another year another yeeaaeer

WOW three years.  It simultaneously feels like it hasn't been that long and like it's been much longer than that.

I've not been doing a whole lot of work on the final game I must admit!  Still!  It turns out having marginally better physical health than before has done nothing for my mental health.  Go figure.  But I've at least been doing more work on other projects in-between than I had been last year!  Just go check out the jam submissions section of my profile if you don't believe me.

... I don't have as much explaining myself to do this time.  Let's just get into the wordcount now.

"Chapter One" hasn't changed much since last year's post, the actual first night with Bev only going up to 658 since then, a whopping 39 words longer.  This takes that portion of the game up to 8,447 words.
Next, the rest, divided by route or in-between-by-yourself:

• Cherry:  1,860 (last year: 1,288)
• Elby:  3,089 (no change :( )
• Bevelyne:  4,250 (last year: 3,874)
• You:  1,698 (last year: 678)
• Secret:  213 (no change)

I'm continuing to have a lot of fun with Bev.  This takes us to 11,110 for everything beyond chapter one (what a fun number....), and 19,557 words in total- 2,007 than last year.  Slightly less impressive a jump than between last year and the year before, but it's still something :)

Don't let that dishearten you though, potential player, as I suspect I'll be a lot more motivated to work on this for the next while.  Not only have the smaller games I've been doing for jams been good practice, but I've also...

Gone ahead and dipped my toes back into all this, with Impression Of Something/Impress Upon Something.

That's right, a spinoff game that's not for April Fool's Day!  I thought about doing it for April Fool's, because the bit with those has been "sudden inexplicable hard pivot into a completely different concept," but I couldn't think of an actual punchline.  Those games do, importantly, have a punchline outside of putting the characters in a different situation.  This does still have a bit of humor to it, but there's not much room to squeeze in one big joke when the whole premise is just "dusting off the idea that got absorbed into a different idea to make it all work nicely".

It Quite A Bit Different!  I don't have much else to say on the matter (that I won't be saving for tomorrow's ko-fi post)!  Simply play it and enjoy or don't and give me $5 tomorrow if you want to listen to me prattle on about the how & why.  (I've been more consistently doing the monthly ko-fi posts, by the way, so there's never been a better time to get a membership.)

It's different, but it's familiar, at least enough so that working on it made me all the more excited to get back to work on the actual final product.  I hope you'll be excited too!

See you again next year!  I'll be aiming for having at least a guesstimate of how many more years this will take by then.  In the meantime, I want to hunker down and iron out a more precise structure (after resting for a bit- I gave myself much more time than I did for the considerably longer demo, but it was still tiresome work) to hopefully make things go smoother.  My folder of scripts is still kind of a mess lol