vrengames

"I'll just add a little scene"

Added 2019-10-07 09:47:39 +0000 UTC

I've spent the past week focused on bug hunting to get ready for the release of v0.21.1, which will be out in about 24 hours. Three nights ago, after chasing up on all the bugs that were reported I said to myself "I've got some spare time, I should add a little extra content. Just a small scene.". I took a quick look at my ideas list for new events and decided that a new at-work crisis was just the thing. The setting for this random event was simple: you're at work and get horny, so you need to deal with that in some way or your productivity suffers. I figured it would be two hours of writing dialogue branches, maybe an hour to get all the function calls set up properly, and then a couple minutes of testing.

Since that was three days ago, you can get where this is going. It ended up being a story writing hydra. Each branch I wrote threw up other possible variations that I thought were important and interesting enough that I wanted to take care of them. The end result is 450 lines long and contains 34000 characters (at an average word length of 5 letters, 6800 words). Not all of that is dialogue, but it gives a rough idea of the breadth of the event.

I'm actually quite happy with how it turned out in the end, and I think it's given me a good case study for how to write interesting events in the future. I noticed I have a habit of simplifying events my first time writing them and telling myself "this is temporary, I'll come back and do it better". Then I get busy with other stuff and never do. For this event whenever I saw the opportunity to expand it or catch an interesting edge case I wrote it right away. The end result is an event that I don't feel like I need to revisit in the future - it's already good.