These last few weeks, Shady Two and I were watching the "Vote for the next girl to focus on!" slowly gaining more and more votes. Some of vote were expected, others weren't. But right from the start, the two favorites strongly asserted their dominant positions. To be fair, that does somewhat match the popularity of their fanclubs on our Discord server, but I did not expect such a big gap between the favorites and the outsiders. Especially when Gwen and Aisling turned out to be ones of those.

But the race between Violet and Elizabeth was something to behold. Violet quickly established a significant lead, but Elizabeth didn't let her win that easily, she was constantly in very close pursuit.

And that was kind of a problem. Because it meant that whoever the winner is - I will have to focus on the girl, whose storyline is very sensitive to the in-game timeline. Three of the girls rely on the in-game events and milestones to push their storylines forward, and Elizabeth and Violet are two of them. So that means that I really need to also focus on adding the third Trial of Cathal into the game ASAP, if I want to be able to focus on either of their storylines.

The progress was pretty slow on that front for a while now. I did plot out the Trial back in June and the event where the second Trial is announced to the player was written back then too, but I was shooting blanks whenever I sat down to write the actual trail. Well, no more procrastination for me there. And now, while Shady Two will be working on finalizing the artworks for the big update with the Halloween event next week, I will focus on the Trial of Might. I have already written the part where you discuss the upcoming round with Eric. Can't say that it came easily, but it did come. Writing can be like this sometimes.

I do believe that once I get past the first hurdle of the MC getting ready for the Trial and get to actual gameplay part - things will go smoothly. The intro to the first Trial was an easy one, firstly - this was the first one for our MC, so there was no really any variation and there was a lot of fear of the unknown involved. At the second Trial - our MC should be either much more prepared or even less prepared than the first time, so I need to come up with a way to either reflect that or come up with something more universal. I have a couple of ideas though, just need to figure out if any of those would be willing to get onto the paper.

Well, we will not find out until next week.

I'll see you all then. Shady Character One, out!