Public Release DW a90M&F, DM a31, SCPX a1
Hey all! Coming at you fairly early in the day with the first Devious release of the new year! As you might expect, I'm gonna take a moment to discuss some stuff about the upcoming year, but first let's get to the part of the update everybody actually cares about.
Devious World
- Main: Jamie can decline the oddly charismatic man when selling chocolate.
- Main: Holly can ask Santa for things. (Holly's Christmas eve outfit has also been altered a bit further up. I'll probably edit the other path a bit later too.)
- Main: Cyan can agree to help the villagers when playing Dean's solo tabletop game as Cybil.
Devious Mundanity
- Main: Defiance can poke around the office in the containment facility.
- Main: Michika can decide to try and escape the quarantine zone at the mine.
- Main: Horse-Caliburn can decide he'll call Pink again.
SCPX
- The initial release of the SCPX document to go with Defiance's storyline. (And eventually other characters.) I'll add things to it that either show up in the storyline or will eventually show up there, and I may or may not start taking suggestions for things to add to it, I'm still pondering that one.
- Anyway, feel free to use it as inspiration for your own projects!
- Anyone who attempts to criticize it for not being like the actual SCP wiki will be demoted to D-class, confined to a 10x10x10 room, and sentenced to cross-testing every other SCP with 682.
Also I know there were a bunch of typos and stuff from last month I was supposed to fix, but I procrastinated and didn't. ... Oops. I'll try to get 'em this month.
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Now, let's talk a few other things!
First off some schedule stuff for the coming year. I'll probably be going on a short trip next week but will post an incremental that Friday (combining the rest of this week with what I get done that week).
As to other breaks, I'm probably going to take the last half of February and the first part of March off from updating; not necessarily from writing content, but just from posting updates, so that incrementals will pause in February and resume in March.
This will allow for my annual birthday trip and also some downtime (I'm getting a bit burned out but still managing right now, some battery recharging will definitely be needed by then). This is subject to change but right now that's the plan.
I'll be pausing Patreon when I begin my break, so everyone should get skipped one month's charge.
Second, barring extreme circumstances, this will be the last year that Devious World will be in alpha. Many years ago I said that if I ever reached alpha 100, I'd upgrade the releases to beta. What will this actually mean? Uh, well... nothing, really. The game, by its nature, never really gets closer to being finished, it just accumulates more content.
But I guess it is kind of significant to me. Release dates used to be fairly arbitrary back before I got into releasing once a month (or shooting for that at least), and way back at the start I didn't really do incrementals so any little bit of added content sometimes wound up being a full update. But still... thinking of it as 100 releases, whatever their size, is pretty momentous to me personally I guess.
Really drives home that I've been doing this a long time. Some of you have been with me a long time too, which I appreciate. I also appreciate all the people we've picked up since then, and will pick up in the coming months and years.
The Devious universe of projects... the CYOA games, the related "serious" prose, the random porn stories that are occasionally sprinkled through... has been and will continue to be a massive passion project for me. That doesn't mean it's not hard work, or tiring, or challenging, or even frustrating sometimes. As has been said of the phrase "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life", well I do what I love and I guarantee you there are days that I work at it.
I do, however, still have this core commitment to myself and to you: I will only ever create content that I consider to be quality, because I think that's what you as an audience deserve. Some days (or even weeks) this results in not getting much, or anything, done because my head's not in the right space to produce anything worthwhile.
Just as (and more) often, it results in me trying something, getting a bit done, and flitting off to something else as inspiration strikes and fades and shifts. I know this can be frustrating to you, and believe me that it's frustrating to me too, all of it.
But I do think it still results in a better quality of content, eventually and overall, than sitting down and just forcing words out of my brain and onto the page in the name of getting something done would be. And to those of you who understand and are supportive of this approach, I thank you most of all.
Happy 2024, and let's all make this year our bottom!
