13/11/2023 Patreon Devlog

Hi everyone! Sorry this is a bit late! I didn't update over the weekend since my spouse got back from a 2 week trip and I've just been busy hanging out with him. 💖💖

Then today, of course, he's back to work so it was chaotic. LoL

Summary

• Finished Yren Chapter 9 stuff
• Re-planned some of the route endings
• Decided I really need to finish editing Asher's route before I can write those endings
• Re-edited Chapter 2
• Lost lorebook work and had to re-do quite a bit of it. Thank you, laptop. Appreciate that.

Ramble

Got a fair amount of writing done this week and made some critical decisions about my dev schedule. And some other stuff happened so keep reading!

Writing

This week I finished writing Yren's chapter 9 scenes and passed the 90% milestone with the script. Now, as always, the caveat here is that this 90% is against the projected word count which is a number I am going to surpass.

There is no way the game is only going to be 466k. This is just my starting estimate.

So when I give percentages, they're against that number but also, that number will be adjusted when I reach it. The reason I don't just adjust it now is that I don't really have a good way to estimate how far beyond 466k I will go.

Anyway, I have all the routes completed up to the point where they split off into their ending scenarios now.

Asher and Daaz, of course, are completed to the end. But the four remaining routes need their ending scenarios written. The endings are what will be most affected by some of the changes I want to make to the antagonists and motivations so that's why I decided that before I can continue to write the endings, I really need to edit one full game path including all the common plot points so that I can solidify the new things before I try to write endings that use those ideas.

So as much as it pains me, I'm going to actually pause forward progress and edit Asher's route.

This is about 200,000 words of content. (A little less....*for now* LoL). It's about 195,000 words.

This includes all the choices and all the LI specific content. With this style of game, it's a little difficult to calculate the linear word count manually because there are SO many choices. So I haven't really done that properly yet.  I'm not sure how many words the player will actually see on a given playthrough in a linear sense.

Editing this route gives me a good reason to figure that out though.

It's also hard to calculate what constitutes a "route" in a game like this. I definitely count all 1x1 scenes as being part of Asher's route. But what is tricky for me is interactions that are not 1x1, but are Asher-centric.

Do those count as part of the route - if they do, then pulling them out from the main content to calculate how many words they are is...annoying. Ha ha.

But I'll probably calculate those numbers too since I'm already doing the edit. By the time I'm done editing you guys are going to get some kind of huge chart with me explaining all of these calculations to you.

I decided to start completely over with my edit - it's just easier to keep things straight when I do it all at once.

And of course, despite having edited Chapter 2 multiple times, I still made a ton of changes. LoL

Art

So something I wanted to do and have sort of gotten started on but not completely jumped straight into is...

Sketching the CGs for the "main" love scene.

(So...explanation....it's set up sort of like GS where there is a larger, more detailed love scene during the story, then a smaller, less detailed love scene during the final resolution of each route.)

If you read the most recent Q&A post, you know I've been struggling with how much visual spice I want to put in the game. So I thought that I would maybe go back through the scenes and plan out CG composition (perhaps sketching the scenes) to see how they will all currently pan out.

As I mentioned in the Q&A, a lot of planning actually goes into when and where I put the CGs and there are a lot of different elements I try to keep in mind.

I just got the latest (and final, I think) iteration of the colour slider tool so now I can finally try to play with it and get a range of skin tones for a possible colour slider for Wil's hair and skin. 💪

We will see if I can make it work!

(Mind you, this is the very first test run. I know the lips are invisible. Ha ha. I have to recolour them separately and haven't done it yet in this screen cap!)

Other

None!

Upcoming

• GS Lorebook. *eternal crying* It's...It's....I have so much stuff left to add. *more crying*
• Writing

Since I will be editing, it's much harder to estimate how far I will be able to get in one week. So on the writing/editing note, we shall see.

I'm hoping as I solidify some of the plot additions, I'm able to smooth out the writing a bit. I've already managed to solve a couple of issue I had with early set-up of certain story elements. So.

Yay!