05/05/2024 Patreon Devlog

05/052024

Ramble

Hallo! Time for this week's update. Brace yourselves. This one was 6 pages in google docs. 😌

Summary

• Nearly finished editing Ch 9

Writing

I am very nearly done with Chapter 9. I have a couple of small scenes left to edit but should be able to wrap it up either today or tomorrow.

I believe this chapter will end up at just under or right at 35,000 words.

As I mentioned previously, this was a somewhat shorter chapter than the last two, so editing has gone by faster. It's also a lot of dialogue and character moments.

One of the really frustrating things about writing a game in this structure is how repetitive the story feels to me as I'm drafting it. For example, if something happens to the MC...and then there's an LI scenario right after, it makes sense that every character would ask - in at least some way - if the MC is okay.

They'd all ask it with their own character voice but they'd still ask it somehow. But now imagine that something happens to the MC in chapter 2, then another incident occurs in chapter 5, and another one in chapter 8.

What ends up happening is that each time something happens, the LIs talk to the MC and query, somehow, if the MC is okay. And I end up writing 18 different variations of "Hey MC, are you doing okay after that thing that happened?"

Even though this is totally reasonable from a plot standpoint, and even though each query is worded and contextualised in a way that is unique to that situation and character...My brain is still like "Damn, these people are ALWAYS asking if the MC is okay!" Even if it's a pretty reasonable level of checking in, it feels like so much more because of how the story is structured.

It gets really difficult to maintain a clear view of whether or not the story is truly a bit repetitive or if the issue is the overlapping routes making it seem more repetitive than it is.

I've been battling some of that while revising this route. I think it's just an issue of having to wait until it's fully revised so I can actually play through a route and see if it comes across the same way when you're experiencing it in the game. I can always make more tweaks if I need to at that point. 

But yeah, it's kind of an additional drawback of writing in this structure. 

Art 

A new BG sketch! 💪💪

Other

*If you are not interested in things like planning or the process of game development and decision making, you can just skip this whole section because I'm going to delve into the poll results as well as some of the things I've thought about while deciding how to handle the release schedule of Stars!*

So a while ago, I made this little poll asking about episode updates. The idea here was about whether it was better to give shorter (such as single-chapter) updates if they came at more frequent intervals (such as every two months) or would it be better to do bigger updates (such as 2 chapters) at longer intervals (such as every 4 months).

The results of the poll indicate that more people prefer longer updates than shorter ones (by a significant margin) but many people are also more concerned with consistency over length.

I ran the same poll in Discord though it had less context and fewer options, but you can see the results are more or less the same.

One thing that came up a few times in the comments was a response to my saying that some chapters have only character moments and therefore might not work on their own as interesting chapters. Several people assured me they are here for the characters more than the plot which I do appreciate but...

Every story is a mixture of Plot (the major events and beats), the Story (the details about how those plot beats play out), and Character/Relationships. Each scene is going to serve one or more of those things - and each of those is valid. But in some early chapters where the MC is getting established in this new place even the character moments are somewhat more basic because they're all getting to know each other. 

So it might be important to the relationship for characters to have a teasing moment together or to share little snippets of their back stories. But just because something is important to the story or the growth of characters, that doesn't mean it will be satisfying on its own.

Looking at it from the standpoint of an "episode", I can see how certain chapters would feel like they didn't necessarily deliver enough to seem worth the several month wait.

This is partially because, in some ways, I've constructed the game as a "bingeable" story despite that I intend to release it in episodes.

Watching a movie and watching an episodic series are very different experiences. Episodic shows are written in a way that each episode stands alone with a beginning, middle, and ending/resolution. Even in a show where the entire season (or the entire show) has an overarching plot that carries through from episode to episode, the episodes themselves have a very specific flow to them and can often stand on their own as an entertaining mini-story within that bigger plot.

Some episodic visual novels are written this way too. 

In fact, when you play them later on after the complete game is released, you can actually still tell the story was released in episodes because each chapter follows that episodic formula. I can think of one game that was written by the devs as it was released and every episode had a very distinct flow to it. I didn't play the game until long after the final episode and revamp had been released. And even so, I could very much feel that episodic nature that was baked into the story and how it was structured (this isn't a critique; just an observation).

I think there are pros and cons to setting up an episodic story that way. But for me, I felt that having such a distinctive episodic structure would detract from the story once it was fully released and decided that I didn't want to set the chapters up as distinct "episodes" but more like typical chapters so that once fully released, the story would flow the same way a normal story flows.

The drawback to doing it this way is that some chapters just wouldn't make for good episodes on their own. This doesn't mean I can't release it in parts. Because plenty of games do break their releases up in ways that don't follow a standard episodic format anyway (with that "episode style flow" to each release). Especially stories that release partial chapters as "episodes.

But in my case, I want to find some sort of middle ground where the full game reads smoothly when it's finished and where each episode is satisfying. So I've tried to step back and see if there are ways to divide up the existing story into satisfying episodes that feel like a 'mini-arc' of their own. 

There are some chapters (like Chapter 5) that would be able to function as a standalone episode very well. And there are other chapters (like Chapter 4), that are very heavy on introspection and conversations, that I feel probably wouldn't function as well as standalone chapters. 

This is where the idea of bundling chapters together came from. It's mostly about trying to manage both the overall flow of the story along with the flow of each "episode" so that whether a player waits to binge the completed game, or whether they play each episode as it releases, they get a fun experience.

There are other considerations too - episode length, episode playtime, etc etc. 

For instance, if a chapter on its own has less than 2 hours of playable content in it because it's a short chapter, that feels like it would be disappointing to people who waited months for it. On top of that, some people only play 1 character path at a time even through an episodic release. So they might wait 2 months for a chapter and then play only the common route + Raif. And in some chapters, that's going to be an hour of content. That seems really unsatisfying to me. 

So this is something I also factored in.

This is kind of a case-study that I did for that. 

If you look at these two chapters, I feel like on their own each of these chapters would be unsatisfying as an episode. Both due to the size and the relatively low proportion of unique content each LI has on their own. For instance, Chapter 3 has 12,000 words of "love interest content" - but divided up among six LIs, that equates to only about 2000 words of content with your chosen Romance target in that content. People who are only playing one path are going to get barely an hour of content out of that episode.

Compare that to Chapter 5:

Chapter 5, by itself is a much longer chapter with a much higher ratio of LI scenarios. Even it was released by itself, it's a decent chunk of content.

But if I pair Chapter 3&4, it becomes a little more satisfying. Everyone gets at least 2 hours of content and those who are playing all the routes simultaneously get four and a half hours. 

I know one person suggested I just just pair the short chapters and let the long chapters release on their own. But the problem is that this is actually the only place where two "short" chapters happen consecutively. 

The actual line up of chapter length isn't that convenient. Sometimes you have a medium length chapter next to a very long chapter, followed by a short chapter, then another very long chapter. So I could try to divide it up so that each episode has roughly the same amount of content, but it wouldn't really be possible to divide it up that way since the chapters aren't that consistently arranged.

One thing I've noticed with other episodic releases is that "fair treatment" is really important to a lot of players. There is discontent if an episode:

• Feels like nothing important happened

• Feels like it was too short

• Feels like it was too long (because it's unfair that other episodes were shorter)

• Feels like one character got more content or attention

Because of this focus on consistency, I do think some players would be extra disappointed in a single chapter release - even if it's a big chapter - if the prior release was two chapters. There's kind of a mental component there. The word count of a chapter isn't immediately visible to players but those chapter cards definitely are. So people would know they got one chapter instead of two but they wouldn't necessarily know it was an 80,000 word chapter where both of the previous two were only 30,000 words. 

That's why, from my perspective, it's more effective to be consistent with the amount of chapters in each release rather than the amount of words in each release.

I don't think it's possible to craft an organic and interesting story while applying rigid formulas and worrying too much about fairness, etc. But part of game development is considering player experience. Which is why I gather information (like chapter word counts and play times as well as player opinions on these things) and try to lay out all that information before I make choices. My observations with other developers and their experiences with episodic releases also factor in!

I usually have a good idea of what I want to do and what feels "good" to me as a dev, but I think it's always beneficial to everyone if I can take a moment to analyse the decisions as I go.

That's why, while it's very uncommon that I would radically change course because a certain option won in a poll, it's still useful to have the poll results as I plan things out!

All of that to say that I'm leaning towards releasing two chapters at a time every 3-4 month, which results in a total of 6 episodes.

You know, once I manage to exit Editing Purgatory. 🤣🤣

Upcoming

This week I will be focusing on finishing up the last couple of bits from Chapter 9 and moving into Chapter...10.

Chapter.

10.

This is chapter 10 currently. You can see that Asher's content is significantly longer than everyone else. This is because Asher's content has already been revised and fleshed out.

Just from bringing others into closer alignment with Asher length-wise, the chapter is likely to cross 80,000 words.

And that doesn't take into consideration that there are several endings currently being counted in the "common" area that I really want to flesh out. A lot.

So I have a feeling this chapter is going to end up...quite long (probably longer than Chapter 7, which is the current longest chapter). And also that I will be revising it for...several weeks at least. 

Yay.

Anyway, I'll let you all know how it's going next week and will be sure to whine a lot for your enjoyment. 😌😌

See you then!