16/06/2023 Patreon Devlog (Gilded Shadows)

Hi! Time for this week's dev log!

This Week's Summary:

• Finished the structural revision
• Started proofreading (up through Ch 6)
• Scripted (basic coding) of Chapters 1-6
• Made the chapter landing screens
• Started on the flowchart templates (up through Ch 4)

The Ramble:

So this week was kind of a weird one since we had a three day weekend last weekend - which meant I really only had 4 work days this week. (Since it's very difficult to work if my spouse is home staring at me with puppy eyes and interrupting me constantly).

Then our heater broke and I had to deal with that on Tuesday which meant I didn't get as much done as I wanted since we had a repair guy to deal with.

So basically it was an annoying week!

I finished with the first bout of structural revision. I do want to go through Chapters 8-11 one more time just to clean up again since I made major edits to those chapters. But I decided to go through and proofread Chapters 1-7 first and then I'll revise and proofread the rest at the same time.

(Proofreading - feeding it to an editing software to find the minor issues I have no hope of seeing on my own at this point).

I also made the chapter landing pages (which I usually do at the point I start coding the chapters since all the chapters essentially have the same code at the start - which hides the dialogue box and shows an image...and it's nice to get that all set up in advance of putting the script in) and did some other code-related prep for Yuu's route (such as setting up the ending variables and the like.

And finally, since Friday was another struggle-to-focus-due-to-outside-factors day, I started working on the flowchart templates!

I always create the flowcharts in a mind mapping program first so I have a template to follow when I start building the official images for the game.

Sneak Peeks:

Look! I have....IMAGES!

First chapters usually don't have super interesting branching. LoL - but you can see Yuu has a lot of the small personality variations happening. A lot. @_@

His branching gets more interesting later, I think (hope?!)

Yuu's first chapter is officially accessible! (to me. Mwa ha ha) ╰(*°▽°*)╯

Yuu's route is written in a way that really does assume the player has played the other Endgame routes. I don't think it matters much for people who have been playing as I release the routes but for any  new players, I feel like I need to warn them that the route is honestly not going to read as well if you play it as your first Endgame route.

For one thing, Yuu's route has a 4 week time skip where all the others take up basically right after Morgan's escape attempt. Rather than re-hash her initial feelings about Endgame for the fourth time, I really felt it was best to orchestrate a skip that let us move on quickly.

There are some other aspects of Yuu's route that, in my opinion, make it work better as the last Endgame EG route but I settled on saying "at least one" instead of "ALL THE OTHERS!" So...yeah!

I did end up having to get one finaaaal background. The lens flares make it feel especially Star Trek-y but. You know. We'll just roll with it ha ha. (￣y▽,￣)╭ 

Upcoming Week:

Okay so my plan this week was a little different than intended but in the upcoming week I'll finish doing the final proofread and scripting as well as do a quick second revision pass of a few of the chapters that may  need it.

I'm hoping I can have Yuu's route fully scripted by the end of next week and hopefully I'll be able to start working on his flowcharts next as they are the next big chunk of work that needs to get done.

Ah! With the currently coded in Yuu chapters, the word count is at 981,000 words! Slowly crawling to that 1,000,000 mark. 👀