HOUSEKEEPING'S PROFILE

1. It's not something the narrative addresses or really needs to, but in my mind she was terminal from the beginning. I also wanted the implicit idea that this was genetic, as Gram also died from an unspecified illness. I want to say that I mentioned his fatigue issues in the dialogue at some point, but it's been a while.

2. Solomon pulled the ancestors of the current inhabitants of the floating continents from the past, so they wouldn't have met him or be related to him in any way. Alan's family has the key to the underground lab since they're in a position of power in the village. How their ancestors got that isn't explored, but I would attribute it to a powerful ancestor hoarding the only entrance to a sacred place.

3. No, I haven't written the tvtropes stuff at all. Ptharien's Flame did post here a bunch while he was playing the game, though. It's really cool to see people like you two get into something I made!

4. I don't know if I stated this or just thought it as I was writing it, but I imagined her around 16. I hope this makes Corigliano seem even creepier.

5. Yeah, Silver Spring is going to take a while to recover, especially if you go back and see who replaced the council members.

6. That's not something I've really thought about, but obviously he has relatives on Balfur, so that could be the case--or maybe Richard's side are the transplants! Originally, though, everyone started out on Terasu, so the second case might be the most accurate.

7. I think of Lovie as a strange, magnificent drifter who showed up one day, and her original place of birth is a total mystery since every backstory she's given has been different.

8. I liked that little scene, too.

9. Thanks. Religion's a tough topic. I also tried to have a sort of old/new testament aspect to the pre/post time skip; prior to the time skip, everyone's fire and brimstone, but afterwards, tolerance and compassion are focused on much more (specifically in Balfur), which is similar to how Christianity has evolved. I tried to handle the whole thing honestly (even though there are obviously fantasy/sci-fi elements at work). Just slapping a god down or outright stating one can't possibly exist seems like a cop out that doesn't reflect on how we experience God--that is, most of us really don't know whether or not He exists.

10. I considered Terasu as a pure capitalist state--they don't want to fight anyone; they just want to live their lives and make money.

11. She doesn't have anything to gain from him, so I think her attraction to him is genuine. I think of her more like a cat that wants to play with a toy, though.

12. Yeah, Gerard's gay.

13. That's a good question. I didn't answer it in the narrative, so there's no real answer to that, but if I were to write it into the narrative, my answer would be that he hasn't. Corigliano would push against it, and I think that Moira might even feel a little ashamed of what she's done for their sake, which might be enough to not try to fight Corigliano on it. She did give Gainer her father's name, though, which I think of as a single act of defiance in her marriage and a sign of the love that she has for her parents.

14. I don't really have an answer to that!

15. Since you can briefly play as Prim and Mag, you can tell that Yvette can be stronger than them. It's been a while, though, so Prim and Mag might have broken the level cap since then, haha.

16. Oliver should still be in Sanctuary. I believe he moved to the second shop area and is standing by a waterfall.

17. Yeah...I probably should have moved it closer to the water on the world map.

18. I'm not sure what's causing that. Sometimes, really event-heavy locations can get slowdown (like the area with all the spikes underneath the Path of Gods), but I haven't heard of the game slowing there, and that area isn't super event-heavy. I'm sure it's an RPG Maker thing, though.

19. If you head back to Old Avishun (the destroyed level north of Avishun), there's a locked tower. Darius is in there. All you get from that fight is the last key for the Fortress of the Four Winds Bandits, which can net you a few goodies, including a dagger that you might use in higher-level crafting recipes. You also get a little scene with him, but, honestly, he was probably the character I liked the least. Yvette has a bit of dialogue there, though.

2. Ivy's not the kind of girl to ask people if they remember her. I should have had Moira mention that she looks familiar, though.

3. No, I don't really have any voice actors in mind. Characters tend to have a voice I imagine when I'm writing them, but I never think to pair that with an actual person.

4. I loved writing Yvette a lot in general.

5. Magnus might actually be that old--I forgot about that bit of dialogue and my math was making him 20 years older than Leif, who I would put at around 60.

7. Thanks for the offer, but I think I'm good. Like I said, this version of the game is more or less completed--I'll update if any bugs are reported, but otherwise it's done so I can focus on other projects. I mentioned possibly remaking it, but this is something that would happen years from now (if ever), and by then my plans for it might change pretty radically.

8. I'm not going to add any NPCs in the current version; like I said, this project is done. If I were to remake it, though, yeah, I would probably do that. I would introduce the town much earlier, so that'd make room to expand it further.

9. Thanks for the offer! I think I'm pretty set for now, but I'm very honored that you liked A Very Long Rope enough to even make that offer.

1. You can continue your current playthrough, so you can still work on the town if you like! The other endings are designed in a Chrono Trigger "what if the party made it to Ubiquity at X part of the story" kind of way, so you're not going to see much of an aftermath in the world post-Raccoon, but you will see why the different parts of the story really mattered to the characters. I tried to focus the main ending on Ivy since the game was primarily her story.

2. Some of the upgrades require having other people besides the shop owners. For example, you need to get Prim and Mag before you can get an item shop upgrade. The new shop upgrades also won't be available until you reach Ubiquity (which you can return to at any time from your town's teleporter). The only really left field upgrade is Miranda's shop; you need to pair her and Jarvis up in the theater before her upgrade becomes available.

3. I was originally going to have the entire wasteland (including the Somnian village) be a big playable area that acts as an exploration-based mini game, but I hit VX's built-in map limit, so I had to scrap it. The idea behind it would be that, in addition to finding items, you would also see little glimpses of the Somnians because of the effects of saecelium fallout. I'm actually kind of glad I had to scrap that, in retrospect, since it would have taken me way too long to implement, haha.

4. That would have been a nice way to develop them a bit more, but I let them be blissfully unaware; Clive and Jerrick had been out of their lives for quite some time, so I didn't push it.

5. I took the easy way out on a lot of the portraits. If I had a character in mind who was in their 20s or so, I would just leave them as they were in order to save time. I cut a lot of corners with this project, and that was one of them.

6. Again, you can continue your current playthrough and complete them. Also, if you start a new game+, when you unlock the town, you get to keep all of your progress--Samson included.

7. I'll have my people call up Steve Blum! (I don't have any people)

8. This is an awful answer, but it sounds like you probably have everyone--or at least you're close. I didn't keep an accurate count of the villagers; there was a discussion of this earlier in the comments, and 53 seems to be right.

9. The idea with leaving Ivy out of those interactions was that most people forgot her as it had been so long.

10. Yeah, Luca's dad died. This was implied briefly in the post-time skip dialogue where it's mentioned that he's sick, and then he's no longer around by the time you get to Silver Spring.

11. There are other adults at the orphanage--including one who vaguely remembers Raccoon if you talk to her after seeing Raccoon's scene in the reflecting pond. So, the orphanage is fine! Although, looking back at the characters there, I should have moved the woman upstairs into Deidre's old position and made her seem frazzled.

12. Magnus would probably be around his 70s-80s, with part of the joke being that he's still 100% spry. Part of the joke with Jarvis is that he has to be older than that since he was Magnus's superior officer, so he's just unspeakably old, haha. I probably could have paired those guys in a church scene, but at the time I really just put Jarvis in Magnus's Soul Tear scene as a little easter egg to give Jarvis some backstory. If I were ever to revist this project, I'd probably expand on their relationship (and on a lot of the town characters in general).

13. That'd be interesting--hadn't thought of that! One of the struggles with the town was giving the townspeople room to interact. That's the main reason why the theater/church events exist, and the council room allows them to do so, too. Again, if I were to revisit this project, I'd introduce the town much earlier, which would give me more room to have lots of interactions like that.

14. I'm not sure Glass would remember them, which would actually make that an interesting scene. Again, hadn't thought of that.

15. Pallance is cheating death, so you can assume that he died, but the reasons why that came about aren't explored in the narrative. If I were obsessed with sounding cool, I would say that it's a mystery and probably type a winking emoticon. Honestly, though, I don't have a background written for him.

16. I'm not sure if you did this, but you can go back to the Sylvia bot after talking to Solomon about the "other" Sylvia, and you can do that very thing! You're also given another option with her, so I'll leave that unsaid if you want to check it out.

17. Thanks! They probably had my favorite skill instructor soul tear scene.

18. Yeah, I probably should have given them some more scenes since their relationship could have gone two different ways. Again, that'd be a cool thing to toy with if I ever revisit this (plus I'd like to have other aspects have pre/post time skip differences based on your early actions--I kept those to a minimum since they required more work).

19. I gave them soul tear scenes, which you've probably already seen. I'm not sure what else I could convey with them, but it definitely would have been fun to gauge out Gram's character a bit more since you don't see much of him.

20. I...don't know who buried Cyril. That might be a neat line to give Mort, though.

21. Gainer's been sheltered a good portion of his life, so his idealism really only starts to get eaten away after Ivy meets him. This might be personal experience, but I just hit 30 and I still have a baby face if I'm clean shaven, and I call everyone younger than me a kid, haha. I probably should have given him some more adult moments, but Yvette does call him out about kind of being a man child when they're in the work camp.

22. Luca's only a bit older than him--she'd be in her mid to late 30s. One of the themes I was focusing on was isolation, and their relationship was a part of that--they're the only two kids in High Town, even if they have a decent gap in their ages, so I thought it was natural that they'd be so close.

23. I didn't think of that! I was thinking it would be nice to see her; she's essentially a meta-character at that point since Ivy has no dialogue with her, but seeing them both in the same room...yeah, didn't think about it like that.

24. Thanks so much! I'm working on another BIG project, but at the moment I'm doing a group contest thing that will hopefully be done in a couple of weeks.

25. I had a few ideas a while back for a couple of short spinoffs--one focusing on Brunhilde and one focusing on Lovie--but I think the direction I'm heading in creatively is towards other areas, so I wouldn't expect anything like that. I will say that if I ever make enough progress in this industry, this is a game that I'd like to go back and do right, which basically means redesigning it from the ground up while keeping the story more or less intact. There's a lot that would have been different if I had more tools at my disposal.

Just a small example: I would have made the chimera follow the kids outside at the beginning of the game and force them to run back into their house for safety, which would have made the danger of staying there feel way more visceral. This isn't something I'd be able to do very well with sprites and a fixed camera, but if I had more dynamic cinematography, this would have been how I handled that scene. That's the kind of thing that makes me want to revisit this project later in my life, but right now I need to focus on the next step in front of me.