18/03/2023 Patreon Devlog

Hello! Time for the devlog!

Sorry for posting a little bit late this week - I wrote up the update last night so my brain was convinced I'd already done it. Which isn't technically wrong. But not really correct either.

First this week I want to note a big milestone that happened this week! Gilded Shadows has officially been out for one year! I was really hoping to be done with the additional routes by this point but it's not like I'm making progress so I'm content with how things are going.

This Week's Summary:

• Made corrections to Reuben's route and updated beta (while breaking a CG)
• Wrote about half of chapter four
• Worked on art book art
• Re-organising lore into Obsidian in prep for lore book

The Ramble:

Okaaaay. So the first thing I did this week was go through the google drive files and make corrections.

There were quite a few weird typos this time around but beta testers, as always, are quite thorough. I released an update to the beta as people are still testing and I want them to be able to play through a corrected version.

Then I (hilariously) broke one of the CGS. It's fixed now but it was broken in a truly funny way. Morgan was basically invisible - except her hair. Very....invisible woman of her.

I didn't write as much in Yuu's route this week as I was doing corrections and some other things. I'm about halfway through chapter four. I did pass the 1,000,000 word mark though!

Now, that's the uncoded word count. The coded word count is probably more like 950,000 words. I do expect to pass 1 million in the final coded count. But I'm not there yet.

Another thing I did this week was work on art book art.

I am trying to do a few extra pieces for the art book - things that aren't the game so it's not just made up entirely of game art. So I did a few pieces this week for that.

I also worked on organising the lore for the lore book.

This mostly entailed taking all the glossary entries in the game and putting them in obsidian, then stripping the code out and re-organising them so they make more logical sense for a book format.

The lore book is not going to just be a repackaged version of the glossary but the glossary information is going to be in the lore book. I'm expanding on some of it and adding "developer notes" or "developer history" to talk about how I came up with the concepts and how they developed from their initial conception. Or to add details and context that isn't in the game.

In addition I am adding lore that didn't make it into the game for various reasons.

I also dumped some of the short stories I've written into the obsidian vault and have started adding some of my developer notes and history.

Overall, right now, it's about 30,000 words of content. I would imagine that's going to double. I assume. I mean, I have a lot of stuff to add still.

I'll also be designing the book in affinity publisher this time so I'm kind of looking at designs and seeing what I want to do with that.

I wasn't really planning to do lore book stuff this week but honestly it's been on my mind for a little bit now that I really need to get this stuff organised. Obsidian is a really good tool for it. I wasn't in the mood to write today (Friday) so I worked on that instead since it has to happen anyway.

Seeing how the lore is going to come together is actually pretty exciting. I think the lore book is going to be really fun and I'm looking forward to designing it visually as well.

Sneak Peeks:

Art book art? Caleb....being a nerd?

Upcoming Week:

I don't know if I will do more corrections this coming week - probably. I imagine it'll depend a bit on what beta testers are doing and if anyone is still actively testing.

I will definitely be writing some more though. And I really have to design the achievement icons - I know what they will be but I've been putting it off because there have been more fun things to do. LoL

But yeah - more of the same. Testing Reuben, writing Yuu, maybe working on the lore book and such.