I am not even sure I can agree with that. The writing is good. Yes. But does a game like this need this amount of text? And for the time it takes him to write it, it isn't even that much. Several months for a few pages of setting up a scene? It feels like 90% of it is pointless. I certainly don't read all of it anymore. Do I need to make a decision on what type of food the character has for dinner? Does the outcome change anything? This is the biggest problem I have with the writing so far. There is a lot of it, but it means nothing. What is the expression? You sure talk a lot, but you don't say anything.
The game uses decision making mechanics and yet, nothing changes. I am not even talking about the skills and dice rolls, because other than being there, there is nothing to it.
I have stated it before, I don't even understand how you can progress with this game without having any idea what you want these mechanics to do. Either come up with a meaningful way and implement it now or scrap it and stop wasting time on it. He says that he wants to expand the game later and build up some groundwork. Well, he has done that for years. Time and time again and every couple of years he gets to a point where he hits a wall and starts all over again. I am not accusing him of intentionally scamming anybody, but even though the last couple of months suggest progress, has the game really progressed?
We got a few dozen pages of text and very little game. For years there was no progression at all and now the story progresses at a speed, where it doesn't make much sense anymore. The Agent barely arrived in Thailand, got herself a job, is no longer forced to whore herself out, but immediately gets raped, has no problem with it and installs cameras at the club so that her story is basically done. She can let the SWAT team do the rest.
At this point I have no idea where the story is supposed to go, how far he wants to stretch it, especially considering that he wants to create some open world kind of thing. At this point the agent can return home. Why would I explore more of the city or the underworld when the story has been told in less than an in game week?
I suggested a while ago, that at this point it would make more sense to go back to the college part of the game, have her travel to Thailand as a student, have her lose all her money and passport for real instead of just pretending and have her being forced by an agency to work for them in order to get home or something. At this point that would make much more sense, would leave you with many more options and it would be a decent way to attach the college part of the game which he wants to bring back at a later stage anyway.
How can you implement the actual character creation and setting up the skills and everything at a later point? You need to know what you want do with skills, how to integrate them and write scenes for it. You need to do that before you do everything else or otherwise you end up rewriting everything again, once you realise that you shoehorned yourself into a corner.
While I do appreciate the fact that we finaly made it to Thailand, I think he is going to hit a wall sooner or later, once he notices that he can't just implement skill checks and such without changing the outcome of everything he has written so far.
