Hey guys! This week (like a few minutes ago 😮‍💨) I finished coding in the new Lifepath structure.

Short report because it's 2110 and I'm tired. This took longer than planned because I did a big fucking edit of a popular Lifepath scene from 1.6, starting Thursday and just finishing today.

It was kind of weird because I was expecting to just paste it in – everybody liked it in 1.6 – but when I went back to it, it just didn't fit well into the new writing style. But the ideas on how to fix it just exploded in my head and, while I never like to rely on inspiration, I think you have to surf it when you've got it.

So I fixed it up – and I think made it much realer and hotter. And I finished patching up the new structure, so the task I started two weeks ago (coding in 134 new passages to a new structure) is done, plus a little extra – it actually ended up being 229 passages (plus 331 other passages that were finished previously). The next episode is gonna be pretty big. 😬

Our illustrator lovely Victoria has been working on art and I still have plenty of editing and tweaking to do while she works. I'll get straight back on it tomorrow morning. 🦀❤️‍🔥

Hey guys!

Everybody around me keeps telling me I need to get some rest, so I took all of Saturday off – first time I've done that in months. Honestly I ended up just feeling sick and stressed and guilty about not working on the game. But I know it's not productive to never take rest days, so I forced myself to sit around doomscrolling and feeling bad.

I planned to work on Sunday but I just slept through most of the afternoon. Maybe I really am fucked up but I don't realise it. I'm going to try to force in some rest days over the next few weeks, and hopefully it will serve the game better. (I don't actually feel very refreshed from it but maybe it will work 🤷🏻‍♂️)

I've nearly finished coding in the new Lifepath structure and I've started pushing final artwork requirements out to our illustrator lovely Victoria, who has been waiting impatiently for these final specs. There are many new art requirements and we've set up a simple online project management page to keep track of all the assets required and their status. I added the first few specs today so she and I are now working concurrently on the release.

I wanted to say a heartfelt thank you to everybody who's supported Female Agent through this very long period of rebuilding and reïmagination. If it weren't for you guys, this would have taken even fucking longer. I appreciate you so much. FA is for you. 🦀❤️‍🔥

Hey guys!  This week I did something that wasn’t actually planned, but ended up fixing something really important (that I didn’t know needed fixing).

It started when I wrote the cheerleader scene (which is an optional Lifepath beat for US heroines).  Everything about it just felt weirdly right?

I realised I’d done something tonally with it that was a bit more positive, lighthearted and fun than I normally write?  It’s weird because I’m normally a pretty upbeat and positive guy!  But from my writing you might think me a total Eeyore.  Everything comes across as so grim and existential sometimes. 😭

This is fine if I’m writing a battle scene in a Syrian firebase, but it’s not exactly capturing the Hot Girl Summer vibe that will actually make the Lifepath hot and fun and authentic.  The cheerleader scene felt like the first time I’d bottled that feeling.  Youth, beauty, that kind of wistful nostalgia – and also exploring the game’s broader themes of agency, sexualisation, commodification of women and male/female power dynamics in a kind of different way from Bangkok.  (This was the big realisation, I was trying to “do Bangkok” but in Boston and it wasn’t really landing.)

Once I’d realised that, a lot of things clicked into place in my head – multiple gnawing problems with pacing and characterisation that I didn’t know exactly how to solve suddenly seemed like they had clear solutions.

With this in mind, I spent 1.5 days restructuring and reorganising the scenes.  A few beats got cut, a few got restored, and some scenes got moved around.

All the major beats in this improved structure have already been written.  Quite a lot of it needs editing, especially to sprinkle in the Hot Girl Summer vibe that I now realise was the missing ingredient in the previous drafts, but this can be done in parallel with artwork production.

Next steps
I’m currently building out the new passage structure in the game engine – this involves basically cutting and pasting from other parts of the source code (and resisting the urge to edit as I go 😬, but making notes about what to go back and edit).  There are 134 passages in the new structure and I’m currently working on building that up so it’s a playable framework in the game engine.  (I’ll get back onto this after publishing this report, I took a break from it to write this because this task is fucking tedious and I’ve been doing it all day 🫩).

I’ll aim to get this completed this week.  Once it’s done, our illustrator lovely Victoria is going to need to create a fucking lot of art based on the new structure and new scenes (and, crucially, new vibe to some of the scenes).  Lots of this can be adapted from existing assets, but many things are new.  Even just specifying all the new art required is going to take a day or so (it’s more complex than it probably seems when you consider different hairstyles, clothing states, undressing stages, etc), but I’ll get onto this once the framework is coded into the engine (since the specific number of story passages between certain beats can affect the art requirements, and plans in a flowchart don’t always exactly work when you make them in the engine).

Okay, break time is over, I gotta get back to copy & paste!  More detailed metrics should be available in the next report.  🦀❤️‍🔥

Hey guys! I finished two university scenes this week.

Writing's going well. I was trying to fix up a meh scene from 1.11, make it hotter and more interactive. I added more choices (including the choice to skip it, which I haven't previously had the confidence to do, but allows for better roleplaying and also I think makes it hotter if your heroine does decide to do it).

University's the last bit I'm gunning up. It needs a few more things – the heroine needs an optional boyfriend, and I want to squeeze in a cheerleader option for US heroines, and there's one more hot scene I want to bring back from 1.6.

I was taking a look at the new Bangkok plans and they're so exciting; I can't wait for the Lifepath to be done and out to you. It's nearly there; I'll get straight back on it tomorrow. 🦀❤️‍🔥

Hi guys, happy easter!  This week I finished multiple scenes and today moved onto the last section of the Lifepath that needs tweaking and sexing up – university.

We already had a template for this – version 1.11, playable here – but I view this version as a cautionary tale.  It’s too long, too detailed, too on-rails.

I created a much much faster version of university for the new Lifepath – but tester feedback unanimously assessed it as too quick, too perfunctory, not sexy enough.  (If you think that would be hard to hear about your lovemaking style, imagine being told it about your porn 😭)

I started work on it today and am making really fast progress with it, but have to stop early because of a stupid family obligation.  i don’t want to have a nice time with people who love me, i want to write Female Agent all the time for you guys 🥰

Okay that's seriously the whole report because I need to stop working and run out the door. I'll get straight back on it tomorrow. 🦀❤️‍🔥

Hey guys!  This week I cracked another really, really fucking difficult scene.

You are probably getting sick of me saying that I'm working hard, so here are some metrics.  Since last week's report, I wrote 12,897 words across 2,453 lines of new code.

This is like writing 15% of a novel in a week – actually a lot more if we counted rewrites, edits and failed drafts 🤪 Rest days: 0.  No peace for the wicked.

This was one of the most difficult scenes in the whole Lifepath, and when I loaded it on Tuesday morning I was fucking dreading working on it, really.  I knew there were big problems with:
– Hotness
– Lack of player options and input
– Characterisation and believability
– Long term characterisation of the heroine - sexy scenes don't work overall if they just undermine or diminish her in the long run

Hotness was the big issue, the problem I didn't know if I could solve.  But I knew I had to, so I just played through it again, drinking coffee and trying to understand the player experience.  I knew the scenario described was sexy, it just wasn't coming out on the screen.

I ended up having to do some really deep work into the psychology of it.  On the surface, the scene is about nudity – but nudity isn't sexy without a context.  Even sex isn’t.

Allow me to illustrate with a personal anecdote.  When I was young (like 18 or something), after a heavy night out my girlfriend was in my bed, and my best buddy had crashed out on the floor beside us.  She and I got frisky, we realised my buddy wasn't asleep but we didn't really care, and me and my buddy ended up double teaming the little slut 🥵 it was absurdly hot.

But the thing that made it hot wasn't the shit I used to write about, it wasn't the fucking or the thrusting or the orgasms or whatever.  It was partly all that, yeah, but it was mostly about what it meant – what she was willing to do, and why, and how she got there with like eye contact and little shrugs and the different way she started to move when she knew she wasn't just fucking, she was being watched fucking and she wanted to look good.

So this is where I went when I tried to fix this scene: really deep into character psychology, and a lot of complex issues around voyeurism, shame, social pressure, arousal, acceptance and I think some really old sexual fantasies about ownership and obligation and belonging and permission that echo today in kinks like BDSM and polyamory.

I'm really, really pleased with where it landed, and some of the lessons I learned are definitely going to improve future scenes in Bangkok (in the club).

I don't wanna oversell it – I'm sure that a lot of people are going to play the scene and not understand at all where all the effort went.  For them, they'll say this is wasted time and for them, they'll be right.  But I can only write for myself and hope some of you will like it, too.  By that metric, this has been a really, really, really fucking good week.

Okay, sorry for the essay, I'm just excited.  I already started work on the next problem scene today, I'll try to fix this one faster – not everything should take a week.  🦀❤️‍🔥