I’m excited to say that Apple Pie has surpassed 300 downloads!! Thank you to everyone who has tried it out! To celebrate, I’m posting some interesting tidbits on the game's development and sharing some unused content.  

I recently installed and messed around with a plugin that extracts the game's dialogue. I was curious to see how many words the game has. Lo and behold...

The end result was over 50k words of dialogue.

You know what popular piece of literature has less words than Apple Pie? 5 out of 7 books of the Chronicles of Narnia series.

The game also has over 780 choices.

 It's no wonder I felt like it would never end. That's 785 possible dialogue choices, averaging ~300  'Show Choices' statements.

What was I thinking...? I mentioned it before on my postmortem, but this level of complexity and the game's length was driving me insane.  It was too much for me. 

I want this post to be more on the lighthearted side, so I'll leave that thought there for now.

Unused Content

Not everything I planned to put on the game made the cut. Maps, features, sprites… it doesn’t always work out as it should. Let's take a look at some of them.

Parameters

Parameters would have been a pivotal feature. Romancing your chosen girl would require you to increase them. One way to increase the parameters would be buying and wearing accessories at stores in the game’s town (ala Princess Maker).  Since the romancing never came to be, I scrapped this feature.

The town I mentioned actually had a map and all, but I hated how it looked. I’m not brave enough to post it here - let’s say that I’m much better at mapping inside locations…

Maps

The cafe above would be accessible via the town, and would be Iris’ workplace in her romance route. Eventually, the player would be able to get a part time job there to get cash. Since the town got cut, I had to scrap this map and its features.

The town’s shops and houses were also mapped, and ultimately scrapped as well.

Another place that got cut is the school’s bathroom.  There, the player would be able to listen to gossip and NPCs’ reactions to recent events. It was a bit pointless in the long run, to be honest.

Dreams

The only fully playable dream in the released game is Rose’s. However, I actually had written and mapped dreams for every girl. Since the rest of the in-game days weren’t finished, they got cut.

In Rose’s dreams, the player would solve mysteries and cases alongside their partner(?) Macky, the protagonist of Rose’s favorite childhood book. In the end you would touch Rose’s heart by helping her realize her own worth and gain confidence.

Iris’ dreams would involve ghost hunting similiar to Day 3 of the game, Elissa’s would involve exploring dreamlike environments, and Sophia’s would have games of hide and seek in places important to her.

Amanda

I’m a huge fan of the Tokimeki Memorial games. One thing that always had me excited to replay them over and over again were the secret romanceable characters.

Amanda would be one for Apple Pie – a secret character that the player would have to go out of their way to befriend and romance.

You can talk to Amanda on the last day in the Dream World – in fact, these pieces of dialogue were the last ones I wrote before releasing the game – but she lacks portraits, a non-default sprite, and gifting/hanging out interactions. It’s unfortunate, as she is an important piece in the grand scheme of Lucia’s past.

Talking about Lucia’s past… not being able to write the ending I had in mind for her was a real downer. It would have been an emotional moment, with the removal of her headband and choosing to live on with her partner and friends, finally letting the anger and resentment of her past go.

I hope I’ll get to explore that someday.

More on Apple Pie's  Cast

Finally, in the past couple years while I was developing the game I also posted some short stories relating to the girls. You can check them out in my creative archive: https://meidenzone.tumblr.com/tagged/ap!

To finish this post off, I’d like to thank everyone who has played, commented, reviewed, and recorded their playthroughs of the game. Thank you also for the very kind reception my postmortem has received. Writing it all down and reading that other developers and fellow LGBT creators have gone through similar experiences was very comforting. I’d like to write about it more in the future.

• Meiri