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Writer's Blog: New Version of Chapter 10 (Finally) Up
🕑 Added 2022-11-23 08:17:53 +0000 UTCTo see the (by no means comprehensive) changelog, you can go here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/writers-blog-74241673
To read the updated chapter, go here:
https://dashingdon.com/play/wildelight/mind-blind-20/mygame/
Average playthrough length for just these 10 Chapters is 90,000 words. Please remind me to make Delivery for the Damned shorter.
Sorry that this took so long to get up! There's been some setbacks (aka my inability to leave well enough alone and stop rewriting--I actually still want to rework Rosy's muffin explosion scene, but finally slapped my hands away from the keyboard and told myself "NO. Bad Jo! Stop changing everything until after all the endings are finished."). Plus, I've been busy packing up to move back to Chicago, plus-PLUS I finished coding another one of the endings.
Gray falls out of a helicopter. Glamorously.
It's very sexy, and also very disastrous.
I love it.
. . . Gray does not.
Of course, coding an ending doesn't mean diddlysquat if 90% of the variables required in said ending don't, uh, actually have opportunities to trigger anywhere in the previous chapters. Most of these are clues (cryptically: "lab", "doorlisten", etc.). Other of these new variables are personality traits!
For example:
Chapter 10 now has a dialogue option that marks Button as a bad liar. This variable is, creatively, called "badliar". Being a bad liar will cause issues in some endings.
(I'm evilly smirking right now, by the way. Y'all have no idea how chaotic some of the endings are.)
Anyway, "badliar" can also be triggered in Chapters 12 and 15. So it's not an action that's being remembered, but rather something that Button has said about themselves. Right now, I'm going through Chapters 11 - 17 and adding in a bunch of opportunities for these personality variables to trigger.
Why did these get added? Honestly, whim. While writing the endings, I had several instances where it occurred to me that "hey, it would be pretty nifty if this played out a differently because Button is super clumsy and thus drops the gun they're trying to point at someone!" I managed to restrain myself from reworking earlier chapters to add traits, but figured that I might as well include them since I was already working on adding foreshadowing (or "clue variables") to Chapters 10 - 17.
Does that make sense? I'm hoping my explanation makes sense, but it's almost midnight and I need to post this before I turn into a pumpkin.
Anyhow, I'm confident at this point that all the variables needed by the endings are now in Chapter 10. I am less confident that the procession of Vengeance members plays out smoothly, so please let me know!
Rest of the chapters will be posted once all the new variables are added, and you can save on this version and it'll work on future updates. Chapters 11 - 13 will go up on November 29th.
My goal is to release the Vengeance ending and hopefully one other by end of December (which was also my goal for this month, but moving cross country has been more time consuming than I'd anticipated).
Comments
saarebasra
Skimmed through the code once on my commute. The "Gray just blue himself" bit is my favorite new detail. The talk about Rosy with a reconciled Nick during the Muffin Incident feels smoother now. Something I noticed here: The "taste in women" variation for Ambrosia checks for (Kgender = "man"). Re: Bad liar Button. Is the "My essay blew up" option in the last chapter your typical bad-liar!Button material? If so, I'm looking forward to their terrible, terrible lies. Re: Nick's flashback. I will be a little disappointed if we don't get more and/or some new details in chapter 12. Still wondering if he objectively failed big time or whether he simply cannot forgive his past self for not being experienced enough when it mattered. (Not meaning to imply that only one of those can be true. I mainly want to know if it's comparable to what happened with the Karmic Collective.)
Yay! Good luck with the move. I helped my sister move from Indiana to Seattle so I know it's definitely not easy
saarebasra
Woot! I have a job interview on the 29th that I'm already dreading like an execution, so the prospect of new chapters -- at that date or sometime in December -- would be something to look forward to. No time to check the code right now but I'm already excited to see all the changes, especially for the pre-party scenes. Good luck with your move! I moved earlier this year (and only a couple of streets away) but that was already stressful enough.
