25/02/2024 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

Ramble

Hallooo! Time for this week's update. It was a pretty good week. Nicky returned from being overseas for two weeks so that's been a bit of a distraction for the last couple of days.

Sadly it's only for just over a week and then he leaves again. *cries*

It's nice to have him back. Even if he's already being loud. 🤣🤣

Summary

• Revising Chapter 5
• Updating menu screens
• Continuing the David run
• GS Lore book
• WSC epic guide stuffs

Writing

This week I've been focusing on editing chapter 5.

Chapter 5 is the longest chapter so far at around 65,000 words. Yes. For one chapter. *cries more* It is one of three chapters that cracked 60k in length.

Ch5 has what is, at this point in the game, the longest single scene the MC has with the love interests.

I break the content in WSC into three categories:

• Common content that involves non-target characters
• Common content that focuses on the targeted character
• LI-specific content

Common content + non-target characters

This is content the player will basically encounter on every play through and that involves group scenes or is essentially a non-optional scene with a character you may not be targeting. So in a scenario where you're targeting Yren as the LI, you may still have a scene with Noel in his role as the ship captain. Or you may have a mess hall scene that involves the entire crew or some of the crew members.

This kind of content tends to be very plot focused and is where most of the driving force of the plot is located.

Common content + targeted scenarios

This is content the player has the option of encountering on every play through and is not very specific to the LIs but does involve an interaction with them. An example of this is the meeting scene in Chapter 1. You can choose who to sit next to and you get a short interaction with that character, such as Asher introducing himself and saying he's curious about the MC.

But these aren't really LI-focused scenarios. It's just a small interaction within a larger scene that isn't exclusive to the LI.

LI-specific content

This is the content I consider making up part of the LI's exclusive path through the game. These are basically 1x1 scenes with the love interest. They are dotted through the rest of the content throughout the game. There is at least one per chapter and they range from 2000 to 7000 words of content.

These are scenes that sometimes involve similar events (such as walking to the MC's room or doing a mission together) but that I wrote specifically for each LI without copying and pasting the content.

The "LI specific content" makes up the majority of the game content (I'm estimating that it's about 70% of the game since I'm in the middle of editing so numbers are shifting around)

So all of that is to say that in Chapter 5, you get the most LI specific content up to this point in the game. There is a BIG SCENE at the start of the chapter, then some common stuff, then another significant scene later in the chapter.

It makes for a long chapter.

There are only two other chapters (currently) that go over 60,000 words. Chapter 7 and Chapter 11.

This is also the chapter where the LI's route gets locked in.

And I've had a huge struggle deciding how that's going to happen.

You see, I really didn't want to have it be a single choice that ignores all the previous choices in the game. I just don't like the idea of allowing the player to target, say, Daaz and get every Daaz interaction....then pick the Raif romance route.

My issue with this is that, to me, this makes for a somewhat shallow game experience if Daaz isn't allowed to be hurt by this change in behaviour and if Raif just accepts it like it's normal. That feels like a very false human interaction.

And on such a small crew, surely that sort of thing would cause drama.

So deciding exactly how to gate the routes and do various checks on how the player has been going through the content has been...tricky.

Because why would I ever do something simple?

I think I've mostly figured out how it's going to work but...who knows. Sometimes you think you know how it will be but then you code it and none of it makes sense. Ha ha.

That's a problem for Future!Esh.

Anyway, editing wise, most of what I'm doing is just fleshing out the interactions but in Noel's case I have had to make some more substantial edits because some of what is said in his scene doesn't align with the new edits and changes I made to the story. So he's had a much more substantial amount of revising (vs just fleshing out) than Daaz, Asher, and Kav.

Currently I'm working on Raif's big scene and then I get some common content to edit (bearing in mind that all the common content has already been edited once so it requires much less editing at this point).

And yea...that's what is going on writing wise

Art

I've received a new finished BG and two new sketches.

Other

I finally finished editing the lore book but I haven't sent them out quite yet. That will be soon though.

I've also been slowly working on the Fancy Guide (™) for WSC.

And, finally, I've been updating the in-game menus with the new menu screen and having a lot of fun with it. Of course, it's tricky at times to figure out what expression really works for the choices and sometimes I feel like it's not as important because the choices themselves are much more obvious.

But it's still been pretty fun to go in and add the new screen and test it. I really like this addition and it'll probably make an appearance in future projects too.

Upcoming

So in the upcoming week, I imagine I'll still be editing Chapter 5 the whole time. As I said, it's a really long chapter.

After I finish the first character scenes (mid-Raif at the moment, and I have Yren left after this, which will probably require a some more significant updates as I did tweak his personality a bit about halfway through writing the game so he's a bit different in these early chapters from how he is in later chapters and I've had to fix that for continuity) I have about 11,000 word of "common + non-target characters" to edit.

As I've said, all the common content has already had one edit so it goes a little faster than the character oriented content.

And after the common content, I have 15,000 words of character content to edit. Then another 1000 words of common content.

So yeah, still a fair bit left in this chapter. Ha ha.

Ha.

One of the hardest things about this game is that I feel like I get stuck treading water. In GS, I edited one route at a time and the chapters were 7000 - 10000 words. This meant I could usually edit a chapter a week. Sometimes a week and a half.

In WSC the chapters are 25k - 65k and I'm editing all the routes at once (because this is the easiest way to keep the flow of the story straight in my head). So instead of taking one week per chapter, I might take three weeks to edit one chapter. I'm not used to working this way and it's just really...tiring.

I feel like I'm not making progress and I get frustrated. So I'm trying to refocus myself and instead of looking at it as "editing this chapter", I'm focused on "editing this scene." It helps a little but I'm still frustrated at the slow progress for writing this game. So...

Yeah. Ha ha.

Anyway! We'll see where I am next week!