Sept 10 Newsflash

This fortnight I've been dividing my time between Chapter 6 of Royal Affairs and work on The New Thing which I'll go into more below!

Royal Affairs current wordcount: 132,821 words

Current average playthrough length: 39,077 words

Royal Affairs has pretty consistently been bigger than Blood Money, and smaller than Creme de la Creme. Creme de la Creme is a behemoth, so I feel good about RA being more of a manageable size, and it bodes better for release schedules!

My Royal Affairs work has been mostly focused on the Chapter 6 coding, and also on Chapter 5 difficulty balancing. A combination of exhaustion and... well, mostly exhaustion meant that I didn't do balancing for Chapters 3 and 4, which meant that by the time Chapter 5 rolled around, the difficulties were all over the place!

For example: it was unintentionally really hard to get high Entertaining or high Calm (good for socially awkward characters with no chill, but not for others!), and as for the grades, it was impossible to get  an A grade based on the difficulty threshold. So I took some time out from writing to get that sorted out and make the game fairer.

I have been doing some writing work on Chapter 6 too. Everything I've done requires a bit too much context to give a satisfying peek, but this chapter has a lot about the drama club and the play performance in it!

The rest of this fortnight has been focused on The New Thing which got greenlit on September 1st! I'm so thrilled.

The New Thing is:

• Set in the same universe as Creme de la Creme and Royal Affairs
• Set a couple of years after Creme de la Creme
• A completely standalone story
• Focused on clandestine romance and friendship under strange, confined circumstances
• Set in Jezhan, and not in a school or other educational institution
• About people in their early/mid twenties

The keywords I put in my pitch to Choice of Games for this project were: clandestine romance, memories, gilded cages, deceit, crumbling majesty.

New Thing current wordcount: 10,983 words

Current average playthrough length: 6363 words

So this fortnight after it was greenlit, I outlined, coded and wrote Chapter 1 and sent it to my editor in a flurry of unusually fast activity. (It won't be that fast going onwards - I happened to have a nice confluence of time and energy that aligned!) I've also outlined and coded Chapter 2. I'm so excited to share more as it progresses!

Behind the scenes:

Yesterday was my last official day at my dayjob, where I used to work on Love Island the Game, a romance game based on the TV show. My post here, and my colleague's Twitter thread, sum it up nicely. It wasn't at all how I expected my summer to go, but I'm trying to look ahead to the future and focus on nice things on the horizon.

I've been taking time to watch some things tangentially related to writing projects! I've done the Mia Wasikowska Jane Eyre, the Natalie Dormer Picnic at Hanging Rock series, and just recently We Have Always Lived In the Castle, based on Shirley Jackson's book that I adore. I broadly enjoyed all of them, though Hanging Rock got a little bleak for me by the end. I kind of wanted Sebastian Stan in We Have Always Lived In the Castle to be Matthew Goode in Stoker, but that's hardly his fault. So as far as clandestine romance and weird mansions go, you may be able to discern some things about what I've been working on!

Non writing:

I took my child to the beach on the last week of the summer holidays and raced in and out of the water, which was absolutely glorious. Really nice to get away from a screen, since that's where I do most of my work.

Sneak peeks: this is some writing from Chapter 1 of The New Thing. Enjoy!

Cutting room floor: a Chapter 6 I coded and then realised the chapter was already incredibly long! It was going to be about hanging out with pets and one of your classmates in preparation for later pet sport events, and as you see, Beaumont was going to be very cuddly with their pet. I will probably use this in a later chapter, but this chapter had so much going on already.

Thanks for reading, and I'll catch the Sneak Preview subscribers on September 22 for the answer segment of the non-NSFW September Q&A. Take care!