TheLetterB
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Hiccup to EE's next update
🕑 Added 2022-01-29 19:46:57 +0000 UTCLong story short, the next task that I was supposed to write for Equivalent Exchange is the alpha kobolds in the caves, fulfilling the same role as the Alpha Imp and the Goblin Matriarch before them.
Unfortunately, I got roughly 6,500 words into the project and I realized that I'm just not feeling the direction it went in.
To summarize it so far: you come across one wandering alpha kobold named Uli. They lead you to the kobold communities deeper in the caves, and how you're received and how you're treated is dependent on how many beta kobold's you've defeated in the caves and how often you submitted to them, just like with the imps and goblins beforehand.
But I'm just not into what I've written so far. Uli has no gender and there was going to be a system of parsers that changed their pronouns based on your input later. Which I'm no stranger to, if you've kept up with my other projects for TiTS and CoC2, but Uli's sexual equipment changed based on your input as well, with the intended justification being that they have a penis - they can just choose to not get hard if you referred to them as a girl. It felt pretty hackneyed, unintuitive, and overall just not fun to write.
I also wanted to write the PC's standing among the alphas changing based on how you acted around Uli and the rest of the kobolds. The more you denigrated yourself, the more the others, including the betas, would put you beneath them. If you kept challenging the alphas for a higher standing (and won, of course), you'd eventually be seen as the alpha of alphas among them.
I think what I'm going to do is start from the beginning and put much more focus on the public use/alpha worship/willing subjugation aspects of the writing and not include Uli at all. This means starting from the beginning and putting off the next update to EE until it's done, and I know most of you are here for EE and it already gets precious few updates as it is. If you want to unsub until I manage to get out a more concrete update, I understand completely, but in the meantime, I don't want to work on a project that's fighting back against me every time I sit down to write it.
As a concession, attached is the document to what I had up until this point, so you can read everything I've put down for your enjoyment.
Comments
1hundredknight
Sad to lose Uli, they seemed like a really cool character! But I understand when it just doesn't click and having to redo everything. The new doc is also really good!
