Password Post Mortem (ish)

So because I wanted to do an AMA, I feel like I should talk somewhat about Password's development so far. For those that are new, welcome! You've just missed the main slog of development before it goes into a hiatus. It'll come back, so don't worry about that so much, but when it DOES come back it'll be back in a somewhat different form, hopefully a lot cleaner.

Before I get too far into it, while I originally wanted to write up a proper PDF outlining my thoughts over the course of the project, we don't have the time for that so much anymore. Instead, I'll give you the abridged version.

Password as a furry visual novel, I believe, was a failure. Personally I think this is a great thing.

Hearing that something like this was a failure likely confuses some people. The VN itself was scoped and dreamt up to be something very different to what we have now. Both in good ways and bad ways, but that's the nature of developing live month-to-month. Personally, Password failing allows the next iteration of it to have a decent foundation on what works and what doesn't. There are contentious scenes, characters, and even plot threads that went unresolved; for Password to be as good as it should be (and what I'd like it to be someday) things need to change.

Again, keeping this in the abridged version of things, we'll break down these three things and leave the rest for the AMA.

Characters:
I don't hide this, though it does occasionally come up to the surprise of people. The cast of Password were originally conceived via inspiration taken directly from people I knew IRL. There are some characters that this affects more (to the detriment of a lot of things) and some that just use those people as a starting point, but for the most part these characters became their own people. Now my failing as a writer is seeing some of these characters (specifically Dean) and imprinting more upon them than I should have, and making things too personal. These characters, a lot of them, had roots in people that are no longer with us today for one reason or another. Again, not 1:1 facsimiles of them, but probably a little closer at times then they should be; not a good thing. For those wanting to write realistic characters, I would absolutely endorse using real life as a source of inspiration, just don't pick so close to home.

Scenes:
There are some that just read as bad, or are placed in the wrong place for a proper flowing story. It's what causes sometimes lengths of dead air to happen in a route because of the way month-to-month updates were written. But also some are just tonally wrong to the rest of the VN, typically on Tyson's (or at least that's the one that comes up most often) along with Sal's (where things linger too much or not at all and no in-between). This is the main thing I'd want to tackle first were I redoing this as a proper character drama with redone routes across the whole thing rather than just the Dean rewrite that just got put out. Not to say that there aren't good scenes in the VN, I'm quite proud of certain sequences but critical analysis of some really let those good moments down when looking at the project as a whole. It goes hand in hand with...

Plot Threads:
During development, there were a lot of ideas, and I mean a lot that I wanted to do come the climax. I've compared the original vision for the ending to be something closer to Mass Effect 2, where you'd have learned about the characters well enough to assign them jobs to properly help in the end game. Ultimately this failed because of scoping but also people seemed to not really want to engage with mechanics inclusive of the password system itself. At the time, and this was maybe 2-3 years in, it felt safer to just hard move away from that in favor of something a bit more streamlined. So a lot of the incidental things that crop up, like the ECM or Dean knowing robotics, or Sal's water sense all had things that would've had a pay-off, but were scrapped when there wasn't a need for them. It did mean that some days that were meant to cover them originally had to have different content inserted there, leading to some strange scenes that frame things as important when they never come up again.

Now there's a lot more I could talk about, a lot more that there is to say about the project and even the points above, but that's where the AMA comes in. Yes, yes, last time I had about 25% of the questions be about dick sizes and while amusing not really the goal here. I could go into another small paragraph of why NSFW content was cut, but if you're looking specifically for raunchy details I'll tell you that you won't find them. About the characters, development itself, that I should be able to answer.

I'll leave it up until the questions slow down, so maybe a couple weeks, and then compile the answers for an update on its own depending how long it takes me.

https://forms.gle/Ddgt2fJNkw1JoP8T6