10/04 Patreon Devlog

Hi everyone! Time for this week's update. Except....where did the week even go? Man, it passed so quickly! 

First of all, we want to wish everyone a Happy Easter and a Happy Passover. We hope all of you have a peaceful and safe holiday.

In the meantime, let's discuss this week in game development.

Writing:

So this week I completed the rough draft of Caleb's first chapter and got started on Chapter Two.

The first chapter is always a little easier to write than some of the others since, especially with Endgame, the routes all essentially start with the same basic event - Morgan wakes up in the Endgame medical ward.

That said, this chapter still ended up more complex than I expected simply because I ended up having a personality based branch that then broke into a choice based branch. And because of the details of the situation, those ended up being significantly long branches by design.

I also...at some point went through Caleb's entire synopsis/outline and polished it up. I don't remember when I did that or if I mentioned it on last week's updates. 

My outlines are in synopsis form which means I have each chapter broken down by scene, with a summary of each scene. Essentially I'm just fleshing out the summaries beat by beat. I'm hoping that cleaning up Caleb's synopsis ahead of time will minimise rewriting and restructuring so I can focus on just writing. 

Music:

This week, we got some new tracks and we got some cleaned up old tracks. Our composer always sends an early WIP, then we go through a couple of layers of cleaning up. So some of what we got this week was just polished up tracks that we'd heard before. 

Some of what we got were all new tracks. I'm just saying...

Our soundtrack is going to be awesome. OwO

Tobi, the composer, cracks me up because he keeps saying he's going to take a break and - like a typical creative - keeps working on his breaks. LoL

Artwork:

None! We didn't get any new BGs this week though we have several artists working on various things. Sometimes the background side of things can be slow. 

Coding/Testing:

Beta testers - including some of our volunteers, some Patrons, and some KS backers sent in feedback for the new demo content. It was mostly fixing typos and missing words and double words from bad previous edits, and the like.

I have to make some additional tweaks before the new content can be published. But it looks like we're on track to post an update to the demo soon.

There was a traceback/exception that was occurring, and we never really found what was causing it. But it seems to be fairly rare during normal use of the game and mostly presents itself when players are really abusing the skip/rollback features. I think it is likely a bug within renpy and not within Gilded Shadows specifically.

It was incredibly difficult for me to reproduce and I could never do it consistently. When I did recreate it, I could never pinpoint an exact cause for the trigger. As such, it's not fixed per se. But I don't think it's going to trouble people that much.

Otherwise, it's just been typo fixing. 

Part of me somewhat misses the bald sprite adventures of Changeling but it's not so much an issue with how our sprites are coded this time. Mostly because if I screw the sprites up, their clothes pop off. And that's so noticeable that I fix it long before it reaches testers.

LoL

Anyway, I'm hoping to update the demo maybe next week but we'll see.

Upcoming Week:

I will be focusing on writing, which is pretty much going to be the thing for a while, as I've said previously.

I want to finish Chapter Two and at least get started on Chapter Three of Caleb's route. I'm really hoping I can get through his route much faster than I did Caissa.

If I can work at a pace of 1.5 - 2 chapters per week, I can finish Caleb's route in two months, and that's definitely my goal. I really, really want to try for 2 months per route. That still has me writing until the end of November when it comes to the six original love interests. It would be nice if I could do it faster, but I am only a mere mortal, after all. ;o;

Anyway, that is all for this week and I will see you all next week!

~Esh