30/09/2023 Patreon Devlog (WSC) (Patreon)

Summary

• Finished all chapter 8 scenes
• Finished revising Chapter Two (asher's path)

Ramble

Not going to lie, this was a rough week everyone. Like really stressful and lots of distractions. Of course, part of that was releasing Yuu's route, which officially wraps up the game content for Gilded Shadows.

But also just real life is being intense right now. I wrote significantly less than I have been, managing only 7300 words for the full week.

But that's still something. So let's jump into the details!

Writing

So as much as I dislike not sticking to a sequential writing approach, I am working somewhat non-sequentially on WSC at the moment.

This week, I did two things simultaneously. The first was to try to finish all chapter 8 scenes for the remaining characters (which I did).

The second thing was to start editing Asher's path/route. This means editing all the common scenes + Asher's individual scenes. And I edited this up to the start of chapter 3.

The goal of editing now, as I said last week, is to help me be able to write the end-route content that relies a lot on earlier revelations and foreshadowing since I intend to introduce some more complexity to the main conflict and alter some antagonist motivations.

But I also hate the idea of stopping my forward progress because I don't want to throw off my deadlines.

So I've been continuing to write my 1000 words a day to move my progress forward, then spending any other time writing beyond that to edit.

It sounds complicated but I'm just trying to big-brain my way through this so that I can finish the draft while also reducing how much I have to - rewrite later on.

Chapter 9 is a mostly character driven chapter. There's actually very, very little shared content and most of the chapter is oriented around the relationship rather than the conflict.

I think I may have said at one point that the routes split after chapter 8, but that was true before I added in an additional chapter. The proper split is after Chapter 9. That said, Chapter 9 is about 85% made up of individual LI scenarios. So even though it doesn't fully split at this point, the routes definitely have already started to diverge quite significantly.

Point is that I'll probably continue my 'split screen' strategy in the upcoming week where I draft new scenes until I hit my daily goal, then switch to editing.

Not how I prefer to work but sometimes we must adapt.

The total word count is at 380,000 words

Art

Nothing art related this week!

Other

Nothing to report here this week either.

Upcoming

Writing!

There is about about 32000 words of content that's needed (8000 words per character) for Chapter 9 so there's really no way to finish that in a week, even if it's my entire focus. But I will be working on that. 

I will also continue editing through early chapters, focusing on Chapter 3

Chapter 3 is the recently added chapter so it's a bit more rough than the others and certainly needs some fleshing out.

I am still on track to finish the draft by the deadline or earlier. I actually only have to write about 6500 words a week to manage the deadline. Anything above that is extra.

With the art book for GS nearly finished, my focus will turn to the lore book and I'll be splitting my time working on WSC and compiling all the stuff for the GS lore book.

So yeah. Basically...I'll be busy!

We'll see how far I progress when I check in with you next week!

~Esh