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Hey everyone! Hope your week's been a good one!
I've spent mine focusing more on writing than on rendering. Last week when I was working on the patch, I ended up replaying the entire game (which is something I hadn't done before, surprisingly) and I picked up on a couple of things I want to talk about today. So get ready for a yapfest!
It feels like up until now, the game's focused more on the corruption aspect than the NTR aspect. While that's natural, given that no hard NTR has taken place yet, we're at a point in the story where things will start changing, and I'm going to need to start giving more attention to the NTR side of things, specifically when it comes to Mystery mode. So what do I mean by that?
- Sense of dread.
People play Mystery mode to immerse themselves in the story and put the pieces of the puzzles together themselves. However, as we near a turning point, the immersion aspect would feel a little hollow if it didn't dive more into Jeremy's mind and doubts and feelings.
He's been living the good life abroad, mostly believing that things back home are a-okay. At the end of V4 however, we saw the first crack in that facade, in him being weirded out by the last video call with Marissa, and freaking out when she didn't pick up his calls the next day. It's a good first step into my foray into trying to put the player in Jeremy's shoes, and conveying his anxiety and dread the best I can. I want to lean even more heavily into that aspect moving on, and give his internal monologues when he's spiraling as much attention as the girls' monologues when they're rationalizing their own actions.
On top of that, the tone of the video calls is going to start changing too. How long can he pretend that everything's fine, and be afraid to question Marissa before it starts boiling over? How much is she willing to reveal or keep hidden? Only time will tell!
- A real sense of loss.
Everyone knows what the stakes are. She's supposed to go join him in a few months and live happily ever after together. The problem is, that idea has only been told to you, and never really "shown". The player's only seen how much Jeremy loves Marissa through their texts and small interactions where he's talking about her with others. I want to expand on that. By the end of the next couple of updates I want the player to truly understand the depths of longing Jeremy feels for her.
Those feelings he has, contrasted with the things she's done and will do in the future, will make them hit that much harder.
- More action, less agency.
Distance in itself is a massive aspect of this game. It's what's allowed Marissa to get to where she is now. We haven't however really seen the effect of that distance on Jeremy properly yet. When things get bad, he'll want to do everything in his power to fix them, but their distance limits him to a severe extent. And that's what I want to hammer in. The story will have much more emotional weight if we see Jeremy do everything he can to keep things together, and somehow still falling short because of circumstance, not inaction. So that's something else I want to build on, though we'll see more of it in later updates.
I believe that focusing on these three points, while also giving the forum more attention will elevate mystery mode significantly, making it a very unique way of playing the game, on par with omniscient mode.
Now of course that doesn't mean that the focus on corruption is going to lessen at all. You can expect the same attention to that aspect as you've seen so far.
In any case, that's all I have for now. I have a long week of writing and re-writing ahead of me, so I'll let you know next Sunday how things are turning out! Thanks for tuning in and for your support. Have a wonderful week!