Gameplayed myself into a corner

When I had my initial creative flare that resulted in this entire new game I inadvertently created a real nightmare of a situation with all of the possible dialogue surrounding the main focus of the chapter (Kiera) because I wanted there to be lots of options available to the player for corrupting her. In the back of my mind I knew that I'd done that and have been ignoring the problem for as long as possible by developing everything else around it. All of that is finished (bar some editorial work) so now I'm forced to face the inevitable.

The best way that I can untangle this mess is that once the player has chosen a corruption path they won't be able to flip to an alternative method (at least, not that easily). That creates a more rigid narrative structure but in order to make it interesting enough to be replayable the paths need to be more diverse once chosen. This has resulted in the creation of more characters, more locations, more objects and more scenes but I think in the long run it'll be less work to create the extra content. My writing is getting quicker the more I practice it and a creative writing course that I took recently has really helped me there as well. I actually enjoy doing the writing more nowadays and that can only be a good thing.

Anyways, here is the next part of the exclusive story I promised:

Game page updated

I made a lot of progress today so I decided that it was probably time to update the game page! It should give you a bit more of an idea of what the game is about and how some of the puzzles can be approached.

In other news, I'd like to say that I'm really excited about the impending release of H.C. and the Wizards Sacrifice over at H3N Comics. The artist is the person behind the amazing Fallen Star comic and is also co-written by one of my favourite artists on the Hypnopics Collective, jnightshade! It looks like it'll be out in the next week or two so be sure to check it out.

A treat for my followers

Progress on Souls of Gaia is slow but steady! I've written a lot more over the past month and have been doing a lot of alpha testing as the game becomes more playable as a result. I haven't encountered any bugs thus far but I have changed a few puzzles that I thought were more interesting than they actually were.

As a reward for being patient with me I'm posting an image story I've been working on recently. I normally post this sort of thing over on the Hypnopics Collective as a flash file but I thought you guys deserved an exclusive. It's going to be about 20 pages long (4 parts) which I'll post steadily over the next couple of weeks. Enjoy part 1 and feel free to leave any comments!