Pause to philosophize, now back to work.

In case you didn't notice, April 1 has come and gone, and Caro and I didn't release a game for NaNoRenO. So, yeah. There wasn't a huge amount of progress. We still like the idea of the game, though, so we intend to make it at some point. One character's face got finished, at least! That's... something. Maybe. Here's Ringlets, anyway.

See, I had decided that it would be quicker for me to not use lines at all and instead do more elaborate shading to make up for it, because I am SO inclined away from making neat, clean things. Line lineart. This wouldn't been great and totally gone quicker if I shaded everything the way I shaded the cloak: ~4 different shades, not even trying for smooth blending. But then for the face I ended up using like 10 different shades and trying to make everything blend really well and... yeah. So it was still slow. Also it came out not quite like I wanted and definitely less expressive than when there were lines, so we'll see if this gets tweaked more or not by the time the game gets going.

Anyway, I completely and officially paused work on RESET for the month of March to work on this game instead. And then me and Caro both got totally sucked into Sherlock fandom and have mostly only spent our time making Sherlocky things (did you know Caro makes awesome music videos?! True story) and doing stuff for school. For the record, it's not like I haven't been writing; I just haven't been writing RESET.

But somehow, yesterday, I think the combination of Reichenbach feelings and playing RisAmo managed to jolt me back into the mood to work on RESET. So, that's pretty cool. I'm in the middle of doing some writing; here, have a quote from this morning.

"You're right, Zack, it was just supposed to be a game. Except that it isn't. We broke the most important rule: we forgot that it was a game. We forgot how to call time-out."

I've done some thinking lately, and there are changes that need to happen. I've been excitedly saying for ever and ever that there were only TWO MORE SCENES TO WRITE or ONE MORE SCENE TO WRITE or something like that. Well, here's how things stand now. There is only one more scene to write in the "first draft". It's a scene containing a branch, and I need to write approximately a few hundred words before the branch then a few hundred words after each of the two options. And then I'm going to say the first draft is done. That will probably happen today.

But that doesn't actually mean a lot, because some pretty big changes are happening. I'm changing a key detail of the crisis which means that, although the gist of the scene is staying the same, a bunch of lines will need to be rewritten to accommodate. And then of the four endings I had, I'm scrapping one altogether. It's incompatible with the new version of the crisis, and it didn't make much sense anyway (in a meta way, it was triggered very "unfairly", and even in-story it was a very improbable occurrence). Then I'm taking one of the three endings that remain--the good ending!--and splitting it out into two.

This paragraph might be a little spoilery.
The new choice that I'm writing today and the new ending I'll be writing address something important in the "message" of the game. No this isn't a game made to "give a message" as much as it is to just tell a story, but it's a fact that people always will extract a message, and RESET as it was lent itself easily to a pretty unfavorable message. See, Zack and Jason's relationship might be considered unhealthy in certain ways--emphasis on might; I really don't intend to take a stance on that. But as it was before, in the end, the relationship would always stay that way (this was never meant to be a game about the relationship; it was a game about two people who happened to be boyfriends). I anticipated that it would bother some people to the point that it would break immersion that they'd want to address the problems of the relationship, but Zack never gets the chance to. I'm sure some people will even wish they could just dump Jason. And the inevitability of the situation--and Zack's acceptance of it--was likely to give the message that I condone it. Soooo, I decided that it's all around better if I put in a chance for Zack to voice concerns about the relationship. A chance for the player to actively decide whether they think that what's going on is okay. And an ending that puts them on the path to doing something about it. And really, it's not only about accommodating player reaction; it's become more appropriate than I thought. At first this game was meant to be about some things Jason is going through and Zack trying to help him through it, and yeah obviously their relationship played a role, but only insofar as one of the factors in Jason's situation. It wasn't meant to develop in the game. As I've been writing the latter half of the game, though, there was more and more discussion of the relationship itself, and some scenes wound up actually confronting the issue of whether their relationship was okay. I didn't intend to do that, but I like it, and now it feels right that the game should confront those issues, that there should be the possibility for the relationship to change in response to other events. And I like that it's now in the player's hands--in Zack's hands--to have the final word on whether something needs to change.

So, that change is going to be hard. The crisis and the endings and emotional and intense and morally complicated and in some ways very close to home. It's pretty draining to write, and I admit I'm a bit afraid to go back to it, to experience those feelings again (I've always been rather glad that it's the end, and that I wrote it nearly first, and that I don't need to go through it when I'm writing and testing other things). And there's again an issue of being afraid of what I appear to be condoning, of whether my characters are doing things the right or wrong way and who's going to think what if they're doing things the wrong way.

Remember that my characters aren't author mouthpieces. They aren't message-bearers for anyone else, either. I want them to be human, which means being wrong sometimes. I don't choose to tell my stories because I want people to take my characters' word. I want them to consider my characters' word, perhaps, as one potential way of seeing things that may be better or worse than other ways. I want them to think, if they dare. Or I just want to present something interesting.

Alright, back to the writing.