March 24 Update

Hey look, I have 2500+ followers on Steam. This does not really mean anything (a quarter of the way to five digits I guess?), but the number is bigger than before! Not very large in the scheme of things, but I think okay for a solo dev. Assuming the current paradigm of Steam remains stable, I wonder how high it can go. ^-^

Anyway, if it wasn't clear from last week, I am deep into work on the final battle. I'm putting in good day after good day... and it's only chipping away at the work. Accomplishing everything I want in a conclusion is just a lot.

That said, I'm also making things hard on myself by adding complexity. I don't actually mean insane calculations under the surface or anything - the big killer this week was slight variants. It feels impactful to me to let the player choose X, Y, or Z, but then those interact with different outcomes A and B... and I end up having six different branching paths. And if I'm already going this far, why not have different variant dialogue for everything? @_@

The purpose of TLS has never been complexity for the sake of complexity, of course: the hope is to make the game reactive enough to the player's choices that you feel a meaningful sense of decision and consequence. I want the player to feel like a commander, making important decisions in a battle for the fate of reality. But even though I'm familiar with combinatorial explosion by this point in development, adding just a little more, over and over again, really adds up.

I do worry that some of these variants will go completely unnoticed: players either won't think about it at all, or will assume everything always turns out one way regardless. I hope the combination will still produce a positive effect, and at minimum everyone opening the game files will see my absurdity.

Sometimes I also wonder how many of these branches will almost never (or maybe actually never) be experienced. Is someone who plays 100+ hours of TLS really going to go into the final battle just not doing the harem quests?

The final battle is not intended to be a feat of insane optimization, for the record. If players go in straight from the beginning of the endgame segment, they'll definitely fail, but if you do everybody's personal request, then you'll be getting largely positive results. These are (mostly) clearly tied to your efforts, so hopefully it will feel rewarding even if you never see all the bad outcomes? That is my thought process in designing, anyway.

Well, I have rambled long enough. I am plugging away and will continue to do so.