More Vol. 1 wip! (Patreon)

Hey guys! 

Here's a Monday update on what I've been doing over the weekend. Unsurprisingly, it's still the chapter 1 adventure stuff.

This segment is when Jamie, CJ and Sarah are walking around just after Jamie meets them at the train station. Instead of just cutting straight to after school, like in the existing material, you instead get to play as Jamie and explore the town with CJ and Sarah. 

This serves as an introduction to the initial areas on the map and is a great opportunity for these three characters to interact and get to know each other. This is especially important for Jamie since even with her expanded role in the prologue, she still hasn't had a ton of stuff to say and none of it super important. 

Now, here's the hard part.

You see, the chapter 1 adventure segment is by word count actually going to be one of the largest in Volume 1. This is due to a few reasons:

A) Because it's CJ, Sarah and Jamie all walking around together. 

This typically isn't a problem in most games, because a party is usually focused on *doing* something so there's no reason to flesh out their banter. Except in this case, narratively that's exactly what Jamie and CJ are trying to do: reconnect and get to know each other again. 

Due to this, Jamie has a separate dialogue scene for CJ and for Sarah in every area plus a monologue scene where she tells the reader about the place she's in at the moment (and sometimes finds something unexpected!)

This isn't necessarily a problem, but it's compounded by the fact that:

B) There are 8 areas in this initial segment. 

So just to count, that's 16 full dialogue scenes including spritework and another 8 of Jamie talking to herself. 

But wait! 

There's actually a third person Jamie speaks to in one area! So slap on another two scenes.

Grand total: 26 dialogue scenes just for this part. 

Now the idea here is to give the characters plenty of room to just chit chat, learn about each other and more importantly, for the reader to be able to see our protagonists interacting in a normal, stress-free environment (before everything gets dramatic). 

An important part of this is that none of it is actually mandatory. You can absolutely just walk through each area of the map, go back to the dorm and say "I'm done." without reading any of these walls of text. 

One advantage of the interactive format is that I can give the readers who want a bunch of lore as much as I can think of without boring my other readers to tears. 

One of the best examples of this that I can think of is Mass Effect 1, which had an absolute ton of world building waiting for the players that wanted it while leaving the path open for players who just wanted the main story.

Anyway speaking of walls of text, I should wrap this wall up.

Here's a little preview of Jamie misinterpreting a question and allowing her envy about a certain subject to show. Also included are the 4k versions of that art for no particular reason.