Weekly Update - 8/2/13 (Patreon)

Weird handful of days. Didn't have poker night because a couple of the guys I play with came down with Covid, so here's your free reminder that it's still out there and you should still exercise caution now and then.

I put out Before The Storm 8 yesterday, and QT2:13 will drop sometime tonight before I got to bed, as I'm getting caught up on things. I took a break from finishing the QT chapter to get the weekly update out, but it'll be out before I go to crash tonight. I've spent a lot of time looking at Google Maps for this particular chapter, and I know I could absolutely be making up the lay of the land, I like having a level of authenticity to it, and it lets me give more flavor to the story.

Some people noticed that there was a new Quaranteam spinoff that started appearing over at Literotica and have sent me messages asking if I knew about it. (I forget sometimes that many of you aren't on the Discord, and that's my bad.) Yeah, Agathon, the author of Quaranteam: The Upstart's Knight reached out to me a while back and asked if they could do a UK take on the story and had a few chapters for me to look at.

I gave them the same rules I have for anyone else who asks, all of which I feel like are pretty reasonable - don't make any global changes, don't get ahead of my timeline (i.e. Dec. 2020 as of current writing) and don't use any of my characters without asking first. (There's also a specific exemption that says if you want to set your story in Australia or New Zealand, we have to talk for a bit longer, but hey, that's a teaser towards the future.)

Other than that, I'm always eager to see what other people want to throw into the sandbox and the first several chapters of QT: UK were very encouraging, so yes, to those asking, I do know about it, and I've offered help when needed and praise as deserving. I hadn't really even considered how different the media divisions of the UK would handle the rollout, or how the privatization of public medicine would impact things. It's surprising how easy it is to miss things in areas you don't live in!

Part of the fun of the QT-verse is that different regions have handled things wildly differently, and I feel like the best way to reflect that is to have some insight into the regions you're writing about. And a couple of other people have asked about writing QT stuff, and while I haven't seen anything from those folks yet, they have asked and as long as they're adhering to the rules, everything's cool. If you're interested in it, feel free to reach out, and I can even link you to the timeline document that BreakTheBar put together for us to make sure we have all our time continuity laid out clearly in one place. (I used that a lot when I was doing the edits and cleanup pass for QTB1.)

Baldur's Gate 3 comes out tomorrow, and I'm going to do what I can to keep from pouring too much time into it (shit, I've still got Jedi: Survivor to finish) but know that I'm definitely going to sink a little bit of time into that. (No, I'm not going to fuck a bear... probably... look it's complicated! Ha! But seriously, not into bears.)

Speaking of Jedi: Survivor, I want to go a brief rant/tangent that is a little spoilery, but if you're going to play J:S and don't want a short bit of Dev's thoughts, just move to the next paragraph. Game story writers, stop using narrative defined deaths as a thing when the player's in control. It doesn't happen often, but those of you who played the original Final Fantasy VII will remember how mad you were when Aerith died, and you were thinking, "I've got Phoenix Downs right here!" J:S does a similar thing where you're put into a particularly brutal fight you know you can't win, and the character you're controlling at the time wins the fight only to immediately die. That's an awful narrative to put a player through, because any challenges the gameplay presented at that point, they've been rendered meaningless. This isn't to say I mind when characters die in games. That's not it at all. But character death is a thing that has to be carefully managed. When done well, (which I actually think FFVII did very well), it can have tremendous emotional impact. (Cyberpunk 2077 has another other these very powerful death scenes.) But in this case, all it made me want to do was throw my controller at the screen. BIG SPOILER TURN BACK NOW: You're fighting against Darth Vader, for fuck's sake. You know you can't win. Winning isn't an option. Meaning the entire scene is basically predetermined, and the fact that you're making me waste time on having a hard fight that I'm guaranteed to lose (which I can only get past by making it look like I'm going to win) ... holy hell, that's such a fucking cheap shot, I almost walked away from the game entirely. I get the appeal of wanting to show how cool it is to fight Darth Vader, but that's not this story, and it's like putting a Kobe beef hamburger patty smack dab in the middle of a club sandwich -- you've taken two things I like individually and made me like them a bit less by forcing them together. In a variation of "This could've been an email," I want to offer "This should've been a cutscene." Your mileage may vary, of course, but being presented with a hard fight that you have to do well in just to progress the story, added to the fact that you can't win the fight, well, it's a bad, bad storytelling choice.

Sorry, rant over. It made me so mad that I was angry for hours and called not one, but three of my friends to bitch about it.

I'm going to throw up a poll for next week tomorrow, and those of you who are Tier 4s and up, you'll have the weekend to vote on what you think should get the next chapter of something. I'm going to mark off this Friday, 8/4, to give a story that's long been in need of an update, but hasn't had its commissioner, QT: Phil's Tale. Without a commissioner sponsoring that work, it's been on hiatus, but I feel 4 months is enough time that I should put a refresh into it, and maybe someone else will come by and pick up that commission to bring it back to monthly status.

For those of you asking about the stuff that was released as 'alpha' content to tier 3s and up last month, that stuff will start trickling down to everyone in the Patreon this month, so expect to see the first part of  Neon Stonehenge (with cool logo even) this month, as well as anything else that went to alpha last month. (I still owe a couple of commissions for last month, but hey, how's that new, right? Ha ha. *sigh* Those'll hit in alpha form for their commissions from last month over the next week or so, I hope.)

As a quick recap, the way commission projects that are being shared publicly currently have a release schedule like this: In the month it's commissioned, a First Draft is delivered to the commissioner, for them to request tweaks, changes, alterations and spot any major typos/continuity errors. A month after that, it's released in Alpha form to all Tier 3 subscribers and up, around the time the commissioner is getting the First Draft for the next chapter in their commission. A month after that, the chapter moves from First Draft to Patreon release, and comes out for all Patreon subscribers. Six months after THAT, the chapter is released to public sites.

So, tl;dr version: X - to commisioner, X+1 - to tier 3s+, X+2 - to all Patreon subscribers, X+8 - to public sites (LE, EMCSA, etc.)

Planned public releases are as follows: 8/5 - QT2:4, 8/12 - MG 15, 8/19 - Silversmith 3, 8/26 - 7 Secrets 6, 9/2 - QT2:5. That means the end of Seven Secrets of Mr. Magpie will hit the public sites at the end of September.

Anyway, I've probably ranted and raved long enough, so I'll get back to finishing QT2:13 and have that out for you all in a few hours. Enjoy!