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Chapter Five Retrospective
🕑 Added 2024-01-17 11:59:20 +0000 UTC
Hi everyone, and thanks for joining me for this week's public check-in!
First some news, the School Council, my elite core of top-tier supporters have finished their deliberations and the next quest to be implemented will be The Reign of Jess (Part 3). This will conclude the Reign of Jess arc as well as the first act of the main storyline. After this, there will be some far-reaching (and hopefully very sexy) changes to Saint Alancia's.
I hope you all enjoyed Part 2, and this is fair warning if you haven't played it yet that the spoilers are about to start. If you still have to play Chapter 5, this post will still be here when you've done so (though the poll at the bottom closes next week.)
A history lesson
One of the criticisms that's been made about this arc is the disconnect between its tone and execution and that of some of the other stuff in the game. If you're one of the players that feels as though the game went in a radically different direction, and especially the characters of Jess and Miss Paris were changed significantly by this story, then allow me to offer some context.
When I created Missy 0.1, I included four quests: Chapters 1 and 2, and Abbie and Lola's relationship quests. But I had others partially written, and the Reign of Jess was an idea already well established in my mind. I had the beginning, end and a decent chunk of the middle sorted. However, in the intervening two years, the game, its world and its characters evolved, while my idea for Reign of Jess was still at that point in early development when my mind hadn't really gotten past "hey, let's do a story where Jess makes Missy her slave by blackmailing Miss Paris. And she makes her go to her house all weekend and dominates her! Oh, and there can be a scene where she spanks them all! Man, that's hot. I'm writing this down!"
Marrying up the development of the characters up to this point with the Reign of Jess story proved harder than I expected. To be honest, I can't help but wonder would this story have worked better later on in the game. I eventually decided that no, because Jess is getting a relationship quest, and so this all needed to happen before they become lovers. I mean, it'd be a weird thing for her to do to her girlfriend. Also, I really wanted to make Reign of Jess and I'd already waited two years!
Anyway, I'll talk more about this once Chapter six is done and I can discuss it in the context of how Reign of Jess actually ends. Right now, I'm constrained by not being able to talk about that.
To Fivaviana!
I was, I have to say, looking forward to doing Abbie's quest. She's Missy's sensible counterpart, and so was an enjoyable change of pace from little-miss-permanently-horny. The city of Fivaviana was also a lot of fun to flesh out. The idea for the Governess and her daughters came quite late in the creative process, so they'll not be featuring too heavily in this story, but the other purpose of this chapter was to put Fivaviana into the game, and now that it exists, I'll make it possible to go back there later as Missy.
The idea is to open up the rest of Fivaviana in Chapter 6. We'll be visiting the port, which is currently off limits and, with time running out, we have to find a way into Elizabeth's house. This chapter also gave us a few other little things - we saw our first Sapphorian slave auction (but not the last) and also got a peek into what happens to convicted criminals inside the guard precinct. Hopefully those women we helped on the first day can be of some help to us on the second.
One thing that's worth noting is that Chapters 5 and 6 were eventually meant to all be one quest, called Chapter 5. I ended up splitting Reign of Jess part 2 into parts 2 and 3 because... well... you'll see when you play the next quest, there's some crazy stuff to come yet, and so it worked better, I felt, to introduce Fivaviana and its people on day 1 and then have the revelations and drama happen on day 2. So if this chapter felt a little like filler to you, that wasn't the goal, but I did need to introduce a whole new city.
On the whole, I'm happy with how Chapter 5 turned out, though one problem I butted up against in making this quest is that RPGM games without lots of combat can struggle to maintain pacing. Combat serves to pad out games, which I don't think is a particularly good gameplay loop, which is why Missy doesn't use it, but it can also mean it's hard to know how long a quest will take. If you explore every part of Fivaviana, there's plenty there, but I expect it's also possible to speedrun this quest quite quickly. I'm still working on how I ameliorate this problem.
As usual, I'm eager to hear how my work was received. I've added a section on the above to the poll to find out how you found the pacing of the quest. Please choose as many options as apply to you.
Have a great week!
Trinian
Comments
Ariel Herrera M
Controlling Abby was perfect and expect to continue in the future with more content like this, congratulations, I would like some kind of point for choice in the traininig with Jess, like be more submisive or not with Missy, but was fine the scenes. I would like more training sessions like maybe for convert a Missy a more submisive gal. XD
Basteala
I mentioned it being both perfect and short because honestly this patch gave me a lot of what I wanted to to do, the scenes were nice both for Missy and for Abbie, but it did break my heart when it ended...I was caught a little off guard lol. That said, as an Abbie lover I adored this patch. As for trying to "normalize" playthrough to completion--take this with a grain of salt, but maybe one or two "sidequests" (akin to what we sometimes see in First or Third Period Break) might be handy? The odd side CG would probably go a long way to encourage exploration. May not work for everyone, but so long as the concept is introduced offhand in the main story (or there's like a blue checkmark or whatever on the person to arouse curiosity), I think the majority of people embrace that exploration and embrace that looking around. Also, on a similar vein, I have to compliment how people had something special to say about Abbie wearing the maid dress. Words are a fun part of the embarrassment bit, lol
Dee_Zee
I wanna comment that my vote that it was too short it's only cause i was expecting both days and i think i might have missed when you said it wasn't gonna have both days but overall i really loved the update and the scene that was sadly bugged was gold and so good it completly change my outlook in the update, before i was disappointed after that scene as i said already i can say i'm very sadisfied with the update
