Hello, folks. It’s Chief or Hobson the Monk at the moment, since this is being written while I play D&D, here to bring you the weekly Fates report. It’s the holiday season and it is only me manning the studio. Even I’m going to be heading home back to Virginia soon. I don’t take time off very often, but I managed to snag some to see my family. But before that, let’s do our quick weekly update. Like I mentioned before, this week and next week are going to be sparse.

Demo: Delays on the backgrounds are slowing this down. I apologize and ask you to bear with us for a little longer.

Special writing event: I know many of you might be curious how the Kika route writing event went. Work hit me harder than I expected, but I was able to do some pretty decent writing sessions. The final workcount is 20,086 for the Kika marathon. I’d say I’m about a third of the way through her route specific events. It might be a bit less since I am entering the big events for Kika’s route in the third act. The first act (Celestia) and the second act (Tropolain, the elven ranger planet) are relatively calm for her, focusing more on strengthening your bond with Kika and showing some of the softer sides of the princess. Act three… To put it blunt, there is a decent chance that Kika’s actions are going to hurt you and she might not make it out alive…

I’m going to try another writing marathon over the holidays from the 24th to the 4th. I really wish I could do some sort of streaming to possibly make things more interesting than textual updates. If you have an idea, please let me know.

Since many, if not most, of those who are reading this are fans of visual novels, you are the best people to ask this question. Most romances in visual novels are dependent upon choices. If you want to be in a relation with a specific character, you are almost forced to choose certain actions to keep on the character’s route. I remember wonder a few times why Muv Luv even bothered giving me options once I decided which character I wanted to go with. So, here is my question…

As the player, would you rather just choose the character’s route at the start and then have all options be plot related or do you like the current visual novel setups where your options are intertwine between the romance and story? Ex: Telling Kika that you think she’s right because the investigation lends itself to that instead of saying it because Kika said it and you want Kika’s route. It was just something bothering me as I looked at how I wanted to layout certain scenes.

I hope you all enjoy your holidays! Until next week, Chief out.