18/02/2023 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

Hellooooooo! Time for the devlog. ╰(*°▽°*)╯

This Week's Summary:

• Coded all the remaining sprite expressions for side characters 💪
• Worked on Reuben's walkthrough
• Worked on Reuben's content guide
• Completed two CGs
• Completed Yuu's chapter-by-chapter synopsis

The Ramble:

Hi everyone!

Let us jump in.

So the first thing I did this week was get all the remaining sprites coded. This was fairly simple and took less than a day. Sprite work is officially done.

The next thing I did was work on getting Reuben's walk through set up and tested to make sure my paths through the game actually work. I did find a small error in one choice that would have prevented one variation from being unlockable and I got that fixed.

The walk through is more or less done but I have to add some details about the CGs to the backer guide whenever it is complete.

I also worked on Reuben's content guide. I think it's essentially done but we'll see if anything else comes to mind as I work to complete his route.

Once I had done those things I spent a couple of days working on CGs and completed two - the first CG in Reuben's route and the CG for his bad ending (basically the two simplest CGs I have to do). Since my hand was starting to bother me toward the end of the week, I decided to take a break from drawing on Friday.

Instead I spent the day working on solidifying Yuu's plot. I have been working on this off and on for weeks to the point I have two documents that are a convoluted mess of notes.

Until now I haven't been satisfied with any of his plots because I have been DETERMINED to keep the plot simple for Yuu's route but every plot I came up with was too complex.

I finally hit on a solution for that and managed to simplify things more to my liking so I can focus much more on characters and relationships than a very intense plot.

I fine tuned the synopsis until, by the end of Friday, I had a chapter-by-chapter synopsis for Yuu's route. Fortunately I will be able to keep all of Chapter One (which is already written) since it works with the plot I came up with.

There is only one more step to completing the Synopsis and that is to break it down into individual scenes and further flesh them out so I can catch any plot holes and fill in any gaps that may exist. Overall, though I somewhat miss my original plot, I feel the current one will showcase Yuu better as a character and, ultimately, be a little easier for me - which was part of my goal.

I think it'll be nice to finish on a more character-focused route as well.

Side note, I found a new resource that does a much more in depth set of stats for Renpy games and here is some fun information for you! 

Overall...here is everyone's amount of dialogue so far:

(Magnus, Reuben, Caleb, Jack, Lance, Caissa, Quill, And Ari)

(Magnus, of course, talks a lot and has important roles in multiple other routes than his own so he ended up with a lot of dialogue. Meanwhile, Ari doesn't talk much in routes outside his own so he has far fewer lines by comparison.)

Of course, Yuu is far behind since his route is yet to be completed.

In their own routes, the numbers are a little different with Reuben and Lance having the highest word counts. The two of them and Quill have the advantage of cohabitating with Morgan so there's way more opportunity for them to have dialogue than some of the others.

The two quiet guys are still incredibly obvious though. LoL Poor Ari - Caissa is a bit better but not much. LoL.

I also like that this word counter looks at both menus and the actual number of choices. A menu, of course, is a collection of choices. So this is basically the difference between the number of times you are given a choice and the number of possible choices you can select from.

These are the basic stats that Renpy gives you (all the above stuff is extra stuff the resource I found breaks down):

Anyway, it's just fun to see all the data broken down this way (it's fun for me anyway!

Sneak Peeks:

👀

Upcoming Week:

I think it's unrealistic to expect that I will have all the CGs done in the upcoming week. Though there are only four left, the reality is that I try to have two CGs that are "multi-part" CGs (just because that's been kind of the standard across the routes). Depending on the nature of the variations it means I could have 2 additional CGs to do. And I know that Reuben's kiss CG is a significant variation (there are big pose changes between the two).

In addition, Morgan will also be appearing in most, if not all, of the remaining CGs. That always makes them way more complex.

But I will probably be working on CGs all week. If I need to take a break to rest my hand, I'll be working on some of the fine-tuning and polishing in Reuben's route (adding some visual effects and animations) or polishing up the outline for Yuu's route.

So that's it for now. I will see you all next week!

~Esh