My development process

I thought I'd write a little about my development process for the people that are interested in knowing how I write the story, and how long it takes me to write a scene. I'll talk about the general process, and give specific examples for one scene (DAY04.SCENE04).

The general process for writing a day, starts with me writing an outline for the day. For the fourth day, since the PC had made a schedule for the girl, this is what I started with. I then divided the day up into several scenes, noting at what time each scene started, and then started writing a short summary for the scenes. This process took me about an hour for the fourth day.

I then start working on the scenes, using the outline I made as a guide. I start with just writing what comes to mind as a rough first draft. I do edit quite a bit while writing, though, and rewrite most sentences several times before I'm happy with them. As I'm writing a scene, I add choices that lead to the next part, so the coding is taken care of at the same time as the writing. How long this process takes, depends on the scene; On what the scene is about, how clear the picture of the scene is in my mind, and its length. For the example scene, "Version 1" took me 1h 57mins.

I then go through the scene, get rid of all the typos, and rewrite sentences as I check the spelling and grammar. This is the first round of revisions; generally, there is another round when I release an intermediate release with several scenes, and then a final revising pass when I release a full day. For the example scene, "Version 2" took me 19mins.

I then read through the entire scene, to see if I like it as a whole, and see if it flows well. Since I wasn't happy with the edited first draft, I went in and changed things in places. To get to "Version 3" in the example scene, this took me another 1h 16mins (mainly reading, thinking about what to change, and then repeating the editing process).

Then, it's time to release it as an individual scene. I turn the ".twee" file into a ".html" file, and start writing the Patreon post to accompany the release. This process, in all, takes about 15 mins. 

So, to write an individual scene with ~2000 words, it has taken me: 10 mins for the outline, 1h 57mins for "Version 1", 19 mins for "Version 2", 1h 16mins for "Version 3", and then finally another 15mins to release the scene to my patrons.

Totaling 3h 42mins for one scene. And the story so far, which has about ~35000 words, using the above statistics has taken me ~66 hours to write. And that is without taking the initial coding and the extra revising passes between releases into account.