22/07/2024 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

Hi everyone! Sorry for the late devlog this week. I don't have a real reason other than "I forgot to post it." Ha ha.

Some of you know that I write my devlogs up in google docs before I post them here and the result is that sometimes I write them up but forget to post them over here (particularly if I'm busy like I was this weekend!)

Let's get into it.

Summary

• Revised and Formatted Kav's endings

• Revised and formatted Noel's endings

• Started revising Yren's endings

• Worked on the playthrough of Yren's route

  • Made edits and corrections along the way

• Worked on UI stuffs

  • Revamped the settings screen

  • Worked on some other small UI things!

Writing

This week I worked on revising the endings. I managed to get through Kav and Noel. And I've started Yren's edit. The draft, which was 639k last week is now 650k. I expected it to grow - I left room for it to grow because I always flesh things out on revision. I expect the draft to end up at about 655,000 words when I finish Yren and Raif this week. The coded word count...well, I'll discuss that below!

So in addition to revising, I also formatted Noel and Raif's routes. I currently have about 578,000 words scripted into Renpy. Knowing how long the endings have been so far and how long Raif and Yren are likely to end up, I can safely say the coded game is going to end up between 610k and 615k on this first pass.

That may not be the final word count though. I've made quite a lot of edits into Yren's route as I have played it - adding in choices, etc. I've also spotted places that needed variations due to prior choices and options where I realised there were continuity issues due to that.

So it is possible the word count may end up a little higher as I continue to spot and fix those issues.

Art 

Received one new BG and two new BG sketches. My artists are hiveminding on the sketch timing again, as usual.

Other

As I mentioned last week, I've restarted my Yren playthrough with self voicing. 

This is essentially just me beta reading through the game. As I mentioned, I've been doing a fair amount of edits - mostly for things that are difficult to catch when focusing on the entire script vs just looking at a single path through the story.

This is something I've talked about on my server a bit but this game structure is really not conducive for managing the pacing and flow of the plot. And continuity is pretty difficult to track as well.

In a game like GS, I'm really looking at pacing across a single story - a single route (typically...100(ish),000 words). And while it's still a little tricky when looking at a script with all the branching in it, it's not too unmanageable.

In WSC, as I draft, I'm managing pacing and flow across all six routes at the same time - essentially, the entire word count. It's way harder. As I play the story in a linear way for the first time, it's giving me a very different mental map of the plot. The result is that I have to make adjustments for the story now because I'm seeing it from a different angle.

As I mentioned, I've added more choices - and honestly will probably continue to add more here and there as I do playthroughs. I don't want to add superfluous choices but there have been several moments I realised that a choice menu with, say, 3 options...needed 4 or 5 options to benefit the player.

So yeah! I've been doing the playthrough of Yren's route - usually for a few hours each night - and intend to do at least one straight playthrough of all the routes before anyone else sees the script.

I also revamped the settings screen. It was just mostly changing images and adjusting the location of stuff. New sliders. New toggle buttons but same functions.

Upcoming Week

This week I hope to finish Yren and Raif's revisions. I was really hoping to do it last week but it just ended up not working out. There were some things that threw me off (like a random power outage that lasted for hours and completely threw off two days of work).

Yren's is in progress and Raif will be last (I did these two out of the normal order since I started with Yren's playthrough and am getting to a point in it that I kinda need his endings to be available. Ha ha)

That's going to be my big focus this week. I'm sure that I'll also be doing a bit of UI stuff and the like this week as well.

That's all for now. I will see you next week!