#pb progress update

Hi all,

How have you been? With my travels concluded as of this weekend, it's time for my latest fortnightly update - this one also includes notice that a minor update has been pushed today to the Demo.

Progress Update

With my travels done, a few weeks having now passed since the Chapter 3 drop, and the update I pushed today having gotten the demo in good enough shape for now, I'm planning to begin work proper on Chapter 4 in the coming days.

As I mentioned in my last update, this is expected to be a slightly shorter chapter that covers off what I consider the culmination of the Pactbinder's first term at Hightower and what I consider 'part 1' of the story.

I'm trying to work towards a release some time in July, which I think I'll be able to honour if I keep to my usual pace, but that may drift a bit depending on how busy work is and whether the chapter ends up longer than I'm planning - there's some stuff in there that I'll have to work hard on, including some romance stuff for each core RO, so who knows where I'll end up! As always, I'll keep you in the loop.

Demo Mini-Update

As mentioned - I rolled out a small update today, mostly focused on C3 cleanup but with changes throughout the whole demo. I don't think that the changes are substantial enough to warrant another playthrough for people who've already run through C3, but they should improve the experience on future readthroughs.

I've cleaned up a number of word repetitions and a few phrasing points throughout the story - hopefully this subtly helps the prose to feel even more polished - anyone who's doing a replay in coming days, let me know if the changes are noticeable / a net positive…

I've also fixed a couple of minor demo bugs and added a couple of dialogue options, mostly in line with suggestions / requests from people who noticed choices where they didn't have an option that suited their Pactbinder well.

And several more tweaks and adjustments in the above vein!

Hi guys,

Hope that you’re well! Time for the latest fortnightly Chapter 4 progress update.

Very pleased to say that my pace has picked back up significantly over the last fortnight; Chapter 4 is now at 65.7k words, which means that despite my mid-June slowdown, I’ve returned to my usual target 10k/week target for the last two weeks - if not surpassed it, as the weekend isn’t over yet!

In terms of chapter progress - I’m closer to the end than the beginning. I’m in the middle of one big set of branches (romance scenes!), then after that I will be moving into the chapter’s home stretch (though said home stretch is a big chunk of content, so may still be a bit of work to go).

Ironically, I actually thought that 65-70k was going to be my wordcount for the entire chapter, so the fact that I’ve already reached that threshold means that once again I’ve gone past my chapter length estimates…

In terms of timings - rather than think about wordcount, I’m going to challenge myself to finish my first draft of the chapter by the time I report back to you in another fortnight, so I can move on to editing in the latter half of the month.

As such, I might actually meet my late-July target release after all (though it will be tight) - and even if I do slip into August, at this point I’m fairly confident that it will be early August.

A couple of fun milestones to point out - my copy of the game is now about ~357k words long - it’s cool to have gotten past the 350k word count (though I can’t help but laugh at my initial word count estimate - funny to think that I thought this thing would be 500k to 600k words all-in…!).

Hi guys,

Hope that you’re well! Time for the latest fortnightly Chapter 4 progress update. Though due to personal reasons this hasn’t been my best couple of weeks of writing.

Work and personal life (I bought a house!) have been extremely busy, which has left me with very little mental energy to write at decent quality. I elected to slow down rather than write a lot of stuff I’d end up rewriting, which has had the side effect of making me really quite desperate to get back to writing a lot.

I’ve managed to write a few thousand words since the last update even so - most of the ‘connective tissue’ between the exam season and winter break is done, but I got myself badly stuck on a scene for a week, which was really annoying.

I’ve tried to use the downtime productively, though - I’ve designed most of the chapter’s finale, which should make that smoother sailing once I get there.

In terms of timing - I’m still aiming to get something out by end of July if I can, but I think realistically that’s looking likely to slip into early August. I’ll keep you updated if that changes, of course…

Hi guys,

Hope that you’re well! Time for the second fortnightly Chapter 4 progress update, though again a pretty brief one.

I’m a month into writing Chapter 4, and continue to be on schedule in terms of progress through the chapter and meeting my usual soft target of 10k words per week; I just hit 40k words on the chapter today. That includes the completion of a new batch of free roam options, plus the entire Winter Exams segment that follows it - I just wrapped up the magical practical exams this morning.

There’s still plenty to go on the chapter itself, but I’m relatively pleased with my progress through it so far. Especially since life has been extremely busy outside of writing!

Assuming that my assumption that this is on track to be a reasonably short (albeit mechanically complex) chapter holds true, I still feel good about my chances of finishing a draft by mid July, then releasing later in the month after the usual editing round.

Hi all,

Hope that you’re well! Time for the first proper fortnightly Chapter 4 progress update, though it’s a pretty brief one - all good news, though!

I’m two weeks into writing Chapter 4, and I’m pretty much dead on schedule in terms of progress through the chapter and my usual soft target of 10k words per week; I’ll be on 20k words by the end of today; that includes the opening to C4 and a lot of work on the new free roam options that are unlocked in the chapter.

That's a big relief - I was worried I'd struggle to shake off the rust after my travelling break - and it means my working draft has sailed right past the 300k mark just as we hit the 5 month anniversary of the demo drop, which is very odd to think about.

Once free roam concludes (I still have a couple of Antioch conversation scenes left to write, plus a couple of early-game ruin ‘explorations’), it will be on with the show in terms of progressing the actual Chapter content.

I’m still expecting this to be a relatively short chapter overall (not tiny, but shorter than C2 and C3) - though, again, I’ve been proven wrong before. Assuming I’m roughly right, though, I think I’m still on track for my previous estimate of getting C4 out some time in July…

Hi all. Slightly early progress update as I may be tied up this weekend. Bit of a weird update as things over the last two weeks didn't quite go as expected; C3 timelines have been impacted.

Last time we caught up, about ten days ago, I'd just hit 68.5k words and was on track to have a draft of the chapter to be done by month end April, so I could spend two weeks editing and have it out for you in mid-May.

Somewhat bafflingly, I appear to have written about 51.5k words in the last ten days. So, err, the chapter is now finished, and is 120k words long. So I have been made a liar in several ways - I said C3 would be shorter than C2, which hasn't proved to be the case, and my target date of mid-May may also have been a bit off...

I suspect Chapter 3 will be out mid to late April accordingly, depending on how editing goes. Last time editing took me about a week, but this chapter has a quite a bit of branching, so I'm assuming it will be trickier this time.

Just to set expectations - I'll share some word count analysis when the chapter officially drops, but I'm not expecting this chapter to feel like the game has almost doubled in size on a single playthrough despite the word count - between the player's Society picks, the free roaming section (where you can choose how the Pactbinder spends their free time) and a big branching section near the end, there's a lot of content you won't see in a single playthrough...

Hi all,

Fortnightly update post (and happy Valentine's Day to you all!). I can't decide whether it feels like a long or a short time since my last fortnightly update—I think it feels like Chapter 2 has been out much longer than the ~ 10 days or so it has actually been released for...

I intentionally paused writing on Pactbinder after launching Chapter 2, so I could focus on any bug fixes or tweaks that people pointed out (plus also just to take a break, writing 168k words or so over the course of 3 months was not easy). I've also spent time thinking ahead to the structure of 'Act 2', though I won't elaborate on that for now!

As such, whilst I have started Chapter 3, I've only written a couple of thousand words of it so far. As of today, however, I'm returning to writing-focus mode.

Chapter 3 will be mainly focused on the Pactbinder's first term at Hightower, so will primarily consist of classes, the Pactbinder's choice of Society and the first magic choice lock-in. Oh, and Halloween. My gut feeling is that it will be longer than Chapter 1 (about 56k words) but possibly shorter than Chapter 2 (which was about 97k words). Either way, it'll get us past 200k total.

I'm hesitant to commit to a hard timeline just yet - as predicted, work has gotten a lot busier since the start of February. I'm going to keep aiming for my usual 10k words a week target but I suspect I'll be missing that target more often and overshooting it less often!

As such, tentatively I want to say that Chapter 3 will be out by mid-May. If I can get it out earlier, I will - as always, I'll keep you guys updated and I suspect this deadline is going to shift a bit more than the Chapter 2 one did. I'm just not sure if that means earlier or later yet!

Hi all. Last progress update for the month below!

Still busy - I'm finding that in these times my progress is really difficult to track per day, but somehow still averages out nicely over longer periods of time - I'm writing a great deal in short bursts, then going plenty of days without being able to write anything.

Progress is decent and I'm still exceeding my 10k/week target wordcount, though; since the middle of the month, Chapter 3’s word count has increased from ~45k to ~68.5k as of today. That's pretty cool and means that I'm probably going to hit 50k words written in March total! Only a few hundred words off...

In terms of story progress, I've just finished my draft of the first 'Free Roaming' section where the Pactbinder gets to decide how they spend their free time outside of classes and Societies. Stat training, personal research, that sort of thing. And a couple of optional conversations with two of the Pactbinder's collegemates; I'm taking inspiration from Dragon Age' 's camp for these. I've had to learn a bit about ChoiceScript design to get this all structured - dreading the testing!

Though there's still plenty of work to do (two more class scenes, Halloween and something else) in terms of remaining scenes, it does feel like the path to the chapter's conclusion is in sight now. After so much branching from the Societies and Free Roam, I'm really looking forward to moving on with the core plot...

Still feeling good about the mid-May release date estimate for chapter 3. I’ll let you guys know if that changes; right now my gut feeling is that I'm going to make it with a couple of weeks to spare in terms of writing, but this might be a hard chapter to test and edit because of the Free Roaming section.

As always - feedback and thoughts on the demo are really appreciated.