[Ep 1.18] Storyboard conversion 134/212

Hey guys! This week I continued converting storyboard slides into working game passages.

Last week, I converted 76 slides; this week 58. I hit some difficulties with a nude scene, which kept coming out kind of flat and unsexy.

I was struggling with it, but last night I figured out why. I was sticking too rigidly to the plan, not allowing myself enough space to adjust things ‘on the ground’ to make them work. I stopped writing it, and challenged myself to think deeply about what actually made the scene sexy.

This was a little scary, because the answers that came out were heavy and psychological (related to complex personal and interpersonal issues like power imbalances, stereotype, gender roles and internal conflict). I felt like they’d be difficult for me to understand, let alone articulate and depict.

But it was also exciting. It reminded me of how the heroine’s first shift at the Hard Cock Cafe had felt, flat until I pushed and pushed myself to dig deeper than ‘it’s sexy because she’s topless’ and really imagine what it’d feel like to go from intelligence officer to serving drinks in a thong.  (Several contributors helped a lot here, especially Behbeh).

Today I reworked the new scene. Putting it more inside the heroine’s head, and dwelling more on the emotional escalation than the physical description of exactly who was touching who with what, made everything feel fresh, hot and relevant. I hated it on Friday, and I’m really excited about it now!

I’ll continue next week, starting tomorrow. 🥱 I’m going to try my best to get the storyboard completely converted next week!

After that, there’ll be a few tasks that need to be done before it can be released:

– xGrotesq pitched a scene that I think will fit perfectly into the start of this episode, so I want to include it. It’s basically an opportunity to characterise the heroine and her relationship with the Task Force a little bit better.

– our illustrator lovely Victoria is hard at work creating artwork for the episode, which needs to be coded into the episode when it’s ready.

– there’s some placeholder text and dialogue that needs a second pass.

– one scene has a neat new little piece of code that is written, but only partially implemented. It needs a pass through to implement fully.

– general tweaks and improvements to the text.

Okay, guys, it is bedtime. I’ll report back on progress next week.