Hey guys!  I finished three writing scenes this week, we’re moving into the final stretch.  It’s nearly ready!

(The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that one of the three scenes is a different one from the three that were planned.  This is because the writing can’t always get done in a sequential order, like you’d expect – sometimes you need to jump forwards or back to work on a different part.)

Writing transparency

There's a common piece of feedback, which I agree with: sex in Female Agent is hot right up until the sex scene.  The build up is (humbly) great, the sex scenes themselves are kind of meh.

I’ve tried lots of things in the past to fix it – branching, mechanics, dice rolls, etc.  An early version of Female Agent even included a working Sex Engine, which totally randomised every sexual encounter, (and made them all really boring).  “{NPC_name} puts his {male_body_part} into your {female_body_part}!  You {feminine_enjoyment_noise} in pleasure.”  Computer generated slop, before AI was even invented!

I tried something totally new this week, which I started two weeks ago by jumping back into an earlier scene and tweaking tone and character motivation, and executed in the last 7 days. It was really fast work for me – parts of scenes that would normally take a lot of blood, sweat and tears just kind of flowed out fast. Felt like I wasn't grinding at it for once, which I hope is a good sign.

I’m not gonna say it's perfect (not by a long shot), but I’m happy with it and I think might be the first hot sex scene in the game.  Your feedback will really help – if this works (or nearly works and can be improved based on your feedback), then all the sex going forward can be pretty hot.


Next steps
Our illustrator lovely Victoria has been holding off from her last few tasks on this ep – she needed me to finalise these scenes before we could nail down the exact art briefs.  I’ll work on those first thing tomorrow then move back into the last three writing tasks.  But I’m hungry and frazzled now, so I’ll call it a day and get straight back to it in the morning.

Okay, that's it! How are you guys liking the new style of project management reports?  Are they an improvement?  Let me know here and on Discord. 🦀❤️‍🔥

Hey guys!  Thanks for all the get well messages, I’m back to normal!  I think we’re now two weeks (or so) away from the release.

This week I’ve been working on the last difficult bit of writing, which are three related scenes.  I’ve been working on them all at the same time, because there’s crossover in the emotional beats in each scene, and they’re all partly completed.  I aim to move all three into the “complete” column this week.

I’m really happy with how it’s going and I feel like I’m close to doing something we’ve never done in Female Agent, which is write a sex scene that is hot but doesn’t rely on any stunts (like someone else coming into the room or whatever).  You guys will be the judge.

Once these scenes are done, all that’s left is some minor editing, polish and bug fixes.  Alllmost there!

Thalion update
On Tuesday Thalion tricked me into what I thought was just a call to catch up, but was actually a part of the process called a sprint retrospective.

Having tried to implement my own half-assed versions of Scrum and Kanban in the past, I knew these were a thing, but dismissed them as a waste of time.  In fact – it was incredibly useful.  We spoke about what had gone well and the problems I had encountered, and Thalion was able to give me some great advice on the problem I had two weeks ago, when I needed to go “off plan” and do some tasks that weren’t on the Kanban board.

I didn’t really know how to deal with it at the time – I thought it was maybe a symptom of underplanning, and my intended solution was to take extra time to plan the shit out of the next episode so it didn’t happen again.  But Thalion gave me better advice: if it happens again, it’s fine, just create a new ticket and work on that.

He said that in the future – as I get more mastery of the basics – we’ll start moving towards more industry standard techniques (like weekly Kanbans, the addition of “story points”, etc).  When teams are using these methods weekly it’s normal for new tickets to be created every week, so I shouldn’t lose confidence in the process if I need to create a new ticket over multiple weeks of work, that’s normal.

This was really helpful advice, because I think not really knowing how to handle problems like this is the reason I drifted away from the Kanbans in the first place.  But they’ve been really helpful both to me and our illustrator lovely Victoria this past few weeks, so I intend to use them again for the next episode.  (And beyond.)  Danke schon Thalion.

Okay, I’m gonna go chill out and get back on it tomorrow morning.  🦀❤️‍🔥

Hey guys!  I hardly ever get sick, but I’ve had a stinking cold since Thursday and it’s been hard to concentrate and be creative.

I completed two writing tickets anyway, and these were the most difficult ones.

I’m still under the weather but today was the first day I wasn’t wrapped in a blanket and bingeing on paracetamol so I’m obviously on the mend, hoping to sleep it off tonight.  I’m gonna turn in early and get back on it tomorrow.  🤒❤️‍🔥

Hey guys!  This isn’t a normal project management report, because this week went a little weird.

I wasn’t sure how to explain it, so I’m going to hand over to the novelist Dean Koontz:

This is what happened to me this week.  I had a bunch of writing tasks to do, but it really felt like the heroine in my head told me no, that sucks, let’s do something else.  So I followed that instinct from my subconscious (I am crazy, but not crazy enough to believe she’s real and telling me what to do).

I made a bunch of tweaks and changes to various supporting scenes, adding some new content (which is really hot 🥵), UI and dialogue choices.  This is something I was planning to do last, but doing it now has made all the remaining writing tasks from the outline much, much easier, so I guess that’s why my subconscious was screaming at me to do it.

It was really, really exciting.  I don’t need inspiration to work, but when it comes: it feels amazing.

I’m done with the unplanned changes now, and will get back on the normal plan tomorrow.  🦀❤️‍🔥

Hey guys!  This week I have mainly been working on one big, complex task – adding new skin tones to the character creator.

This included exporting and coding 262 new art files into the game! 🤪 and fixing many glitches and problems, like layers not displaying properly or seams between body parts appearing in the game engine after export.  It was technical, detail-orientated and tedious work.  But it’s done!

Victoria really did an incredible job with the art assets in Illustrator.  Assembling them into the game has felt like working on a thing of beauty – I wanted to make sure they look as good as possible in the engine, whatever combination of bra size and skin colour and tanlines you pick for your heroine.  

She looks so much hotter with her clothes off now.  Even though this was a ton of work, it’s going to pay off in every nude scene.

There are now three skin tones working in the character creator (each with their own “bikini tan” and “topless tan” versions).  Changing them in the character creator gives you a lot more fine control over your heroine’s appearance.

Okay, this task sucked but it’s done!  I am gonna get an early night and get back to game dev first thing in the morning.  🦀❤️‍🔥

Hey guys!  This week our illustrator lovely Victoria created tons of new artwork for the episode!  It’s all looking really great, as always.

One of the things she finished were updates to the avatar hair and body, so this week I went to work coding the new hairstyles into the game.  There are now currently four natural colours available in the character creator:

She automatically ties her hair up at work:

And lets it down when appropriate:

In testing: it is surprisingly delightful seeing her hair change in different scenes; it makes a really big difference to her look.

Her hair can also get wet and mussed up (for morning after/walk of shame/just-been-fucked scenes), and you can manually switch between the different styles in certain places (e.g. you can make her curl or straighten her hair before a date, if you want).

As part of the mission prep at Faslane, the heroine can now dye her hair to alter her appearance and support her cover:

Check out the roots!  😮  Her natural hair colour automatically peeps through if she dyes it.


Actually putting it into the game was really boring and time consuming
I had to process, upload and test 168 separate graphic assets; create new UI code in the character creation menus; create new internal code to actually display the correct assets at the correct times; create new layering code to display all the hairs correctly, front and back; and fix lots of annoying bugs and visual glitches.

This took a few days, and was boring as fuck, but I did it anyway because I love you.  Tomorrow I’m going to get to work implementing the other half of this avatar upgrade: new skin tones.  The whole point is to make your heroine in the next episode and going forward much more personalised and yours.  🦀❤️‍🔥