04/06/2022 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

04/06/2022

This Week's Summary:

• More Chaos
• Quill's route
• Fashion research! LoL (for Morgan)

The Ramble:

Yes, it's the same as last week. 🤣🤣

So we're a few weeks out from release but there is still a lot more activity on all social media and discord so I will be continuing to manage that stuff going forward. It has quieted down a lot but is still way more active than usual.

I've continued my pinterest fashion search for Morgan and other other characters and did not, in fact, work on art this week. It just happens when I'm writing that I think I'll find time and then no...in fact, I just write like a maniac the whole time.

Speaking of writing I am finished with Ch 8 and have made my way about ½ way through Ch 9? This chapter involved Quill's first love scene which is always an adventure. Though this love scene is a bit different than a lot of the other "first love scenes" that happen - in many of those, characters are seeking comfort in a stressful situation and there's almost this thread of desperation, melancholy and just wanting to be lost in each other for a while to forget everything else...

Quill's route doesn't have that all.

Though I wouldn't say it's a totally light hearted route, it does have a different vibe than some of the others and there's no real desperation to their romance. Just "I like you and want to be with you."

(It also involves a sofa again. Beds are not popular with these people I guess.) 😏

ANYWAY. Quill's route is just over 80,000 words. I'm a bit worried about the word count if I'm being totally honest. Routes average 108,000 words. The longest is 114000 (this is all uncoded word counts - they are shorter once I code them).

108,000 is what I'm using for my goal word count and..with 5.5 chapters left, that means 5000 words for each remaining chapter. That's not a lot. Chapters tend to be longer than that. More like 7-8000 or more. Ch 13, being the climax chapter, always tends to be more like 10000 words...

Even with a word count of 114000, that only gives me about 6000 words per remaining chapter. So I'm really worried that Quill's route is going to be quite long and I'm really going to need to trim it down.

Unfortunately, trimming isn't my strong point as many of you know.

For new patrons who weren't here for the rest of the process - I've been trying to be really careful about keeping the routes more or less the same length. I don't want it to feel like any characters were favoured over others. Even though right now, some people feel that certain routes "feel shorter" - for the most part the routes are all within a really close amount of words. There's only an 8000 word difference between the longest and shortest routes so I'm trying really hard to manage route length.

Hopefully the editing process for this one isn't too arduous.

Anyway, as of right now, I have to write about 1090 words per day to get the route to 108,000 words by the end of June.

Fun fact: I spent a lot of time this week researching the impact force of car accident, watching what happens with cars smash into walls, figuring out how fast car accidents occur and contemplating psi shields and how they would work in this scenario.

LoL. It was fun.

Sneak Peeks:

No sneak peeks yet, since this is all writing focused for now!

Upcoming Week:

W R I T I N G

Finish up Ch 9, start Ch 10.

That said, looking through my plans for Chapters 10 - 13, I do think I have to pause and reorganise some events.

I'm trying to avoid adding in more content due to the aforementioned length concerns but the upcoming chapters do feel sparsely populated as well. I may need to reconsider earlier chapters and see if reorganising will better spread out the events across the chapters and avoid having REALLY LONG chapters followed by REALLY SHORT ones.

I'm not sure. We'll see how it goes. Either way, my goal is to be 7000 -10,000 words further along in the story than I am now by the next update.

Reuben appeared in the previous chapter and I realised I'm likely going to need to draw another outfit for him for this route. So...that's now on my to-do list too but I probably won't get to sprite stuff until much later.

Anyway, that's all of my rambling for this week.

I shall see you next week!