Update and Unrelated Rant About Lewd Game (Patreon)

Hey guys, I wanted to let you all know what's going on and what I'm up to. I didn't say so but last weekend my adderall prescription wasn't ready so I took those two days off, and for the last three days I've not been feeling great even though I'm past that. I hate the pace I've been working at lately and I want to improve but my mood is more unstable than it usually is as of late. It's been making work on Clouded Soul difficult, especially with the darker subject matter in the early chapters (which is only going to keep getting darker). What makes the mood thing so bad is that it's especially active at night which is when I do most of my writing so I'll sit down to work only for it to not go anywhere. It really sucks, and it drives me to just lay down and read or play games instead.

I want to try harder to push through it and get done with the ten remaining chapters so we can go public but motivation is difficult when I know no one is reading it yet. It's a hole I dug for myself and I doubt I'd be feeling this bad if I hadn't made the bar so high, but I'm already 2/3rds of the way in so changing the goal at this point would be silly. If I keep getting affected by Clouded Soul's darker subject matter I might have to work on something lighter on the side. Clouded Soul is really only so dark at the beginning, but I've never done so much setup for a story before. We're already 50k words in and still not even done with the prologue yet. Once we get past that and into the training arc, the adventure, and the romance, I doubt any of this will be a problem. The whole point of Clouded Soul was to make a story where I can vent all my frustrations and have a hero trying to make the world a better place, so I didn't expect it to be much of a problem, but to get to that point we have to suffer through everything that ends up shaping Jun into that kind of person and I didn't see that coming.

My whole struggle here is that the only way out of this situation is 'grind' and I am not in a healthy enough mindset to do so with this story in particular, so you can see why I'm struggling so hard and it's like a negative feedback loop of suckage. Either way, chapter 24 should be done today and I'll start on 25 as well while I'm at it.

Unrelated to my writing but I have a recommendation for a lewd harem game if anyone wants to hear it. Because of my depression I've really got sucked into the dating sim Love and Sex: Second Base, and I can't possibly give it a higher stamp of approval. It's become a comfort game for when I'm feeling down lately. It's a hentai dating sim on Steam with 20 different girls to date and 15 different harems you can build with them. By that I mean getting into a throuple with your two sexy roommates is the 'Home Harem', getting into a one with your band is the 'Band Harem', etc.

What makes the game so good is that there's just an unbelievable amount of content in it. I think the dev said he'd seen people with 500 hour playtimes who still haven't seen everything. Most importantly, the girls are all really, really fun and there are so many that even if you don't vibe with all of them there will be enough that you can definitely overlook the ones you don't like.

There is one major flaw I have to point out before fully recommending it, though. The art can be wildly inconsistent and it ranges from really good to very bad. The game has at least 5-6 different artists from what I can tell, and not all of them are at what I would call a passable level. Most of the time I can overlook it because of the writing, but it's still a small shame. Also, the main character looks absolutely horrible no matter who is drawing him. You can't salvage that hair.

There are a few minor bugs, too, and chars will sometimes reference things out of order. Like you get locked out of doing the band content if you don't have the guitar skill by a set date, but in their events the band girls will still talk to you about the band plotline and treat you like you're on that route. Hard to really fault that when there's so much content but it can be a little distracting.

The only other thing is that you should go into the game with a bit of research, as you can fuck things up with several girls and make them leave the game if you're not careful or get locked out of content because you didn't raise a girl's parameter. An example being I was locked out of adding one of the main chars into the Home Harem because her submission wasn't high enough to accept that my character sleeps around. There's also a yandere girl who can get jealous and kill another girl, I think? Not sure because I'm very careful around her and haven't triggered any of her events but I do know you can stop her from doing it. Between that and another char who I told the wrong thing to leaving the game, I ended my first run early by marrying one girl and carrying over everything to NG+ which definitely helps a lot but it's still something to keep in mind.

Not sure why I just wrote so much about this game but I guess I wanted an excuse to rant. Was fun, though.