Valentine's in the Bring Out Your Ghosts Jam

I started Valentine's sometime in 2015, after I made Thanksgiving. This game would take place four years after Thanksgiving, with the same protagonist.

I liked the idea of the PC having hit a bad spot in their life and using their con-artist skills much more explicitly and regularly. They'd need to settle on a persona and decide which strategies to use that fit it best, in order to orchestrate a gorgeously romantic Valentine's Day blind date for an unsuspecting guy they intend to fleece at some point in the future.

It didn't end up going further than this for a few reasons:

• I started selling IF to sub-Q Magazine and began prioritising work that I could publish there; I then started working with Choice of Games and spent most of my writing time working on Blood Money, my first project with them

• The scope was a lot higher than I thought it would be when I started, and I was less good at assessing scope than I am now. Thanksgiving is 15,431 words and 215 passages; this, only a small amount in, was already 3,226 words and 54 passages. Having three separate personae would end up with three different routes - it made the size balloon while also making it more challenging to plan out. 

• This is the biggest reason: it's bleak. I tried a couple of different configurations - this one where Landon was a blind date whom the PC is seducing, and one where Landon and the PC were already together and the PC was trying to get engaged to him. The latter, I abandoned quickly because it was just too bleak; even with this one, the PC is in a horrible place mentally and the game is ultimately about performing a romantic finance scam on someone wealthy but undeserving, and I couldn't quite face making an entire game with the PC in that state of mind. I liked the idea of subverting the dating sim convention where PCs mould themselves to fit an NPC in order to get something they want out of them, but in practice, set in the real world, with an absolutely miserable PC? That was a bit much for me.

I've returned to it every so often over the years, but the combination of the bleakness and the fact that I didn't have the time/expertise to make it look beautiful (not that it was ever going to be that beautiful; the drab colour scheme would always be like that!), plus the amount needed to finish it, meant that it didn't end up going anywhere.

That said, I do have another, much more finished and much less bleak, entry in the Cute Guys series (where Casey/Taylor is aged 29) sitting around on my computer. Maybe one day I'll put it up! It's complete enough that I don't quite want to submit it to the jam...