19/05/2024 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

Ramble

Hellooo~oo everyone! Time for this week's update.

Summary

• Started working on Chapter 10

  • About 40% through it

• Experimented with some new sprite placement techniques in the game

• Redesigning the UI (LoL)

• A new BG!

Writing

I have moved on to Chapter 10. Originally the 3rd longest chapter and already grown to the 2nd longest chapter. 

I knew this would happen because...

Having already edited Asher's route, I know that I have to flesh out the other character scenarios by quite a lot. There are some really important character moments in this chapter so it's normal to expand those with dialogue and banter and sweet moments anyway - my potato drafts tend to be a bit sparse in that regard. 

But also, this is a chapter with three endings in it and that entire ending section had to be written. It ended up at just over 7000 words and only about 1500 of that was written when I first started this chapter. So...

(I also may do another pass of that section before I code it since  most of it is technically a new draft and it would be nice to edit properly once.)

With the ending scene(s) written, I am now working on revising the character scenes. I still think this chapter is going to end up over 80,000 words and the longest chapter right now is 80,000 words (uncoded). So that will still put this chapter in the lead for word count when it's done. Where, exactly, it will end up is hard to estimate but I think between 85k-90k (uncoded)

But we're only at 73,000 right now. 

This is the last chapter before we break into the individual character ending scenarios. And I expect to be working on it for a couple of weeks.

But yeah...lots of progress so far (the 40% mentioned earlier is based on where I think it's going to end up, not based on how long it currently is).

Art 

Got a new BG - the last one of the BGs for Aether Station I believe.

Other

So I have continued to work on the sprite adjustments and just some minor coding stuff.

And I have also been working on some slight UI redesigns. This is nothing major but I feel like as the game has progressed and themes have developed, I've been wanting to slightly adjust the vibe of the UI. It's a pretty subtle change though.

Logically speaking, I also wanted to try to reduce the space taken up by the dialogue box in the game so that the sprites aren't as covered up. AND I needed a new quick menu button which required a redesign of the quick menu.

It's still similar with that slight neon glow, colour scheme, and everything - but it will have a slightly different vibe that (in my opinion) suits the game better.

I haven't implemented the changes yet but I have been working on designing the new screens and sliders and things. 

Upcoming

I will be continuing to work on Chapter 10 as my main focus. Now that I'm finished with the off-ramp scenarios, I am focusing on quickly re-reading the Asher content to refresh my memory and then editing Daaz's content. I'm giving the "Common scenes" another glance over as well just to continue cleaning those up.

I'm hoping to finish up with Daaz's content in a couple of days and move on to Kav. But since I'm also doing a clean up of the common stuff (and any issues I find in Asher), it may take a little longer to go through Daaz's scenes than some of the others.

Anyway! That's where things stand now. See you next week!