02/01 Patreon Devlog

Hello everyone, and Happy New Year.

Welcome to the first devlog of 2021!

This Week's Summary:

• Completed Maggie Chapter Six
• Completed to about halfway through chapter seven
• Maggie's route is now 58,000 words - a little over half complete
• One new BG
• Updated Renpy to the new 7.4 full release (it's not really different from the pre-release though. LoL)

Year in Review:

It has been a WILD ride this year, hasn't it?

In my first devlog of 2021, I had one route of Gilded Shadows complete (Ari's route), and the common route of course.  I was writing Chapter Two of Caissa's route. The script was around 200,000 words long.

I finished Caissa's route a little after our Kickstarter. His route took longer than I'd have liked because, well, there was a Kickstarter to manage in the middle of it.

I then went on to work on Caleb's route. Caleb's route proved quite difficult to work on because I started second guessing some of my decisions and worrying too much about the end product. I ended up having to stop forward progress on his route and go back to edit and fix it before it was done. There was what we jokingly refer to as the "Calebpocalypse" where a comment I made on tumblr created a sort of avalanche complaining about Caleb being "too mean" in the common route. I came incredibly close to actually just removing him as a love interest because I was fed up and frustrated.

But Caleb survived and so did I. LoL

I then worked on Jack's route which also proved problematic in a way. I became aware of another project that has a very similar character in both appearance and personality, down to some of Jack's more specific and minor details. This made me begin to question his character and, again, second guess decisions. I felt pressured (by myself - no one else) to veer away from my original plans so I could present Jack a bit differently than expected in the hopes of differentiating him from this other character. This was my own choice but I also resented (and still do a little) feeling forced to do that. Because of this, Jack's route was a struggle to complete as well, and I was stressing out about it much more than I normally would have. But I finally finished it. Time will tell if I'm still happy with it by the time I get around to editing it.

And I began work on Magnus' route. Currently, I'm halfway through it.

The year started with 200,000 words and is now over 550,000 words. When I look at all my progress spreadsheets and realise in spite of a year of work, the project is only about 60% complete, I feel a little bad. I wanted it to be further along by now. But realising I've written 350,000 words over the course of this year makes me feel a bit better. I know authors can take months and years to write entire novels and I've written the equivalent of several.

Not to pat myself on the back but I think that's pretty awesome.

In addition to writing, I worked on numerous sprites and several CGs. I also pushed out multiple updates to the demo. We went from a small, single chapter demo to the entire common route being available.

We launched an ultimately successful Kickstarter that funded within the first 24 hours - which was amazing.

We were able to commission nearly all our background art, slowly watching this bizarre world in my head take shape visually.

Of course, all of this happened during a year otherwise brimming with turmoil and heartache. When I ran the Changeling Kickstarter in 2017 I said that barring anything dramatic happening, development would go smoothly. By the end of the year we had begun the long, stressful journey of moving to another continent. 

In 2020, I said development would go smoothly barring something dramatic happening like last time. Within weeks of the KS finishing, it became clear the pandemic wouldn't be just a little blip but something that would dominate the year and leave its mark on our development progress.

I've had to get accustomed to working at home with someone else - which has been a huge challenge. I'm used to having uninterrupted quiet for much of my day. That is no longer something I am guaranteed on a given day. I really underestimated how much I rely on that quiet to be able to focus on writing. And not having it has really slowed me down significantly.

I'm also used to having several hours of quiet after my spouse has gone to bed, but he has been staying up later due to not having to get up early to catch a train. So this has absolutely destroyed my usual method of working. That has been a real challenge to overcome.

As well as just the stress of watching the world deal with so much tragedy. 

I never realised how much I needed tranquility to create, but it's clear I'm not a person who can work well without it. I get easily distracted by the goings on in the world and the stress of of being an observer to so much global hardship has sometimes made creating very, very difficult. Not to mention worrying for friends and family and acquaintances on a daily basis...

Keeping my own headspace clear and ready to be a chipper game dev each day is not something I have succeeded at.

But I have tried my best to persist.

The Ramble:

Going into 2021, I'm going to try to adhere to a much stricter set of word count goals. Rather than a somewhat loose goal of 1000(ish) words per day, I am going to really focus on keeping track of exactly how many words per day are needed to finish a route by a specific deadline. 

I don't usually set hard deadlines for myself because I just like being more flexible and allowing for days I'd rather draw than write. But I really want to to get the writing *done.*

In the past, using a very rigid goal structure has helped me stay focused when focusing has become a problem. I've never gone with a strategy quite as structured as what I'm doing right now…

But I really want to have Magnus' rough draft finished by the end of January. And I want to have Lance's finished by...if I'm being totally fair to myself...mid-April. February is a short month and I know I will need some time to restructure his synopsis so I won't be able to begin writing it immediately after finishing Magnus. So I want to give myself to mid-April rather than the end of March.

When Lance's route is complete, my next step will be to edit Jack, Magnus, and Lance, then import their scripts into the game.

At this point, the entire game will be available for alpha testing.

I'm hoping that this will happen by mid-May.

I will then start going route by route to finish all sprites and CGs. I haven't decided if I will asset-code each route after all the artwork for it is done, or if I'll try to complete all the artwork then asset-code everything at once.

One of the last things I'll probably do is set up the wiki articles. They won't really take that long so I'll just save it for the end. Probably.

It is a lot of work that remains but it's important to remember that not everything holds the same weight in terms of how much space it takes up within the development process.

If we think of a full route as writing, editing, scripting, assets, and art...the process might look something like this (in a perfect, ideal situation - we know reality is messy and delays are a thing):

8 weeks to write

2 weeks to edit

1 - 2 days to script

1 week to asset code

2 - 3 weeks to complete the CGs

At the maximum that's about 14 weeks per route (again...ideally. Obviously some routes took 3 or 4 months to write). You can see that over half of this process is writing. Meanwhile, scripting is barely anything.

The point is that after the writing is done, the other things start to fall into place fairly quickly because those things just don't take as long.

It's one reason I prefer to just get the writing done as soon as I can. It is such a weight off my chest when it's complete.

(Caveat here - three routes will be written after the game is released, of course. Which means technically the writing for GS won't be finished after Lance's route is done. But I guess the writing for this phase of the project will be done. The expansion phase is just...a different part of the process.)

So getting back to what I've done this week and what I'm currently working on…

This chapter in Maggie's route is when the big plot catalyst happens. The event at the end of chapter seven is what sets everything in motion for the rest of the route. It's also going to be where you see the shift in Magnus/Morgan's relationship.

I've been building up the Endgame council as an antagonistic force. Now they are going to make their big move. And it's going to set things on the path needed for the rest of the route.

I think a lot of Maggie's idiocy and flirting will be added into the route during editing. That kind of stuff isn't always easy to come up with on the fly. Rather than stop and constantly think about how to portray his weird personality, it's easier to have him be sort of...vaguely Magnus flavoured then add in the full amount of brattiness later on.

Right now I'm mostly trying to get the right events in the right place. I'll worry about characterisation later.

So yeah. That's what's going on in writing this week.

Sneak Peeks and Previews:

Finally, the lobby of the Endgame HQ…

We only have two more BGs left after this. I know one of them is the training room, which I'm having redone. And the other one…

I don't really remember what it is. OwO;;; It is an Endgame related BG I think. *ponders* 8|

Oh! The lounge...right. Oof. So yeah. Training room and lounge are the last two I believe.

Anyway.....lobby!

(As you all can see, the Futuristic Hexagons have returned. LoL)

Upcoming Week:

I want to get about 12000 words written in Maggie's route. This will put me about halfway through Chapter Nine in the next update, if I'm able to accomplish it.

My ultimate goal is about 1700 words per day but I'm actually trying to overshoot that amount by at least a little each day because the more I overshoot my daily goals, the less I have to write the next day.

This means that toward the end of the route when the chapters are naturally getting more difficult to write (story climaxes are always a little slower to write since they need more planning), my word count goals will also be smaller.

So that is my plan. I expect we'll probably get a background sketch of some kind in the next few days. We only have one BG artist working on backgrounds right now. And he takes about two weeks per BG. We just got the lobby so we should get a sketch for one of the other two  this week...

Hopefully we can expect the BGs to be completed by the end of January. That would be great. But we'll have to see! 

Anyway, that's all for now. We will see you guys next week!