This week is the turn of another main character, Kira (the middle sister):

Kira is the middle child and often feels the pressure of such a position. During her younger days, she always found herself trapped between Joanne and Thalia when they were fighting. She sympathised with her older sibling’s desire to help them all grow up but she also found herself agreeing with her younger sister that Joanne was not their mother and had no right to act that way. In the end, she usually ended up siding with Thalia but occasionally she would agree with Joanne when their youngest sibling just went too far with her teasing.

When she was old enough to leave home, she moved to a town a few miles away from Triberg to work as a guard. She enjoyed the life very much. There was a comradery amongst the guards that she had not experienced before and it made her happy to live amongst such a large group in their barracks. Unfortunately, many of her fellow guards were into drinking heavily and Kira got into that habit too. While she is not an alcoholic, Kira finds it hard to stop once she starts. This has led to her getting entangled in several illicit liaisons with her fellow soldiers. On occasion, this led to brief but disastrous relationships, most of the time it just led to a very awkward morning and a splitting headache.

Perhaps her greatest weakness is a lack of belief in herself. Kira is rather convinced that she is stupid and that her love of alcohol just confirms it. Despite that, Kira really is not stupid but simply lacks the confidence to use what she was given. She often solved unusual cases when working as a guard but she fails to see it was because of her intellect that she did so.

As a rule, Kira finds being direct is the best course of action and his little foibles when it comes to using whatever comes to hand to succeed. She will use her strength and even her love of low-cut shirts to get what she wants. She finds it very easy to make friends although some do find her a little taciturn at times. Most of all, she badly misses the structure and feeling of community being a town guard gave her. Her sense of duty keeps her from abandoning her family’s attempts to free their mother even when it feels hopeless, however. In order to get that back, she is determined to succeed and woe betide any who gets between her and her chance to return to the life she loves.

Scripting games

PSCD intro scene it’s the only one I had actually coded so far…

I was so enthusiast last week about the good news that I actually forgot a very small detail… beside writing the stories and coding the gameplay, the games needs also to be scripted!! 🙂

What I mean by scripting? You know, every time in the game you see a new background, a character shows up, then moves on screen, changes expression, and goes away, every time a music plays or a sound effect is heard… behind it there’s scripting. All the writers I work with are quite familiar with Ren’Py so they know already how to place menu and use variables. But still, after the game has been written, and the logic/choices works, someone needs to add all those things listed above, the game scripting.

It’s really not a hard task: but it’s LONG! because you need to type all the commands and then test them to make sure you didn’t show a character flipped vertically hanging out from the roof 😀 (something that actually happened to me in some games in the past!).

So I’ve hired some people to do it for me to speed things up, this way I can focus on the game design and coding (what I can do better). In Queen Of Thieves case, the writer herself wants to script it, but it won’t delay much since all the main scenes have been written already.

In the end in last week I might have been a bit too much optimist about the times, since for example PSCD is over 200k words long, and scripting everything would probably take a month alone. Anyway, as always I’ll keep you updated on the progress!

Speaking of PSCD, in case you haven’t read it already in the forums, the generous Miakoda (the writer) offered to write more romances for the planned DLC so that there’s an even amount for all genres/combos! In practice, the DLC will have as much romances as the base game. Because of that will take longer to finish, but at least everyone will be happy.

Here’s the updated chart then:

I’ve seen some preliminary sketches for the new DLC romances and I can assure you that they WILL be worth it. Probably the best DLC I’ve done for all my games. I’ll also try to add some more gameplay/cards with it, but it’s too early now to decide.