30/05 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

 Hello everyone!

Everything sort of crashed into me yesterday afternoon and evening, so I apologise for this being a little late. 

While the situation in Minneapolis is far removed from us here in Australia, it's still saddening and worrying to see. It was terrifying to watch the twitter feed last night and see the fires, arrests of reporters, and just the general pain and anguish feeding the riots and protests.

We hope that if any of our supporters are in that area, you are all staying safe.

On that note, we'll move into discussing this week's update.

Writing:

This week in writing, I finished the first revision of Chapter Six and got the potato draft of Chapter Seven completed. I know I need to flesh out portions of this chapter and I really need to emphasize some developing feelings that are, well, developing.

That'll be what I work on over the weekend.

I also got more editing done in Ari's route - the first few chapters are fully edited and I've managed to trim it down a bit even while fleshing out some scenes. This actually makes me really happy and I'm glad to see I still have managed to keep from increasing the word count. 

I really hope this continues. 

I was a little worried about Ari: 3, because it's an exposition heavy chapter, and I suspected I was going to have to flesh out some explanations. I also needed to add in a backer character from the Kickstarter - while her appearance in Ari's route will be smaller than others due to the fact he was already written when she came into existence, it doesn't make sense for her to not be present at all.

Fortunately, even with the additions, I was able to trim enough that his route came out a whopping 22 words shorter than it was before. LoL I didn't trim *much* - but at least it didn't get bigger.

I also needed make substantial edits to two side characters who have now become other backer characters. With the new details of the backer characters, I had to make some significant edits to these two. But fortunately, again, didn't have to really add that much content.

I'm really eyeing Ari: 5, though. It's the longest chapter in his route at 10, 450 words. I think there's actually a large branch in this route, revolving around a confrontation with a rival that Morgan has (not really a love rival as much as a rival for the queen position). I still want to try to trim it down. It would be nice if I could keep all the chapters under 10k. 

We'll see! 

Art:

This week we've gotten a new background but mostly have gotten a lot of sketches for one particular location in Cestrescir - several parts of Caissa's route take place here and most of Jack's route will occur in this location since the central hub for the Court.

The Court isn't really a very organised group at all - and its people are spread out through a wide area in Cestrescir. But most of the leaders live in a single, rundown building that is an old hotel.

So that is what the BGs reflect! There are a lot of different locations related to it that we needed art for.

We also got another background for New Terra!

You can see all of that stuff below:

Coding: 

As far as coding codes, I worked on importing the first couple of chapters of Ari's route. 

Though I usually don't start importing the script until the entire route is edited, due to the fact that sometimes there need to be major continuity edits in early chapters, I feel pretty confident going ahead and importing the first couple of chapters since I don't think any continuity fixes will need to be made.

Script importing is fairly easy since it just involves copying and pasting the script into the code environment then making a few fixes, changes, and formatting changes. Generally speaking, this part of the coding process goes pretty fast. The tedious part is the part that involves sprites. LoL

I haven't started on that yet but I may begin spriting the next two parts of the common route. I also need to do chapter landing pages for those. In any case, those are fairly short scenes. 

I don't have any of the BGs for Cor Solaris yet, though. I've been waiting for the artists to clear out some of the existing list of BGs before I order those. 

And the Endgame "Interlude" all takes place at Cor Solaris, of course!  I'll probably start ordering those backgrounds soon. OwO

Currently the game stats are:

The game contains 4,467 dialogue blocks, containing 63,747 words and 327,239

characters, for an average of 14.3 words and 73 characters per block.

The game contains 22 menus, 86 images, and 108 screens.

(word count obviously only includes how much is coded at the moment)

Music:

Our composer is eager to release the album of the sound track so we've been doing some work regarding that involving picking a play order for the songs and doing some graphics for the cover art.

So there have been a lot of back and forth emails over that stuff.

He's working on creating some additional track variations, which I'm excited to be able to hear and share with you guys. Hopefully we have those by next week! 

Upcoming Week:

I will definitely finish revising Chapter Seven over the weekend. I want to also start Chapter Eight and hopefully finish the potato draft. It would be nice if I could finish the chapter entirely and move to Chapter Nine. 

Caleb is proving to be That Character that is just annoyingly difficult to write. =w= *sigh* I knew he would be. The brat.

I will probably continue working on editing Ari's route on the side. So…

Basically, focusing on writing. Still. LoL That will be the name of the game for a while yet! 

That's all for now!