17/10 Patreon Devlog

Hey guys! Here is this week's devlog. Back into the writing vortex! LoL. But there were a few other things that happened so...yeah! 

Let us begin. OwO

Summary:

• Lots of corrections to Caissa's route
• Just one new BG (with variations)
• Rewrote about half of Chapter 6
• Started Chapter 7

The Ramble:

This week was focused in both making corrections to Caissa's route and getting feedback as well as working on Jack's route again.

So far feedback for Caissa's route has been positive. People enjoyed the story and development and like Caissa as a character which is always wonderful news. There are, of course, numerous typos and the like. We're focusing on getting those pointed out so I can fix them. The early part of the week was mostly centred around that.

Most of the testers have reached the stage of replaying to try to access all the bad endings, which is a fun time for me (Mwa ha ha!). To be fair, though, Gilded Shadows has far fewer endings than Changeling and Caissa only has two bad endings so it's not that bad an experience this time around LoL.

I spent the latter half of the week delving back into Jack's route. I ended up rewriting part of Ch. 6 - mostly because I think I was just starting to burnout a little and the content wasn't flowing well. So I wanted to get that smoothed out and flowing better. I had a few continuity issues to resolve as well.

We're nearly mid-way through the route and this is when the romantic development starts to move a little faster so I'm looking forward to getting to explore that side of Jack and Morgan's relationship. I do think I'll have to do a lot of editing in the early chapters to make it build up better than it currently is. But that'll be something I do in the editing phase later.

I actually ended up making a lot of changes to Jack's plot as I was writing (mostly just due to spontaneous developments and ideas as I was writing.) I do try to plan out routes and this time around I have much more detailed outlines to work off of than I did with Changeling. But I really dislike simply sticking to the outline - especially when I'm really prone to getting new ideas as I go.

This means that I sometimes have some really brilliant (in my opinion) spontaneous ideas but it can slow down the writing process as I have to pause and work out logistics of new ideas or even go back and make continuity changes.

I can't remember if I talked about this idea that I have been utilising from day one - which is that queen ranks are able to visualise psi-energy. They don't see it, per se. It's just a sort of very clear mental image. For Morgan, her brain visualises psi as coloured energy around people. Initially I had Morgan "seeing" everyone with a unique colour/shape/structure where the density and vividness would vary based on strength. But at some point I thought it might be more interesting if Morgan's mind actually classifies people based on their rank. So everyone within a rank would be within the same colour family. (Density and vividness would still have to do with their strength, though.)

This would allow her to tell, at a glance, what someone's rank is though. And this means making some edits to earlier routes or anywhere in the story that was written before I made this change.

So this is just one example of how world building can change mid-way through. And it's also one reason I don't tend to like to publish any game content before the whole thing is complete. It means I get stuck in the setting and am unable to make changes if I get a new idea. This is why I could never do an episodic release. I'm way too much of a "plantser" by nature when it comes to writing.

Anyway, I'm in chapter seven now with Jack's route. It's kind of a low-key chapter because Jack spends most of it injured with Morgan taking care of him. So much of the chapter is that and Morgan talking to Caissa, who comes to visit. I'm not sure anything too exciting is going to happen.

I actually have been a little worried about Jack's numbers because it kept feeling like his chapters were, on average, longer than other routes. But I checked word counts for this stage of the writing in each routes and it's actually not too bad. Caleb's route was longer by this point than Jacks, Caissa's was about the same length, and Ari's was a little shorter.  So that makes me feel better. I was fearing his route would surpass Caleb's in word count and I'm trying REALLY HARD to keep them all about even.

So yeah. That's kind of this week's ramble!

I'm hoping I can do a lot of writing without interruption this weekend and get the next chapter completed or nearly complete. Would be nice!

Sneak Peeks and Previews:

This week we received…...Reuben's living room!

(currently I'm using Quill's living room as a placeholder for Reuben's place when Morgan teleports to him so it'll be nice to get the proper BG in there.)

This was the only completed background we got this week (well, we got a few variations for this room as well).

And, really, I don't think I did any other art so…*thinks*

Oh, I did make a minor adjustment to Jack's sprite - namely, just making his scar a little more visible. I've gotten repeated questions about whether he has a scar or if people are imagining it. LoL So I decided I should make it a little more obvious so people can be certain that, yes, Jack has a scar on his lip there. =3

Upcoming Week:

Upcoming week - probably just writing, really. This next chapter is laid back but the following chapter has some big events that take place so that'll be fun to write!

The last few weeks have been really distracting and there's been a lot going on from family issues to other real life things taking focus away from writing and game development. I'm really hoping the distractions end and I can start focusing again.

Anyway, see you next time! *waves*