Thoughts on developing 50% of the game

As summer ends I think it's fair to give you all a bit of an insight into upcoming episodes and share a bit of our development process with you. This is a longer post but you might enjoy this insight.

First, the important thing to remember is that the main story arc has been completed a long time ago. We know how the main story ends and what the possible endings are. The stuff in between is slowly being filled out and getting there.

At this moment we have completely written episode 5 and will soon move on to writing episode 6.

Episode 5 marks the halfway point in the game and brings a lot of…but I’m getting ahead of myself :)

Let’s talk about episodes and length!

Episode 1 was always just a short introductory episode, it takes place on Thursday evening and in code terms has a size of 700 (this is just a number we’ll use to compare episodes, don’t worry about what it actually is). It has about 10 minutes of gameplay, perhaps a bit more if you replay it. But it was always meant to just give you a glimpse of the actual game.

Episode 2 takes place on Friday and introduces you to several different girls, already twisting your particular story branch in one direction or another. It has a size of 3300 – so almost 5 times that of Episode 1. It also introduced some animations, offers definite replayability to experience different scenes and has extra scenes (size 125) featuring Stefanie! Let me remind you that Episode 2 is currently free and if you wish to experience the extra scenes and girl voices in some scenes you can get the full version as a $10 patron.

Episode 3 brings Saturday and an opportunity to continue exploring your relationships with the girls. It is very similar in size to Episode 2, staying around 3300, but bringing with it extra scenes of size 500 – again featuring Stefanie! We’ve inserted much more animations and there’s also more voices which fit in better. As the story twists there’s quite a lot of play time now and you can always replay the game to explore everything.

Episode 4 is the one we’re working on now. The story is written and most of it has been coded already. The images always take most of our time because it’s hard, long work and requires great hardware to be done fast. As we are trying to turn most if not all of the special scenes into animations that also adds time but we think it’s worth it! The size of Episode 4 is 4500 making it the largest so far! It takes place on Sunday and, while of course giving you freedom of choice to do what you want and explore your relationship with all the girls, the primary focus will be Claire. Episode 4 will not feature any extra scenes however, as there’s quite a bit of other stuff we wanted to put in.

It is important to note that in Episode 4 you will make some very big decisions – not big in the sense you will recognize them immediately but big in the sense that you SHOULD save your game at the start of Episode 4 as you might end up in a dead end and there will also be a huge branching. So don’t say we haven’t warned you! ;) While there’s a lot of work to be done on Episode 4 it should be finished and released in this year. As always, we will post regular progress reports.

Episode 5, the halfway point, will take place on Monday. At this point there’s simply too much spoilers if we tell you what awaits in this episode but it is huge. Are you ready for this? It is 8200 in size making it larger than Episodes 3 and 4 together! Not only that but it features extra scenes of size 1800 which is basically half of a standard episode size – and extra scenes in Episode 5 aren’t just Stefanie but many different girls. All scenes of a special nature should be animations in Episode 5, at least that’s how we’re planning it.

Episodes 6-10 will take place on subsequent days and end on a Saturday. The exact details of those episodes will be revealed as we get closer to them.

You know that most of our time is spent on making images and at this point there’s nothing we can do about speeding that up. Perhaps we’ll be able to make some hardware upgrades in the future but for now Episode 5 will probably be released in spring 2020. We don’t want you to worry – we really enjoy creating Twisting Vines and plan to see it through but what keeps us going is you guys – our audience. So please leave comments, join our social communities and be as vocal as you can in giving your feedback – we enjoy it! Of course, your support on Patreon is also appreciated as it enables us to put more time into development.

This wraps up my development exposure on the first half of Twisting Vines. I hope you liked what you read!