First and most important is to address your unnecessary addition of a "U" to words. Bad Brit. You stop that right now.
Humor > humour
Hey, he's not entirely "Brit". I found a typo/bug in the matrix that I decided to keep quiet about and not report
.
During Chapter 1, when Molly watches porn and fantasises about something, if you choose to watch lesbian porn, part of the text is written "ass" instead of the London version "arse" , and there's a part where it's even written "asshole".
However, that's how I'm used to seeing it written 99.99% of the time, so I consider it correct .
Gotta put a stop to it before we're hearing about the "colour" of his tea. Himeros probably doesn't know the proper way to prepare tea (the microwave, obviously.)
Guilty as charged! It's funny you mention about the ass/arse thing - I think ass has definitely crept into more common usage in the past decade or two, I guess from American media. It actually feels like the more natural thing to type. That's the one Americanism I'll let slip into the game - however anyone who microwaves their tea (without the proper license) will of course be sent to the tower...
Josh killed Dumbledore
Josh is Keyser Soze
Josh and Tyler Durden are the same person!
Josh is Luke's father.
Thank you for at least not revealing that he returns in Season Two as Josh the White after apparently falling to the Balrog...
The new sprite is great, as is her room (and the others, each captures the flavour of the character).
I'm even prepared to forgive her for being an Arctic Monkeys fan
Thank you! And ha - I'm sure she'd appreciate that, she takes her music taste
very seriously!
I just wanted to say that I really like this game.
I was really surprised how different some scenes play out depending on your previous choices: In my first playthrough of chapter 1, I went with “upper class”, and Molly was a guest at a certain party; the second time, with a different background, she was working as a waitress…
I also love the small difference in the masturbation scene depending on Molly having a lesbian fling or if she was “blacked”… I love these kinds of details!
Personally, I’m rooting for a lesbian happy end with Imogen. (And just as an idea – a lesbian wedding in the epilogue…
)
Out of curiosity, may I ask why you chose history/biology/psychology as majors for Molly? I’m asking because to me they feel rather similar. Normally I would have expected more fundamentally different branches (for example history/medicine/economy.) Was it because knowledge in these fields will be useful for the plot or because it is easier to get the different personalities Molly may have to work with these subjects…? Or did you have other reasons?
Also, may I ask about the time frame of the story? Chapter 1 plays out in two days, while the prologue covers everything before. Will the next chapters also play out in days, and will there be gaps between the chapters?
By the way, I also miss the “old internet" - it is quite funny to see how, by our modern rules, it is ok for fifteen-year-old Molly to smoke, but God forbid, she had sex (not to mention incest).
Thank you for the really kind message, I'm so glad you like the game, and I'm really pleased you played it through a couple of times to see how differently it can unfold with different choices, it has been a lot of fun mapping it all out.
There will definitely be more wholesome and more depraved paths for all major romance options (including Imogen) - I hadn't actually given any thought to the idea of an epilogue yet, but I do always love games that round out the stories of the characters you've come to know and love, so yeah, happy to confirm that one day, years down the line, when the game is finally finished, you will get your epilogue! And I won't spoil anything (especially as you only gave me the idea a few seconds ago so there isn't much to spoil yet...) but I am sure that at least some of the paths could end up with epilogues involving weddings, depending on the choices made along the way...
I'm happy to go into detail on the university courses and my rationale for them! I did try and make them somewhat different from each other - Biology is a hard STEM subject, History is pretty much the classic humanities subject, Psychology is a science but in some ways a social science, so very different from Biology.
But your instincts are also correct, in that these fields are all useful to tie into the plot I have planned. Each subject will have its own story arc over the game as a whole which will tie into the main story. You will be going to lectures/tutorials/labs in the next release so will find out more in a few weeks when you will get to meet lecturers and fellow students.
In terms of timeframes, it really depends on the episode in question. The prologue was the big exception in that it is effectively a character creation process in narrative form, over 19-20 years of Molly's life. The story itself starts properly in Season One Episode One, which as you noted, takes place over 18ish hours. Going forward, some episodes may take place over hours, or days, or a couple of weeks. There will be small time skips between scenes and episodes when it makes narrative sense for there to be. I've vaguely envisioned Season One (which will be ten episodes long) to take place over the Easter term (so roughly from mid-January to end of March, so about two and a half months). I currently have loosely sketched out plans for seven seasons in total (subject to change).
A lot of my narrative influence for how I want to approach the game and story (and hence why I am calling my releases Season X Episode X) are from prestige TV shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men*, and so thinking about how those shows handle the passage of time is as good a model as any for what you can expect from the approach in
Black Incense going forward.
Hope that's of interest, always happy to answer further questions!
*the reason these are such a conscious influence on my approach to the game is because the nature of adult game release schedules (roughly an episode a month) fits in far better with how the best TV writers approach story, compared to how the best novelists would approach it. The writers of the shows mentioned did incredible jobs of making each episode its own self-contained story, set within a self-contained season, set within the story as a whole. The crafting of each episode into its own unique thing is something the prestige TV format has really mastered, and I've tried to learn what I can from that to ensure that each new release feels really satisfying for the player to play through and experience as a story within a story.
