24/01 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

Hey Everyone! 

Today I actually remembered it was Friday! I just got distracted a little bit this morning. LoL

But let's jump into this week's Patreon update.

Writing:

This week I finished up the "potato draft" of Caissa Chapter Four and have gotten about halfway (maybe a little more??) through editing it.

In this chapter, we're finally starting to get Morgan interacting with Caissa a bit more (and setting it up for the two of them to start working together more closely) and we also start to see a little more of what Caissa's personal situation is…

And stronger hints of what he's really like under that cold exterior. 

Maybe also some foreshadowing as to what Caissa's plans are and what exactly he's trying to do.

Morgan is still struggling a little with the fact that she's now a part of a crime syndicate, though. LoL A player choice in the previous chapter has potentially left her on less-than-ideal terms with everyone. So that has set up several branches in this chapter where people are responding to her a little differently based on what the player chose to do previously.

I expect I'll finish the editing by the end of today or, at the very most, tomorrow. 

Due to some of the changes I made when I was writing up Chapter three, I actually had to also spend a little time completely re-plotting and re-arranging Chapters four and five. These chapters were not fully outlined and only had synopses so I just replanned them and rearranged some events so things flow better and consistently based on the events in Chapter Three.

Caissa's route is just under 34,000 words. I'm secretly hoping to get it to 45,000 before the KS launches. But I'm not sure I can make it. 

When Changeling went to KS, we actually had four routes complete! We'd been working on it for a year already by that time. This time around, we're getting funding a little earlier in the process. 

I'll admit. There is a part of me that is considering the possibility of a route-at-a-time release. We would have to change up the structure of the common route slightly and do a set up where faction and romance routes are chosen more explicitly. But I can think of several reasons why this sort of release might be better for us.

There are some big drawbacks as well. And I would definitely not release the first route until I had at least two - maybe even three - more completely written - that way I could keep a buffer of two completed routes. I don't know. 

It's such a difficult decision to make. But releasing the game one route at a time lets me start pushing out content way earlier rather than forcing a years long wait with no content at all. And that's pretty tempting.

I know our core base of followers don't mind waiting but I wonder if it would help grow our audience if we did have content coming out faster.

Anyway. This isn't really even about writing any more - just me rambling some of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately.

MOVING ON!

Art:

I didn't do too much art-wise. 

I did add some animated rain to the game! That was fun. I have this mental image of Delphine raining a lot even though mentally I'm not sure it would since rain means utilising the weather system and, since Delphine has lower power reserves, you'd think they wouldn't waste power on rain. But I've been thinking of world building that would allow for rain because I mean….it's cyberpunk! It needs rain! Rain is important.

Hence...animated rain. I just really love the effect of animated backgrounds. And I'm not sure I can animate *all* the backgrounds. But I want to add animations to the ones I can. If possible.

Weirdly, I feel like this is one of those things players don't really place much value on as a whole but I just...really love small animations in the BGs (but I don't care about them in sprites. Sometimes I explicitly dislike them on sprites. So strange!)

I don't know if it's because put a lot of value on good world building, and animated BGs make the world feel more alive...but I just love them. OWO

So this is the start! 

I added a few small variations for a couple of other BGs as well. For instance, in the car environments, you can see the current location sort of blurred through the window. But I wanted to add a motion blur to it so it gives more of a "motion" effect. 

So I did that.

Coding: 

The main coding thing I did was something really small. LoL

I implemented the eye glow! There has been art for this for a long time but I just never actually coded it.

So now their eyes glow at certain points where they're using psi ability.

I also made some corrections to the glossary where links were broken or things were just linking to the wrong place. Thank you to angels-do-exist for taking the time to check the glossary and point out all the problem areas.

I really appreciate it!

Upcoming Week:

I will finish editing chapter four for sure, and start chapter five.

That's all I know for sure I'm going to do. At this point it's really just trying to crank out rough drafts of chapters one after the other. So...writing...writing....writing...panickingaboutthekickstarter...writing...writing....rinse/repeat!

So we will see you guys next time!