Autumn 2022 After completing Noblesse Oblige, I noted down some ideas for future games. One of them was being a bodyguard at school, but I didn’t focus very much on it. I liked the idea of being some sort of assistant role, though.

December 2022-January 2023

While beta testing Royal Affairs, I was thinking in more detail about future ideas as I knew I wanted to get going on something new as soon as Royal Affairs was in copyedit. I started with a number of ideas, including but not limited to: Cambridge Spies style espionage, academic backbiting, being a political aide amid turmoil, being a bodyguard to Jezhani royalty, running a boarding school, cosy zoological research in a small town, being a research assistant at university, and going on a wild Grand Tour.

I went into some depth on some that didn’t end up going to CoG, but ended up putting them on the backburner. These included the Cambridge Spies style espionage (I haven’t quite figured out what story I want to tell and how to manage such a high level of deceit), running a boarding school (not enough varied goals; it felt like it worked better as a book), and the Grand Tour (I couldn't quite get a plot I was satisfied with). They’re all concepts I like and may well return to, but they needed more time in the oven.

The Honor Bound pitch originally started as the "bodyguard to Jezhani royalty" idea, in which you were the adult bodyguard to a young teenage royal. I went some way into coming up with a plot about labour rights and corporate malpractice, but when I stepped back to examine it, it was darker than I wanted to go for in this series. It also didn’t have a lot of grounding for the PC - would they necessarily care about factory deaths in the town near their charge’s school?

I had another pitch that was set in Teran about a race to uncover a politically important archaeological find. When I thought about it some more, I realised it was more thematically suited to Zaledo. So with that moved to Zaledo, when I went back to think about what became Honor Bound, I realised I could take some of the ideas and transplant them to Teran. The militarised setting felt perfect for having a bodyguard PC.

I went back and forth between being a bodyguard in a school vs being a (romanceable) politician’s bodyguard, but I’d wanted to write a single parent love interest for a while and I liked the dynamic of being a bodyguard to someone with whom you had a different kind of relationship. I’m also aware that school settings are a big part of the Creme de la Creme series and I knew it would be fun to explore school from a very different perspective!

In the end I sent the Honor Bound concept and two others.

February 2023

And they asked for an outline for Honor Bound. I was thrilled! I was really excited about all of the pitches and didn’t have a secret favourite (unlike when I sent my Creme de la Creme pitch, when it definitely was!) so I got to work fleshing it out.

I knew I wanted the Fiore, Catarina and Simone, Varenn, and Raffi characters straight off, but it took a little longer to settle on personalities.

I had Fiore and Matia down pretty quickly. It’s funny looking back at the below immensely vague “these are characters I’d like to do at some point” list that I kept updated before even starting thinking about this because there are definitely some similarities! (Not all of them show up in Honor Bound though - maybe they’ll appear another time!) Matia maybe counts as “powerful but generous silver fox” but they show up on another of my lists elsewhere as something like “badass competent outdoorsy person”. They were a character I’d earmarked for a different game concept whom I moved into this one.

Varenn and Raffi’s personalities took a little longer to solidify but I knew what roles they’d have in the plot. Once I had their personalities sorted, I could figure out their personal journeys and how the PC interacts with them.

The last character to form was Savarel. I was really keen to have a priest character! Teran is a religious society and I wanted to have a way in to explore that (especially as Pascha is the main very religious character who’s appeared so far and they are… not typical in the setting). I had made a priest character for the cosy Jezhani zoologist game so I transplanted them here. Savarel not only helped me flesh out the Teranese religion, they also added an additional perspective on the town on top of Matia’s - I always wanted the school to be more connected with its local community than Gallatin and Archambault - and opened up the veteran criminal subplot.

(Fun fact: I initially earmarked Savarel and Raffi to be one of the polyamorous relationships. As I expanded their personalities, though, that really didn’t work.)

I also wanted to expand on the NPC plot work I did in Royal Affairs, and give each character their own dedicated personal plot. I did do this in Royal Affairs too, but here I wanted it to be a bigger part of the game. So at this stage I outlined in detail what each character is dealing with and how the PC can assist, sabotage, or otherwise affect it (or not, if they don’t want to). You can’t do every personal plot on every playthrough, but that doesn’t (necessarily) mean you’re enemies with the people whose plots you don’t complete; it’s more that you’re choosing to prioritise particular people over others.

After two weeks, I had characters, a plot, more worldbuilding notes about Teran, and more of a background for the PC.

What I realised when I was first coming up with the bodyguard concept was that I needed more goals and backstory for the PC and more of an impetus for them to involve themselves with the plot. Although I’d fleshed out some of that in the first draft of the outline, one of the main pieces of feedback from the first draft of the outline was that the PC needed to be more embedded in their situation and with more to lose and gain.

So with the feedback in mind, I further expanded the stakes of the PC’s current situation - they hadn’t just got an injury, they had made a mistake or otherwise got in trouble somehow, and needed to recover their reputation to save their career. I also made Elene’s Prospect the place where the PC grew up, to bring in potentially complicated feelings about coming “home”, brought in the criminal veterans more in the early and mid parts of the game, and added the character of Denario Vecoli. All those things worked together to bring more texture to the PC’s backstory and how they relate to the events around them.

I also brought Fiore into the early and mid game more, as they previously had much less screen time then. I wanted them to have a slightly different relationship structure to the characters who were close in location to the PC, but the setup from the first draft would have left their romance/friendship feeling underbaked. I also wanted plenty of breathing room with their screen time with Catarina so that their relationship could evolve over the game, and for the PC to be able to interact with their personal plotline more directly.

Less plot-relatedly, I also trimmed down a couple of stats. There used to be a Combat stat which I realised wasn’t necessarily - I wanted you to always have a decent amount of fighting skill - and a couple of different Town and School stats that overlapped.

It took almost exactly a month to do the first outline draft, get feedback, and do the revisions…

March 2023

…and while I was waiting, I set up the code for startup, stats page, quiz about previous games, and reminders of previous game events. At this point I was confident that the game would go forward even if there were more revisions needed, and I didn’t want to be given the go-ahead and then have to go through all that admin when I'd be raring to get started.

…I also did some character work, reading Passion and Play by Michelle Clough and thinking about how the major characters relate to romance, intimacy, and the shape of how their relationships can develop with the PC. I strongly recommend this book - it really helped codify my thoughts about interactive romance.

As part of this work I wrote about what each character thinks about each other and how they relate. After my experience writing Royal Affairs it was really important to me to build into my planning how everyone interacts with each other as a group and with their community. I also wrote themes and tones of the polyamorous options because I wanted them to feel really solid - and different to each of the monogamous romances.

…I wrote up lists of what’s potentially going on during each character’s personal plot and journey in each chapter and how the PC interacts with and changes it (or not). I’d figured out several romance dealbreakers already, but this helped me solidify how and when love polygons are resolved (this was a bugbear in both Creme de la Creme and Royal Affairs, in which I didn’t plan love polygon resolution out from the beginning and ran into issues in Chapter 9 where you can theoretically break up with several people in quick succession - it’s OK, but was a lot of fiddly work and not totally immersive), any further romance dealbreakers, and the last points at which you can start romances. A lot of this early planning was in response to Fay’s pre-production work on her current WIP; I’d seen the detailed planning she did and was inspired to follow her lead.

…I also figured out the options for PC backgrounds linked with the stats. This is very much my wife Fay Ikin's wheelhouse and she helped me a lot with it. If you look at Asteroid Run and Heart of Battle, you’ll see the lovely levels of detail you can get from choosing your backstory. In Honor Bound, the backgrounds affect your stats; you can also make choices about the nuance of what happened when you were injured, and the nature of the injury itself. The idea here is to give a solid sense of the PC early on as well as their opinions about their situation. I went back and forth over whether injuries should affect different stats (ala A Study in Steampunk, where, say, a hand injury reduces the Medical stat), but in the end decided not.

…and then on March 14 the game was greenlit! I was immensely excited!

Part 2 will go up next week, sharing how progress on Honor Bound went through the rest of 2023!