Coming Out On Top

Kickstarter sent me this email today reminding me to make sure I send all my backers an update via their system.

“We know it’s been awhile since your project was funded, but we wanted to write and encourage you to keep sending project updates.”

We all know what happened the last time I followed their advice regarding updates right?   I got an exasperated message from someone telling me to stop sending so many freaking updates.

So I’m gonna leave this “helpful reminder” alone.  I think all my backers know where to find me.

Hint: it’s not “comingoutontop.com”, which is incidentally, a Christian ministries site.

Today I wrote out one of the endings for the relationships and I felt the sudden accumulation of moisture emanating from the glands in my eyes.  Lord, what’s this…was I crying?

Man, that was awkward.  I didn’t expect the any of the stories to take that kind of emotional turn, but sometimes your characters just end up having their own agendas and you’re unable to stop them.

Not to worry.  An hour later I was back to snickering over crazy shit elsewhere in the story, obviously stuff I can’t really reveal right now.

In any case, there are no guarantees to which scenes get left in or out.  I tend to keep rewriting until the very last second, up to the very moment of hitting the “build distribution” button on Ren’Py.

Just plowing through the second draft right now.  Sorry if I haven’t replied to your emails right away!  Unless it’s urgent, I’ll be responding to your email closer to the end of the month, once I get through this phase of writing.  Thanks for your messages and signing up for the mailing list, in any case!

And if anybody’s curious about the dreaded writing process, I generally map out my outlines on my iPad, using a handy program called iThoughts.  The particular outline below was for an early version of Alex’s story (which I’ve shrunk down drastically so as not to spoil anybody.)  Once I’ve got the outline down for somebody’s path, I start writing multiple drafts (which often take me back to the outline and make the necessary revisions when I find a scene doesn’t work.)

Writing involves a lot of staring into space for yours truly.

Sorry about being slow with the email responses, guys.  Please bear with me as I play catch up!     

Will be taking some time off work just to get through Draft Two this month.  I have extremely high expectations for myself in terms of delivering a good story.  It’s funny because a compelling story is probably the one thing people least expect from an adult dating sim, right?  I believe it happens to be my forte, however, so you’re getting one whether you want one or not.  :D

In other news, the closed development forum amuses me to no end…hopefully I can keep it running even after the game and its add-ons are released (and possibly open it up in the future to whoever purchases the game.)  As some of you know, the forum was already shut down once due to the contents of one of its subforums, unsurprisingly titled “SEX”.  Let’s just say I was innocently requesting references, and my forum members were only aiming to assist me…and…anyways…we got slapped with a 48-hour shutdown notice within a few days of its existence.

I guess it all worked out though.  We ended up moving to a different service with slicker features.  Like that damn chat room, taunting me to come visit every day.  Not sure what the heck’s happening in there, so I’ll just assume our caring forum members are helping each other with homework.