Dev Journal 03/26/2023

And now we have our dev update for the month, starring the lovely Ines.  One of these renders has already been chilling on my Discord for a while, but it's probably my favorite Ines render I've ever done so it gets recycled. Now on to our feature presentation.

Physically Ines was interesting to build. When I first began to work on her I literally only knew one thing for sure I wanted her to have, and that was her hair color.  In the early stages of her assembly all I was sure about was that her hair had to be black.  I already had two redheads, and two brown haired girls in the pack, with a blonde snapping around the group as well. I needed a black haired character, so I knew for sure it would be her. I started creating her model early into the development of Part Two, I wanted her complete so that when she was ready to be introduced in the next part I wouldn't be down to the wire. Funny enough that didn't work out so well.  I had done maybe sixty or so renders of her first scene when a new hair asset was released, and I was enamored. I bought it and put it on Ines posthaste and discovered that it was exactly what I wanted for her, but using it would mean I would have to go back an redo the work I'd already done with her, I was very torn. But after I consulted a few other developers who'd seen her, and discussing it with them I decided that it was such an upgrade from the hair she had at the time and with how much I liked the new asset it was worth the extra work to change it, and thus we ended up with the Ines we have today.  Aside from the little hair snafu I spent a great deal of time working on Ines,  not quite as long as Elspeth, but Ines is a strong second place for character I worked on the longest.  I spent at least a few minutes every day for about two months tweaking her, playing with different looks. I've always been very satisfied with how she turned out, honestly if you were to ask me who I was the most happy with from a physical design Ines would very likely be my answer.

Storyline wise it's harder to discuss Ines than previous journals. One because she's still keeping things close to the vest in storyline and two because as a character Ines her self wouldn't be able to describe who she is.  If I had to pick something to really fit Ines and where she is, it's the word identity. Much of Ines's story revolves around her personal identity and what it means to her. Most of the cast of Unbroken have already sort of found that for themselves, they're older, or have a situation where the aren't really looking for who they are anymore, just looking for how they can be themselves better.  Ines is the youngest, and arguably least experienced of any of the cast. At current timeline in Unbroken she's just a few months short of turning nineteen, she's in that part of life all us old folks experienced, where she's trying to find who she is, and what is important to her as an independent adult. And part of that exploration is meant to be fun, a callback to a different time for some of us. I remember stupid things I thought I'd be doing in the future when I was that age, or the dumb shit I tried just because I could, Ines is meant to be a bit of an ode to those stupid, bygone times.  

Now I can't do much more, as we still have a lot of Ines to explore in game, but I'll bring her back for another dive in the future after we've seen some more. But I do want to take a quick moment and thank my French patrons and fellow devs who've been taking the time to help me make Ines a bit more French. Most know I'm a Yank, and I spent many years of my early adulthood living in the UK (Pompey represent) so I'm a bit more comfortable with those places. France on the other hand is not somewhere I've really been more than a few weeks at a time, and I speak about nine French words that I still remember from school. But it's important to me to give Ines more of her own national identity, so I really want to thank all the folks who've been helping me with that, taking the time to explain French culture and language, and how certain topics might be perceived has been indispensable. Also helping me with grammar and translation so that Ines can properly use her native tongue, much to the chagrin of a certain Croydon girl, is something I really appreciate. I don't know if they would want to be named here so for now I'll just say thank those folks for helping me French Ines up.

Now I've rambled enough so I'll leave it here for now. 

Thank you as always for the support and I hope you have a wonderful upcoming week.

Sláinte!