Patreon Devlog 26/06

Hi Everyone!

Esh here. Brace yourselves for a text wall ramble of doom! 8D

Writing:

Okay - let's start with the simple things.

1. I've been working on Jack's route and have my rough draft of chapter one complete! This chapter is so different from the other first chapters I've written so far. In the Endgame routes, Morgan spends the first couple of chapters - but especially chapter one - learning about and becoming accustomed to her new environment. One she never wanted and chose...but only because the other options were frightening. 

In Caissa's route, it's very much the same. She chooses to go with Jack, but doesn't really know what she's getting herself into so when she ends up in this Mob boss' mansion, she is kind of freaking out.

Jack's first chapter isn't really like that because she ends up exactly where she expected to end up. She's shocked to learn that there are ties with Crimson but Jack is able to fully explain Caissa's situation so Morgan is, at best, a bit wary. 

There's a lot less freaking out and "coping" going on in this chapter which was something I realised as I was writing it. As such, this first chapter is a little shorter and simpler than the others. 

It was refreshing to be able to write something slightly different than what I've done so far! 

2. Editing Ari's route! Overall, I decided to reduce my target word count from 110k to 100k. I initially set it to 110,000 after Ari's route ended up at about 109,000. Because my goal is to keep all the routes within about 5k of each other, I decided I'd have to increase the size of the other routes to match Ari's. 

However, I recently decided to...not do that. And to set a goal of 100k for each route again. And now I'm actually trying to edit Ari's route *down.* If I can get it to 105k or less, it should be fine. As of right now, Ari's route is a little over 107k and I'm around 40% through with editing it. So I still need to trim around 2000 words to hit my maximum word allowance.

I usually do cut a fair amount when I'm editing, but my main issue is that I also tend to massively flesh things out as I write so I inevitably add more than I cut. I'm being much more careful about this for Gilded Shadows and am just watching my word counts more carefully.

So that's the easy stuff. The difficult stuff is, of course.

Caleb.

This jerk. =w=;

So I finally decided it was going to be necessary for me to re-think his plot and restructure his route a little. As you guys know, this route has been giving me problems for *weeks.* I wanted to be done with it over a month ago and I'm still sitting at about 80% complete. This is...ridiculous.

When a route gives me this much trouble, it's time to stop and try to figure out what the problem is. And I think it's just that the plot isn't coming together the way I wanted it to.

Caleb's route has gone through a couple of revamps already and I'm going to have to revamp it one more time.

I'm keeping the same overall themes and some of the major elements, but I'm changing what we're building up to. This means the latter half of the route is what really is going to get the most substantial amount of changes. Early chapters will only need some minor edits to bring them into alignment.

I actually really love my initial plot idea but I think the scope is just too big for a visual novel. The limitations imposed by things like art…can be really difficult to work around in a visual novel. It doesn't seem like it should be that big a problem but sometimes I have to try to severely limit scenes I need to existing locations (Backgrounds are too expensive to get a background I only use one time. So everything has to happen in places I can re-use for other scenes in other routes). Or I have to consider how many additional sprites a given scene might need. For a plot with a large scope, this can be really tricky to manage. 

My other issue with Caleb's plot is that I don't like how the relics (which are supposed to mysterious almost to the point of being magical) are being portrayed. But within the constrains of my original plot idea, I'm not able to fully explore how cool they are because I'm trying to build to a very specific EVENT. By removing that event, it should give me more flexibility to show the relics as being more than what I'm currently showing them to be.

All in all, I knew this route was going to be difficult and I had worried from the start that the plot might prove problematic. I think if I was writing a traditional linear narrative and didn't have to worry about art limitations, my original plot idea would be really cool. As it is, unfortunately, I'm going to have to rework it and fix some things. As I work on doing that I'll continue to write in Jack's route and edit Ari so I'm still making progress on the writing front even as I re-plan the rest of Caleb's route.

Art:

We did get one new background this week, which you can see here:

The other thing I've been doing lately is working to finish out the expressions of some of the otherwise completed sprites.  A lot of times when I'm working a sprite, I'll do their base, their hair, their main outfit (sometimes the side outfits) and maybe one or two expressions. I leave the rest to be completed...later.

The main reason I only do their default outfit is because with side characters, I can't always predict what other outfits they'll end up needed so it's easier to wait until I have the writing done so I can better assess that.

And with expressions...idk. I'm lazy. I get bored. LoL

I had a lot of sprites in this state of needing expressions, so I ended up working on that. I have all but...two...complete now. I think two. Once I get those expressions done I'll probably go ahead and code all these sprites just to have them done.

That'll help me clean up my sprite list and get a feel for exactly what sprites I still need and I can start checking those off the list bit by bit.

As another side note…

While I really haven't touched my side project in any sort of meaningful way since the Kickstarter for GS completed, I did end up doing some GUI related design work for it over the last week. Mostly during times I was ruminating about my struggles with Caleb's route and when I was just needing a break.

I designed a title screen for it and spent a lot of time talking myself out of a fourth love interest before deciding to replace one of the original three with someone else. Anyway…

Here is that image:

(For those who are unaware, Steamberry is "working on" a free side project jokingly (but also seriously) called A Song of Wind and Magic. 

I say "working on" - but in reality, our focus is Gilded Shadows and I don't really touch ASOWAM much since, well, I'm focused on GS and I want to maintain my focus on that. I just poke at the side project every so often when Gilded Shadows is making me want to chew my own head off. LoL)

Coding: 

I worked on coding a few more wiki articles! 

I have a massive list of wiki articles I know I need - and I add to it from time to time as new things come up in the story. A lot of the wiki stuff I have written up, just not coded.  So I've added a few more of those into the game as well.

Most of these are for the character routes and not the common route but I do think I have at least one more common route wiki article that will be linked to in the first few chapters.

Interestingly (this is really more about writing but whatever, I do what I want!) I recently saw a really interesting video/talk about hard vs soft world building. Soft world building is the style of world building where thing aren't explicitly explained to the viewer. A lot of it is left to implication rather than exposition. An example given in the video was Spirited Away where you get a rich sense of the world around the main character but very little of it is given specific exposition to explain it to the viewer. 

Hard world building is the style of world building where things are explicitly explained and defined down to the last detail. A great example of this is Tolkien's universe which had several full languages and thousands of years of world history all explicitly defined and explained. 

I've always leaned more toward hard world building - I think due to my own tendency to question the "why" of things. 

I don't explain everything, but I explain and define a lot. That's one reason the wiki exists. There's so much lore and world building for GS that I wanted a way for the player to learn about it without having to explain it all in the story itself.

I also think that if you are actively engaging with the people consuming your work, it's much harder to stick with truly soft world building because people ask a lot of very specific questions, which forces you to define things you otherwise might not have.

But mostly it's just because I ask myself those questions. Or sometimes I create world building because of one or two lines of narrative. I ended up creating a new metallic glass alloy that is used for prosthetics...specifically because Vanessa refers to it by name like...once. LoL

And now it has a wiki article. LoL

Upcoming Week:

Ugh.

Writing. Whether it's Jack's route, editing Ari, or getting Caleb's route sorted...FINALLY.

That is what I will be doing.

Anyway, I shall see you all next week.

(AS A MINOR SIDE NOTE: I'm trying.....*trying* to make this one, simple background on my own. Trying. If can't get it to match the others style-wise then I'll have to commission it. But as much as I hate doing environment art, I somehow want to do this one on my own.

If I manage it, I shall post a process post for you guys!)

~Esh