19/08/2023 Patreon Devlog (WSC)

Hi everyone! So as Gilded Shadows winds down and When Stars Collide picks up, I will start making the general developer logs for WSC available to all tiers.

And I will start doing them on a regular schedule.

Any spoilers or major sneak peeks will remain exclusive to the relevant tiers, though.

For now I want to do a quick update to let everyone in on some of the work I've done on the project since my last "ramble."

I have not written much this week as I've been busy getting the beta of GS ready to go. But I've been working on some other things.

I have made a lot of minor visual changes to the game - including simple things like simply slightly changing the visual look of the chapter screens.

New background art is slooowly coming in.

(No idea why the colours in that screen cap look off, but they do look weird.) （⊙ｏ⊙）

The artist is currently working at a pace of about 1 BG every two weeks. This does put the BG completion quite far down the line. But since I don't want to start releasing proper episodes until the writing is done anyway, it's not that big a deal. It gives me time to write the remaining story and do edits.

As you can tell, we've had a dramatic increase in the lens flare budget.

And the hexagon budget also had a significant increase. (づ￣ 3￣)づ

Another thing I have been experimenting with is this:

Instead of cutting away to show BGs outside the ship, I thought the use of cut ins like this would be more interesting and just have a better 'feel' to them. I may play more with the size and shape (such as making them a little taller since they're a bit narrow. But this is the general idea.

Of course, other features will also be appearing in the next release - Things like the new music room.

I have a coder friend who is going to help me get some of the other features up and running (like the flowcharts) so those will hopefully all be ready to show off in the next couple of months.

Now then. Other things:

Writing

As I've mentioned a couple of times, I intend to have the writing fully complete (drafted and edited) before I start episode releases.

This is for my sanity and also to benefit players as you won't have to worry about huge delays between episodes due to writing taking forever. The delay between updates will actually just be for the art and coding, which should allow me to keep to an even schedule.

Now that GS is wrapping up, I will be able to allocate more of my time to writing WSC.

Until now, I've worked on this game on weekends and sometimes late at night. But now I feel I can devote some time during the work week to it as I continue to wrap up all the Gilded Shadows obligations.

WSC currently stands at just about 65% complete. (If you have seen previous updates that indicated it was in the 60-70% complete range and wonder why it's still there despite my claims to have been working on it....that's due to the fact that an entire new route was added. That would obviously decrease the percentage complete even if my word count has increased. LoL)

I have been pretty lax in my approach to writing this project because it has been so far on the back burner that there was no reason to have a strict writing schedule. But times are changing.

I have updated my spreadsheets to help me focus on a more steady writing progress and have done some maths and set up a tiered writing goal system similar to what I normally use. This way my progress will be a little less up and down moving forward and will, hopefully, progress at a more steady pace.

I don't expect to be working on WSC *full* time just yet, I think it has graduated from being just a "late night and weekends" project to a "part time" project. So I am hoping there will be a slight increase in the development speed for my part of things (IE the writing).

But the time division between GS and WSC will still be slanted towards GS. So we're looking at something like a 70/30 time divide between the two projects during the week.

We'll see how it goes for a couple of weeks and I can make schedule adjustments as needed.

Anyway, that's all for now. We will see what next week brings and I will see you then for a new devlog.