I had to deal with a nasty bout of insomnia over the weekend, so I sadly got a lot less done than I was hoping to get done, but I did get a good start on the Arrival portion of the strategy guide. I'm fairly happy with how the guide is turning out so far, but I want to reserve any judgment about how good it actually is until after someone else has had the chance to see it. I don't want the guide - a thing that's intended to walk someone who knows nothing about the game through everything from start to finish - to be another instance of "it makes sense to me but no one else." I think the level of detail will go a long way toward preventing that, but I also don't want to be going through multiple iterations of the guide after it's been published as people point out something didn't work for them after they didn't follow the instructions in the guide. Though I'm sure that will happen no matter how hard I try to avoid it.
The less comfy realization that I came to over the course of the work I've done so far is the amount of time this is going to take to complete. If you haven't played Arrival before, it's possible to get through it from start to finish in 15-20 minutes. On the high end, if you take your time and go through absolutely everything, it might take 45-60 minutes. Since I'm putting together a guide, I'm obviously going to be going through absolutely everything, so we can estimate that my actual play time is probably going to be pretty close to an hour. I'm right around two thirds of the way done with Arrival right now, and I've put a total of 10 hours into making the guide so far. The same level of scrutiny applied to a playthrough of the main game can put your total play time pretty close to - if not over - 100 hours.
To put this in terms of simple math, that means finishing the guide for the main game could take upwards of 1500 hours.
I desperately hope that isn't the case and I'll be able to speed up once I'm more used to putting the guide together, or something about the way I tracked my time so far is off, because I cannot spend an entire year making this thing. As much as I want the guide to contain enough to be worth the asking price, I'm also basically giving it away to anyone that supported development for Maids & Masters, and while I hope it doesn't happen, I'm kind of expecting pirates to leak it immediately and ruin any kind of potential return on the investment of my time and effort. Plus I genuinely want to get started on another game. These are just a few of the reasons I was hesitant to commit to making a guide before the poll was up and my Patrons decided for me.
In less gloomy news, the next chapter for DI is very nearly done. I won't talk too much about that here since it has its own Patreon page you can go visit for development news, but once that's done and ready to go into proofreading, that's a big chunk of my time (and available brain space) that'll be freed up to put into things like the strategy guide.
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