24/04/2021 Patreon Devlog

Hi everyone! Time for this week's patreon devlog. Sorry it's coming so late in the day. I haven't been feeling great today. D=

This Week's Summary:

• Finished editing Magnus' route.
• Finished scripting Magnus' route
• Started editing Lance's route. Editing is now about 90% complete =O

The Ramble:

So at the start of this week I ended up taking a break I did not intend to take. Essentially I just sort of let myself work on something else for a little while and I realised I have been *seriously* needing a break from Gilded Shadows.

Sometimes I get so involved in a project that I don't actually stop to consider I've been working on it 8 - 10 hours a day for over a year and that bogs you down after a while. (A friend sort of teased me for not realising it's probably a *bad* thing to work this much. Rofl). Anyway, as I started focusing elsewhere, I had this moment of just realising it was super relaxing to pull my head out of Gilded Shadows for a while because I've been living and breathing it for a while. Especially during the last months of writing the script.

But after two days I picked up Gilded Shadows again and started editing and writing and scripting and all those things again. But I've been battling  not feeling well and computer issues.

Not sure what is going on with my laptop but it is acting really weird. Yet all scans insist it's fine. But it's been blue screening or restarting when I'm not looking. Plus the recent update took multiple attempts to work. So *something* is clearly going on. But I don't know what? And I can't afford to send it for repairs and be without a work computer for weeks. Because it will inevitably be at least two weeks. =w=;

So I don't know what to do. It's not even that old? It's barely 2 years old so...it's not some ancient dinosaur that needs to be replaced. *sigh*

Anyway, enough of that and on to the update.

I started editing Lance's route and this is the last of the OG Love Interests. When I'm done editing and scripting his route, the writing is pretty officially *over* for the base game.

The early chapters of Lance's route already got an editing pass while I was still writing on it so the editing for the first few chapters was minimal. Lance's route, some of you may remember, is shorter than all the others. And I really need to flesh it out because it's too short. I expect that I'll do most of the fleshing out in later chapters since the early ones are more polished than the rest but we'll have to see.

It wasn't until Chapter Five that I really did a lot of major edits. I know that Lance's route is going to require a lot of edits because I wrote it so quickly instead of taking my time and that's a recipe for needing a stronger editing phase. Which is fine! Sometimes it's like that!

Anyway, the first four chapters stayed very much the same but Chapter Five gained 300 words. I didn't do a massive amount of fleshing out but did a lot of cutting and rewriting. It was a talk-heavy chapter so I had to smooth out a lot of the conversations to make them flow better.

In other news I finished editing Magnus' route and also scripted his route entirely. I have close to 600,000 words completely scripted now.  I was relieved to see that coded, Magnus' route is almost the exact length of Jack's route (I was worried because the word processor count was a bit higher and I thought it would be too long but I think I just had a lot of notes for expressions and things so the coded word count wasn't as high as I expected).

Changeling, coded, was 686,000 words and I think we are certainly going to surpass that for Gilded Shadows. But I remain convinced I will still notf pass 700,000 for the base game. I do think I'm going to try to go back to the other routes and add in a few more early romance stat checks. Probably just small things - like the LI puts his hand on Morgan's back (or not) based on romance levels.

I was thinking about how sometimes even with romance meters it can be a struggle to know how well you're doing because you have no frame of reference for how well you can be doing. But I thought if there were a lot of romance variations on the flowchart that players could see if they are/are not unlocking it might be a better indication of how well they are doing.

In other news I think I've settled on Reuben's case revolving around solving an Esper related crime or maybe an Esper related murder case. Not really a murder mystery since it probably won't involve some kind of Dramatic Plot Twist (™), but at least something that involves Morgan acting as an Esper consultant for a serious Esper crime his division does not want to turn over to Endgame.

I haven't started *focusing* on planning his plot but I've been writing down ideas here and there so I can get going with it.

Yuu already has a fairly solid plot idea for his route.

Quill is the one where I'm still unsure which direction I'll take it. I have several ideas but I'm not sure which one is going to make the best story.

So...yeah. Also did some thinking/planning on that stuff this week!

Sneak Peeks and Previews:

I do not have any art previews this week. I was going to post a story snippet here but Lance's early chapters are full of spoilers so it's hard to find a passage I can safely post. @_@

Hopefully I will have something to show off next week in the realm of either art or writing.

(ALSO - Lance has *way* too many moments for cute CGs and I'm struggling to pick moments ;o;)

Upcoming Week:

This week I didn't get any sprite work done because I mostly focused on resting or editing. So maybe in the upcoming week? I do expect to finish editing Lance if not scripting him in the upcoming week. I may find some spare time to get some more sprite work done. If I get Lances' scripting done in the upcoming week, I'll officially be in "Art and Code" mode for the foreseeable future. =O

That's all for now!  I shall see you all next week.

~Esh