12/05/2024 Patreon Devlog

Ramble

Hello everyone! Time for this week's update. It was kind oa rocky week in terms of "real life" stuff. But I survived it somehow. So did the people who were making life difficult.

Somehow. sips tea

Summary

• Finished editing Ch 9

• Proofread ch 9 for typos

• Formatted ch 9 into Ren'py

• Started editing Chapter 10, aka The Monster Chapter (not because it has monsters in it because it's chonky.)

• Experimented with some new sprite placement techniques in the game

Writing

Done with chapter 9 and moving into Chapter 10 editing wise. 

I think I mentioned last week that chapter 10 is not the current longest chapter but I expect it to end up that way.

Part of the reason is that Chapter 10, Scene 2 is basically the "off ramp" for players who aren't romancing anyone. But I don't want to simply shove them out the door abruptly so I'm adding in a proper build up to the three endings that occur in this spot. This means adding a lot of content actually. 

So far I've added about 2000 words of content in this spot and there will be a fair bit more just to make sure that the endings are built up properly and feel earned rather than the story just stopping.

There is one antagonist in particular who I want to give a little more interaction and back story on before the player reaches the ending with him here. (Though technically there is a much earlier ending the player can get with him but that is a very specific choice you have to make there. And while it might be a bit abrupt, I do like having the option of allowing the player an abrupt exit if they want it.)

Anyway, that's been my primary focus this week. 

I am calling it a "scene" but in reality, it's a collection of scenes that I've grouped into the same spot for convenience.

Art 

No new BG stuff this week!

Other

As a side note, I've been trying to force myself to play more visual novels these days because it's so easy to get wrapped up in game development that you do nothing but write and make games without consuming any new content at all.

And a lot of devs feel guilty when they do anything else.

The problem with that is multi-faceted, though.

First of all, you burn out so fast if all you're doing is working and grinding away at a massive project. Everyone needs guilt-free downtime.

Second of all, I strongly believe that all creators need time when their brain is not creating. We need time to, to quote a book I like, "just let ideas come to us." This can be time spent reading, playing games, or just chilling out. But there has to be time spent away from actively creating. Too many of us "relax" but working on side projects or something.

Third of all, I just think it's important to stay up to date with trends in games and storytelling. It's difficult to write compelling content if you aren't consuming content in the same genre. This does mean that some of my 'downtime' playing other games is less for enjoyment than it is market research. But sometimes it can serve both purposes.

For instance, two of the games I've looked at in recent weeks have overlapping routes like Stars. One of them I did enjoy even though I was taking notes while playing. The other I did not. But it was still informative to play it.

While playing them won't make me revamp or change the structure in WSC, I admit that it has certainly reiterated certain things to me involving the pitfalls of this game structure - pitfalls I'm aware of but that were just highlighted for me once again while playing these other two games.

For instance...

I really wanted to examine, in these games, how shared vs unique content is distributed because it really helps me with figuring out how to frame the content in my game. For instance, one game had a ton of duplicated/repeated content. Remember that this is content the player has seen before but that is duplicated in the game script. This duplication means that the game code treats the content as if it's brand new and the player can't skip through it - it registers as "unseen."

One of the issues with duplicate content is that it's usually interspersed through genuinely new content. So you have all this duplicated content that's identical to other parts of the game you've already read and totally new stuff. Turning skip to 'unseen' and just fast-forwarding through it means you risk skipping past new content. The only real option is to do intermittent skipping and hope you don't miss anything. Or to basically hit enter really fast. Especially because, in this game, the auto-forward is pretty slow.

It just once again got me thinking about how to offer the smoothest experience for a game that is going to require players replaying familiar content.

In Stars I have avoided duplicated content to the best of my ability (though it can be surprisingly hard. That said, there are no large areas of duplicated content. Only some small areas where it was unavoidable). There are other places of similar content where the scene was re-written but the content is probably still going to be quite familiar to the player and they may want to skip it even though it's technically a bit different than what they've read previously.

Experiencing a game where six routes were probably 60-70% duplicated content really made me think hard about how to address the similar content in Stars.

Beyond that, the sprite placement in Stars  is also something that I have been thinking about a lot. I decided to try to implement some changes to the way I usually do it. I would say this wasn't inspired by playing other games so much as spurred on by that. I had already been planning on a slightly different sprite staging situation than what I have now (just playing more with transitions and zooming in/out to add visual interest and life to some scenes). 

It's something I've been putting off because, while I do think it would be cool and have been semi-planning to do it, it also seemed like a pain in the ass. Which made me want to procrastinate.  But another one of the games I played did something very similar to what I've been planning and seeing it in action really gave me a bit more drive to test it out in Stars.

And since I've been struggling a little with writing burn out, I ended up implementing some of the new strategies to see how it looks. And I do like it for various reasons. 

So yeah!

Upcoming

I will be continuing to revise and draft in Chapter 10. I'm hoping to be done with this "Scene 2" off-ramp situation. (I keep calling it 'off ramp' but it's essentially just endings for people who don't end up with a love interest).

Then I'll get into revising the LI route content.

I'll probably also keep implementing the sprite placement stuff I mentioned too. It allows for a nice reprieve from editing purgatory which is really starting to wear me down. 

Anyway, I will see you all next week! ( •̀ ω •́ )✧