Patreon Devlog 31/07 (Patreon)

Hey guys! 

Time for this week's devlog. Sorry it is coming late in the day - during the morning I was dealing with a minor family issue. Then had to do school with my kiddo later on…

So I'm just now getting around to posting this. 

Anyway, let's jump into this week's update! 

Summary:

• Edited through Ch. 12 of Caleb's route. There are two chapters left
• Art - Got ...some new BGs. At least one. Maybe two. ~_~ I'm losing track. LoL

The Ramble:

Editing….editing……..editing…….

So I'm down to the last few chapters of Caleb's route. These are really sparse. Really messy and need a lot of revising and reworking. So they are taking a bit longer than the earlier chapters which were much more polished and needed less fixing.

Took some time to work out some kinks in the antagonist's back story. The antagonist is actually not present for much of the route, but shows up in chapter 12. I don't think much of his backstory is going to be revealed. Maybe some...in the final chapter wrap up.

But it's always good to kind of know where a character is coming from and what their history. You can write them more realistically if you take the time to figure out their details. 

The antagonist in this route is named Brenin, and he's also called "The Fisher King" at some points (a reference to Arthurian legends).

Originally, Brenin was another character called "Mab" - I don't know if Mab will maybe make some kind of appearance at some point or if all her plot points will be replaced with Brenin. Brenin allows me to tie some story elements together in ways that Mab didn't because of who and what she is. 

If she ends up taken out of the game entirely, I want to do at least one short story about her for the lore book. I think she was an interesting concept even if she ultimately proves too difficult to use in the game.

Some elements from Rory's story and history made their way into this route in ways I didn't really plan or expect. But it led to one bad ending I really like a lot and am already planning a CG for. I always really love these organic story developments because they feel natural in ways that planned elements sometimes lack. So I'm always really grateful when these kinds of ideas come to me while I'm writing.

Now that I've managed to beat back some of my uncertainties about Caleb as a character, I've found the editing process much more enjoyable. There are a lot of fun snarky and teasing moments between Morgan and Caleb. 

I keep feeling a little doubt about how Caleb's route flows. Once I do get it coded, I'm going to have to do a really thorough playthrough of it and see how it comes across in the game.

Stories always read really differently in game and scenes that seem disjointed right now, may flow a lot smoother with screen transitions in place. (I'm hoping that's the case!) But there are also moments where the transition is fine in the script but in the game it seems weird and I have to flesh out the narrative a little to make it flow better.

That's just part of the process. 

I've been coding Caissa's first chapter as a patreon reward as you guys know - and I can't remember if I mentioned that I think I'll edit Caissa's route after Caleb. 

We don't actually have….*most* of the BGs for the Endgame routes. So Caissa's route is the only one I can properly code at this point. I feel like it makes the most sense to get him fully edited because I can start coding him straight away. With Ari and Caleb, I can import the scripts and……..that's it.

We have one elevator and one lab background for the Endgame HQ. LoL. Caleb's route has several other locations we have BGs for so I can code a few different parts of his route.

Ari's route takes place almost entirely in Cor Solaris and Braesil. And most of those BGs haven't even been started yet.

So yeah. LoL

Another aside is that I'm eyeing some of our BGs and wondering if I'm going to have to have them re-done. Some of the backgrounds we have gotten from GVIO art and Vui are *so good* that a group of BGs we got from this one other artist are feeling a little……..lacking unfortunately.

So there are currently 3 or so that I'm really strongly considering getting re-done by Vui. It's always unfortunate when that happens but I'd rather have quality consistency above everything else.

I think I'll finish up Caissa's first chapter over the weekend (I know I wanted to do it last week. But…...did not happen).

And then back to editing on Monday. I really want to finish editing Caleb's route by the end of next week and move on to Caissa's route.

I really don't think Caissa's route will require the heavy edits that Caleb's has required. Caleb's route just got really messy in the last half. But Caissa's route is pretty polished. And it's at a good place word-count wise, too. So I think a lot of his clean up will just be actual polishing and not massive revisions.

(The same is mostly true of Ari but there are some continuity fixes for Ari's route. So...yeah).

I'm really hoping to go through Caissa's editing phase very quickly and move on to Ari. But...we'll see.

Sneak Peeks and Previews:

This week, we got this background - which is a police station, as you can see.

I'm sure you all can figure out whose route this will be in and I just saw an issue I didn't notice before. There is a map of Earth! LoL.

Uh...so this is about five minutes later and I've mailed the artist on that one. So...yeah. This is the "fun" part of futuristic/space settings. Things like that can slip by so easily. 

I'll have to keep this version as a "blooper" for the art book after we get the fix for it.

Upcoming Week:

So more editing. And more backgrounds. This is where we're going to be for a while.

Caleb's route has reached 100,000 words. That's the word goal for each route but I know, looking at the last chapters here, it's going to go above that. They need massive fleshing out and polishing. And I'm actually thinking his word count is going to end a little higher than I want it.  

I really don't want any routes over 105k. And I think he's heading that way so I may need to look for places I can stuff out. 

In backgrounds - we have at least two in sketch stage + the precinct fix I mentioned above. It would be lovely to get all those this week. But we'll see. I know that both our remaining BG artists are working on multiple projects so it's kind of slow going. But it's out of my control. 

I may go on the hunt for another potential BG artist that can match this style and is in our budget. (I love GVIO art but their prices limited how many BGs we could afford to get from them!)

I think that is about it for this update. I hope our next post is letting you guys know that Caissa's Ch. 1 (alpha version) is ready for you guys to read. OwO 

See you then!