Monday transparency report

Hey guys!  This week I cracked another really, really fucking difficult scene.

You are probably getting sick of me saying that I'm working hard, so here are some metrics.  Since last week's report, I wrote 12,897 words across 2,453 lines of new code.

This is like writing 15% of a novel in a week – actually a lot more if we counted rewrites, edits and failed drafts 🤪 Rest days: 0.  No peace for the wicked.

This was one of the most difficult scenes in the whole Lifepath, and when I loaded it on Tuesday morning I was fucking dreading working on it, really.  I knew there were big problems with:

– Hotness

– Lack of player options and input

– Characterisation and believability

– Long term characterisation of the heroine - sexy scenes don't work overall if they just undermine or diminish her in the long run

Hotness was the big issue, the problem I didn't know if I could solve.  But I knew I had to, so I just played through it again, drinking coffee and trying to understand the player experience.  I knew the scenario described was sexy, it just wasn't coming out on the screen.

I ended up having to do some really deep work into the psychology of it.  On the surface, the scene is about nudity – but nudity isn't sexy without a context.  Even sex isn’t.

Allow me to illustrate with a personal anecdote.  When I was young (like 18 or something), after a heavy night out my girlfriend was in my bed, and my best buddy had crashed out on the floor beside us.  She and I got frisky, we realised my buddy wasn't asleep but we didn't really care, and me and my buddy ended up double teaming the little slut 🥵 it was absurdly hot.

But the thing that made it hot wasn't the shit I used to write about, it wasn't the fucking or the thrusting or the orgasms or whatever.  It was partly all that, yeah, but it was mostly about what it meant – what she was willing to do, and why, and how she got there with like eye contact and little shrugs and the different way she started to move when she knew she wasn't just fucking, she was being watched fucking and she wanted to look good.

So this is where I went when I tried to fix this scene: really deep into character psychology, and a lot of complex issues around voyeurism, shame, social pressure, arousal, acceptance and I think some really old sexual fantasies about ownership and obligation and belonging and permission that echo today in kinks like BDSM and polyamory.

I'm really, really pleased with where it landed, and some of the lessons I learned are definitely going to improve future scenes in Bangkok (in the club).

I don't wanna oversell it – I'm sure that a lot of people are going to play the scene and not understand at all where all the effort went.  For them, they'll say this is wasted time and for them, they'll be right.  But I can only write for myself and hope some of you will like it, too.  By that metric, this has been a really, really, really fucking good week.

Okay, sorry for the essay, I'm just excited.  I already started work on the next problem scene today, I'll try to fix this one faster – not everything should take a week.  🦀❤️‍🔥