First of all some stats on Heileen 2 so far:

The game contains 3862 screens of dialogue.
These screens contain a total of 34649 words,
for an average of 9.0 words per screen.
The game contains 41 menus.

almost 35k words isn’t bad at all. Considerin I’m only doing “step3” of the dreams with the tarot cards, and have yet to introduce the final chapter where you’ll see which ending you’ll pick (there are other endings that can happen before it too). My estimate is that the final game will be around 50k words. The first one was around 40k, but this one has much more variety, and more than 3 endings!

To explain better I made this flowchart in case anyone is interested.

In practice this repeats for each dream: first you make inside the dream the choice that can lead to a Virtue or Sin result. Usually the cards have powers which can influence the real world (I don’t want to give out too much detail), so for each result you’ll also to pick between 2 choices (sometimes even 3). Those latest choices will influence your relationship with the other characters in the game (mainly Ebele and Robert for most part of the game except in the ending).

As you can see the possible combinations are really a lot! 😀

In last period, also because of really poor sales (a global slump though, so probably related to poor economy, recession, schools starting again, etc) I started looking to other possibilities for an indie dev like me, for example other platforms (iphone/XNA) or other game types (browser based, MMO, online games). However all those new things would require a big investment of my time. I started with iphone/XNA but after a few weeks of programming I was completely burned out, and still far from seeing any results. If I compare this to programming normally on Pc/Mac with or without python there’s a big gap. So for now, I’ll focus only on developing more classic downloadable games for those open platform, hoping that people will support my efforts a bit more 🙂