Beyond the Reign of Jess

Hi everyone. With the worst of the recent busyness behind me at last, I'm hoping that this week will provide more opportunity to knuckle down and progress the rendering on Chapter Six's scenes. I've also begun to come up with the implementation plan for the start of Act 2, and can now reveal a few details for how that's going to work. So let's dive in and have a look.

Missy: Act Two Mini-update

I waited to see how this development cycle progressed before I made a decision on this, but with April, my soft target for completion, almost over, I have decided that there will be a mini-update following 0.8 that will open the second act.

What this means is that the Act 2 opening scene and associated changes at the school won't be in Missy 0.8 and will follow a month or so later, along with the other Act 2 stuff such as the opening of Emma's story and various other changes to the school.

Moving the school forward

My long-term goal for Missy is that the school day will have such a large and diverse range of stuff that can happen that it will feel truly alive and each day unique. I'm reasonably pleased with the number of school day events that are currently in the game, but want to add a lot more. Sometimes the challenge is thinking of ways to turn ordinary everyday situations into sexy ones. In the cases of some events, like showering or biology, this is quite easy, while in others, like human statues, I had to get a bit more creative.

Not every event has to be sexy of course, and there's already plenty in there that serve other purposes. Tag Rugby creates the simple choice of pissing off either Abbie or Lola, while the history lessons are just meant to be amusing. The good news is that I still have plenty of ideas, some simple, some quite complex. I have a few notes down for a couple of two-part school day events, where the first part sets the second, and the reason these haven't been implemented yet is quite simply that I need to work out exactly how I'm going to do it. (I have to be careful in overriding the school day generator, as sometimes the game has set a quest-related event to a particular period.)

Some events will be changing in Act 2 to represent escalation. The volleyball bet, for example, will be getting higher stakes and a few other things that were kept fairly tame for the purposes of making them spicier later will now.... be getting spicier. We're moving decisively into the mid-game and things are ramping up at last.

Onward and upward

So with all this still to do, I'm sure you can see why I have chosen to make a mini-update. The alternative is that 0.8 wouldn't be with us for quite some time yet, and that's not what I want. I'm excited to shift the focus back to school, and I'm bursting with ideas for how to embarrass my beautiful girls over the next few updates. The Reign of Jess is coming to an end, and Alancia's will bear the scars for years to come!

Trinian