24/03/2024 Patreon Devlog

Ramble

Halloooo~oo! Time for this week's update. 

Okay this week I mostly did one (1) thing. I edited. A lot.

Summary

• Finished editing Chapter 6

• Proofread Chapter 6

• Formatted Chapter 6 in Renpy

• Started editing Chapter 7...a lot

Writing

I finished up editing chapter 6 and started editing chapter 7. 

Now, like all the chapters, the "common" spaces, along with Asher's path, have already been edited. Unfortunately, that is actually a small amount of this chapter.  This chapter has relatively little "common" content and by far, the bulk of the chapter is...character-specific content.

The first thing I had to do was, honestly, just re-read the chapter. When I edited Asher's path, this chapter got fleshed out a LOT which means that now I have to bring everyone else up into alignment with the new chapter and plot changes as well as bring them into alignment with Asher's higher word count.

So I really needed to refresh myself on the events in this chapter in the first place. I didn't have to do a lot of tweaks to Asher's path but on re-reading there were a few things I ended up making small fixes to.

Then I went through Daaz's path. Got that fully edited. And I also edited Kav's path.

Kav, as always, is an interesting experience. Because he shows up much later than everyone else, his path just flows differently. 

(Actually, in some ways, Noel's route flows a bit differently sometimes too. Because he's the ship captain, it means that I can't always position him where I want in the story. For instance in Chapter 6, there is a scene Nymera has with the other characters that takes place during a meeting Noel is having with someone else. Obviously Noel's version of that scene can't happen during the meeting; it has to take place after that meeting is finished. So that means Noel's scene has to be structured a bit differently.

This can be a bit tricky because in episodic games structured with overlapping paths like this, sometimes people get frustrated if it feels like characters aren't treated equally. It's always a balance between equity and variety...)

Anyway! I have started editing Noel's path.

This chapter is, at this point, the longest chapter in the game at 70,000 words. I expect it to end up closer to 75000 by the time it's fully revised. So yeah. Big chapter to edit.

Art 

Two new BGs! Somehow my artists are still hive-minding despite that one of them went on vacation and took longer than usual. The other one also took a little longer than usual. So they both still turned in their BGs on the same day! LoL

The backgrounds are now about 52% complete.

Other

Well I did format Chapter 6 into Renpy as I've been doing with all the chapters when I get them fully proofread. This doesn't entail any coding of BGs or anything. Just getting the basic code set up.

Upcoming

I will be working hard to get Chapter 7 complete. 

The good news is that the spawn is on break next week so I have a holiday from Office Assistant duty! 

I'm hoping I can use next week to make a significant dent in the remaining revisions. I want to for sure finish up Chapter 7.

There is one more quite long chapter (as in, above 60,000 words), which is chapter 10. And the chapters after that are all a bit shorter. So Chapter 7 is definitely the longest chapter that remains to be edited, followed by chapter 10, then the rest.

And I'm currently about half done with Chapter 10.

So yeah. That's it for now. I will see you all next week.