Dev Log 3.11: Threatz

Hello!

Very productive week this week. Very happy with my progress. This has been the kind of week I wish I could put in on a regular basis both in terms of my productivity as well as the speed of renders themselves.

We're now at 8/17 scenes done for the prelude, with a render total of 572. I'm currently working through a scene that is significantly longer in render times than the past week was, but is way quicker to set up for, so I can leave my computer rendering pretty much as long as I need to without needing to set up more scenes. It's a good and bad thing, I'd rather have a scene render quickly, but it is also a nice break when I know I can set up 10+ hours of renders very quickly. This also frees up a bit more time for other dev related things, too, which is nice. (as well as time to spend doing real life stuff)

As I work through the bits of the chapter I've got to finish writing I'm finding more and more occasions where choices and branching come into play in nuanced ways, and it getting a little difficult keeping a track on all of them. Because I want choices to matter and characters to react to and reference previous decisions you've made I've got to keep adding different little variations of conversations. Multiple times now I've found myself needing to make whole other versions of a conversation predicated on one previous choice being made, and in one instance (at least so far) you'll have needed to make two specific choices previously to see this one bit of a conversation, otherwise you'll not need to see it - and that bit of a conversation itself contains a choice. I'm very much anticipating there being some sort of continuity error somewhere in this chapter, but I'm doing my best to keep a track of all the threads and make sure everything's linking properly.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy doing this work, because it'll lead to a better, more enriching story to play through, but as someone who's really keen to get updates out quicker, especially now that a) I'm monetizing the game and b) we're getting close to some big moments, it's already starting to get a little out of hand, per se, with regard to how much extra little bits of work I'm giving myself - not to mention the fact it gets a bit confusing at times working out how things are interlinked.

But it's not something I'm going to cut back or put low effort in to, especially when I've marketed the game as one where choices very much have an impact, even if it's just the little things, because I want the game and story to exist within a world that feels somewhat real and reactionary to the decisions that are being made. I've mentioned before that the actual story itself is somewhat of a railroad, so insofar as there's a clear start and end with mandatory story beats to pass through, so the influence the player can have on certain things is only so great; exactly why I'm so keen for you to at least feel like your smaller decisions are also reflected back in the world you're experiencing.

That make any sense? Sure hope so. And the best part is all the branching is only going to get more complex as we keep going. My brain is going to turn into a cobweb of interlacing story threads before this game's done, I swear.

Thank you all for your support as always!