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- tldr; The proper rendering work has begun, now that I've got enough written to stay ahead of the script. Also started writing a little short game directly connected to FiN, but I may or may not finish it. We'll see. And Carolina got a new cardigan.
Like, even if you took 10 million and invested it in a bunch of stuff your returns are still unlikely to grow your money to over a 100 million within a decade unless you're fucking lucky as hell and invest in some crazy new tech no one expects to go big time mainstream... 26 is 'i can totally live on this for the rest of my life, buy a nice house, have a nice car, and maybe a boat to go sailing on weekends' money, but not 'let's become a philanthropic celebrity' money.
I've had a lot of people take issue with the amount of money the player has, but there is a reason I chose a relatively 'modest' amount of money for Guy/MC. On the practical side of things, 26 million is a 'small' enough amount that he feasibly
could get it out of a crypto exchange, without a ton of fuss. And even then it's a bit of a stretch.
On the storytelling side of things, 26 million is enough that he can do a
lot, but not
everything. If he was Bruce Wayne (or Lex Luthor, depending on your morals..), then nothing he does would really matter. He could hire ten Nicki's, turn Barron Books into Barnes and Noble through monetary brute force, and buy Viola's apartment building just to punish Mr. Fowler. The fact that he has to pick and choose how generous he can be makes his contributions more meaningful.
On top of that, I've been trying to set up the whole idea that there
is a divide between Guy/MC, and the people who are
obscenely wealthy. We see him play nice with a rich dickhead in the Halloween Special, to avoid depleting his own warchest. We know that the mysterious Vaughn is someone who can throw away obscene amounts of money to chase his particular fetishes, similar to Guy/MC. And we know Risa comes from an 'old money' rich family, and that she personally knows people who dislike our hero because he's disrupted the social order. He feels like an upstart underdog because he
is.
Finally, there
is a bit of a social mission aspect to this game, where I use it to discuss things that bother me about the world. One of which is that our views on wealth have become so profoundly fucked up that we no longer have a sense of scale as to what real wealth is. People see YouTubers giving their friends Lambos, or Elon Musk buying Twitter for 44 billion dollars, and rather than think, "Jesus Christ, that's the operating budget of my mid-sized city for the next 100 years!" they think, "Huh, I guess that's not that much money."
But, I feel like this complaint is rooted in the same place as those about MC's inability to fight: people expect this story to be pure wish fulfillment, because let's be real, that's how 90% of these things go. I mean, if one more person asks me when MC is going to move out of his condo and buy a mansion for all the girls to live in..
Like, there's a
reason why we have Brent in the first chapter for contrast, who's willing to chase wealth and wealth-associated status symbols like Lamborghinis to his detriment as well as Nicki's. Our MC is just happy to have a car that works, and a nice place to live. Now, will he stay that way? He's only been doing this for seven months or so. So, maybe it's possible that his appetite will grow as he encounters real money, and the associated power it brings with it.
But, assuming that he
only had 25 million after he bought
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and
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, paid off his debts, and then somehow found another $700,000 worth of shit to blow his money on -- that remaining 25 million would generate $1,250,000 in interest each year. Enough to pay Nicki's salary ($60,000), write a three-year grant to the museum ($150,000), renovate the bookstore ($100,000), and more. He could pay Pepper and Gabby's tuition at a state school, put Viola and her mom in a nice apartment, and still have a few hundred thousand dollars left over, without ever lifting a finger.
(I do leave taxes out of these calculations, because come on, how boring do you want me to be with all this?)
The point is that you don't have to be mega-wealthy to make a difference. Half of the working population in the United States can't weather a $500 emergency. To say nothing of tens of thousands of dollars. But for the player, it
is ultimately a drop in the bucket, driving home exactly how unfair the world is. He lucked into so much money that he can easily alleviate the problems of a lot of deserving people, and he's not even worth as much as some second-string NFL player that's been on the bench all season.
Yo, dev, your changelog is misleading (in a good way)... I downloaded this game again to replay it (I really enjoy it, even though it's not got either of my fave tags), I'd last played v0.39. The CL led me to believe there was little or no new content. Boy was that a wrong assessment! The new stuff rocks.
Keep up the good work, dude.
Thanks! I honestly stopped managing the thread so directly, since it was just one more thing on my plate. But, I should probably review some stuff in the OP.
