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Hey, folks! Hope you're all doing well, today. Sorry for the late update, I ate something that didn't agree with me yesterday, and was having some nasty stomach cramps. As a result, I just didn't it in me to do a post. But now I'm feeling right as rain, so let's get tooooo it.
I've knocked out some more renders for the next chapter, finishing the little bit that sees our hero reuniting with the Barron family, to finally catch up. It's a cute little scene, and I'm pretty happy with it. Now I'm onto the next set of scenes, which have Guy wrapping up another very long day. I'm almost to the bit where we jump ahead in the story a bit, and Guy's black eye finally vanishes. Rejoice! I know people hated it, but I really loved having him walk around with a living reminder of the consequences of his actions. When I finally wrap the whole game up, I'd kind of love to go back and do a variant of all the chapters, where you're able to avoid Jamie's suckerpunch, and never get the black eye. It'd be a huge time investment for something relatively minor.. But I still can't help but think it'd be fun.
Speaking of wrapping the game up, I recently received a question as to how much longer exactly people can expect this story to continue. I've talked off and on about this, and allow me to opine for a bit. The plan is and has been to make this a two season story. So, we're basically at the halfway point now, and I'm working to wrap it up within 11-12 more chapters. Assuming I continue working at my current rate of speed, that means another 3-3.5 years of content. Some folks expressed dismay at that, which I totally get. It feels both very close and very far away, and people naturally want to spend more time with their favorites, and see all the various love interests get their time to shine.
Buuut.. I feel like, within this space, there aren't very many games that actually manage to arrive at a satisfactory ending. Or an ending of any kind, for that matter. And even when one does, nobody likes to invest a ton of time into a story and then see it reach a conclusion, and all their fictional friends ride off into the sunset. It's bittersweet, right? I mean, I still haven't finished the second season of Pushing Daisies, because part of my brain says, "If you never finish it, those characters are still out there, having adventures."
That said, I think part of what makes a story special is
that it ends, and you get to have a sense of closure. And as much as endings can suck, I think being left wondering, "What would've happened?!" is so much worse. So, yeah. Trying to land this plane in the next few years. That won't mean trying to arbitrarily force the story to wrap up by an arbitrary deadline or anything, and if I need more time/chapters, I'll make use of them. But that's the plan for now.
That discussion, naturally, lead to people asking: what's next? What'll I do once Guy's adventures are over? And right now, I don't know! It's a ways off, and who knows what my life will even look like by then. I think I'll always want to keep making AVNs, and I have loose plans for a few. I think anything in the future would be designed as more of a limited/smaller scope project. I've also talked a lot about taking some time to do expansion/DLC content for secondary characters like Isabella, Jun, Wren, Dash, etc. which would turn them into full love interests. Or building out big date scenes for all the main love interests, which could easily slot into some of the little time skips I'm building into the story.
But I'd also like to get to other creative pursuits. I've mentioned I wrote a spicy fantasy novel last year (which I'm still in the process of editing) and that whole experience was
really fun for me. Being able to just focus on following a single narrative thread, without the demands of doing thousands of images, was really, really nice. I'm also a traditional artist, who wants to do some graphic novels before I die. Not that I'm planning to kick the bucket anytime soon, but life is unpredictable, you know? I've got some stories I want to tell in that format, some spicy and some not.
More than anything else, I just look forward to slowing down a bit. I know, I know. People are probably thinking, "Slowing down?! You're already slow!" :'D But, I basically treat this like a job right now, with a minimum number of hours I force myself to "clock in" every week. It'd be nice to eventually relax a bit and go back to making stuff purely for fun and the joy of making it.
