Friday Devlog!

 Hey Guys! 

Just popping on to post this week's Patreon devlog. Let us jump on it.

Writing:

I did finish the rough draft of Chapter Eleven but my roughs are………….shockingly rough. So I'm planning to spend the day fleshing it out and getting it to a state that's at least readable.

Everything will get another revision later on but Changeling still had some really rough chapters and missing segments when I did its final revision and I want to avoid that for Gilded Shadows. I want everything readable and fully written.

That said, the route is currently just over 86,000 words or 86% to the target word count and we're up to 25% for the total which is a pretty big milestone.

We can now officially say the script is ¼ of the way done, which feels significant! 

A couple of other writing related things I did this week:

I did a short write up on script formatting for a visual novel. Rather, I did a write up on how *I* do it - which is, of course, not the only way to structure a script. There are many methods. But if you're curious about it you can check that out here:

Script Writing 

I know a lot of new developers aren't entirely sure how to go about structuring their script and I wanted to write something that might help a little. I'm hardly an expert but sometimes it's nice to just see strategies.

The second write up I did was on word count (again) - I feel like I rant about it a lot. But I wanted to just kind of put all my thoughts and equations in one place. Again, for newer devs who might be asking some of these questions.

You guys already know a bit about my thoughts on this but if you want to check that out, you can find it here:

Word Count Rambles 

Art:

We got the background we were waiting on for chapter two! I'm so excited. Even though it's just a car background so it's a little boring. It looks really good in-game though!

This time around, I asked our artist to leave the window transparent as this would give me the opportunity to layer in the appropriate setting. In Changeling, the cars only had one BG - the bridge with motion blur. (It might have been the forest BG - I don't remember).

No matter where they were driving or whether they were driving at all...it was the same.

It always kind of bothered me but that's just kind of how it was.

This time our environments are so wildly different between the day and night side (or will be) that I wouldn't be able to reuse this car with the same BG viewable out of the windows.

Vui, our amazing BG artist was kind enough to send me the photoshop (which also gives me some insight into how he sets up his layers. MWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!).

It was actually really nice to see that a pro has layers as messy as mine (and that he doesn't always label them. Haha. I didn't even know you could color code layers! OWO 

Anyway, having a layered file  play around with the environment in the background this can just be our go-to car background. I may try to play around with colors or something. But I may not. I don't think it's really critical for everyone to have a different car background. There aren't nearly as many car scenes as there were in Changeling.

We also got a couple more chibis since last time. You can see those here. They're looking super cute. Three more to go!

Coding: 

I finished up coding chapter two! I got all the sprites done, the music, everything. Even sound effects now.

Side note: Looking for sound effects is mind numbing and annoying. It takes forever to locate the right sound and some libraries really require specific (but not too specific) search terms to find the right stuff.

Fortunately, we didn't need too many for now - though I did also grab some for chapter three - but it was still annoying looking for them.

I actually sent out chapter two for beta testing with a small group - who have found a distressing amount of mistakes…

That means I'll be able to make it available to you guys very soon.

I somewhat changed up the scoring in the game for now. First of all, the relationship meters were set a little high and it was really difficult to they were moving. I've lowered their total range so that a single point has more visual impact.

I also had to move some points around to account for Magnus and Caissa now being 'meetable'. And I added point subtractions.

In Changeling, points were only additive. And this is because we had a sort of "Bad choice" point meter behind the scenes. This time around, I think I'm going to use the relationship points as our only progress tracker. And, in that case, I think it makes sense to have it set up to go up and down based on choices - as opposed to just going up. 

I didn't really do anything shockingly interesting coding wise - but I kind of feel like once you get your base coding done in a VN there's not much interesting stuff left anyway.

DEMO Stuffs:

So I do intend to send the next part of the demo out to you guys very soon - within the next couple of days. 

Initially I didn't want to release part II to the public until closer to the KS, then reserver part III for release sometime after the KS.

I think we're changing that schedule and part II will go public in early December, then part III will go out just prior to KS.

I don't think chapter four will go public at all. I think that will remain a patreon-only perk for our two highest tiers. So red and black tea patrons will get to play the entire common route (and maaaaaybe the two interludes) long before everyone else sees that content.

So yeah, that's the current, updated plan for that.

Upcoming Week:

This week I definitely plan to do the following:

-Totally finish Ari, Chapter Eleven.

-Finish Ari, Chapter Twelve (at least the rough draft for sure).

-Probably send the next part of the demo out to patrons over the weekend.

I noticed last time I kept saying "common chapter three" - I don't know why. It was chapter TWO I was working on. Chapter three isn't even...edited and ready to code yet. I don't know what was wrong with my brain!

I think this upcoming week will be writing focused. I really, really, really……...REALLY want to finish Ari's route before the end of November. It's probably about 25,000 words left? So it's doable. But that means not really doing other stuff like art or coding chapter three or anything.

Anyway, that's all for now. I will see you guys later!