21/04/2023 Patreon Devlog (GS) (Patreon)

Hello! Time for the Gilded Shadows devlog.

This Week's Summary:

• Finished Ch7 of Yuu's route
• About halfway through Ch8

The Ramble:

Another short update, I think!

This week I finished Chapter 7 of Yuu's route (which involved the love scene!)

Yuu has taken the lead in the earliest kiss and the earliest love scene (earliest kiss was previously held by Quill and earliest love scene by Jack. LoL). I'm not surprised tbh.

This is another route I'm attempting to do a fast draft of so I can move into editing as soon as possible. Fast drafting, for me, is the most effective way to ensure I maintain momentum through my drafts because VNs are just...*long* and it's so easy to get bogged down in the tedium.

When you're fast drafting, the goal isn't to write a good draft - it's just to get *a* draft written.

If you've been around a while, you know that I always refer to my first drafts as the potato draft. LoL

I may end up rewriting 70% of it during editing but honestly I'd rather be editing than drafting.

I've now moved into Chapter 8 and am about ⅔ of the way through with it? So I'm doing pretty well on progress. Definitely on track to finish by the end of May (which has been my goal from the start."

In other news, I passed two milestones!

1. I have less than 50,000 words left to write until I hit my target word count. 50,000 words is nothing to sneeze at but it's shockingly little compared to how big this project actually is. It's amazing to have so few words left to write.
2. I passed 1,030,000 words.  Of course, this is just the uncoded word count. I actually haven't hit 1,000,000 yet for my estimated coded word count. It's still at about 985,000 words.

Either way...that's a lot of words!

In other news. I got a new laptop. =w=

Some of you may be saying "But Esh! Didn't you get a new laptop recently??" AND...you would be right. It's only been two years. But the laptop I had was getting to the point it couldn't run photoshop and was struggling with basic tasks.

I was also really having an issue editing on it because it would lock pu and freeze while editing if I was trying to 'accept' a lot of edits at once. I'd run every scan imaginable and there were no errors or issues. And finally...it had started just completely locking up - giving a grey screen and freezing until I did a hard reboot.

So after some dithering and whining, I just got a new one. It's been a bit of a distraction as I had to migrate all my files (again), redownload all my programs (again), set everything up (again) and then spend days wrestling with my monitor to get it looking decent so the characters don't all look like Oompa Loompas because WOW were the reds and oranges on this monitor ultra saturated.

Anyway, I'm finally mostly situated on the new machine, which runs much smoother in spite of trying to turn everyone into one of Morgan's tangerines.

Sneak Peeks:

None for now!

Upcoming Week:

Writing. LoL! I want to finish up with Chapter 8 and hopefully Chapter 9 as well.