Dev Diary, August 1st, 2025

This week I've been crossing off items on my bullet list of things to do, and things are going forward at a steady pace.

I'm currently working on the "phase 2" of script-work.

In phase 1, I write the script and dialogue, and rarely even run the game. This phase is complete.

In phase 2, I run the game and look through the scenes roughly, adding music, sfx, catching up on continuity errors, time, and adjusting animations, fine-tuning sprite movements, adding phone content and new visuals where needed, etc. This is by far the most time-consuming of the phases. I'm about 1/3rd done with this phase.

In phase 3, I play through the game properly, fix (and sometimes completely rewrite) dialogue, intentionally try to break the game, do variable checks, and make sure scenes have the feel I'm going for. This is the phase that improves the release the most.

For phase 4, I run all the dialogue through Grammarly to make the job a little bit easier for the testers before I pass the script files over to them for proofreading.

For phase 5, I add music credits, a new menu background, the end-screens, collectables and incorporate text corrections from the proofreaders. Testers normally get the game at this point for their playthroughs, so phases 4 and 5 mostly intertwine.

I added 140 story renders where needed this week, about 160 frames of animation, and 5k lines of script/dialogue. In total, the episode now has 3,508 story renders, 176 animations with a run-time of almost 20 minutes, 17k lines of script/dialogue, and 23 new songs (with 2/3 of the script still in queue for music).

And finally, Sea told me you need some sort of code to get past her last line of defence. (Don't worry, if you're as old as I am, you know it by heart already.)

Have a nice weekend, with its ups and downs, lefts and rights, and so forth. Stay safe out there.

// Drifty