Best Frenemies Outro

Hi, and thank you for joining me for this public post.

I usually try and do this straight away, while it's fresh in people's minds, but, you know, life. Today I'm going to do the retrospective on Best Frenemies, Jessica's relationship quest, which was released just before Christmas. If you're just here for the latest news, there isn't much, the School Council is currently voting on the headline quest for 0.11 and we're expecting the final result a week tomorrow. Before you go, please do feel free to fill in the usual customer satisfaction survey at the end of this article and if you'd like to leave qualitative feedback, you are welcome to use the comments section.

A Match made in Hell

Going into this quest, I knew two things: It would be very important to get this quest right as Jessica is such an important and popular character and that it would need multiple endings as the range of relationships players want to have with Jessica is... wide.

Applying the lessons I learned between Bad Girls Bitch/Down with the Bad Girls and Avenging Angel, I delayed the decision until near the end so that everyone plays the same quest before experiencing the outcome they want. This did mean creating three different versions of the end scene, but there was some crossover.

How the quest played out went through a number of iterations before I arrived at a final version. I played with the idea of having a longer escape sequence from Slaver Base II, perhaps involving Missy having to attract the attention of the slaver boss so you could steal the key while she slept after having her way with you, but in the end, I wanted to keep the focus on the relationship between the two girls. I also abandoned an early idea to have the player temporarily take control of Jess as this would reveal the existence of the player to another character, and one who doesn't have her mind wiped afterwards.

That super-long scene which begins at the moment of capture and doesn't end until the beginning of the escape is most of the reason for the long development cycle, but as I discussed when explaining the creative decisions that led to Abbie's adventure in Fivaviana, there isn't really a lot of gameplay to be had from being a slave - particularly not one that spends the entire time chained up. So whereas in that instance, I opted to have the player do something else and keep checking in on our girl's torment, this time we stayed with her for the whole time but had no control. I think there's merits and penalties to each approach.

But why involve the illegal slavers and do that whole sequence at all? We already had the counselling sessions through which to explore the girl's growing relationship. Well... first of all, because it was hot. I mean come on. That scene was like 45 minutes of pure gas. This is reason enough on its own in a game like Missy where titillation is the whole point.

But there was another reason: it acted as by far the best relationship development out of anything I could think of. Putting the girls in this extreme and seemingly hopeless situation (and of course chemically removing their inhibitions,) meant that the relationship was forged in fire. Remember Lola's relationship arc where we had to get past her mothers first and it was that much better for it? Well this is that on speed. In the gloom of that dungeon, love blossomed. Unless you chose the rejection ending, I guess.

I am quite pleased with the way this quest came out - from an early idea to have the girls captured together to something which I feel did quite a good job of bringing their feelings for each other out into the open all while doing humour and sexiness. (I hope you liked the sequence where they're talking nonsense at each other as the drugs take hold as much as I do.)

But anyway, now's the time for you to have your say and tell me what you think! I'll probably do another one of these soon for Rise of Poppy as that too probably deserves some creative postmortem.

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Until next time!

Trinian