Santa Lucia Writing Structure (revised)

Hello everyone!

This might be a weird post to see at this stage in Santa Lucia's development, but I think it helps give insight to how things can change during the development process.

I recently sat down and had a good long look at how I have the game structured. This was largely in response to how I'm still struggling to find an update pattern that pleases as many players as possible while still being digestible for me to write. Carefully examining the peaks and valleys of the game's pacing (of both events that have happened and events that are yet to come), I made an interesting discovery in that Santa Lucia is actually divided into FOUR acts instead of three. As such, I have updated the old structure chart to reflect this (hopefully in a less meme-worthy format, hehe...)

What this means for you the players is the point where I can comfortably switch to another route to write is surprisingly close! We have a major shared event on October 3rd that divides the route content into two almost even halves. Once we have finished writing Bryan's route up to this point, we're planning to switch to Carlos's route (who was the runner up in the route focus poll).

Writing for the other two routes shouldn't take as long as Bryan's since all the shared content in Act 2 will have already been written. Each act of the route content takes place in a 3 to 4 week period. With the pace Dev and I are writing Bryan's route, we've found we're able to write one shared event and one Bryan event per update. On average, we've found that we have two route events per in-game week, and each in-game weekend we fill with two shared events that will be seen on all three routes.

By my estimation, going at a pace of two route events per month of development, Carlos Act 2 and Nate Act 2 should take four months each to write. I anticipate being done with Bryan's Act 2 by the end of January or February. Once the other two have caught up with Bryan, we will move onto Act 3 which I expect will take a similar amount of time to complete for all three routes.

Lastly, you'll notice the game becomes more focused again in Act 4. This is the point where we focus on closing out the game, but since there aren't as many branches I'll need to juggle at that point I don't anticipate it taking longer to write than however long it takes me to write Bryan's Act 2. I should also state that everything I've outlined in this post is to demonstrate how I have the game organized on my side. It doesn't change anything about how the plot is already planned. I'm not planning to rewrite the whole game from scratch!

Hope this settles any lingering questions about where we're going, and I hope the news that we're going to switch characters soon helps reassure some of our patrons we've unfortunately managed to alienate due to how I have to structure updates!

Cheers!
~Dzahn