It was, overall, a fairly uneventful fortnight.

Thank God.

We’ve made it about halfway through scene 4 (of 12). Things are clicking and we’ve settled into a comfortable cadence that we hope we can keep up until the release of chapter 7.

Our next 4K renders will be available on the 1st of August for our upper tier supporters on Patreon and SubscribeStar. This month’s subject: Sam!

Now, for the less-than-great news…

So, here’s the thing. When Snax wrote Confusion during the pandemic, it was intended as a kinetic novel with very few choices. Essentially, near the end of the game you would have chosen one of three endings depending on how you wanted the story to end. As we started rendering scenes and coding, there were some natural points in the story where making choices seemed to add value. The effects were fairly low impact, changing bits of dialogue to match the decision points selected. So we just flippantly added them in as we were coding figuring the low impact wouldn’t greatly affect the story overall.

Now, two years later, we’re starting to implement the last few chapters. The problem with giving a player major choices affecting the plot is that it multiplies the number of branches that must be accounted for and maintained. You must ensure that dialogue makes sense at every point where different branches could come together and share plot lines and decisions made.

When Snax decided to add the first few decision points, we should have stopped, gone through the entire story adding the new decisions all at once, and thought through how these decisions would effect the game in the long run. Gentle reader, we did not do that.

Confusion was never supposed to be about “points.” In fact, Snax argued vehemently from the start that they did not want their story to be about “collecting points to get the best outcome,” whatever that means. The game mainly uses flags to dictate story logic, with running tallies of “points” tracking the player’s submissive or assertive choices.

We made some questionable snap-judgements early on. Those are easily fixed, but that would require players to restart the game. Personally, we hate it when devs do that to us, and we went to great lengths planning up front to ensure that you would always be able to play from any save game. But with chapter 6, some players complained that some decision points were just too hard to achieve based on how they choose to play. After review, we agree. This became especially evident when we made the decision to show disabled menu choices, so that now it’s clear when you aren’t able to make choices.

So as much as we hate to say it, starting with chapter 7, you will have to restart the story. Since there are relatively few menu choices through the first six chapters, it shouldn’t be too onerous to ctrl- or tab key your way through them again. Barring a major catastrophe, this should be the only time you should have to do so. We’ve already gone through and done the work we should have done up front. We have made it easier to reach certain goals, so that you have a better chance of getting the choices you want with varying styles of game play. We hope you won’t judge us too harshly.

Come visit us on our Discord server!

And now, within your grasp, a duet of visual souvenirs from the prior two-week span. Wallow in their allure!