18/08/2024 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

Hello everyone! Time for this week's update!

Let's jump in!

Summary

• Worked on the guide again

• Finished Raif's playthrough

  • Lots of fixes

• Affinity metres

• Started on Noel's playthrough

• Started Noel's CG

• Finished Yren's bonus scene

Art 

Started on Noel's CG and finally......FINALLY got a BG I've been waiting for months. And one new BG sketch!

I also started working on another extra bit of art for Noel. 

I usually don't have time to work on non-game art for the characters and have very little character art outside of the game. But this time around I'm trying to do more extra art - both for my own enjoyment and frankly because it helps get the characters to look consistent across the game art as well.

It's nice to have time to be able to just draw a random character art if I want.

Other

This week I did more work on the premium guide and now it's basically ready to be shipped with the first episode except that I have to add the CG thumbnails. And probably proofread one more time.

The guide isn't really hard to set up - but it does take a little effort since it's kind of an info-graphic style instead of just a list. Also, chapter two has a ton of choices. I mean, a lot of the chapters do but in subsequent chapters, the choices reside in the LI branches which means individually, each LI may only get 5-6  choices on their path through that chapter. But in chapter two, the bulk of the choices reside in the "common" part of the route which means that on a given LI's path, there are a lot more choices to cover.

Additionally this week, with the help of Windchimes, the new affinity indicators were set up. There was a slight adjustment to how affinity is tracked behind the scene so I've been making that change and testing the affinity metre.

There are still a couple of "big" features that need to be set up - the flowcharts and the colour slider for Wil's skin tone. There are some additional UI things I need to do as well but we are making progress on this front!

This week I also finished up Yren's bonus scene. 

I finished Raif's test play and have started Noel's test play (nearly halfway through it as of writing this).

As always I did make a fair amount of corrections to Raif's route. A lot of typos of course but there are also continuity issues that needed fixing. 

One of the reasons the test plays go so slow is that as much as I want to, I can't really fully skip through the common route. In order to test continuity I have to play it straight through over and over and over so I can be sure the common route has continuity with each route individually.

There are some sections I am confident I can skip through without issues but for the most part I'm playing it all the way through. With David (self voicing), it goes pretty slow because I can only make him talk so fast before I can't understand him anymore anyway. 

This week I added a new choice menu into a section of the common route I realised was quite long but with no choice options...

Or I slightly edited one choice option for Noel that felt a little too forward/flirty. This is a hold over from earlier versions of the game where I ended up feeling the pacing was too fast. For instance - in earlier versions of the game, the route was locked in during chapter 4. This meant I had only a couple of chapters to establish a solid attraction between Wil and the LIs.

Because of the rush to get that done before the lock-in, some of the original Chapter 2 choices were a little awkwardly flirty for some characters. For certain ones where it makes sense that the overt two-way flirting starts up really early in the relationship (Asher and Raif), it didn't feel amiss. But for other characters like Noel and Yren...they feel a little out of place.

Later, I inserted an entire chapter (the current chapter 3) which means the route doesn't get locked in until chapter 5. This means I can pull back some of the earlier flirting with some characters to make it feel a little less forced.

So yeah - continuing to make small edits like that to smooth out and improve the writing as I test.

Upcoming Week

This week my main goals are to:

• Finish Noel's test play

• Begin Kav's test play

• Finish Noel's CG

• Prep a couple of BGs for the game

• Edit and code the bonus scenes for Chapter 1

My huge to-do list is slowly being whittled down. Probably the biggest time sink I have left right now is my own play test before Episode 1 goes to beta. 👀

So yeah. That's where we stand now. I will see you all next week!