It's been slow for me--I'm finding it hard to manage my time and I'm getting intimidated by the writing part. But as soon as I put even a single sentence down I know it'll start pouring out of me.
Coding
1/4 and 1/5 was tightening up the code further:
I have a couple sets of variables floating around that keep track of which heroine was chosen for which act, and how many acts total they were chosen for. This allows me to spruce up text involving these characters if the player is favoring one of them (or none of them!).
The "$heroine_scenes" variable is numeric, so I can check it with something like "(if: $heroine_scenes is 2)" and then have text that only displays if she's been in two of the three major scenes. The idea is if a specific heroine is with the villain for a growing number of scenes, they should be growing closer and progressing the romance arc, but if they've had one or even no scenes together there won't be as much of a "spark" yet. I didn't want to muck around with Affection Traits or anything--it's not that complicated of a story!
I also have the specific acts set up with "flags" so that the game will remember which acts they were in. If a heroine and the villain share a scene in act 1, I want them to be able to talk about it in act 3!
I puzzled out a way to have Twine remove story choices that had already been visited, using my very favorite rotating array of links trick! This uh, actually took a long time. I couldn't figure out why "$salutations.length is 0" wasn't working, until I realized 2.0 Harlowe has way more intuitive phrasing.
This is the entirety of the "1stletterchoice" passage that displays when someone clicks "Continue." All it does is check which heroine the player chose (it will be the 1st name in the array) and then redirects them to the appropriate passage! Each of these passages begins with a "(set: $salutations to it - (a: "Heroine's name"))" so it removes itself from the available choices. If there's only one choice left in the array, it appears as unchangable text, and if there's no choices left at all, a link appears to progress to the next part of the story. I'm using this for parts that require a "visit every location/character/idea" before the player moves to the next part.
I'm toying with the idea of having the story keep track of which heroine/event you visit first (it's really easy to have Twine check which passages have been visited already) and changing the text based on that, but it feels like gravy. I really gotta get started on the writing!
Writing
I'm tightening up aspects of the setting. I want to make sure I don't end up spending more than half of the game on exposition, so I started working on one of my favorite writing exercises borrowed from Seventh Sanctum forever ago. I'll have few if ANY visual assets for this, so it's especially important that I describe my setting with care.
Today I put Actual Real Words in my game. The first sentence is always the hardest, and I'll probably delete it anyway, but it's still a big deal D: