27/02/2021 Patreon Devlog

Hi everyone! Time for this week's patreon devlog. It's a little shorter this week since I spent the whole time writing! LoL

This Week's Summary:

• Finished chapter 8 (almost)
• New BG sketch
• Sketching out some new game features

The Ramble:

This will probably be a very short ramble this week because all I did was write and think about things.

So for writing, I finished up Lance Chapter 7 and have mostly gotten through Chapter 8 - there are maybe 500 words left in this chapter - I ended up tacking a little scene onto the end of it so it turned out a bit longer than expected. I imagine I'll finish it up and start Chapter 9 today.

We crossed the 50% mark for Lance's route, which is awesome. I'm hoping it's not much longer before it's finished.

There's not much to say about the writing beyond that the next couple of chapters will bring back in the over-arching plot theme  of people being after Morgan. She's had a reprieve due to being off in the Wastes but that is about to end.

In other news I've been thinking of a few new features for the game (small things) that will be beneficial to the player. Nothing major or ground breaking - just indicators for various things.

Right now it's all still very much in the sketching-out stages so I'll probably give more details about what I'm thinking of later on. But it would definitely help the player be more aware of their general progress. The romance meters can be useful for that but I feel like without a frame of reference it can still be difficult to interpret the meters and work out what it means for it to be at certain levels.

I'm also contemplating having an option to entire remove sexual content - so that the characters do not have sex (not even implied) in the game and the kisses remain very briefly described. This will require some additional writing, but not much. And it'll make the game more friendly for people who are uncomfortable with any sexual content - the current set up fades to black after some intense kissing so currently I feel there are some players that might find those areas stressful.

So yeah. Thinking about that.

I think there was something else but I'm forgetting what it is at the moment so...there we go! LoL

Sneak Peeks and Previews:

For our new BGs, I reached out again to Son Huynh, one of our previous artists. He was lovely to work with and he's a little less busy than Vui so I think we should get through this small batch pretty quickly.

This is one of the few completely new areas we're getting done.

A lot of the areas are "transition" areas in that they are meant to bridge two existing BGs together. Sometimes you can just have characters skip from one place to another but there are times I find it awkward to do that without a transition area (a hallway, an exterior, etc).

Most of the BGs we're getting this time around are transition areas within existing environments to help bridge scenes together better. This one *is* in the Twilight Wastes, but is a stand alone BG where numerous lengthy scenes will take place.

Including Morgan pulling a hilariously dumb stunt that gets her injured……again. LoL

Upcoming Week:

W R I T I N G

I do expect that my writing will start to slow down over the next few chapters.

There's going to be a lot more going on right up to the story climax in Chapter 13. The latter half of the route is always more difficult to write and while Lance's route has been REALLY relaxed until now, that is about to change.

I'm hoping to get through with Chapter 9 this week. I have a feeling this chapter is going to require a lot of on-the-fly research, though. So it may take me a little longer to write than previous chapters.

It involves an archaeological dig and I do want it to read correctly.

So yeah, that's basically it this week. I'm still keeping my focus solidly on writing and not allowing myself to stray much from that. So I expect the next few updates will be a little lacklustre as "Yup, still writing!" isn't always the most interesting thing to ramble about.