Or "thinking about what I want to change whenever I start work on 2.0."

(Fair warning, there are some spoilers for the late game and bad ending late in this devlog.)

Obviously, this was too much to try to accomplish in a game jam--even a two month one--especially since it didn't leave a lot of time for reflection on the script, or to make changes to it.  (Admittedly, I could have made those changes rather than pressing ahead with the full release using the original script, but...that might have turned this into one of those dead projects that never gets past the demo.)

The most problematic aspect, of course, was my attempt to make it feel more "game-like" by giving the player choices of what to do every day, leading to about 2.5 times as many events as there are days to encounter them in, as well as the mostly random newspaper articles, of which there are fully 3 times as many as a player can encounter in a single run through the game.  All of which meant extra work on both writing and coding, work which did nothing to enhance the experience for the player, some of which most players will likely never see.   Whenever I revisit this project to make it into more what I really want it to be, I will definitely be retooling the way the days work, so that the number of events a single run misses are greatly reduced, if not eliminated entirely.   This will also give Ace more agency in what should realistically be considered his own story, despite that it's Pat who's the player character.

Speaking of which, my decision to make Pat the narrator was probably my biggest mistake, unfortunately.  It meant we were glued to Ace's side the whole time, and due to the structure of the original epic this was re-imagining (re-inventing?) that meant missing out on getting to know Hector and his siblings.  There is, after all, a reason that Achilles up and disappears for eight books in the Iliad!  (Watching someone sit around and sulk just isn't entertaining, no matter how attractive they are...)  So, I think what I'll likely do whenever I return to this project (possibly early next year?) is to spend half of every day with Pat and Ace--still letting Pat narrate that so I don't have to throw out his narration, as I'm rather fond of a fair chunk of it--and then spend the other half of the day with some other character, so we actually get to witness some of the chaos unfolding, get to know Hector and his siblings, etc.  (An unfortunate side effect of this is that I'll need a whole lot more art, even though the BG art is already one of the game's big stumbling blocks...)

I'd also like to make the branching between the good ending and the other two endings a little more organic, and a lot less forced.  I'm not currently sure how to do that, so it's going to be something I'll be thinking about very carefully whenever I start working on the expanded text.

One of the other things I'd like to do is to alter Ganesh's role in everything a bit to make it line up a bit more with Agamemnon's role in the original myth.  Of course, it's hard to properly assess Agememnon's role in the Trojan War:  the majority of the modern interpretations I'm aware of (including most of my own, lol) frame his leadership of the allied Greek forces as motivated by greed and/or lust for power.  Both of those were frowned upon by the ancient Greeks as negative personality traits, just as they are today.  (Though I'm sure that then, as now, they were more disdained in theory than in practice...)  But Agamemnon was one of the many Greek figures from the Trojan War who received outright worship in Classical times.  (We know, for example, that Aischylos' play Agamemon was routinely performed in the ruins of Mycenae, and that people would leave offerings for Agamemnon in said ruins.  (They also left offerings to Cassandra, so that's at least something.))  Therefore, despite accusations made by Achilles during the first book of the Iliad, the ancient Greeks likely did not see Agamemnon as a greedy figure whose determination to get at Priam's treasure houses was one of the driving forces of the war and all its carnage and tragedy.  This makes the standard modern interpretation in direct opposition to the ancient one.  So, actually, Ganesh lines up more with the ancient perception of Agamemnon rather than the modern one, which could be a good thing, but...I guess what I really dislike is how unrelated he is to the cause of the argument.  The argument between Agamemnon and Achilles in the original epic was 100% Agamemnon's fault, even if Achilles was being remarkably immature about it; no one else was even remotely at fault.  (Well, I guess you could make the case that Apollo was at fault for wanting to punish Agamemnon for being a dick to his priest, but...that's still Agamemnon's fault for acting that way, particularly to a priest.)  Whereas the argument between Ganesh and Ace is pretty much entirely Ace's fault.  I'd like to rework things (or at least reveal information later on) to make it at least partially Ganesh's fault.  Most likely, that will have to do with making the "trade war" between Ganesh's import-export business and that of the Hipolito family more detailed, logical, and prominent in the story.  And probably will involve both importers courting a major retailer that's either named Helen or owned by someone named Helen.  XD  Because, you know, she's only the most famous mortal associated with the war, and she's not even in hinted at in the current game.  (Despite temptation to make her Ganesh's estranged sister-in-law, I doubt that I'll actually do so...or should I?)  I am not, currently, sure why the two companies bankrolling the bands (in a way) courting the same retailer would make a different retailer yank an award away from one performer in favor of another, though.  (Especially not when there's the much more believable reason that they took it away because they found out he was in a relationship with another man.  (Which reminds me, I'd also like to find a way to make the game more explicit about the fact that Ace is actually bisexual, not homosexual, but he calls himself gay because the man he loves is gay...and because it was the 1980s.  It doesn't really change anything for the character, as such, but I don't want to be guilty of bi-erasure.))  Obviously, I haven't yet devoted much time to figuring out how to alter Ganesh's role in causing (and amplifying!) the situation, so it's necessarily muddled right now.

(In case you're wondering, that big chunk of strikethrough text up there is because I wasn't done with this devlog and left it overnight, then while I was in the bath this morning, I had a revelation about what to have happen on Thursday morning after the first fight in Ganesh's office, which renders much of that speculative pondering obsolete.  I'm not going into details on that right now, though:  you'll just have to wait and see how it's going to turn out.  ;)  But it's a promising start, I can assure you of that.)

From here on out, it's pretty much more of the same, to be honest:  things where this version falls flat compared to the ancient original.  (Like, why do we not meet Dimsdale until right before the branching point, when Diomedes was such a major player in the original that he has his own section of the Iliad that's one of the best (if not outright the best) parts?)    This especially applies to the bad ending, though:  Patroclos' final battle (rather, his only battle, since he has to stay with his princely boyfriend while he sulks in his hut) was truly worthy of the word "epic," and he performs all sorts of feats, including easily killing a son of Zeus, and killing 27 Trojans in one sentence.  His battle with Hector in this is, uh, less than epic, to say the least.  Now, granted, part of that's because they're musicians, not warriors, but still!  I'd like to punch that up a bit, but as writing fight scenes is not my forte  (to say the least), I'll probably need some help with that whenever the time comes.

More problematic about the bad ending, though, is what happens to A.J. in it.  Obviously, the logical thing would be for A.J. not to get involved when Ace goes charging off to avenge Pat, if you're looking at it from a modern perspective.  Pat was officially ruled as having been the instigator of the fight, and Hector's actions have (rightfully, as written) been ruled as self-defense, and A.J. is too smart to think that trying to avenge someone in a situation like that is going to end well, and of course he knows how much worse the law (and law enforcement) is going to be on him than it would have been on Pat, or even on Ace.  So, realistically, A.J. should not have gotten involved.  Mythologically speaking, his role in the tragedy would be most aptly to try to rescue Ace's body after Alexandre shoots him, since Aias famously carried Achilles' body back to safety in the Greek camp after his death.  Neither of those felt dramatically as powerful as if the whole band dies, carving them a grand place in rock-and-roll folklore, and winning them the eternal devotion of their fans.  And it's not as though Aias survived the war, but I couldn't really use his traditional mode of death:  in the main tradition of the Trojan War, Aias and Odysseus both claimed the divinely crafted armor of Achilles, but then rather than letting them fight over the armor physically, Agamemnon insists that they debate for the armor, so of course it goes to Odysseus, and Aias is is outraged that he--as the new champion, the better warrior and Achilles' cousin (as he is in pretty much all post-Homeric texts)--has been denied this armor that he decides to kill Odysseus, Agamemnon, and all the other lords who made that decision, take the armor and go home, and so Athene drives him insane, so that he slaughters their herds instead, and when she lifts the veil of madness from his eyes in the morning and he sees what he's done, he's so horrified that he kills himself.  There was no conceivable way to make that work in this setting!  However, there is an alternate tradition regarding the death of Aias.  (Pretty much only one, though; it's one of those few things in myth that seems to have gotten an "accepted version" early on, and thus has minimal variations.  Probably  because it's obliquely mentioned in the Odyssey, albeit in the section that many scholars now believe was added on later.)  That alternate version--which was probably actually pretty late--sprang out of a version wherein Aias was granted partial invulnerability to match the partial invulnerability that was ascribed to Achilles in later texts.  In Aias' case, it came about when his father's dear friend Heracles visited their home during Aias' infancy, and he wrapped the baby in the skin of the Nemean lion.  For some reason, that transferred the lion's invulnerability to the infant, except in the one place where the skin didn't touch him:  his armpit.  (This was still made to work with the madness version, however, by saying that Athene "helped him out" by pointing out the one place he could be killed.  Gee, how nice of her.)  Thus, the Trojans are unable to kill him, and devise a plan to get around his invulnerability:  they dug a hole and buried him alive.  Thus the weirdness in the current bad ending where A.J.'s body is found at the bottom of a half-built swimming pool.  Best I could come up with after I'd kind of fried my brain writing so much in under a month's time.  I'd like to come up with something better, though.  I do like the image of the bereaved Warriors fans holding candlelight vigils outside the police morgue holding the bands' bodies, and since they did all meet tragic fates in the original it does seem most appropriate for them all to meet tragic fates in the bad ending of the game, too...but I'd like something a little less out of nowhere and a little more logically consistent both with this story and with the original myth.  Hopefully something will suggest itself to me as I write the other half of the game (as it were), which will let me have a better familiarity with both A.J. and the Hipolito siblings.

So...in conclusion, I hope anyone who's experienced the current version of the game was able to get some enjoyment out of it--there's a lot of it that I personally enjoy, even if there are also parts that make me cringe a bit because I wanted to do better--and I hope that maybe some of you will want to check out the expanded version whenever I get it made.  :)  This was a very new experience for me in a lot of ways (first time on a dev team, first visual novel, first time using Ren'py) and I think I've learned a lot that will let me do a much better job in future endeavors.