15/05 Patreon Devlog

Hi everyone!

Time for this weeks patreon dev log! 

Writing:

OOF.

This was a tough week in writing.

Chapter Five has been a really difficult chapter to write. As I mentioned before I realised my original idea for Chapter Five was just not going to work out. It was repetitive and boring. And while I don't want to gloss over how untrained Morgan is, I also don't want to rehash the same training sessions over and over again in the Endgame routes. 

Hence, I decided to do something a little different in this chapter. Morgan does end up having a brief training session - but with some of the Endgame rookies rather than Caleb, since she chooses to go work out on her day off. This lets me bring in two backer characters for a cute scene with her (Casey and Birdie have a fun vibe together).

It actually let me introduce an interesting story element regarding Morgan's mimicking ability, so I'm happy with that.

The latter half of the chapter involves Caleb taking Morgan out into the city for a while. I really like having this moment because it's another example of Caleb knowing something is important to Morgan and going to make it happen on his own. Essentially, he's showing he cares without being like "I CARE."

The second half of the chapter involves a Danger Moment (™). And I'm currently working on cleaning that segment up a bit.

I finally was able to work out what exactly was causing to struggle so much with this chapter (it's ironic because I'm working on the write-up about staying productive through writer's block and part of it is about exactly this - finding out WHAT has you blocked). I've been trying to really watch my word counts with this project due to feedback on Changeling.

And sometimes when you're writing - you know you need a branch. And you know it's going to have to be a big branch. And that can be daunting. I'm trying to keep the word count for each  chapter between 6-8k, and I could just tell this chapter was going to be very long if I did what I felt was probably the right flow of events. And not wanting to have a 10-12k chapter was really holding back.

I finally just embraced that it's going to happen and was able to finally get the potato draft done. Right now, having half-edited the chapter, it's 9k. I still have to really flesh out the latter half so I know that's going to go up quite significantly. But, at this point, it is what it is.

The chapter won't *play* longer than normal. It's just going to have probably be around 40-45% branched, so the word count will be almost double what the player actually experiences one time through it.

SO YEAH. I expect to probably have this chapter done by the end of today.

Art:

As I expected, this week we got to see several new BGs. Somehow our artists are kind of all in similar phases with their art so we go through these periods of seeing nothing at all...then getting all the BGs at once. 

You can see some of the ones we've gotten this week below:

Music:

Most of our tracks have been polished up and finished. Tobi is doing two things for us right now - he's cleaning up the looped versions for use in the game. And he's also making "finished" versions for the OST that we'll be giving out to KS backers. These tracks don't loop and have a nice finish on them.

If you listen to a looped track just one time through, you'll notice they tend to have a really abrupt cut off. This is obviously because it's meant to just start over. And it's usually cut in a way that makes that loop sound smoother and less abrupt. 

We obviously don't want to just give those weirdly cut tracks to backers, so Tobi is given them a nice end finish for that purpose.

We also ended up getting a little bonus track for the OST, which is fun.

So yeah. We have almost all the tracks! 

(At this point there aren't many changes being made to them anymore. Mostly just small tweaks and additions.)

I do think I will release the OST to everyone eligible for it as soon as we have the completed version. I don't think we'll be commissioning more music. If we have to fill in any gaps, it will be with royalty free tracks that wouldn't be included in an OST anyway. 

So yeah! That should be sooooooon. And that means an update to the demo….SOOOON.

Upcoming Week:

Hopefully this upcoming week will see:

Completion of Chapter Five (I'm really hoping that is going to be done by the end of today though)

Completion of Chapter Six

HOPEFULLY completion of sound track + *potentially* the update to the demo.

Hopefully a few more BGs as well! 

I have one TINY sprite "to do" thing I want to get done before the demo release. It's nothing major - there's just a reference in Common 4, to Caleb having a cut on his eyebrow. And I wanted to make sure that's reflected on his sprite when he shows up. So yeah.

That's the plan.

I'll also be posting the Part II of the "maintaining steam" thing! 

See you all next week!