First Contact postmortem

Ok now it’s postmortem time…

First and foremost, a great thank-you to the reviewers, whose reviews was full of constructive criticism, and this postmortem address many of these criticism, which indeed contribute to the size of this postmortem.

First and foremost, the “kink”; indeed from every review I see that the salvo hit its mark, range and bearing, but the fuze don’t work as designed.
Out of the obligatory Naval reference :wink: the breaking of the suspension of belief works as expected, but led to unexpected results.

I’ll explain: Railei IS a very different world, and a much more different culture, stemming from physical and physiological differences, all, I admit, stemming from my, so to speak, “speculative biology” and some thought of mine on social “science” (I don’t consider sociology an exact science), namely that the propensity of war depends on the life expectancy, and that war’s acceptance is very rarely, if any, a “natural” state of the society, raised by artificial means. and that in Railei things are so different, don’ led readers/players to think about comparing these differences.

Now, kudos to Wolfbiter for his interesting questions, whose reveals some limits in the concentrated, fast paced, world building in First Contact: the question on the thermodynamics is explained clearly; Lan points to the cafeteria, and our trio dine together with food taken from the cafeteria; Lan 's milk has a prodigious concentration: she gives out roughly the same quantity of milk than everyone else, but is very concentrated.

Now, I point the attention on the reference on females being life-sustainer: is where is the result of my unholy mating between speculative biology and sociology: if women’s lactation is permanent instead than during the lactation, what will be the society ? the role of the women will be much more important; for example, they get a larger share of the food on the table, for thermodynamics reasons :wink: along many more social advantages.

Now on the other issue, the pacing of the narration: Indeed, as noted in a thankyou, with hindsight is a narrative too large for the confines of the IFcomp, with the added restricting from the other first contact: the one between myself and the choice-based IF development.

the huge dragon (as in “huge elephant”, but much bigger) here is the pacing of the love bonding; its fastness has solid reasons, only very partially explained in the much shortened epilogue (originally two epilogues of the same size of the other chapters) but in hindsight, perhaps is too fast-paced, perhaps even by Raileian standards.

but I dislike retconning (hence the “dragon-sized elephant here”) so let’s appeal to the suspension of belief.

Also, the lack of time forced me to scrap the obvious solution of the issues of the first chapter, the one presenting the background in form of a thinking: a realistic (and common in all worlds where academia exists, I wild guess…) one: students waiting for the start of the lessons do always two things: stroll around or read some books… both conductive to background/world presentation. My apologies, at least can be done in post-comp release without retconning…

On post-comp release, I’ll announce that will be double, one being tentatively called “the intimate pages”, to will be posted in the AIF section, at least initially, perhaps this is an excess of consideration…

Now the length of this postmortem is beyond TL;DR grade, so I’ll stop here, next time I’ll tackle single reviewer’s criticism. In the meantime, please comment and/or give more criticism !

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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prior of tackling the criticism by reviewer, I’ll note some things I forgot to write in my general postmortem above:

the language: is out of question that the final step in Isekai’s development will be an huge public beta prior of the official release, following the example of * Never Gives Up Her Dead*, but in the meantime, I should work on improving the English in the text; specifically, I think that the current released version on IFComp site got enough improvements, but is still lacking.
the in-story language: I follow the style of leaving non-direct-equivalent words in Raileian languages; players of The Portrait have surely noted that this style is very appropriate to the narrative, but less appropriate to the other narrative.

Initially I have tried a “wikipedia” approach, whose hits a major limit of chapbook (only one level of backtrack stack, ending locked in a loop between two passages), then I studied how to build a glossary, hitting a rendering bug (in my color scheme, chapbok fail to render the dividing line between the header and text, giving an ugly look to the screen (aside that mysterious “starting with the default color scheme” issue I don’t have figured…) which forced to me to change the layout from the originally intended

Chapters                                    Glossary
-----------------------------------------------------

                    story text

-----------------------------------------------------
Back                                          Restart

to the somewhat uglier


                    story text
--------------------------------------------------
Back                 Chapters              Restart

in the released version (and a day and half was lost in attempting to bring the rather shy top separator on screen…)

accepting the noted issues of not having a lexicon; I don’t wanted adding an “abridged Raileian/English dictionary” as a feelie, because at this point was an expedient fallback.

the attempts to break the linearity here and there was not precisely a great idea; with hindsight, having more side passages (like the one on the class years’s names and that on Lan’s breast) wasn’t the very bad idea I thinked… some more will be useful for deepening the story, but not much; being a prequel the end must follow the narrative.

Another hindsight is that perhaps dividing the first contact in multiple days, e.g. between the dinner and the terrace, and after the convo with Lan, will give more “realistic” (if this has sense) sentimental evolution (but the magic of the “love at first sight” is objectively stronger in a society where lifespan is measured in (raileian) centuries and millennia… this is another meaning of the applause)

Later for the per-reviewer postmortem & criticism debate !

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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