29/12/2023 Patreon Devlog

Halloooo~oooo everyone! Time for this week's update. I feel like I somehow got a lot done. 👀

Leaky Roof Saga:

It's been raining a lot. LoL

So you can imagine how that's going.

(No updates on repairs. I think they're hoping the roof fairies will fix it for us.)

Summary

• Finished Editing Chapter 7 & 8
• Finished a Jack POV piece for the GS lore book
• Received a new BG sketch
• Worked on the Fancy Guide ™
• Worked on a Noel wallpaper
• Recoloured Greyscale Wil stuff?

Writing

I finished revising Chapter 7 (Asher's path) and also finished going through Chapter 8 surprisingly.

Chapter 8 is when Wil gets some really solid answers, for the first time, about what *exactly* the current situation is. We meet another 'antagonist' type figure that has been lurking around but that we've not gotten a clear look at until now as well.

Wil spends the rest of the chapter pissed off at everything. LoL

I had a conversation recently about how quickly my characters get over being angry sometimes. Wil does a lot of sulking about their situation in this chapter. They are going to have to get over it but just..not yet. Gotta spend a little time salty and planning how to travel the universe to kick their father's butt.

Chapter 8 is also the last chapter where I have to reset people's motivations.  I still have to make edits to things based on that reset, adjusting the fallout of these revelations over the next chapters.

But this was the last chapter setting it all up so this marks the end of the section I was *really* wanting to get edited.

Now I'm just battling the incessant urge to cram in more branching and increase the word count even more.

(Which I know everyone is always like 'add more, add more!' but realistically speaking I have to keep the branching reasonable. I do not actually want to write another 1,000,000 word game. If I add huge 1000 - 1500 word branches for Asher, I'm going to have to do the same for the other 5. And suddenly I've added 10,000 words, you know?

One of the other issues is that just because Asher has space for a huge branch, it doesn't mean the others wil so I really need to be careful about writing myself into difficult positions just because I see a pathway for doing it. LoL

I'm trying really hard to these word count bubbles where I suddenly add a ton of new words because I have to keep equity across the routes.)

I have added additional branching but somewhat smaller and I've really kept it to places I felt it was necessary.

As always, it's a journey of trying to balance out what I think will be interesting to the player with keeping scope manageable.

Art

Received a new BG sketch.

I also can't remember if this was last week (but I just didn't mention it) or if it was over the weekend...but I decided to finish colouring Greyscale Wil (™)

I've been playing with a greyscale version of Wil for the colour slider for a while now. But I really just recoloured 1 body, the 2 heads/faces and a couple of hairstyles and a couple of facial features (one mouth, one set of eyes, etc).

But I had to go back and recolour everything else to match. And there are a lot of parts for Wil so I've been kind of putting it off because it seemed kind of annoying.

There are four separate bodies, 2 heads, 8 sets of eyes, 4 mouths and 8 hairstyles. But the thing is...the eyes for head 1 and head 2 are different. And the hair for head 1 and head 2 is slightly different.

So for the eyes, there were really 16 to do and there were also 16 hairstyles to re-do.

I changed the alignment of some things as I recoloured and ultimately...it's all done now. I just have to re-save the images.

I think I may have recoloured the CG already. Or I may have started recolouring. I don't remember. But I have to look into that next and get it recoloured so that all the greyscale versions are ready to go.

But yeah, that is something that happened.

I also saved all the new images which...saving the files is probably one of the most annoying aspects because everything has to be saved with a specific naming strategy and in the current set-up some of the mouths and eyes have to be broken into two images.

Anyway, that's all done now too. So. 💪

Other

Worked more on the Fancy Guide.

Mostly I'm just trying to figure out the layout, how the choices are going to be set up, etc etc.

Also, just trying to decide what "extras" to include.

GS Stuff

I finished up an in-progress POV story for Jack this week. And am basically focusing on finishing up the other POV things I have in-progress so I can add those.

I have a couple more I want to write, some of which are loosely plotted out and some which require brainstorming.

Part of me wants to write like 20 little side stories but honestly I will never finish if I try to do that much so I'm trying really hard to limit myself to just a few - just the ones I have already written or have partially written and/or somewhat planned out.

We'll see how much I'm am able to resist temptation. 😩

Upcoming

Obviously my goal is to get the remaining chapters of Asher's route edited. Once that happens I will be going back to finish up the remaining route whose ending scenarios I haven't written yet.

I also want to finish up a few more of the side-stories for the Gilded Shadows lore book as I'm nearly done with it. NEARLY there.

So yeah. Lots of writing of course, as always.