08/05 Patreon Devlog

 Hi everyone!

Posting this week's patreon devlog.

Writing:

This week I started writing Chapter Five of Caleb's route. I initially started off somewhat sticking to my original synopsis, but quickly went off track. When I tried to get back to the synopsis, I realised that my original plan was to have a confrontation between Morgan and Caleb - one I feel is a little pointless given how Morgan has developed in this route to the current point. This caused me to re-evaluate my initial goals and replan some scenes. 

At some point I realised I wasn't going to use my original synopsis at all. I was going to end up scrapping the entire original chapter and do something totally different.

So I paused in writing and actually took a moment redefine my goals and strategy for this chapter. Especially since it looks like it's going to have a kind of pivotal moment now where something big happens - and this will go on to impact Morgan and Caleb's relationship.

Because it's significant, it needs a lot of thought behind it. Initially I think I was planning something quite dull, and now it is shaping up to be a much more interesting chapter.

So now that it's reorganised, I need to complete my initial draft and get a completed rough done.

Art:

I have seen some BG WIPs. Nothing finished, unfortunately. But that's just the way it goes sometimes. Hopefully we'll see some new BGs in the upcoming week. But as of now, there's not much to report on that side of things.

For myself, I actually did crack into some sprite files and work on a few minor things. I made some corrections to Yuu's sprite - nothing serious.

I also worked on some of the alternate outfits for the main cast. Some of them still don't have all their alternate outfits finished (because there's no need for them at this point - this is all stuff that will appear in the character routes, not in the demo.

But sometimes if I need a break from writing, it's nice to open up the sprite files and work on some art for a change.

Coding: 

I coded all the new GUI designs and got the flowcharts set up through chapter four of the common route. I believe I actually did this last Friday between doing the update here on Patreon and the one on tumblr.

Most of that stuff didn't really require new coding. Or at least nothing significant. It was mostly about changing file names in the code. But in some case, I actually did have to re-align the text on the screen.

The original menu BG had a motif on the left hand side that caused us to need to have all the text slightly off center. With that motif now gone, everything looked off and needed to be properly centered on the screen. 

I also had to play around with the location of certain buttons and the like. 

Then I discovered an issue with the actual image files and had to re-save a bunch of them. So that was irritating. 

Game development requires a strange amount of time to be spent on just saving files. LoL

Sometimes it's possible to use Photoshop's ability to process files in batches but sometimes that's not really something I can use for what I need to do. So...yeah.

I coded music too - but I'll talk about that below.

Music:

Tobi is still working on polishing up our tracks and I haven't really heard anything from him this week beyond one message early on to just confirm what he's working on and what the process will look like.

That said, I decided there was really no reason to wait for the polished tracks to actually code the new music into the game. Doing it now means that when we get the official files, we can just swap the correct files in without needing to actually do any further coding.

Of course, the game already has music but the music cues for Tobi's music really needed to mostly be re-done. I'd say about 90% of the current music changes were just not working with Tobi's music.

I think the main reason is that Tobi approaches tracks a little differently than a lot of composers who make music exclusively for visual novels. 

A lot of game music has a really distinctive start with a repetitive melody. The tracks themselves have no particular flow or build to them. They start, they maintain the same level of presence and pacing throughout, they reach the end...and loop.

Some of Tobi's tracks are like that as well. Others...are different. They start softly, with a solo and then the main theme kicks in, they build...they pause, they build again, they taper off. This makes them more interesting to listen to, but it means I can't always treat them the same way I treat other tracks.

Sometimes I have to code in a command that starts the track, not at the beginning, but maybe 16 seconds in - because I need it to start where the main theme starts, not at that delicate solo.

At other times I found I would start a track and switch to another relatively quickly. But for Tobi's tracks, which sometimes need a bit to build, I found it sounded better to just...not switch to another track as quickly. Sometimes those switches just weren't needed anymore.

And then…

Sometimes you order music and you think you'll use it one way but when you actually get it, you find you need to use it a different way. Or you get a track that you like but that does not work in game the way you thought it would…

Anyway, all of that is to say that I spent some time re-coding the music and learning how we're going to be using Tobi's tracks. This also helps me see potential gaps in our soundtrack in case we need to supplement our original tracks with any other music from another source. 

Upcoming Week:

A lot of waiting for freelancers to complete stuff…

And more writing for me.

That's it, really. Weeks where I do a lot of waiting for freelancers feel kind of boring because it feels like I don't really have much to show or tell. 

Hopefully this was still an interesting read, though.