I spent the first half of November drafting Chapter 6, and the second half coding Chapter 7. I also worked on the Royal Affairs epilogue beta, and did revisions to Chapter 5 and 6.

I didn’t keep track of progress in such detail through December, but wrote Chapter 7 before the holidays. Chapter 7’s earthquake sequence was a lot of fun to do as it was so action-packed. When planning Chapter 8, I hit a few difficulties with Raffi’s storyline (again! Poor Raffi!) and had to take some more time to sort it all out.

Over November and December I had some health issues which put a dent in my momentum and mood, but the holidays were a welcome break.

January 4-11 2024 I spent this week coding Chapter 8. It went through a few different iterations which wasn’t always easy, but once I had it down I was much happier with how it was put together.

January 15-Feb 9 Because of all the front-loaded work, I was in a good state to get on with drafting Chapter 8. Some days I was doing around 5000 words a day, which is unusually high for me - it felt great. At the end of December I'd established a few good health habits (getting out in the light helps with SAD - newsflash!) and was able to carry those through to January which had a good knock-on effect on my work, and on life in general. There were various life dramas at this time, but at the end of the month the Royal Affairs epilogue came out!

Feb 9 And the Honor Bound Steam page came out too!

Feb-March I completed the Chapter 8 draft and got started on Chapter 9. This turned into a big task because I did a lot of upfront work about romance conflicts and edits to Chapters 6-8 to make sure incompatible romances weren’t happening. Lots of emotional scenes in Chapter 9 too! Although I got sick in both February and March, I did have some big writing days and started planning and coding Chapter 10, although it wasn’t as much as I hoped.

April-13th May Through a lot of April, I unfortunately continued to be ill on and off, and it put me on the back foot. Also, because on 7th May I put up a public update for the demo, that ate up a lot of time because I was lucky to get a bunch of feedback and bug reports that took some time to deal with.

In the end, I finished the draft for Chapter 10 on 9th May, and spent two days playtesting and editing Chapters 8-10.

14th May This was when I started planning Chapter 11. I’d planned it in a fair amount of detail at the outline stage, but I’d changed a number of things around now that I was here, and it had a lot of moving parts to deal with.

Through the next couple of months, I did things in a weird non-linear way. Instead of planning and coding all of Chapter 11, I went on and planned and coded Chapter 12, then wrote most of Chapter 11 before planning/coding, then writing the sections about the worst-case-scenario spill.

27th May-2nd June I took a holiday, which was wonderful and also made me realise how good I felt having a brain break after returning to writing. For the rest of June, I did some other freelance work for a startup studio, plus continuing to work on Chapter 11 - sometimes jumping back and forward, and it was at the end of the month that I finally finished it. I also started weightlifting, which had a great positive impact on my shoulder and hip pain levels.

1st July I started an intensive push on this day to complete writing Chapter 12. This wasn’t always linear, as there were things that came up from playtesting and various other things I realised that meant I had to hop back and forth to change things. As a result of being able to get out of the house for a couple of nights and focus entirely on writing…

15th July I finished the first draft! I spent a bit of that week playtesting, but there was sickness going through my house which put a dent in my progress (and in the progress of my wife’s playtesting), so I worked pretty intensively through the next two weeks in order to…

26th July …send off the full draft!

27th July Along with some work the day before, I also got the cheats and hints finished.

Over a couple of weeks, I spent time on revisions based on my editor’s notes and my own thoughts. Throughout August I didn’t work the way I usually do, because of my son being on holiday, but…

14th August Beta playtesting began on 14th August. This is always nerve-wracking because I worry that no one will be interested in the game and not want to sign up… which is never true, and I didn’t have to worry. I had huge amounts of really thoughtful feedback come in which was incredibly useful.

I also had detailed feedback from Becky Slitt, one of the CoG editors, I did a full playtest myself plus some playtests of individual chapters (there was a lot to test in Chapters 11 and 12 in particular), and my wife did another one as well.

Over the course of beta testing, I added around 50,000 words to the game. Some of this was expanding things throughout the game, and most of it was expanding the epilogue sequence to include lots more detail about where the PC is living at the end, their career choices, who they’re living with if anyone, letters from friends and loved ones if they’re living in different places, and rundowns of what major characters are up to if the PC’s living in the same town/location as them but not living in the same house.

I don’t always include an “epilogue” sort of chapter, but in this case it felt right because so many of the PC’s choices have been about their career and their relationship to work, and I wanted to round things off in a way that felt complete while still leaving various things open to the imagination.

This was an intense month and a half triaging feedback, responding to it, and testing. I also started developing some of the ideas for a future game that I’d been thinking about on and off over the past few months of writing.

30th September On the 30th, I sent the full draft to Abby to go to copyedit. It was 592,000 words long and about 98,000 words playthrough - the longest and most ambitious game I’ve ever written. It’s very funny to me that I intended for this to be shorter than Royal Affairs, but actually it was far longer.

A lot of the length comes from chapters having multiple branched events in them. It’s obvious, really, but it surprised me that a chapter like Chapter 5 ended up so big. But it splits in half for the first part, then has a whole complicated section at the town hall, then splits again into thirds for the last part. Just the pre- or post-town-hall sections could have been whole chapters by themselves!

And then there’s the fact that the whole game has a lot of reactivity. I wanted the PC to feel they had a personality, so almost all the onscreen dialogue from the PC branches based on the personality traits the player’s developed for them - that adds a lot. And as for the intimate scenes… they ended up incredibly long and complicated. During beta testing, that was something I expanded for some of the scenes too.

2nd October I finished off the cheats and hints - I had a few changes to make to the achievement guides, plus some added achievements, as I’d changes how some of them triggered - and sent them off too.

I’m really proud of Honor Bound. I love that the characters, including the PC, have been through a lot of different, some difficult, experiences, and feel like fully-fledged adults with concerns about family, work, romance, and community. I really enjoyed writing reactivity around the PC’s injury and trauma responses, and how the NPCs react to it. And I’m proud of how the plot unfolds: I think it meshes with the PC and characters really well.

I’m so grateful for everyone who’s been excited about Honor Bound, who has given financial support while I’ve been writing, who’s given feedback, and who has engaged with it. It was a big change going from Royal Affairs to Honor Bound, and I was nervous that players might not want to come on the journey with me. So it gives me no end of joy to see people understanding what I’m doing with it, and picking up what I’m putting down.

The game released on 5th December 2024! It'll be a little while until I learn more details about how it's doing financially, but creatively it was a delight to write. It was the first CoG game I made where I was almost entirely working on it full-time, and I think it shows: I was able to write extraordinarily fast, which meant early parts of the game were much fresher in my mind and easier to revise.

It was also brilliant to be able to put things into practice that I'd learned from my earlier projects - CoG and non-CoG alike. I had a lot more clarity in general about what I was doing. And I'm really proud of it.