Camping Event plans (behind-the-scenes workflow)

As we approach the end of the month, I thought I might give you a glimpse behind-the-scenes of how I go about writing/programming a scene.

I find when writing, a good approach is to get a rough skeleton down first. It can be difficult to get started, but it's much easier when you put less pressure on yourself and say "alright, all I want to do right now is to start writing out some basic ideas of what I know I want."

(The following may be hard to read, which is why I've included a larger screenshot in the images up top).

So I might just spit out some basic goals first, like "Make sure David talks a lot," or "Get some bonding in between Flin and Eric," and then I get more specific later.

In this camping update, I'd like to shine the spotlight a little on David and Eric because I believe that will ultimately make the Julie and Kelly scenes more hot 😅. They've also been generally underdeveloped this entire time and I'd like to flesh out just a few interactions with them before LLRR comes to a close.

I also sometimes make little programming-related notes like this:

Like in the above bit, I mention that I should make the above variable a string, "Amy." At first, I was like "alright I'll mark a boolean of True/False for whether or not Amy will be joining," but then I'd have to make a boolean for Kelly and Julie too, and I'd have to check all three of them later to figure out who's sneaking into Flin's tent. Much easier to just save one string that defaults to "None" or something and change it to the name of the lucky lady.

And since that's a good idea, I decided to mark it down so my dumb ass doesn't forget.
Anyway, next, I start writing the scene, following the notes my past self has written. I TEND to follow what I've written, but obviously I can change my fucking mind.

Here's a snippet of what I've got so far. It's cut off on the right just so it can be more zoomed-in and easier to read:

In the above code, I haven't bothered with music yet. I'll probably add that in after I've written a bunch of the scene.

During this stage, I'm trying to figure out how many CG's I need to make.
One of the most important things to determine while making a visual novel is what kind of stuff you want to represent with sprites/pure text, and what kind of stuff you want to make a CG for. CG's are obviously much nicer, but take a LOT more time.

But once I have a game plan, something like "Alright, I need a shot of Flin and Eric hiking together and chatting, and then Flin changes his expression, and also a shot of Flin and Stella being cute together," then I can open up Blender and make 3 images fitting those exact specifications. It helps to know exactly what I need.

Sometimes it happens in reverse. I get inspired, make a hot image or few, and then decide to write the story around that imagery. For example, when I did that camping commission for Amy, I didn't have any of this written. So what I wrote tries to take that imagery into account. In other words, sometimes the text comes first, sometimes the CG's come first, but as long as one accounts for the other, it comes together.

SOMEtimes I fuck this up, and make an image that doesn't actually fit the flow of the scene. Such imagery usually randomly gets shared here on the Patreon, because it might never go into the game.

Here's an example. I made this image:

And then I made this image:

The first image is in LLRR. The second one is not. That's because the flow of the scene ended up going a different way. I MIGHT add it in and use it someday. Wouldn't be that hard to work in in this case. But who knows.

ANYWAY.

As I write this, I don't currently have any code for the sex scenes done yet, but I'll be going about it the same way: Plot out a vague idea (something like "Missionary, switch to cowgirl, go up to lotus, return to missionary, missionary, missionary * 800 and then unapologetically add a fuckload more missionary") and then flesh that out a bit more (lotus ➡ "lotus kiss, lotus normal, add sweat, lotus climax"), and then write out the scene but leave the CG's out. Then go make the CG's.

Or make the CG's first and write out a plan that'll use them all. Or bounce back and forth.

Oh yeah, and a new part of the workflow: go back over it and add in music, then sounds. That goes relatively quickly.

My point is, you should follow a structure, yes, but you don't have to be rigid about it. Use a mixture of plans and inspiration to get through. Or work out what works for you.

Unless you're working on a team. In which case, fuck what I said, coordination is key. But I do literally everything when it comes to LLRR.

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I hope this was informative and amusing as a sort of status update. I'll admit I didn't get as much done this month as I was hoping, but a lot of important groundwork was laid out and some imagery was made (including sprites of everyone wearing their hiking jackets, which I'll share next time).
I'll have to think about how much recycling of imagery I want to do. The whole camping update could honestly go pretty fucking quick from here if I recycle a lot, but I always want to add SOME totally new stuff to every new scene, too.

We'll see.