Hey guys! For the past few weeks I’ve been working on the MOABS, the Mother Of All Beat Sheets. The aim is to fix the story and player experience problems in the Bangkok section – too repetitive, heroine too passive, story progression too slow.
I’ve been working on it solidly and I’m happy to report the MOABS is now complete. I’m incredibly excited about converting it into new game episodes! I guess the best way to explain it is that Female Agent was always supposed to be the game I wanted to play, and I can’t wait to play some of the new planned content.
Next steps I could have kept tweaking and improving the MOABS forever, but it’s now at the point where it needs fresh eyes and new brains.
Reading the MOABS is a lot like reading the fucking Necronomicon – you shouldn’t do it – but a few brave and trusted souls have volunteered to peer into its unfathomable depths.
It was never meant for the world of the living
My hope is that the MOABS can be changed from good to great with some fresh insights. While we’re working on the new Lifepath, I plan to be continually improving on the MOABS in the background, so when it launches it’s even tighter and better.
I made it using h̶u̶m̶a̶n̶ ̶b̶l̶o̶o̶d̶ a combination of the Mac OS Notes application and an offline calender in Thunderbird – it’s not especially accessible or readable in its raw form.
So I’ve been organising it into a readable PDF to make collaboration easier. I aim to finish it off and get it out to collaborators this week. (The pretty layout is a stock template in Apple Pages – I didn't waste time on the nice design.)
I know that a lot of people will really really want to see the MOABS (and honestly I’m so excited about it that I kind of want to show it off), but it’s filled with major spoilers, and I want to keep the circulation list very small in order to prevent it leaking out and ruining everybody’s game.
Okay, that’s it for the report, I’m gonna get back to work! Have an awesome day everybody. 🦀❤️🔥
Hi guys! Last week I finished a third draft of the design doc I’m working on, the Mother Of All Beat Sheets (MOABS).
This was always my fear too. But the results are just so exciting! Like I said last week, significant improvements are on the way. I’m psyched about getting them out to you ASAP.
By its nature, the MOABS is full of spoilers (including plot twists), so I’m trying to limit who has to see it (and end up having their game spoiled). But some selfless contributors have seen early versions.
With the third draft, the MOABS is roughly complete; we now have a (very) detailed outline of story beats to implement. The existing Bangkok structure has been kept – but we’re moving around some events, introducing a few new locations, and bringing forward the introduction of some important NPCs (and an organised crime subplot stolen fro...I mean inspired by Johnnie To, which the heroine will get sucked into). The overall aim is to pack out each episode with more variety and more for her to do (instead of being passively led through the story by NPCs). I think you’re gonna love it!
Next steps What’s left is some fine tuning. The structural changes have created some continuity and characterisation issues. (For example, Connor’s role in sexualising the heroine has now been spread out across a few different NPCs, which is a big improvement for the player – but that’s left his story role feeling a little inconsistent, so I want to work in a few extra story beats to handle that. Also the heroine’s friendship with the bargirls requires a little more bonding time than is currently planned in the MOABS, so I want to squeeze in some “friendship mini-quests” to make that feel believable. That kind of thing; technical story stuff.)
Workflow The MOABS has now become so big that it’s actually kind of hard to visualise. I’ve put together a calendar of story beats allowing me to easily move things around and visualise where the story beats we need can be inserted.
I took a break from it to write this report, but I’m itching to get back to it!
While I’m working on this, our illustrator lovely Victoria is working on a few avatar improvements that we’ll roll out as part of the reintroduced Lifepath. (More info on that will be released in a little bit.)
Okay, thanks for reading, guys, I’m gonna eat lunch and get back to work! 🦀❤️🔥
Hey guys! I’m working hard on the Mother Of All Beat Sheets. Last week I finished a second draft of the MOABS–covering hundreds of big and small story beats, strung out over a range of Bangkok episodes – and it’s significantly better than the first draft (which itself was significantly better than the planned continuation of the Bangkok story arc).
While I am very conscious that I don’t want to get stuck in a cycle of overplanning, the results of this exercise are just so exciting (and hot 🥵) that it’s obvious I need to continue prioritising it right now. If you liked the previous episodes of Female Agent, you’re going to love what’s coming next.
The main improvements I’m excited about are:
Hotter, more varied sex scenes 🥵
Faster story pace with more spy action
A less passive, more customisable heroine with more dialogue and decision points
It’s going great. I’m working on it every day with high energy (basically until my brain is out of gas 🫠). I’m going to continue working on the MOABS, adding to it and – critically – making it easier to read so that contributors can help to edit and improve it further.
Okay I’m gonna get back to it! Have a lovely day everybody and thank you so much for all the supportive messages and comments, your encouragement means the world to me. 🦀❤️🔥
“[It’s] what I call ‘The Valley Filled with Clouds’ technique. You’re at the edge of the valley, and there is a church steeple, and there is a tree, and there is a rocky outcrop, but the rest of it is mist. But you know that because they exist, there must be ways of getting from one to the other that you cannot see. And so you start the journey.” –Terry Pratchett
Female Agent has always been a valley filled with clouds: I’ve planned out the major plot points in advance, but not the exact paths between them. I always feel like I’m under pressure to produce content so, as soon as I’ve got a half-decent plan, I set off on writing the next episode.
It’s possible to over-plan I’ve always been wary of over-planning. Some planning is great, and I’d never want to start anything important with no plan – but, in my experience, over-planning wastes time and stifles creativity. I think it can encourage project paralysis, and even cowardice: it’s much easier and more comfortable to be planning (which, by definition, can’t fail) instead of actually delivering work (which can fail and humiliate you).
But it’s also possible to under-plan That said – I think some of the problems with slow delivery and not-hot-enough episodes can basically be traced to me getting lost in the valley filled with clouds. The problem is that it isfilled with fucking clouds and it takes me a while to find the right path.
Current project I’m currently trying to fix this by planning out all the remaining episodes in medium-level detail. The Mother of All Beat Sheets. I’d always thought this much planning would be a waste of time, but – now I’m doing it – it’s just obviously the right thing to do.
For example, yesterday and today, I was trying to fix an episode in the outline (set in the club) that just felt flat and slow. After some thought and stress, I realised I could hit the same story beat by bringing forward an episode planned for much later (set outside the club).
This fix took one day; it feels like the kind of problem that would have caused weeks of stress and significant rewrites if I’d encountered it on the ground in the valley filled with clouds. So I think that, if I prioritise finishing this process now, it will more than pay for itself in smoother and faster production of episodes in the future.
I can tell it’s intellectually demanding work because I’m frazzled at the end of each day. 😩 I’m going to take the evening off and get an early start tomorrow. Have a lovely Sunday evening guys! I’ll report progress next week. 🦀❤️
Some testers liked playing this episode. But I’m not happy with it. I’m releasing it as an unfinished beta, which means it’s in an unpolished state, and has some missing dialogue branches.
I basically think the Bangkok episodes are getting too long and linear. This isn’t the experience I want in Female Agent going forward – I don’t want to keep making episodes like this.
I want:
Shorter episodes
…with more choices, branches and dice rolls that customise your story
A tighter, faster moving main plot with constant story progression
Better use of montages and time skips (instead of playing out every single club shift)
More chances to characterise and customise your heroine
More cool spy action to balance out her demeaning undercover work
A focus on sex/nude scenes that are more exciting and novel
My plan to achieve this is:
Restore the Lifepath. This will enable you the player to customise your heroine’s stats, skills and sexual history before the mission.
Cut the flab from the existing Bangkok episodes, and add in some branches and decision points to make them more fun.
Very tightly plot out the rest of the Bangkok barmaid arc.
These last two things are what I’m working on right now. It’s complex and challenging work – I’m throwing myself at it for long days, and by the end I’m frazzled – but I’m really excited by it. I feel like the game will make a huge jump forward in quality and player experience in the next few releases.
Hey guys, I'm sorry for the lack of visibility recently. I’m working constantly on the game. I keep feeling like I’m one day away from having a clear and concise progress report, and I’ve kept pushing it back.
1.21 STATUS All the art for 1.21 is done* (and looking greta, as usual). I’ll release the episode before the end of the month.
LIFEPATH STATUS Based on the feedback here and on Discord, I’ve decided to go ahead and restore the Lifepath next. Here’s my plan for how it will work.
Release schedule The Lifepath will be released in four separate chunks:
Lifepath 1/4 will cover character creation and early backstory. The current version only supports UK characters; we’ll add support for the other four 5 Eyes nations, and also activate the character sheet, stats and skill systems (which are working in the code base, but not activated in the current game).
Lifepath 2/4 will cover the heroine’s backstory between age 18 and going to university/college. This section is where the heroine has her formative sexual experiences, and goes on a foreign adventure (either in Switzerland, Africa or Greece). This is complete in 1.11.
Lifepath 3/4 will cover the heroine’s university/college experience. We have a partly complete version of this in 1.11 – which I think was too detailed and on rails. We should base this more on the content from 1.6 (which is complete).
Lifepath 4/4 will cover the heroine’s recruitment and induction into her national intelligence agency. A complete version of this is in 1.6, and we can roll in the Christmas episode (Zero Kate Thirty, which is also complete) as an optional early career experience for especially badass heroines.
I want to make a few targeted changes (for example, I want to insert into an opportunity for the player to set the heroine’s preferences regarding anal sex, you could say I want to squeeze it in) but the structure is largely there to be drawn from instead of created from scratch.
After these 4 chunks are released, we’ll return to the Bangkok storyline. To make this part less boring to replay we will add in some extra branches, decision points, flavour text and dice rolls (so there’ll be something new to experience in each of the Bangkok episodes).
These will be small changes – don’t expect major rewrites or huge structural changes – but I feel like some episodes could be made twice as good with just a few extra choices and improvements. Also, some flab can be trimmed to make this part of the game progress a little faster.
GAME STATUS As prep for restoring the Lifepath, I replayed the game from the start.
That’s what’s caused this delay – as well as figuring out how to implement the Lifepath, I’ve been reflecting on the pace and direction of the next part of the story, and working out how to make it better.
Although I knew the correct thing to do was push this thinking back until after releasing 1.21 – I just wasn't able to ignore it.
The truth is that I feel that I’ve put a lot of flab in the Bangkok episodes, and haven't focused enough on pacing and player experience. The heroine doesn’t have enough choices or opportunities for characterisation; the bar scenes get repetitive and don’t progress quickly enough; there aren’t enough spy/action scenes to balance out the sexy scenes; the sexy scenes aren’t hot enough and are too railroaded. I'm just unhappy with the state of the game.
I’ve been working obsessively for the past couple of weeks on my plan to fix this going forward. (Like up at 0600, work ’til I drop kind of obsessive. It gets to the end of the day and I’m too fucking tired and blasted to write the amazing dev report I should be prioritising.) I’ve overhauled my plans for the remainder of the barmaid story arc, and identified areas in the existing episodes where we can quickly add some new choices and branches to make the game experience much more personalised and hot.
I’ve written more than 60 pages of notes so far. I’m currently weaving and editing this big block of content into a tighter, more fun structure that I think will turn the rest of the Bangkok arc into what I always wanted the game to be: an action-packed, sexy blast with a customisable waifu heroine.
I’m sorry I haven’t kept everyone updated while I've been working through these issues. Ultimately I can’t keep making the game if I don’t love it. I feel like what I’m doing now is absolutely crucial story planning and strategy, and I think everybody will like the result a lot. You guys, of course, will be the judge.
More info and episode 1.21 to follow shortly, I just wanted to post an update with the current status. 🦀❤️
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