March 2023

The final piece of outline feedback was to consider trimming the number of stats again, which was still pretty high, though it was made clear that the CoG editors believed I could handle them. When I had a look at my stats page ingame, I removed Observation (noticing things could be covered by other, more specific, stats and I didn’t want confusion about “is noticing people’s domineering body language Politics or Observation?” etc). This meant doing another iteration of the backgrounds but didn't actually result in much extra work, and tightened them up as well. I cut a stat for Catarina’s reputation, and made Pressure a single stat rather than divided into Pressure and Health (I realised in this game it was clearer to make health holistic!).

Then I handwrote brief summaries of Chapters 1-6 to sense-check and spot any gaps. Among other things it helped me with: establishing some transportation logistics; including more about the veterans early on; a point in Chapter 4 in which in the outline I’d blithely written “the PC can meet with each of [a selection of characters]” but I realised that the section didn’t quite flow.

In particular, doing this helped me flesh out what the opening section of Chapter 1 (I really wanted it to be different to Creme de la Creme while having some familiarity, and do a lot of work introducing Teran) and helped me think about stats and where they might overlap or need clarifying. I also realised that my current setup had the player railroaded into helping Savarel. I couldn’t really rationalise being ordered to do it, since it’s not the player’s job, and an early railroad like that can be sour for players (including me!), so I came up with a branched alternative.

Then it was time to start coding! Because I'd set up the startup, checkpoint system, stats page and quizzes, I could get on with the story. This stage is really helpful for foundational sense-checking. For the first chapter I focused especially on stats, as they're harder to change in later chapters: do the stats make sense? Do their names need to be different? Are there ways of behaving that aren’t robustly covered by the stats as currently set up? I noticed that “Objective” and “Cautious” could feel overlapped, and made notes to reinforce their differences and tutorialise them in particular early on.

At the coding stage, I can also go into more detail about the shape of scenes, how much branching there is, and making sure I'm building in responsiveness to earlier choices. I find it easier than writing straightaway, because everything is shorter and easier to see the big picture. I can also amuse myself with silly placeholder text:

It took about the equivalent of a couple of full days' work to code the chapter. I ended up being ill and having some other personal commitments partway through which disrupted things slightly, but because of all the front-loaded work, and it being the first chapter, it was pretty straightforward.

Finally, I checked the stat balance using an approach based on Emily Short’s description on her blog. I discovered that Politics was disproportionately high, while Sneaking and Survival were low; Callous, Emotional, and Decisive were high (Callous happened because I wanted to give enough pragmatic/ruthless options and overcorrected; the others were the result of erring on the side of high action). It took three passes or so to even them out. I planned to revisit the balancing test after completing the chapter, because stat changes often shift over the course of writing.

March 22-31

Because of other personal and work commitments, and Royal Affairs coming out on March 30, I knew I’d have less time to work on Honor Bound in April, so I wanted to really rev my engines for writing once I was ready. I wrote the first draft of Chapter 1, 28,000 words, in around 25 hours spread over the course of eight working days. As with the coding, I was ill for some of it, but aside from that I was able to get an excellent run at it. I didn’t expect all - or any - of the other chapters being as quick as this, since it has so much first-chapter momentum and simplicity, but it put me off to a very solid start.

Again, a lot of this pace was due to the front-loaded work I’d done with planning and coding. I can’t emphasise enough how useful pinning things down beforehand has been.

On March 30 Royal Affairs came out which was tremendously exciting! I took some time away from Honor Bound to do quick bugfixes and talk to people about it. The fun thing was that I’d done so much on Honor Bound already by that point that I felt comfortable doing so.

I finished the first draft on March 31. Once done, I spellchecked, balanced the stat spreads again as I’d edited a few stat changes while writing (Rebellious had crept a little low), and generated several RandomTest playthroughs to read through. Doing that helped me find a few weirdly-spaced paragraphs, revise some awkward sentences, and fix a couple of pronoun/verb agreement errors that had come up because of changing how I was doing them.

I earmarked the first two weeks of April for mostly family time with other work where I could fit it in, so I didn’t anticipate getting much done on Honor Bound until at least April 17.

April 4-11

I did manage to get outlining on paper done on April 4 which was great! I then did Chapter 2 coding where I could here and there between April 5 and April 11.

On April 11, the beta playtesting for [Elite Status: Platinum Concierge (tab:https://www.choiceofgames.com/elite-status-platinum-concierge/) began (I had taken on additional writing and testing responsibilities for the game, which was mostly written by Emily Short) which was my main priority.

April 12

This was a big moment for me because my wife Fay had the chance to play Chapter 1. I was so excited to hear what she had to say, and a little nervous because it always feels strange for someone else to see what you’ve been working on. I didn’t have to be nervous, of course - she’s the ultimate first playtester because she’s got an eagle eye for improvements while being very positive. There were a few continuity bits and typos which were easy to fix, and I ended up adding another option to the train robbery scene to give more breadth of choice.

April 13-15

Where possible, I took time to carry on coding Chapter 2 and finished the first coding draft on April 15. I then did balancing. In terms of stat scores things were pretty even, with some slight trends towards Dutiful and Decisive, so I tweaked that slightly. More of an issue were the testing choices. Checking the choices seen in average playthroughs, I had very few Sneaking-based testing choices and not many Crafts ones, so I added some in and reduced Politics, which was overrepresented. Even more of a concern were the opposed stats, which were all over the place. Rebellious and Objective were very underrepresented, with Decisive and Dutiful wildly higher than all the others. This took a bit of tweaking to even them out.

For Chapter 1 out of interest I checked the average number of choices, so I did the same for the code draft of Chapter 2. Chapter 1 was 86 choices and Chapter 2 was 69 - interesting as Royal Affairs goes from 76 to 57. Chapter 1 was around 13000 words long for a playthrough.

On April 14, I sent Chapter 1 off to be edited!

April 18

I did a little stat page layout tweaking to make it more readable. Most of what I did between April 11 and 18, though, was Elite Status: Platinum Concierge beta editing.

April 19

I had started feeling burned out in earnest on April 17, but the pressure from having been ill in late March, as well as entirely failing to take a break after completing Royal Affairs, had been brewing for a while before that. On the 19th I hit a brick wall and realised I needed to take a short break from Elite Status: Platinum Concierge, Honor Bound, and the other contract work I was doing.

Whether you’re a game developer or someone else in a creative industry, please consider watching the Occupational Burnout talk from GDC 2023. I watched it on April 14 and it helped me recognise that it was happening earlier than I might have otherwise. Like a lot of people in the industry, I take a lot of pride in getting the job done, and doing excellent work quickly. But there needs to be breathing room. You can’t push through these things, and if you try, it’ll hit you for longer. I took three work days off and scheduled a counselling session as soon as I realised what was going on.

April 24-May 15

I returned with a lot more energy and loved getting back into writing Chapter 2. During my time away I had my editorial notes back for Chapter 1 and implemented them; I also added a couple more Chapter 1 options.

Chapter 2 was a much longer haul, not only because I was working on the Elite Status: Platinum Concierge beta and other contract work at the same time, so I wasn’t working on Honor Bound every day, but also because the code alone was 8447 words to Chapter 1’s 5849.

I knew that in Chapter 1, doing the writing roughly quintupled the code skeleton so I was set for a second chapter of about 42000 words (which was almost entirely accurate, in the end!). This was also much more branched. Some feedback from Royal Affairs was players feeling that they didn’t have enough chances to build their skills, so I put in a large branched section for skill-building and getting to know one of the four school-based characters. That took most of my writing time!

The other non-main-project business I had during this period was creating a small interactive prologue, separate from Chapter 1, to introduce players to the setting, and lots of setting, and character introduction posts. My plan was to post something every week starting from May 11, leading up to July 4…

…and on May 11 I posted an Honor Bound announcement on Patreon!

May 16

I posted about Honor Bound in public on May 16! I was over the moon with the responses, especially given that it wasn’t a “typical” announcement with a first chapter. I felt really flattered that people trusted that it would be a fun game, even though I’d only posted a small bonus prologue.

Posting the announcement coincided with the day I finished the first draft of Chapter 2. I did some playtesting and edits, and stat balance (Rebellious was skewing low and Decisive high, even after the work I’d done to even them out, so I returned to do more balance work on them.)

For the next couple of weeks I split my work time between coding Chapter 3 and continuing the Elite Status: Platinum Concierge beta. I took a week off from May 27th to June 4th for family commitments.

June 5-June 16

During this couple of weeks, I drafted Chapter 3. As part of this, because there are some steamy scenes in this chapter, I put some work into the way the game describes the PC’s body, including some edits to earlier chapters. On June 6th, I posted the first chapter on Patreon which was a great experience and led to some very useful initial feedback - I revised based on that while I was doing Chapter 3 work. I also wrote a couple of side stories, with the potential eventual goal of posting them on Patreon in the future.

June 20-24

After completing the first draft on June 16th, I spent a day on other work before doing playtesting and revisions. Getting into Chapter 4 was really quite challenging. The nature of that chapter is a sharp change of routine and tone and introduces a lot of new characters and pressures for the PC so it took a bit more thinking to plan it in a way that felt good for the big picture.

June 26-28

After doing a pretty detailed outline, I got on with coding. I then spent a day on difficulty balancing. By the end of Chapter 4 I had course-corrected well in some areas but in some cases it had gone the other way - Emotional was now very low. Survival and Sneaking were low compared to the other skills. And as usual, Callous was too low. I decided to go back and look at all the earlier chapters to see where the issues were, and while I was at it, look at the secondary stats too. It was not very exciting work, but very necessary for the long run.

July 3-21

I wrote Chapter 4 pretty steadily once it was sorted out. There were some scenes opening up more about the world, as well as a few of the main characters in the game, so it was great to give them time. I briefly considered a fling scene for the PC with one of the other party guests, but it messed up the pacing a bit and would have made the chapter even longer!

July 22-August 29

In late July, I took a bit of time to rejig my Chapter 5 plans: I realised that what I had planned made Chapter 4-6 feel repetitive, and that if I put everything I had planned into Chapter 5 it would be overwhelmingly large. So I swapped out what I had originally planned for Raffi for an optional road trip with Simone and Catarina.

I outlined and coded fairly slowly during this period because of family commitments, and completed the coding at the end of August. I didn’t change much from my new outline when I coded, except for adding the option to spend time with Denario - I wanted to lean into the times in which the PC could interact with him, and I’d already been considering adding another Denario scene in Chapter 3, so this would follow on from that well.

September 1-5

I planned not to get any writing done during this time, but ended up being able to make a great start on Chapter 5.

September 6-19

And then I returned to full-time writing! It was great to be on holiday, but fitting writing around childcare is a lot. So being back to my usual routine felt really good, especially as I was excited about all the personal-plot scenes for this chapter. On the 19th, I finished drafting.

September 20-October 27

I did a bit of planning and coding for Chapter 6 during this period, but mostly I worked on the Royal Affairs expanded epilogue. October had a childcare week in the middle so I knew Chapter 6 would be difficult to complete if I tried to do it then, so I changed my plans. CoG have always been very responsive and flexible when it comes to deadlines so this went well.

October 30-31

I hit a snag on October 30 when I realised I needed to make some changes to Raffi’s storyline in general and to what happened in Chapter 6. It’s usual for me to hit this sort of difficulty at this stage because things become more complicated in the middle of the game - but I talked it through with Fay and she helped me figure out what the issues were and how to fix them. I then spent Halloween doing difficulty balancing (the scariest of all tasks…?)

November

I spent the first half of November drafting Chapter 6, finishing the draft by the middle of the month.