Life super got away from us since IFComp ended, but in celebration of our four-way tie for Best Plot in the IFDB awards @EJoyce and I decided to knuckle under and get this done! So without further ado: here is our very late post-mortem for Lady Thalia 4.
EJ: The reception of this latest Lady Thalia game has really blown us away; I still can’t quite believe how popular it is. Part of the reason for that is that, as we’ve mentioned before, the series was meant to be just a bit of self-indulgent fun to hone our skills for our real, serious project, which was Winter-Over.
We didn’t write a postmortem for the first game, but we do have ones for games 2 and 3; if you haven’t read them and want to. or would like to refresh your memory, you can find them here and here.
Now, on to the development of LT4 specifically! After Winter-Over we were a little bit like “what do we do for an encore?” We batted ideas around a bit, but couldn’t really settle on a next big idea. As of the beginning of this year, we weren’t really planning to do IFComp at all.
But we did have a next project that we were already committed to for Spring Thing, the game we’d skipped making in 2024 to have more time for Winter-Over: the fourth Lady Thalia game.
NC: So, after the 2024 holiday season wrapped up, we started brainstorming for LT4. And honestly, it was really fun! Winter-Over wasn’t not a fun game to write, but it dealt with some pretty heavy stuff. During this period we roughed out the initial shape of the game, with focus on the following points:
- This time it’s a detective game
- Thalia’s impostor nemesis, and her career as a journalist
- Wrapping up the will-they-or-won’t-they
(After stretching the last bullet out for three previous games it’s a miracle anyone didn’t scream, honestly!)
With all that settled we planned to start actually writing the game in February to give us plenty of time, and as it tends to life had other plans for us. Based on previous post-mortems one might assume that we got sick again – but no, we had to deal with a variety of other unexpected life happenings in January through April that severely cut into our free time and energy. (And on a happier note, after getting married during IFComp last year we were also planning our somewhat-delayed honeymoon! It was a wonderful time but we were not writing IF on the beach in Sorrento.)
So as the Spring Thing deadline approached, it became clear that we had some tough decisions to make: crunch, or delay? And delay to when?
EJ: I have to admit that the two of us got stuck going around in circles with this, so we actually polled the Neo-Interactives Discord server. The vote came out strongly in favor of throwing the game into IFComp, which came as a bit of a surprise to me, but the people had spoken, so who were we to argue?
At this point (mid-March) we had all of Act I written, most of Act II, and a little of Act III (I had gone ahead and started on the daytime portion while Encorm was working on the nighttime portion of Act II) and we decided to take a little break and start writing again once we were doing better. Which, as it turned out, was making a pretty big assumption about how our year was going to go. But one way or another we did start writing again in late June.
One of our big concerns throughout this whole process was keeping things fresh. We wanted returning fans to have the kind of experience they enjoy about Lady Thalia, but we also didn’t want to bore them with more of the same old stuff. The thing is, I, at least, didn’t really have a good gauge for what people might find boring other than what I myself was getting a bit bored of.
NC: The other thing we were increasingly worried about was that by entering IFComp we were going to get a lot of new players unfamiliar with Lady Thalia and needed this entry to stand more or less on its own despite being the fourth in the series, AND still keep long-time players happy and not bored. A tall order, and something we found really intimidating! We had already been worried about that with the third game, and tried our best to get ahead of it… and still had some players blindsided by issues jumping in at part 3 that we hadn’t even considered. So if we wanted to put part 4 in front of an even bigger audience, we really needed to be careful.
EJ: The story aspect was bound to be tricky too, because we had to show Thalia and Mel moving into a new chapter of their lives both individually and together, and Thalia in particular was starting off at a much lower point than we’ve seen her in the past, though the plan was always for her to find a new sort of equilibrium by the end. We wanted to treat characters and relationships with a certain degree of realism, as well, which was going to require making them sad and frustrated and not always resolving things right away, but the intention was still to keep the overall tone lighthearted. This we kind of whiffed on, according to reviews!
I feel like the fact that we were not having a great year kind of played into it—the problems we were having and the problems the characters were having were not similar (except sometimes in the broadest possible sense) but the mood filtered in. Sort of like a reverse Winter-Over, where instead of the sad game making us depressed, our depression… made the game sad? That sounded snappier in my head, I’m sorry.
NC: Yeah, 2025 was completely cursed and that definitely affected the mood of the game. Sorry to everyone who got blindsided by that!
Anyway, to solve the above problems we decided the best strategy was, as usual: rely on playtesters to catch issues instead of trying to psychically divine them ourselves! And to that point we made a real effort to recruit some playtesters who hadn’t played the series before in addition to our usual fans. This was, surprisingly, harder than expected, I guess because we’re IF Names now? There’s a decent number of people who like our work and want to see more of it! But when it comes to playtesting there’s something to be said for fresh blood, especially in this situation. So while we had a wonderfully strong group of initial playtesters, only two of them were new to the series and both of them were testing multiple other IFComp games. In the end we had to make a last-minute request for an additional playtester to go in blind, and DemonApologist stepped up to the task and gave the game a very thorough scrubbing for which we are eternally grateful. (All of our playtesters did a fantastic job and deserve quite a lot of the credit for this game turning out remotely playable, really.)
As usual, despite our best efforts we were still working on the game and sending out new versions to playtesters right up to the deadline. This is actually why I ended up as lead author on the game and not EJ for once - she was also doing a community theater show at the time and had rehearsal the day we needed to submit. So in a way you can blame William Shakespeare for getting us into the whole Rising Star snafu! (Also I hope the IFComp website will keep better track of coauthor participation now that we lived through that.)
EJ: I had not prepped a speech for the IFComp awards livestream because it felt sort of presumptuous—what if we didn’t make the top 20 after all?—and then the Rising Star mixup meant that I started out somewhat flustered, so that was definitely not my smoothest public speaking moment. My heart rate did some pretty interesting things while that was happening.
But the important thing is of course that people loved the game! This was really touching and gratifying and also, frankly, it surprised me, because while responses to the series previously had been largely positive I always suspected the ratio would shift just a tad more negative if it ever got in front of an IFComp-sized audience. Partly this is probably my damage from having at least lurked in the community since about 2009 and having been here when it had its GamerGate moment. On some irrational level I still expect to be stuck in a sort of no-man’s-land between old-school parser fans who hate queer Twine games on principle and are frequently very nasty about things they don’t like and a smaller group of queer Twine game fans who just don’t really take notice of anything that isn’t personal, confessional, transgressive, and arty. (Great respect for people who do that kind of thing but the thought of being that vulnerable makes me break out in hives.) I’m glad that in general, the really nasty people have left, the people who are still here are more willing to give stuff outside of their usual wheelhouse a try, and there’s space for queer art to just be silly.
NC: Speaking of people who are willing to give stuff outside their wheelhouse a try, getting in front of the IFComp audience has confirmed something we’d suspected for a long time: Traditional parser fans really like Lady Thalia. Which is not something we ever expected! But thanks to the awesome review culture in this community, getting in front of the larger IFComp audience finally gave us enough data to figure out exactly why.
The general wisdom holds that the attraction of parser games is that you can do anything (or at least try to), but it seems to me that what fans like is more of the feeling of fine-grained control. Which the Thalia games have in spades, albeit in a completely different form from your typical parser game! But you always have multiple avenues through a conversation or multiple ways through a night in a way that gives a feeling of directly steering the PC action by action, even if the game is fairly on-rails at a macro level. A lot of Twine games aren’t like this because it is frankly a mammoth amount of work! Each game has about a novel’s worth of text, only half of which is visible on any given playthrough and much of which most players won’t see. That said, this ethos is clearly key to the broad appeal of the games so while it’s a lot of work I personally wouldn’t change a thing for the next one. (Yes, to nobody’s surprise there’s going to be a next one! More on that later.)
I think there’s a world where these games could be ported to Inform or similar (with the daytime segments taking advantage of some of the choice-based conversational extensions, of course) and not lose their charm, but that’s more of a(n accidental) success of game design on our part. Good games are much more about thought and effort than the system they’re designed in.
EJ: There’s stuff in these games, particularly in terms of “bad” options late in a conversation, that I’m honestly not sure anyone has ever seen. There was a bug in one such option in the first game that wasn’t reported until this year. And the dual POV section in this game basically doubled the amount of work I put into writing text that I’m not sure anyone will ever read. That whole bit was a huge amount of effort in general relative to how fast it goes by for the player, so anytime anyone comments on liking it I’m just like “oh good, glad that wasn’t a total waste of time.” (I mean, admittedly I do love playing with multiple POVs, so I guess it’s also “glad that wasn’t totally self-indulgent.”)
Anyway, as for the future of the series, the next planned entry is a sidequel starring Oscar and Yorkie, exploring exactly what they were getting up to at the Order of Poimandres. We were planning this from pretty early on in the LT4 process and so we were actively trying to imply that there was a bigger story going on there and also trying not to give too much away about it, and I kind of expected people to comment on that (possibly in a negative way, like “why wasn’t there a proper resolution to that plot line?”) but it went totally unremarked-on, for better or worse.
So, good news for Oscar and Yorkie fans and people who really wanted more Spiritualist shenanigans in LT4 (I know there were a few people who found that section to be a highlight, at least), but for anyone who’s like “if Mel and Thalia aren’t there I don’t care”, don’t worry, we are also in the process of plotting out a proper Lady Thalia 5! … But we do also have a totally unrelated and very ambitious idea for IFComp 2026, so the less good news is that you may not be seeing either of these until 2027.
NC: But overall we’re very happy with how this whole process went, and how well LT4 was received (even if I am personally still expecting someone to message me and tell me it was a mistake, due to a database error we actually placed 46th). And that makes us feel empowered to try a bunch of new things as well as keep noodling around with things we’re good at. Maybe the new stuff will be a hit and maybe it won’t? But we’ve proven to ourselves that we’re good at this, at least a little bit, and the next step is to challenge ourselves even further. If we stumble a bit on the way then that’s just a learning experience, right?
Thanks for reading this far, and see you in the next one!