16/07/2022 Patreon Devlog

Hellloo everyone! I'm feeling a little better this week (but still in pain unfortunately. ;A;) Let us jump into the update!

This Week's Summary:

• Second revision is complete up to Ch 10

The Ramble:

So this week I have mostly been focused on doing line edits and small fixes but I realised by around Ch 5 or Ch 6 that I needed to make a really big change/fix and that took up most of my time this week.

So what was it?

Weelllll~

Basically when I finished the first draft of the story I knew there were a few things that would need fixing:

• the villain is non-present through much of the route and only shows up at the end. While this happens in other routes and works okay, it doesn't work as well here. It would be like Trent never actually showing up on screen until the final scene or something. I knew it didn't work and I'd need to bring the antagonist in earlier.
• there was another element that was mentioned a few times but really felt shoehorned in at the very end and I had to fix that.
• the antagonist's motivations felt overly complicated and I decided I needed to simplify them because the story was trying to juggle too much.
• the romance element of the story felt weak and I knew I'd need to increase the romantic scenes and interactions to make it feel more natural

The first draft involved massive amounts of re-working and fixing. By the end, the route was 120,000 words strong (too long!) and I'd solved two of the above issues very solidly, while improving the other two.

As I continued into my second edit, I just realised that, while the first two bullet points were better, it wasn't enough.

The problem was that I knew I needed to bring in the Research Institute more and I knew I really, really needed a scene with Morgan x Antagonist interacting directly and without anyone else there.

But the route is already too long and I needed to be cutting content, not adding content.

There was one scene in Chapter 9 I was already planning to reduce. It had become borderline superfluous when I simplified the antagonist's motivations. This scene also had a lot of build up in Chapter 8 (and also has some mentions in Chapter 10). There were probably 4000-4500 words of content relating to this scene that could be cut to make room for a new scene involving Morgan, the Research Institute, and the antagonist.

So that is what I did.

The Ch 9 scene was cut and moved to an off screen occurrence and I wrote a brand new scene involving Morgan geeking out and then having to interact with the antagonist. This one scene solves multiple issues. But it did involve a lot of cutting, creating new content, and then fixing things for continuity.

It also cut a cameo from another character but, alas, sometimes it is like that. 😔

The end result was that, in total, I have mostly fixed the two problems I needed to fix and I even managed to slash about 700 words off the total word count in the process. So it was a very successful week in that regard.

This is the last chapter before the final act starts so after I get through Ch 10, it's all the action scenes. These were mostly cleaned up during the last revision so I am hoping I can get through Ch 11, 12, and 13 quickly.

One thing that has been really fun is just adding in some really silly and flirty moments between Quill and Morgan. I feel like they do more flirting, almost, than Morgan and Lance even.

Sneak Peeks:

None this time! 😭😭😭😭 

I could show you a photo of me with a heat pack, curled up with my laptop editing. But who wants to see that? LoL 🤣🤣

Upcoming Week:

I am really hoping to finish up revisions THIS WEEK. 💪

And by that I mean that I'll shift to editing typos. LoL

Editing purgatory continues.

I've been giving a lot of thought the character designs for the androids and cyborgs (Neo Humans and Augments in the game). Quill, of course, looks 100% human but I think I may give at least one of the other NH characters unusual eyes or some trait to remind players these are not humans.

There is now a new "extra" who will probably get a Bob sprite (similar to some of the other named Bobs) who is an Augment so I'm thinking about how to design him so it's obvious. I'm looking forward to getting to that stage just because I think it'll be fun to design some of these characters.

(Also, I'm really torn on how to design the antagonist. I'm kind of leaning toward attractive in an annoying way.) LoL

Anyway, that's all for now.

Side note: Patreon looks weird to me this week. I am not sure if it's just me or if they did slightly alter the design. 👀