Familiar February

Hey Boo,
I've always thought of myself as a lazy transcendentalist. Like, the spiritual has always felt familiar. It's always felt like I've always been meditating. I've always felt connected to my inner life and thoughts.

It's possible that it's over exposure. I'm familiar with meditation through pop culture made by people who DO meditate and believe in inner truths that are deeper than ourselves and connected to the universe.

It could be great marketing. People want familiar things. It's Die Hard but the building is on fire and your sister lost her clothes. You were already meditating, let these teachings show you how to take full advantage.

But that can't be right. There must be more to it. More that I don't understand, don't do right, and don't grasp. But it feels familiar, so I use that as an excuse to not investigate further. Thus lazy.

I was given David Lynch's book Catching the Big Fish. It can't be worse than when I based a whole game off an Allen Watt's speech.

Progress
I've been building sets and picking outfits again. It's nice when an asset like my location exists already and I can just tweak it to make it my own. Like THE convenience store or THE park with a running path and tunnel. It makes sense to have some things the same from game to game. Places in games don't need to be just like the real things but they do need to feel like the real thing. If something is supposed to feel real but it's unfamiliar then it is uncanny and uncanny is distracting, and people reach for the reason behind the feeling. 

Then, the people are usually wrong.

Writing
This is the big progress. I'm staying above my minimum writing goals but a part of me wishes I could work out a scene as fast as I summarized it in my outline. Writing harem, there is less branching and more skipped content. There's a path where everyone gets romanced so it doesn't make sense to choose between the girls.

So, I kind of write everything and let play testers and alpha readers pull me back when it's too much.

I also have to avoid the dispatch problem of having Invisagirl be more involved in the plot than Mandy. Some chapters will lack certain goals but my goal will be for the finished game to feel like none of the girls are side girls. It's already possible to reject Beatrice and that is going to effect the rest of the game and cause alternative scenes.

Why does the game start with alternative/exclusive scenes? It's easier and more likely that people replay the beginning while that's the only content or easiest to replay. There are lots of people that just replay the opening acts of Boulder's Gate 3 or Dragon Age Origins. Once they get a feel for the character they want, they take that save to the end of the game.

I'm also a little lazy. So, preferences that can be fixed with mods, I'll leave to mods.

Discord
Discord is going through all kinds of fuckery to make people scan IDs or mining their data until an AI can determine their age, despite several data breaches happening at various points of the company's history.

Nothing has been like discord for me as far as community building. So, I don't know what I'll do. I have cancelled nitro in protest and I encourage others to do the same. I've never forced people to join it and I can email people directly, if reminded. I've heard that steam chat has gotten really good but that's for a close group of fans and I'm not sure that can translate for my purposes.

Backer Rewards include Tulip, Meka, and Donna.