09/08 Patreon Devlog

 Hey guys! 

Time for this week's devlog. 

It's a little late again - I've been really absorbed in wrapping up Caleb's route. And, well, I'll get into that below! But here we are! 

Summary:

• Finished editing Caleb's route. IT IS DONE (more or less).
• One new, completed BG artwork
• Worked on a new flower wallpaper for you guys
• Released the sneak peek of Ari and Caissa!

The Ramble:

So I managed to complete Caleb's route. The last two chapters were pretty messy and needed a lot of reworking. Especially chapter 13. I edited and cleaned it up pretty much sticking close to the original flow of events…

Then decided I wasn't happy with it and rewrote half of it. LoL

I mean, that happens sometimes.

There's just a lot going on in that scene while Morgan is busy with something and it was hard to balance everything so I had to sort of shift things up and change the scene focus a little. The same stuff happens; it just doesn't happen in the same way.

One thing I'm struggling with (I don't know if 'struggle') is the right word is that Morgan is built up as this powerful queen rank and I want to show that but at the same time…

If she's only a couple of months into psi-training I don't think I can have her be this all powerful telekinetic either. 

I don't want her to feel Mary-Sueish in that regard. So I'm trying to balance out showing that she's quite strong but mostly that she has a lot of potential and that's where her true value lies. We may never see her full potential in some of the routes because she doesn't get that far in her psi-growth. But we can see that it's there.

The other thing happening in Endgame is that while the current plots always get tied up and the day is appropriately saved...that doesn't mean all the problems get totally solved. In Caleb's route, the bad guy actually gets away.

And they know there will end up being future encounters with him. I mostly do this to show that there's no finality - the story continues and Morgan's still only at the start of her journey when the routes finish.

Anyway, with Caleb's route done, I will probably start to import his script into the game. This actually doesn't take that long. I would say that it's maybe about half an hour per chapter (if that.)

Script importing largely just involves copying and pasting the route into the game files and reformatting some things. In the game, all the lines of narrative have to be offset with quotation marks - and while I try to include those as I write, I inevitably miss some. So I have to fix any of that.

(By the way, for those of you who talk to me on Discord - if you ever see me add stray quotes to something, the reason is because I get so used to doing it when writing that I kind of go into auto-mode when typing. LoL So I add them when chatting sometimes too).

I also have to format all the choice menus. 

When coding, the way things are indented matters a lot. And renpy cannot read "tab"/"indent" characters from other programs. So I have to add in all the proper indentation at the time of coding. And make sure that everything has the right punctuation, etc. Like I said, it's mostly just small formatting stuff and it doesn't take long. 

Adding in the assets (sprites, backgrounds, music, etc) is what takes the most time while coding. I can get the script fully imported in a couple of hours. Doing all the sprites in a route can take a week or two. @_@ It's pretty time consuming.

I'll also be starting to finish up Ari's route. I think I'm already through chapter four of Ari's route editing-wise but I believe I need to re-do one some of them to remove a character. Either way, I think Ari won't take as long as Caleb did. As a whole, the route is just more polished. Caleb's route was a disaster so some of the chapters really had to essentially just be re-written or nearly started over. 

I think last week I said I would do Caissa's route next since I have all his BGs and can actually add them in when I import the script. But then I realised I'm so much further along in Ari's route that it really makes more sense to just finish his up rather than focus on Caissa. I like being able to tick things off a list as "DONE" and I can do that with Ari faster than Caissa.

So this week will be editing Ari's route! 

I have somewhat turned my thoughts to CGs. I don't know for sure that I'll start working on these just yet but once these routes are totally complete writing-wise, nothing stops me from working on the CGs for them. 

I still haven't really made up my mind on how many CGs per route. Changeling had 5 and while that was a lot for one person, I won't lie...even I felt like it wasn't enough.

I'd much prefer to do 7 per route. We'll have to see. That's a lot of CGs but the art style is a little easier on me this time around so I might be able to manage it? I'd like to anyway. I definitely want both love scenes in each route to have a CG + *potentially* one bad ending CG per route. If I do five, that only leaves two more scenes to get CGs. If I do seven, I still get four more CG moments beyond the love scenes and a bad ending. 

I don't know. I am going to aim for 7. But we'll see. LoL. WE WILL SEE.

Sneak Peeks and Previews:

This week in backgrounds……..

Night! 

This rooftop is where one of my favourite Caissa-route moments happens. 

We'll probably end up reusing it for other scenes as well. But yes! Caissa route + star gazing on the night side of the planet. Fun times! 

Also have been working on Yuu's flower wallpaper!

Upcoming Week:

Editing...more.

I forgot to mention (I've ranted about word counts a lot so I'm sure some of you are sick of it) but Caleb's route ended up at 113,000 words. =w=

I guess I'm going to stop trying so hard to cut down Ari's word count because I want to try to keep all the routes within 5-6k of each other. And I honestly do not think there's much in Caleb's I can cut. In fact, I worry that some scenes still will end up needing expanding once I see how it flows in the game.

*sigh* LoL

When I first started writing, I started the route word count goals at 80k. Then booped it up to 100k when I realised (very quickly) that 80k is unrealistic for me for a branching storyline. (Keep in mind that the routes each have around 30% branching. So a 100k route means the player sees around 70k on their playthrough. A straight read of the story is about like reading a YA novel. If 80k was my maximum word count, the linear story would only be about 56k long - shorter than a normal novel by a lot. I think that's why I struggle to do routes less than 100k. I don't know…)

ANYWAY. What I was saying is that I jumped the goal up to 100k, then 110k when I realised I'd be consistently going over 100k. Then, in a fit of stubbornness, I was like 'NO. ONLY 100k. >=O" And was *determined* that 100k was my max, so I lowered my word count.

Here I am, three routes in and I'm like…"*sigh*....it's gotta be 110k, right? =w=" LoL 

So I *GUESS* 110,000 words per route is my maximum (*stares at Caleb who is past that by 3k). And I think I'm going to try to keep the routes within 8000 words of each other. With the way we're calculating play time for this game, 8000 words is about half an hour of play time. I think keeping the routes all within ~30 minutes of each other in terms of overall playable content should be fine.

I guess if someone complains about it this time, I'll just have to shrug and say "It is what it is!" LoL.

(It's hard though! Sometimes you really do want to take and apply feedback. Then you just realise you're a verbose weirdo and it's impossible for you! LoL)

SO YEAH. I guess that was your second ramble for this particular dev log.

I will be editing in the upcoming week and tentatively looking for an additional BG artist. Both the ones we've worked with have seriously slowed down their production time. One of them is up to about 3 weeks per background. So I really want to find someone at about the same pay rate to supplement these guys and maybe get a faster turn around on our remaining BG art. It can be hard to find artists who can match this style at a reasonable price. But I shall endeavour to do so! 

And that is all for this update! Hope you guys enjoyed my rambles!