(Not quite A) Progress Update

Edit: The (new) visual style is now uploaded, and has replaced the old download links. Anyone who previously downloaded the old version may notice this one is significantly smaller (almost half the size!) That's due to a different style image compression I tried. I personally couldn't notice any difference in the quality of the larger (KB-wise) images vs the smaller ones, so I'm going to stick with the better compression (AKA smaller file size) unless someone can point out that they notice a significant decline - in which case I may switch back.

I experimented with a slightly different visual style for this release. Today, after playing around quite a bit - I've decided I'm not entirely happy with it. So I spent most of the day messing around with stuff, and arrived with something I much prefer. I'll be re-uploading the game sometime late tomorrow with the "new" graphics (it's the same really, but it does look a little bit different), as well as a couple very very minor bugfixes that I assume no one will notice. It'll likely be late tomorrow because I stopped working on it about halfway through because I have been up for 20+ hrs, so I'll have to finish it tomorrow.

Well, with Ch1 finished, what's next? Ch2 obviously! It'll be a little bit before I get started on the renders for it. I decided I want to do things a little differently going forward, so I'm going to get all the setup for that done so I have a good flow once I start on Ch3 and beyond.

So far my flow has been this: Write the entire chapter skeleton. (Every event, anything major, 90% of the minor stuff, use my "global" storyline as reference). Then write the actual dialogue for at least a month or so worth of rendering - then get into that. At that point I splice in writing and rendering as I go until I'm done - mixing in coding whenever I need to.

Moving forward I want to actually storyboard everything out. Normally when I'm rendering, I'm building the renders to the dialogue, and coming up with everything else sort of on the fly. (Anything going on in the background that isn't story important, any "stuff" around, the camera angle, all that stuff). Instead, I want *all* of that pre-determined. This frontloads the work slightly, and it'll obviously still be subject to change, but it will accomplish two things. #1 - It'll make the actual process of building the renders easier, as I don't have to spend as much time "coming up" with stuff as I go. Second, it'll help a ton with consistency. I've run into issues a few times where I put something in  a scene, but then I had to go edit other stuff to make sure it was there as well and it becomes a nightmare quickly. By having everything laid out from the start, I'll be able to hopefully work faster, and maintain a visual consistency that I'm happy with.

So what's been done so far? So far I've just worked a bit on the overall outline of Ch2. Over the weekend I'll be making sure to flesh out every event (major and minor), and throughout all of the week I'll work on dialogue for at least the beginning stuff, plus storyboarding everything out. By the week after I should be able to start rendering the first few scenes, and I'll go from there. This is going to be a learning process, so it might slow me down the first few weeks, but once I get the hang of it it'll overall be much better (and allow me to get stuff done quicker!).

So that's all for now. I'll give a quick update next week (though it won't be much since it's all writing for the next week or so!), so until then, have a great week!