06/07/2024 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

Helloooo everyone!  Time for this week's update!

Summary

• Finished drafting Noel's ending scenario

• Finished drafting Raif's ending scenario

• Sprite tweaks

  • Noel

  • Yren

  • Daaz

• UI stuff

  • Namely creating screen mock-ups and re-designs

Writing

This week I finished up Noel's ending chapters and managed to also finish Raif's ending chapters.

I actually wasn't sure I'd finish Raif's but I did manage to push through and get his final scene completely drafted yesterday.

Yren's is the last of the ending sequences I have to draft.

I still have to edit of course, but in some ways editing these is easier than editing other parts of the game because these sections are self-contained so I don't need to maintain continuity - just roughly the same length.

I wrote a total of 23,000 words in the last 7 days. Which is a lot.

It's a lot.

But the good news is that this upcoming week I only have to write 15,000 words.

immediately cries

Art 

Received a new completed BG. Backgrounds are about 75% complete.

I also made some minor sprite adjustments - mostly regarding expressions. Sometimes after a while I just notice that certain sprites aren't quite as expressive as others. Their eyebrows or eyes don't really move a lot so their expressions aren't as easy to read.

That's usually a fairly small adjustment to the facial features which is what I did for Noel, Yren, and Daaz. A lot of times these are really small changes - I'll be moving the "sad" eyebrows down by like...five pixels. But visually this can actually have a surprisingly big impact.

Especially now that I'm moving the sprites closer and further away more so you do see them "up close" more frequently.

Other

I worked on UI stuff this week as well. This week I'm mostly working on creating mock ups and assets for a friend who is going to be coding in some of the screens that I don't want to code in or don't know to code in.

So yeah - did some of that this week too.

Upcoming Week

I should finish Yren's ending sequence this week. And I will finally. FINALLY be done with the rough draft.

Once his draft is finished, I will go back and edit them all and my first full revision will be done as well. And after I get them formatted into the game, I will have the "final" word count (I put it in quotes because I will inevitably keep editing things as I test and play through the game. Which means the word counts will definitely change more.)

Currently the word count - uncoded - is 624,000 words. It's going to end up at 650,000 before the end for sure. But that's uncoded. 

The coded word count right now is 538,000 words. Asher and Daaz both have about 18,000 words of "ending content" in coded format in Ren'py. If the other four routes match up to that, then that puts the final coded word count at 606,000 words.

So it's clear to me that the final word count for Stars is going to end up somewhere around the 600k mark. Whether that's just over 600k or just under 600k is going to depend on the four remaining routes and how that pans out.

So yeah. That's it for this week. Next week, the big hurdle of the writing should be cleared. And then it's on to slightly more fun stuff. Whew.