17/01 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

Hey Everyone! 

I thought it was Thursday again! What is wrong with meeee? Why is my brain doing this!?

To be fair, I also slept really late today for some reason so I guess I was tired. I had interesting dreams though. That's always fun.

Anyway, on to the update!

Writing:

So this week in writing, I finished Caissa's chapter three. This chapter ended up being a lot more difficult to write than I thought it would be. There is a significant story branch that happens about midway through. One of those branches has another branch within it. 

I knew at one point I was going to have to write in a pretty intense scene and it was just really difficult to kind of mentally feel the flow of that scene. This was a scene that deviated from my outline so I was really writing spontaneously. And sometimes that can be really hard.

Sometimes you are at Point A in the story and you know you need to get to Point B. But the events between those two points are kind of fuzzy.

My usual strategy for keeping myself focused and making progress is to use word count goals. I set really small goals for myself - usually in increments of 1000 words. And by doing this I can keep myself focused on the immediate goal without getting overwhelmed by my overall goals. It also helps me see my progress better because 500 words out of a 110,000 word route is *nothing*. Even if I track that, it feels like I made no progress. 

But 500 out of 1000 is much more significant. So if I keep myself focused on these kinds of smaller goals, I don't get overwhelmed and I stay focused.

The problem is that sometimes this strategy just doesn't cut it for me. When I find I'm kind of stalling out even with this technique I switch to a different time management strategy that involves working for a set period of time rather than trying to hit a set amount of words. I set a timer for 25 minutes and I just make myself write for that full 25 minutes. Take a 5 minute break. Write for 25 minutes.

This technique usually helps get me through times when I feel stuck and the word count goal isn't helping me. And that's really what I had to do to get through this difficult scene.

The good news is that Caissa's Chapter Three has a full potato draft. And about half of that has been edited and smoothed out. I'll probably get the editing done over the weekend and be able to start Chapter Four next week.

Caissa's route is about 25% done (Yay!)

Overall game is about 32.5% done. ;AAA; That overall percentage stat increases….so.slowly.

Art:

This week in art….

Well, I've showed off some of what I've done - namely, just making some adjustments to sprites and adding variations and whatnot.

Fun, but not terribly exciting.

I also did redesign Lance's outfit?? I think that was this week? It feels so long ago somehow. @_@ But I looked over last weeks update and see that I mentioned wanting to do it.

And I did that. So I guess it was this week.

Man it is hard to keep track of that stuff sometimes.

Coding: 

I started scripting Common:Chapter Four into the game! Woo! Scripting doesn't actually take too long as far as just taking something that is in a document and converting it to code.

You take something that looks like this:

And turn it to something that looks like this:

This is mostly about small formatting fixes and actually naming the variables correctly, etc. It takes me about 10 minutes per chapter to convert the script from, well, a script...to game code.

The time consuming part of scripting is actually adding in the assets, to be honest. Namely, the sprites. It's soooo tedious. ;A;

In any case, I have Chapter Four scripted in with all the background changes. 

And I'll be finding time here and there to just starting working in the sprites, then all the music and sound effects.

Fortunately, Morgan is alone through a significant chunk of the chapter, then it's Morgan and Jack for a while. Others don't show up until way later. So spriting the chapter should go quickly. Group scenes or scenes with complicated actions are always the most difficult.

Demo:

I released Chapter three of the demo! On the 14th! I survived all the way until then. LoL Go me! 

Demo is now officially and fully released to the public! And now Kickstarter in 2.5 weeks! It's creeping up on us with slow determination, for sure.

As a side note, I found a typo on one of the profile pages that no one has pointed out to me yet. ;A; I need to fix it. 

Why are typos so embarrassing??

Upcoming Week:

So this coming week:

-finish the edit of Caissa chapter three (Already half done)

-start Caissa Chapter Four. This is the start of where I no longer have an outline to work for, just a scene by scene synopsis. And I already know I'll have to deviate from what I have based on how I deviated from the outline of chapter three.

-maybe will work on sprite coding for Chapter Four

-Will start the two week countdown for the Kickstarter with this fun image where we reveal it bit by bit every day! OwO

Fun times!

Anyway, we'll see you all next week. Maybe I'll actually post on Friday morning like I'm supposed to!  *dramatic pose*