Dev Log - Refining Words

Hello Everyone!

Usually it's me (JV) bringing you the news and updates, but today we have a special message from our writer, so take a minute to look at what he has to say about our next update!

When we first came to the idea of creating a visual novel inside the world of Elfheim we established two main pillars that the plot had to follow, the first one being the need to improve and display everything that makes the world of Elfheim special, starting by the lovely Elves who inhabit it and then the mysteries that lie beyond the usual artworks you see coming from this world; the second pillar of this medium is the freedom it provides us in introducing newcomers to our universe for the first time, making sure that the structure wouldn't scare anyone away by sheer complexity or volume of information.

Our first draft followed what you could expect from a standard kinetic visual novel, a dynamic mix of text and sprites on a background telling a story, this formula usually changes for a few special occasions to present a composed scene showing a specific action with great amount of detail and depth. In that script, we had more than thirty thousand words, that, as I recall, were a blast to write.

But not long after the script was completed and revised, we felt that we had missed on one of our pillars: we were showing everything the world of Elfheim has to offer, even more than that, but that came at a price, we were going with an extensive requirement of immersion from our readers, making it hard to keep the fun going around and the “boredom” close at bay if you weren’t that interested in what was going on.

A change was needed, so we got back to the drawing board. After a handful of days we reworked the style of our project from the ground up, making our first announcement about it in late december, it was then that the style of the visual novel we have right now was established: a kind of "manga/comic" novel, without any sprites that would take most of the screen time, instead using only fully composed and rendered scenes.

To compensate for that, what was written also had to change, we made sure to move the interesting parts to an early appearance, and at the same time, to shift from an extensive writing style to short and concise, the text now is meant to complement the art, and the art... Well, now our artist has more than quintupled the amount of work he has to do, but since I haven’t heard Sunna complain about drawing more Elves even once, I don’t think that will be a problem.

Our first alpha release was in late January, and after that only small changes and fixes were made to the text, yet, since then, I had the intent to make adjustments and improvements to all of it, sharpening some edges and elaborating on some parts in relation to the art that was being completed, keeping the experience in alignment with both pillars.

And as of right now, the changes are ready! If you have played any of our past alphas you will find out in our next release that the plot has not changed, all the tweaks and improvements in the script didn't interfere with the destiny of our slimy hero, neither changed how he meets everyone else, what is different now is that some lines were altered and a bunch more were added.

From a mathematician’s perspective, we have added one new line for each four others we had previously, that’s not including the many more that were altered or adjusted, I’m sure that these changes made the character interactions even more charming, and the mind of our protagonist is now a little bit more filled with attention to his nearby surroundings, as well as his personal slimy quirks, after all, a Red Slime could sneak behind him at any time.

In conclusion, I'm glad about where this first part of our journey now stands, not to say there won’t be any more fixes or small adjustments when needed, but our next release will be a good time to read everything from the start, or re-read all of it if you haven’t done it before!

-hrb