September 20 Update (Patreon)

I know that I'm doing a lot of different things, but I just want to tell you guys that I'm really trying to restrain myself. In any given week my brain goes in a lot of different directions, many of which seem promising. I can't count how many times in a month I get really inspired to do something and hold myself back, but I have dozens of notes files.

This past week I was reading about the pharmaceutical industry and found myself thinking about Crimson Gray again. Though I think the story leads to a weirdly split audience, I had an idea that I thought could work while also filling in another part of Lizzie and John's life: a yandere raising simulator.

Imagine something like the Princess Maker series, except that you're trying to raise an unstable child. Less of a focus on knowledge stats and management, more of a focus on psychology over time. If it focused on certain periods of life, we could cover multiple ages as well, which I think has interesting potential. Overall, I think this could recapture the mix of tension and warmheartedness that made the first game find its unusual audience.

It wouldn't have the diversity of paths and outcomes of something like Long Live the Queen, but I think I could do far more with the emotional balance and psychological states. I have some ideas about how to lean into the diversity of possibilities while also reducing the amount of trial and error involved.

Though I see pitfalls and weaknesses to this, the idea of trying to work this out really gripped me. My experience with this subgenre is much weaker than some others, so of course I'd want to play more broadly to have a better set of frameworks to build my ideas off of. And so on and so forth; this would be a major project.

I didn't do any of that. When I get this inspired, I try to get down the ideas that I think are actually insightful into a little planning doc, because my memory isn't perfect. Then I set them aside and the ideas... usually just sit there. If I ever decide to pursue this for real, hopefully that mental work will be preserved.

I'm unsure what would happen if I tried a less restrained period of work, but my restraint in this particular case paid dividends. Work on TLS 0.54.0 is going very well and I should have a strong estimate by next weekend.