07/01/2023 Patreon Devlog

Hellloooo! Time for this week's devlog!

This Week's Summary:

• Second revision of Reuben's route is complete!
• Proofread up to Chapter 7
• Scripted up to Chapter 7

💪

The Ramble:

So!

This week I finished with the second round of revisions. I am done revising this route. (I say that with some level of understanding that I'll probably do more edits when it's coded because I always do. But I'm officially done).

As I mentioned, my next step is to feed it through a editing software to try to catch some of the smaller grammatical errors (missing punctuations, small misspellings, and things like that). It also checks for things like readability fixes (there's a whole range of suggestions it will make but most of them are just to slightly smooth out the wording such as suggesting the use of "despite" rather than "in spite of").

It also highlights adverbs and overused words like "just".

I check every chapter and clean them up, then dump them into Renpy. The chapters then have to be formatted to be functional code, basically. (This is what I mean when I say "scripted")

So that's the stage I'm at right now. I think last week I said I was going to edit, then do flowcharts, then do scripting but I don't know why I said that because I always do the flowcharts *after* it's scripted. So anyway.

Yeah!

At this point I have started to shift away from writing and into coding. I will consider the writing officially "complete" once the whole thing has been scanned for typos.

Sneak Peeks:

😩 Some day I will have something to post here again.

Upcoming Week:

This week, I expect to get finished with scripting the story early in the week. It doesn't take long to scan and script a chapter.

Once that is done, I think I will probably do the flowcharts and that will probably take the rest of the week (and the week after). Flowcharts are much more time consuming.

I essentially make a mock-up of the charts in a flowchart program and then I have to create the same thing manually with the GS graphics. Then I have to code it and because they are image maps that means I need the coordinates of every little "scene module" in the image because the code uses those coordinates to know which part of the image to unlock.

Each module is then associated with a variable that is associated with a scene in the story and I have to go find the scene and make that variable get set to "True" so the associated module unlocks at the right place. And then it has to be tested because sometimes I mix up the modules and put them in the wrong scenes or there's a typo that prevents it from unlocking or my coordinates are off so the image doesn't look right, etc etc.

Essentially, each chapter flowchart is several hours of work to set up. So it takes a couple of days to get a route's flowchart entirely done. So that will be my next "big" focus after the route is entirely proofread and scripted!