Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of Adult Ages,

My first monthly update on Scarlet Moon 2! Ooh, it feels all fresh and new and exciting.

Anyway, I’ve been working steadily on the second half of Episode 1. The episode kind of got away from me, and will likely end up a fair bit more elaborate than I expected. Don’t expect this to continue! The mechanics I’m using are proving to be a bit of a dream to work with, and writing these characters feels comfortable, familiar, and relatively easy. Also fun. I’m having a lot of fun.

Anyway, there are two main paths in the second half of the episode depending on whether Prometheus and Poseidon successfully stole the Big Ruby in the first half or not. I’ve finished the path where Prometheus and Poseidon successfully steal the Ruby. So now I need to work on the path where your team successfully kept them from doing so. I expect that path to be much shorter and less elaborate, but seeing as how in the first half you get an entire bridge sequence if you defeated Prometheus and Poseidon, I think it will roughly balance out. Also, players are more likely to fail anyway, so I think giving the failure path a bit more love is reasonable.

It’ll probably take at least a month to write up the rest of the content, plus I’ll need to do some debugging and editing and the like. So don’t expect anything before end of September at the earliest.

I’m also still wrestling with how I want to handle the romances. I think I know how I want to introduce and handle Midnight in a non-romantic context. But I don’t want to erase the romances from your character’s backstory either. Some of my favorite scenes from the first game are in Midnight’s romance, and I don’t really want to “lose” them. The question is whether I can work the romances in in a way that will minimize their burden.

David won’t be showing up again, regardless. He was conceived of back when I imagined the game being a bit more like Silver Age Spider-Man: a single heroine (plus her sister whispering in her ear), and the game spends as much time on her mundane life as it does on superheroics. However, that isn’t really what happened. The game ended up converging on more of a DC Justice League style with a team of heroes and a strong emphasis on the superheroics, with perhaps a scene or two of their mundane lives thrown in here and there. There really isn’t room for David in that kind of setup.

On the other hand, both Anklyana and Midnight are heavily involved in the superheroics. So it would be relatively easy to have them involved regardless of romance. It’s a lot easier to introduce slight variations on a scene depending on whether you’re romancing a character or not than it is to write entirely different paths based on it. I can also, relatively easily, have little transition scenes. Maybe PC and Natalie have their date interrupted by a bad guy if they’re dating, instead of being at home or whatever. The PC can be hurrying back home at the end of the episode because she has a date with Tania if she’s in a romance, and because she has homework that needs to get done otherwise.

So, yeah. I may have a little scene with Natalie in the second half where the player will have the opportunity to tell the game “I was romancing Natalie in the first game.” We will see.

AKA