Friday Devlog 11/8 (Patreon)

Hey Guys! 

Here is this week's Patreon devlog! 

Writing:

So this week I finished fleshing out chapter eleven and got a rough of chapter twelve written and mostly fleshed out.

Ari's route is now 93% of the way to the target word count, which means the total word count is neeeeeeeeeearly to 26% LoL

The main word count moves up at a distressingly slow pace. ;A; Ari's percentage can move up so much and the main total percentage is just like "LoL. What progress??"

I'm definitely going to pass 100,000 words for Ari's route. I expect that by the time I'm finished with chapter twelve alone, we'll hit 95k.  There will be at least two more chapters and, at the way I'm going, I think I'll probably hit around 110k for Ari's rough draft.

Anyway, I thought I'd share a quick snippet from earlier in Ari's route when Morgan briefly watches the two of them sparring with each other. She's definitely not ogling anyone.

--

"I actually didn't expect Ari to be that...fit."

"My eyes followed his movements as they fought. It was easy to see why they'd gathered an audience..."

"(Watching two sweaty, attractive guys practice isn't all that bad. I guess...)"

Van: "Soooo."

Van: "Like I mentioned yesterday, this is where a lot of us who have named ranks do our training."

Morgan: "Uh huh..."

"I was barely listening to her. I didn't know much about this sort of thing, but there appeared to be several styles of fighting going on at once."

"Prior to joining the Safety Department, Wayne had studied martial arts as well. I'd watched him spar with his classmates before. They did a lot of bouncing at each other without ever throwing a punch or kick."

"Caleb and Ari were not like that. It felt really intense for a sparring match. And if they were pulling the punches, it didn't seem to be by much."

"Caleb definitely seemed to have the upper hand."

"I could catch snatches of conversation around me, and wasn't really much surprised that most of the people watching were rooting for Ari."

"(Poor Caleb.)"

"Van leaned in closer."

Van: "Most everyone here is upper level infantry and ranked junior agents. Lower level infantry are all housed in a different location. Same for non-agents - like researchers and such."

Morgan: "Mmhmm..."

"(Ooh! Ari almost got him there.)"

"He'd managed to hook his foot around Caleb's leg and very nearly swept him onto his back, but Caleb twisted away and responded with a solid kick that Ari only just blocked."

Van: "The training rooms up here are also better reinforced so it makes sense that those with stronger abilities come up here..."

Morgan: "Hmm."

Van: "So which one do you think is better looking?"

Morgan: "Huh??"

"Van laughed when I whipped my head around and glared at her."

--

It would be nice to get the rest of the writing for Ari's route completed this next week, but I don't know. We'll see. 

Writing progress always slows way down when I get to the last chapters as there's usually a fair bit of branching going on due to endings and what not. I have to spend more time planning, thinking, organising...and less time just writing.

But I can dream!

If I finish Ari's route before the end of the month, I will probably work on my final revised draft of Common, Chapter Three. I'll edit for typos and grammar issues, all that. And maybe go ahead and import it into the game so I can slowly start working on getting it ready to be released in a few months.

It would be great to get all that done before December.

Art:

We got one more chibi! Caleb - looking super cute.

And that's really all on the art front this week. We have one more BG I'm waiting on and then I think that'll be all we need for the common route…

Maybe. 

Btw, here are a couple of BGs that haven't shown up in the game yet but will show up in......chapter 4 I think? Maybe at the veeery end of Chapter 3.

These are from another part of New Albion but rather than do entirely different BGs, I just got variations of ones that exist. 

One of the most frustrating things about having a limited budget is finding ways to cut costs and re-use assets. Doing variations like this was cheaper than getting entirely new BGs. And given that Morgan is only in this place one time (at least, that's the plan for now), it didn't make sense to spend more money on unique BGs for this sequence.

Anyway, I feel like they're a little dark so I might brighten them slightly for use in the game. But this is an abandoned, spoopy sector where Morgan ends up after a variety of Dangerous Things happen to her.

Coding: 

Nothing particularly. As I said, this would be a really writing focused month. So...I probably won't have any coding related news for the next few weeks. Unless , as I said above, if I do finish Ari's route before the end of the month, I'll start importing chapter 3 of the common route.

So I'll probably be removing this section from the next few devlogs - until I have something to say about it! 

DEMO Stuffs:

Patrons, of course, got access to the second chapter of the demo. We've heard feedback from a couple of people and have had some typos and other stuff pointed out.

But a lot of you haven't downloaded the update yet.

Upcoming Week:

This past week I managed to tick off everything on the to do list (Yay!) and now in the upcoming week, I want to:

• Finish fleshing out chapter 12
• Get a rough draft done of chapter 13

And that's really it for this week. I feel like writing oriented updates are not always the most interesting but they also make up the bulk of updates since writing is sort of the longest part of the process. I'm really looking forward to getting one route under my belt. The first route really helps in setting the strategy for how I go about the other routes. 

With GS having a lot of structural difference from Changeling, Ari's route has really helped me figure out how the game is going to work. I know I'll continue to adapt my strategies as I write - and that I'll likely have to make some edits to Ari's route to make it match the other routes better. 

But even so, Ari's route has really helped me work out how the personality branching will work and how I want to handle branching in general. I hope that means the other routes go by faster. ;o;

Anyway, I'll stop rambling for now. See you all next week!