It depends on which iteration of the game you take into account. :hidethepain:
Nothing on this project moves that fast. I give it two years for the Lifepath thing to meander and stall and then another two-and-a-half for the next revision of the paper doll. Then he'll restart.
The second version ended after her first year at uni, and Crush said he had plans to cover each year afterwards until she graduated.
You just had to go and remind Crush how re-integrating life path will give him an excuse to spend 2 more years of "development" by polishing the handful of existing scenes to "accurately reflect the diverse variety of personalities your agent can have heading into the Bangkok mission" or whatever marketing bullshit he'll need a week to come up with instead of actually doing the work.
That was the 2nd version of Lifepath...
Second version of Lifepath is still in the file, just not linked to anything so one would hope he can just pick it up. Of course this is Crush we're talking about, the Todd 'I Can't Tell If It's Incompetence or Malice' Howard of this space.
Yeah, when i said Kate enters university i meant there's a bit of early content in there and then it just died.
- Female Agent is an enormous dynamic world
SEE THAT ABANDONED APARTMENT BUILDING? YOU CAN CLIMB IT!
Yeah - now that he's established that stand-alone episodes are a thing - he could just write the parts he has ideas for as stand-alone features and sort out how they connect to each other later. He's been teasing a handful of named episodes since at least autumn 2022, so it seems like he has a pretty good idea what happens in them. Why can't he just write these named episodes as stand-alone ones?
Because the most basic premise of storytelling is "show, don't tell". So, the game shows what's supposed to be important part of the experience, the continuous escalation of the situation MC is in, instead of just summing it up with a snippet like the one you've produced and skipping to "and then three months later".
Fair enough, I suppose, but since Crush says he's struggling with making barmaid shifts between more important story beats exciting ("I realised that I was repeating story beats we've already had"), why not just gloss over these barmaid shifts - and write the parts that do advance the heroine's corruption?
I mean yes, this is one way to deal with it. Another would be to introduce new elements to alleviate repetitiveness, like the poster above suggests. And finally, yet another way would be to recognize that "story is not ready for heroine to make jump to bargirl" is entirely arbitrary, and actually making this jump without necessarily dragging out the story with weeks and months of regular bar shifts first... may be for the best -- this is, ultimately, a spy story and these tend to be fast-paced.
