09/09/2023 Patreon Devlog (WSC) (Patreon)

Summary

• Imported the new BGs to the game
• Did a couple of new sprite outfits
• Finished the music room art
• Finished up Kav Ch 6
• Started on Ch 7 additions
• Received a new BG sketch

Ramble

Let's get into it....

Writing

So I finally finished catching Kav up to everyone else. Noel, Raif, and Yren are all completed up to the end of chapter six. So I was trying to get Kav up to that point as well.

A lot of moments with Kav flow a bit differently than everyone else. His romance is also paced a little different than the others, which I've mentioned before. Word count wise, Kav is now on par with everyone else, which is good. I can stop worrying about that now.

I am currently writing an extra scene in Chapter Seven's "common" content. And then will get back to writing everyone's individual character scenes.

In terms of overall writing and milestones, the game is just over 350,000 words and I hit my 75% milestone. As I mentioned, I was meant to hit this at the end of October but have obviously reached it much earlier.

My word count didn't actually drop as much as I thought this week but I suspect that is just because I wrote a lot over the weekend so I didn't have to write as much during the week to keep the current trend.

My current policy for weekends is "I will write/draw game stuff *if I want to*" - if I don't want to do it, I remind myself I have no obligation to spend my free time working. But in the end, writing and drawing are both my work and my hobby so if I want to do it and it's not stressing me out then I will.

As of right now, I'm not stressed or burned out on WSC so working on the weekends is still enjoyable and I find myself wanting to spend free time on it. That's really helpful for making very fast progress.

Typically as I get more stressed or burned out on a project, my will to spend my free time on it diminishes. But we're not there yet so WSC still gets the extra boost from me working on it most weekends.

Art

So this week with art there were a few things that got done.

1. I worked on some minor sprite additions for existing characters. Mostly new outfits. Um..somehow everyone is getting a full wardrobe at this point. So Raif got another outfit.
2. I finished the art for the music room this week. I only had Raif and Yren left. Now that is complete.
3. Did not touch the CGs that need updating because...I completely forgot, basically.
4. I got the new BGs (the corridor + variations) imported to the game. Typically this involves doing some colour correcting first to make the palette more homogenous, then just replacing the ones in the game, which isn't hard.
5. And finally I did get a new sketch from the artist, this one for the decontamination room which actually only gets used a couple of times but still needed a background.

Here is a sneak peek of Yren's music room image (he and Raif had to get earbuds instead of over-the-ear headphones like the others. LoL). Like Asher, the full sized image will be available as a wallpaper to some tiers at some point in the future!

Other

I have a programmer friend who is working with me on some of the more difficult features for WSC. Now this doesn't look impressive. It's just a flowchart. But what makes this flowchart cool is that it's done entirely with code.

For Gilded Shadows, I had to make the flowcharts manually in a program like photoshop or illustrator. Those images were then put into the game and the flowchart was set up as an image map.

It functions fine but there were some drawbacks to doing it that way (in addition to just being time consuming.) What we wanted to try to do was set up a system in Ren'py that would let the flowcharts be constructed with code rather than being constructed manually as complete images.

That may not seem impressive but...when you realise the first attempt to place the connecting lines looked like this:

It becomes more obvious (I hope) how cool it is that this can be done with code rather than in an image editing software. The hope is that the flowcharts will be less of an ordeal to put together using this method.

Upcoming

Presumably more writing in the upcoming week between doing some final GS things and continuing with the beta testing and correcting.

Now that Kav is caught up, my focus will be on finishing the Ch 7 scenes for Kav, Noel, Raif, and Yren.

Based on Asher and Daaz's ch 7 content, I should have around 22,000 words or so to write for KNRY's (They are now an acronym because LoL) Ch7 content. Definitely too much to write in one week so we'll just see how far I get. 💪

My next major milestone (as I count them) is hitting 400,000. I usually base my major milestones around percentages or pretty and round numbers. So 400,000 will be the next one.