ShoH Update (October #2)

Hi everybody, I hope your October is going well! Hopefully it's starting to get "fall-y" where you guys are--here in the desert, it's still 100+ F degrees every day, so it feels less like spooky autumn and more just like... hell. 😅 We'll get there, though!

Some things about ShoH this week! (I'm rather liking the bulleted list-style posts, aren't you?)

• I've made a ton of progress on Chapter 5 and hope to "finish" it by the time I update the alpha this month. So hopefully by the next time I post about it, we'll be heading into Chapter 6! (I say "finish" because the coding for these battles is a gigantic pain in the ass, taking up several days of just coding, so I'm leaving one path dangling with a placeholder, the same way I did with Chapter 4 and Mekduk.) 
• I'm very happy with my work on this chapter and am excited to start thinking about Lavi, or possibly going back to tidying up Halek's chapter. Briony has been a treat to write with, not least because she's a little more of a ditz than I was expecting, which always makes me laugh!
• Thinking about the timeline of the game has struck me with the uneasy revelation that I miiiiight have to add an extra chapter of the story (aka an extra mission...) for the pacing of certain things to work out. (For example, say Blade's side story has to take place over 10 "days off" sequentially. First you talk to him on the first day off about how he came to work for the Autarch, then you get to know him better on the second day off, then on the third day off, XYZ happens...) And some people (especially the ones who come later in the story) might need an extra day off to resolve things and certain storylines they have... but I also can't just stick two day offs in the same chapter, so... maybe an extra chapter is needed?
• So yeah, I'm going to plot out everything in a table/graph (I hate doing that because I'm awful with Excel and making things look AestheticTM, which actually affects my work ethic!) and see, but we may possibly have to elongate the game by an extra mission! Most likely the vampire mission I've mentioned I cut out before. I'm sure this will make some people who aren't ready to leave the world of Blest happy, but if it happens, it may (will) also add a month or two to development time! So we'll see!
• I was struck with a bolt of inspiration recently and have finally uncovered the next ChoiceScript game I'll be working on after ShoH and its DLC are completed. I've resolved not to work on it a stitch until after the main story for ShoH is complete, though, so as not to divide my attentions! But once that's done, I'll be eager to talk about it here and drop the demo here early. :) Don't ask me about it, or I'll want to work on it already! All I'll say is that it's not related to the world of ShoH or its characters in any way, but features a cast of characters I'm also very excited about! And, of course, I'm not discounting the possibility of a future ShoH-related game in the future, either! 

That's all for this week: stay spooky, and stay tuned for more exciting developments!