similar system for the characters that you interact with as well, but that will be much slower to do since there's far more characters than there are classes. But that's the trajectory I have right now and I figured I'd share it with you all and see what your thoughts are. 

In terms of the voting experiment this month, I'm really pleased with how it turned out. I think I'm going to leave it this way in the future, with a rotation of characters in the polls and letting everyone vote for as many characters as they want instead of only picking one. Let me know in the comments if you liked/hated the polling system or want to see it done a different way. 

Oh, I guess I should mention one other thing about the mini-update. I discovered that if you summoned the otherworldly assistant at the movies, or from the library with Monica, and asked them to look into the Maywoods for you, she actually showed up and talked about Al'Azar instead at the end of 0.007. Doing it from the library alone worked fine though. I've fixed that so you might want to re-read that paragraph if you fall into those categories, since now she'll give you the actual information you were supposed to receive. And, for people that want the best outcome with a transformed Mr. Maywood at the hotel in this upcoming mini-update, you'll actually NEED that information ;). 

Also, just want to remind any professor-tier supporters out there that even though the poll is over, content requests are still available for the next week. If you want a scene in the next release, you'll need to make your request before that's closed next Monday.