Hello, folks. Do you know what really grinds my gears? Moving. There’s nothing worse than having to pack up and find somewhere new to live. With my contract coming to an end soon, I’m going to head back to the midwest. That means I have to find somewhere to live from 1000 miles away. It’s like throwing a dart at the board and hoping you’re going to hit the small spot with the good apartments. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to do that in a fantasy space setting. How did Natalie pack up and move from her backwater station to her position aboard the Nimross? We’ll find out in the next Rising Angels game! Maybe. Not at all. Let’s talk about some more realistic things in development.

Writing: This week was a great week for writing. I rarely get inspired and have time to write. They generally are mutually exclusive things. Time to do anything is a rarity and finding the time to put in the hours is sometimes incredibly difficult. It’s such a rare thing that I am taking off 45 days in late January into early March that will be devoted straight to writing. If I can’t get things done with that amount of time, I’ll be amazed. But my work-cation isn’t what I wanted to talk about. No, what I wanted to talk about is the 38,915 wordcount we managed to get this week. That’s right, things got done this week. Some of that was Order of Ataxia and RA: Hope, but the majority of it was our beloved Fates.

The ending has been troubling me. I didn’t like how it ended. There were so many open threads and it didn’t quite wrap up the way I wanted it. With everything that was going on around it, a clean simple “Bam! You win!” ending just didn’t fit the feel of the story. Natalie’s struggle has always been against the odds with enemies in the shadows. In Reborn, the enemy sat right out in front and was so obvious that you’d think he was almost acting like it… Fates has the enemy forces more… unknown. More ambiguous until the end. When it wraps up, I want you to know who you faced, why you faced them, and at what cost. That “AH-HAH!!!” moment was missing from the previous end. You did the thing and everyone ate cookies.

I’m not even sure what triggered the moment of inspiration. Maybe it was the copious amounts of confusion in my life, but I had a sudden epiphany in the madness. The Rising Angels series has always been about making personal choices in the chaos that is life. Good or bad, right or wrong, the choices that Natalie and Faye have had to make were always important things to their lives. That’s how I wanted Fates to end. What sort of victory matters to you. So I have the canon ending of Fates now. The die has been cast and perhaps will take Natalie on one more adventure. It ties in a lot of the less mentioned plot threads and draws the series one step closer towards the true foe of life.

CG: We’ve almost hit the point where the required CG for Fates are finished. It’s quite heartening to see the end of another key part of Fates. We are still planning on slipping more in there as time allows since writing is still in that sprint to catch up. A couple weeks ago we shared a cute one with dear adorable Faye recovering in a bed in the Nimross. This week, you get to see the completed version of it!

Rising Angels: Hope: After losing some hope (I need my puns) early in the year when things went wacky, Hope is rapidly making progress towards release. A couple CG illustrations have been completed and all the basic sketches have been done. There’s some fun going on in the old R&D about making a time management sim in there where you play Faye trying to keep everyone on course for passing, but it will probably come out after the remake is finished. Time to repel that feature creep! There are also some weird things going on with R&D as well. Something about a yaoi version with a genderbender… I don’t know. The head of IDHAS R&D is a madman who has odd whims when he gets to coding.

That’s all for this week. Still working the details for the writing job, so that should be posted on the studio site tomorrow. Until next time, Chief out!

Some various talks this week have led to this video o’ the post.