27/07/2024 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

Helloo~~oo everyone! Time for this week's update!

Let's get into it.

Summary

• Revised and formatted Raif's endings

• Revised and formatted Yren's endings

• FINISHED the writing. For now.

• Worked on the playthrough of Yren's route

  • Made more edits along the way

• Worked on UI stuffs

  • New glossary screen

  • New Save/Load screen

• Started on The Big To Do List of Fiddly Things (that aren't all actually fiddly)

Writing

Okay! Last week I predicted that the game would be "between 610k and 615k. Technically I was wrong. Because it's currently 616.4k. So...I was off by like 1400 words.

But I was close.

I was able to get Yren and Raif's endings revised and formatted into the game. The heaviest bit of writing and revising is now complete.

I'll obviously continue editing as I playtest but the big, organised effort to revise is done and mostly what I'll be doing here on out are line edits and copy edits.

Going forward I probably won't be updating on the writing as no major writing will be taking place.

Art

Nothing this week I don't think.

Other

Last week I showed you the new settings screen. This week we have a new glossary and a new Save/Load screen.

So the glossary has slightly different functionality compared to the "demo" on Itch right now. Before, you would click a hyperlink and it would take you immediately into the full glossary entry.

Currently it shows a short summary of the topic and you can opt to click "full article" and, well, read the full article. This isn't revolutionary for the already-short entries. But for a lot of the longer, more detailed ones (like the planetary classification entry, which is huge), I thought that not all players would necessarily want to read the full article. This lets people get a snapshot of the article instead of showing the whole thing.

The Save/Load screen, as you can see, is set up so that each LI has their "page" of save slots.

For a game where a lot of people are potentially going to have concurrent playthrough, this seemed like a good way to help them keep each of their character paths nice and separated.

If you fill up the existing empty slots, you can easily add more to the pages, which is nice as well.

Thank you to Windchimes for helping me set this up.

I have also started working through a quite long to do list of fiddly and not-so-fiddly tasks that have to be complete before I can release the first episode. Some tasks are tedious but fairly easy (sprite staging and expressions...ugh). Some takes are a little "bigger" like completing the CGs. There are also things like...writing up any  new necessary glossary entries, adding in any achievements for these chapters, and things like that as well.

I am also continuing my personal playtest of Yren's route. Now that I'm no longer working on revising, I should be able to devote more time to the play test and hopefully start going through it a little faster than I have been (I've only been devoting a couple of hours a day to - usually after a long day of writing. That will be changing now).

Upcoming Week

In the upcoming week, my biggest focus will probably be on the Yren playtest. But also working through that huge list of stuff.

Right now the task I'm working on is the scoring of the choices. In order to really have the scoring laid out clearly I need to put it all in a spreadsheet. Which I do have right now.

There are a lot of choices in the game right now. Almost 300.

So trying to get that set up for Episode One.

That's my focus on the moment and yeah. I should be able to start moving through some of these tasks fairly quickly. And we'll see where things stand next week!

LAST THOUGHTS

The last thing today is that I am working on a (what is turning out to be....a HUGE) Q&A/FAQ for this game. I've gotten questions from a lot of people about the game, its structure, what to expect, etc.

I thought I'd do just li'l post.

You know.

A li'l question post. Just answering a few questions.

But...the problem is that some of the questions are from people on the Discord server who have listened to enough of my rants and rambles about game design that they can ask really hard questions.

GOOD questions. But ones that are difficult to answer in simple terms. So the "li'l post" is like...7600 words at this point.

I am thinking I may have to break it up into multiple posts.

It'll probably go up here on Patreon as a public post. And maybe on Itch as well. I don't know. But the first part of that should be coming soon...ish...too. Keep an eye out!