11/15 Devlog (Patreon)

Hey Guys! 

Here is this week's Patreon devlog! 

Writing:

This week was almost a purely writing focused week.  I finished out Chapter Thirteen, which took a while but it is done. Woo! 

Chapter Fourteen is in "potato" stage and needs fleshing out and refining. I think I may have that done by the time I do the regular devlog on tumblr. If not, it'll be done this weekend.

And that is the first route. Done. Right now, we're looking at 106,000 words but after Fourteen is fully fleshed out and in full rough-draft mode, I do expect that'll go up a little. Of course, later revisions are also likely to expand that. Yoiks! D=

Currently Ari only has three endings - sweet (I actually have been referring to this as the "moving forward" ending, romantic (referred to in notes as 'beloved ending') and one bad. Not sure if that will remain true in future edits. But that's where we are now.

Overall branching is right at 30% (29.79 to be exact) so the linear word count is just over 70k right now. Basically the length of a YA novel. At 250 words per minute, the straight playtime (start to finish) is currently right around 5 hours and the playable content is at 7 hours.

With 6 love interests, that currently puts the estimated amount of playable content in the game at over 40 hours. Woo.

Total word count is at about 28% toward the target and is just over 180k

I also went ahead and edited Chapter Three of the Common route - I was going to do that after Ari's route was done. But Chapter Thirteen was quite tough and I needed to step back and work on other things at several points. (Climax chapters are often like that.) So I got that part done as well.

When I finish Chapter Four - that's it for the focus on writing for a while.

Art:

We did get the final BG for the common route from Vui. This is the last BG in this batch. I won't be getting more until after crowdfunding. Some of you have already seen this, but it is Jack's car. So fancy. Much driving.

And, finally, we also got Jack's chibi. There is only one more left and the chibis are done.

I haven't personally done any art for GS in a while but that will be changing in upcoming weeks. I did, however, end up giving the Endgame crowd a secondary uniform. So that will be one more outfit for everyone.

Yay.

Coding: 

As far as coding goes, I did make a few more corrections as one of our patrons has been very diligent with testing and has found some issues (including a lurking traceback error) - so I was able to fix all those things.

Thank you to Kattie!

Other:

So I have been looking at a site that is sort of a Kickstart analytics and organisational thing. I wanted to look at the back end and tools but they wouldn't let me in without a KS campaign draft. So I did set up the Gilded Shadows KS page. There's almost nothing on it right now - no tiers, no images, nothing. I think I uploaded the video and named it. LoL

But it's still a milestone. The KS page exists now. So that's amazing I guess. 

I'm still looking at BiggerCake as a potential tool to use, though I'm a little confused by their formulas for estimating end of campaign funding. I've been watching a couple of live campaigns and am really not sure how they're figuring some of their, well, figures. 

But we'll see! It looks like an interesting tool.

Upcoming Week:

I will definitely be finishing Chapter Fourteen of Ari's route. But as I mentioned, I may have that done by this evening - or by the end of the weekend at the very latest.

As Common, Chapter 3 is already edited, I think I am going to start making a list and schedule and plan for getting all the KS related stuff done.

I have my tiers planned out and all the information written up - I've had this done for a while. But there are a lot of images to get done.

I have character cards, headers, banners, animated gifs, mobile wallpaper, basic character wallpapers, the YCH wallpaper bases, some exclusive art I want to be able to release to backers mid-campaign, etc.

I also think that, if possible, it would be good to maybe sketch out some of Ari's CGs to just be able to show additional art, etc. 

I'm planning to publicly release part 2 of the demo in maybe three weeks? - right at the start of December. I'll need to start coding the next chapter as well because I want to release it in January, just before the KS. Which means you guys will need it in December. Fortunately, coding that stuff doesn't take too long.

But as I'm sitting here thinking about everything I need to do for a February 4th launch, it's actually freaking me out a little. That seems so far away, but I know 11 weeks will go by like nothing. *sweating*

That's 11 updates from now and I know how rapid fire these weekly devlogs seem to me. It seems like I blink and I'm writing the next one.

So now I'm starting to panic a little and wonder if I can get everything done in time. 

Anyway, that's all for now - I will obviously keep you all apprised of the goings on over the next couple of months! 

See ya!

~Esh

PS - since I'll be doing a lot of work on wallpapers and stuff that means I should have more art and things to show you guys! So updates should start to get more interesting. Woo!