With build 0.5 complete, it’s time to look to the next phase of Lord of the Manor. I’ve been working towards this specific moment in the game for a long time (longer than I thought I would, certainly, but better late than never) and I’m very excited to sink my teeth into what comes next. Without spoiling the end of build 0.5, it’s enough to say that Flax’s expectations about his holiday have now been thoroughly upended. Things will be very different for him going forward—and not only from a personal perspective. The very world itself will switch to a different ruleset.

Until now, the game has been working to a daily chronology, with an approximate split of each into mornings and afternoons, and every day accounted for. It’s only been three and a half days, but still. However, from 0.6 onward, that will change to a weekly chronology. And not an endless one, either: there will be six weeks and then it’s over. So if it’s not day-based anymore, how’s that going to work? Well.

So far, you’ve been fairly explicit about deciding what to do. You don’t always know the outcome of a choice like “go left” instead of “go right”, but most option have been more up-front about what you’ll be doing. From here on, that pendulum swings back much more in favour of “fuck around and find out”. Although given the subject matter, perhaps “find out then fuck around” would be more apropos. The valley of Paardenrust is large, and there are many more locations and stories to find than have been shown or even just hinted at thus far—far more than you can possibly hope to see in a single playthrough. This information is subject to change as I iterate on implementation, but the general mechanic for the rest of the game is a sort of simplified version of the game director concept from the Left 4 Dead series. Because I am an extremely original writer, I call it the Porn Director.

At the start of every week, the game will prompt you to pick a “focus” for the week from a large set of choices (“large” being ten or more). The options that make up the choices will come from a variety of sources. Some might be as simple as “Spend time with Suri”, to indicate to the game that you wish to spend time with a specific character to pursue the associated route. Others will stem from possibilities opened up through suggestions from other characters; if one of them mentions a fun activity or location they’ve found in their own travels in the valley, that might crop up as something you could choose to explore. And yet others will be suggestions from the Porn Director, pulled from the pool of internal options that are applicable to you. These will be more vague; things like “Explore the southern veldt” or “Spend time in town”. What happens if you pick those? Well…it depends.

When you pick one of those options, the Director picks an appropriate option from the pool. Choosing “Explore the southern veldt” in Week 1 will not always put you in the same situation, but—as you become familiar with the valley and learn about who tends to hang out where—it does bias you to running into certain characters more than others. Though even the same character may have a few different stories they can involve you in. (You’ll always have the option to skip out on a given story in the very beginning if you decide you’re not interested). Many of these stories are going to be one-offs that play out during the allocated week and wrap up. Some may make permanent changes to the world that will be acknowledged by any content that happens after. Some will be multi-chaptered, kind of like mini-routes, with the game prioritising those in subsequent weeks. The length will vary; some might be an hour’s playtime, some might be far longer. The style will vary: some might be very character-interaction driven, some more introspective. Some, independent of their word count, might wrap up before the middle of a given week, in which case you might get the chance to choose another action for the same week. Imagine this view of Paardenrust as a sort of literary open world in which all the characters are going about their horny lives, and you get given a variety of ways to intersect their lives each week.

“That sounds like a lot of work,” you may be thinking. And it is—but, crucially, it’s a different sort of hard work. Classic routes (of which Lord of the Manor does have four or five) play out in a largely linear manner, with choices tending to accumulate as you go to determine a final state. They take a LOT of fucking work to provide for all branches in a satisfying manner. The Director stories I envision are either standalone experiences or less strictly linked together; you could play the opening of a chain and never know there are subsequent parts since it will never end on a cliff-hanger or whatever. Equally, you could spend week 1 doing a main route, then drop it for the next week before picking it up again in week 3. That’s not to say there won’t necessarily be no consequences to “ignoring” someone for an entire week, but those consequences will scale to the depth of perceived investment. If someone thought you just had a fun time one week, they’re not going to be mad at you if you didn’t find time to chat to them until a couple of weeks later. Everyone in Paardenrust has a job, and they know how to keep busy. Though, of course, they might seek out others to fill their need for company, so if there’s someone you especially like, maybe don’t ignore them for too long…

Back to the point. Writing a sub-10,000-word story with a fixed goal will always be simpler and faster than an ongoing route that has to account for cross-interactions and many more choices. It’s the sort of writing I cut my teeth on and have been doing for years and years. This means that I can write a lot of it. A lot. The Porn Director concept allows me to then tap into the best parts of both routes and stories, filling the world with experiences to enjoy when you want a distraction from the longer, more in-depth routes—or, if distractions is all you desire, you can brush off the main routes (indeed, even the main story) and just have a good time. You won’t always know what you’re gonna get, but it’s my job to make sure that all choices are entertaining. There are no “bad” options within the horny world of Paardenrust.

The unifying goal for these stories will be to have more self-contained entertainment delivered in a punchier timeframe than a full route, with a bias towards more intense or over-the-top stuff. The road to 0.5 has been about establishing all the characters of my large cast to a sufficient degree that you can have a solid idea of who they are; from here on out, I can leverage that work to start combining characters and locations to do fun stuff without necessarily worrying about long-term choice and game impact. The routes, then, will be the more grounded and more “invested” options: the well-baked layers of the cake. The stories will be the icing that goes under, around and on top of them, adding flavour, pizazz and flair. I have years’ worth of story ideas that I never got around to writing, and this is the perfect way to bring a lot of them into existence. I also have years of stories I did write, which might be able to be adapted into this model. The sky is the limit.

In this way, I hope to provide a consistent rate of new content. Even if work is going slow on the core routes, I can take a break and write a random little story or two to clear the mind—then toss them into the build and forget about it. The game gets extra diegetic content that I don’t have to be too particular over, and then I can go back to the more carefully curated content. Because stories aren’t all going to be tied to the game’s timeline, I don’t have to feel frozen into working on everything in lockstep, and stories I add early on in the process can pop up even in week 6 in the Director judges it valid. Variety is absolutely key to not getting burned out, and I have high hopes that this model will both achieve that and make for exceptionally fun gameplay that gives something different from the usual VN approach. Paardenrust will become a semi-open world of stories that you explore to discover, and each time you visit, it’ll be a little different.