31/1 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

Hey Everyone! 

Today I not only remembered it was Friday but I remembered to do the update early! =OO I didn't remember at 4:00 PM when I'm so busy with other things that it takes several hours to get it written up.

And this in spite of being WEIRDLY SLEEPY today. 

So let's get into it!

Writing:

Lots of writing done this week! I finished editing Chapter Four. I wrote and fully edited Chapter Five. And I'm nearly done with the potato draft of Chapter Six. 

So...wow. All the writing! 

Caissa's route is nearly to 46,000 words which means I did hit my previous goal of reading 45k prior to the KS. Maybe I can even get a little closer to 50k in the next few days! That would be awesome.

The total amount of completion for the entire game is 35% (This is based on a 650k word count. Realistically, it will be higher. This is just what I'm using for my goal.)

At any rate, I'm hoping to be done with the "potato" draft of Chapter Six by the end of the day. And then editing by the end of the weekend. It would be great if I was starting on Chapter Seven by Monday! 

Chapter Six involves a lot of introspection and conversation as Morgan learns more about what his plans are and finally gets to see more of Delphine. 

Caissa is definitely starting to show signs of…..CARING. LoL

So yeah, I got a ton of writing done this week and our total word count is slooooowly heading toward 250,000.

Art:

I really didn't do any Gilded Shadows art this week. I did some art for my side project - mostly on the weekend or stupidly late at night.

*may have been up drawing until 1:30 A.M. this morning*

With the Wind is something I only work on when it's the weekend or when I'm done for the day with GS. Usually that means after 8PM during the week. It's very much something I don't touch during "normal working hours" if you will.

With Gilded Shadows, I'm really just not focusing on art right now. I have one CG for Ari's route that I've nearly completed, and I may take another look at his route and contemplate a few others to kind of start sketching out. 

But writing is my big focus at the moment.

Coding: 

I scripted the two interludes - these are basically the "lead in" scenes that take you up to character route selection.

They're just scripted. No BGS, no music, no sprites. I don't even have the backgrounds for these scenes at the moment.

I've also done some mucking about behind the scenes to streamline some of the code. This isn't anything that changes stuff for the player but it changes how some things need to be coded.

I've also started seriously looking into the possibility of Unity for this and future games. Now at this point I don't know the Unity engine well enough to say we'll definitely switch. It's just something I've been thinking about for a while because Unity ports to more platforms than Ren'py.

There is a fairly new visual novel toolkit for Unity - it's called Naninovel and it looks really cool. I'm going to be spending some time trying to learn more about Unity and how to work with Naninovel because in the event we do want to release this game on Unity, Naninovel will be my choice of toolkit.

It's in active development and constantly adding necessary features that players want in their VNs. It looks super promising and I'm really excited to be looking into it.

That said, GS will continue to be developed in Renpy for the time being. There are no solid plans to change that.

Upcoming Week:

Finish writing and editing Caissa: Chapter Six. 

Start Caissa: Chapter Seven

Maybe start another of Ari's CGs. 

And, of course, the big one……...Kickstarter. 

Kickstart will launch on Tuesday, February 4th AET. I'm not sure what time yet.

As a final thought...

Did you know that today is a special day. It's been almost exactly a year since we launched Changeling as a final product. @_@ A YEAR. 

In some ways it feels way longer and in others I can't believe Changeling has been out for a year already. It's definitely been a crazy ride and a lot has happened. 

We're really excited that things with Changeling went we enough we could continue making games and jump into a new project. we don't know what the future holds for us (I mean, who does?) but we're looking forward to making many more awesome games for you guys.

Thank you to everyone who has been with us from the start. 

And thank you to everyone who has joined us along the way! <3

~Esh