2/11/24 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

Helloo~oo everyone! Time for this week's update.  Let's get into it.

Summary

• Finished Wil expressions for Ep 2

• Worked on the flowcharts

  • Got ch3 and ch4 mostly set up

• Worked on Asher's CG

• New BG sketches!

Art 

This week I got some new BG sketches and have nearly finished Asher's CG. I took a break from it because while Asher is completely rendered, I have to contemplate exactly how I want to proceed with the background elements. (It's another where I have to paint in the entire background.)

But yeah! I really like how the render of Asher turned out. It's also full body but will probably be substantially cropped in the game. 

Coding and Other Stuff

I finished up coding Wil's expressions. Finally. Almost 2000 of them for Ch 3 and Ch 4 combined.

And I decided I needed a break from that before starting on the rest of the characters so I decided to code the flowcharts for Episode 2.

So far, the flowcharts have been fairly straightforward. Massive, yes. But straightforward.

Chapter 3 also has a fairly straightforward flowchart but there are a couple of places like this:

Areas like this where the flowchart isn't symmetrical or close to symmetrical get a little trickier to code because I have to wrangle those connectors into place. Still, Chapter three isn't too bad.

Chapter four, on the other hand...you can see we have these two big sections of asymmetry. This Kav's fault. Kav, of course, shows up in Chapter three. And because of that, he starts out significantly behind in terms of interactions, overall content amount, opportunity to gain any affinity with him at all...

So because of that, his scenes in chapter four are much longer than the other characters. 

By the start of Chapter 4, all the other characters have around 10,000 words of content that is just 1x1 scenes with them.

Kav has about 2200 words of content by the start of Chapter 4. So I spend some time in Chapter four trying to shrink that gap just a little. By the end of Chapter 4, he has around 10,000 words of content where everyone else has about 13,000. So they're much, much closer in terms of overall length.

And that gap continues to shrink over the next few chapters until Kav catches up to everyone else.

What that means is that the flowchart has some asymmetry due to Kav. 

There is still one little issue I have to fix on the flowchart. Here. The little transparent square is a fake node that is just there to convince the connector to bend how I want it to bend (it'll be invisible in the actual game build). But you can see the connector isn't actually connecting to the node on the left. It's snaking behind it and pointing downward. So I have to fix that. Somehow. Ha ha.

Apart from that I have to go in and add all the tooltips/ labels and then actually set the unlock statements. So the flowcharts aren't done yet but honestly getting them built is the the hardest part so that's squared away now.

Upcoming Week

So this upcoming week I will be...working on a bunch of stuff as usual.

• Completing Asher's CG

• Finishing up the final touches of the flowcharts

• Starting on the other character expressions

These are kind of the big ones. And that's basically all there is to report this week I think.