Saturday Devlog (April 8)

Hi everyone, and happy saturday once again! I hope you're staying safe and healthy.

Progress is chugging along somewhat slowly these days, as in the first third of April the bulk of my efforts have been spent on storyboarding this final arc's finer details. There's a lot I initially planned to accomplish in the 'day-off' segment before the arc launches in proper, but now that I've finally laid them out, I think it's likely that stuffing them all in will make the plot feel like it's dragging its feet. Usually when I face this conundrum I resort to a vastly branching segment, only a portion of which can be seen on any given playthrough (think the Calinger arc back in Book 1!), but there's quite a bit of plot-important expositions sewn into the scenes--enough so that it'll be very difficult to track which specific pieces of information the players have seen. This makes it so that a huge amount of variability has to be introduced to a lot of the scenes later down the line, which is effort I'd rather spend on other, more rewarding content.

That being said, I do currently have a storyboard I'm relatively satisfied with, which I hope will achieve something of a happy medium between the two. It's very likely that I'll have to revisit this segment again prior to Book 2's release, as there are some segments within that demands fine-tuning. I'll do my best to still make it engaging in the meantime!

In terms of actual writing, I've gotten a couple of scenes done here and there, focusing largely on the scenes that I'm certain will make the cut even if the storyboard were to change again. The side effect of not working chronologically (as I usually do), however, is that what I've written omits a lot of the context necessary for the scene to make sense. As such, I think it would be best to postpone the sneak peek this week in favor of a double feature next week.

In terms of art, commissions have already gone out to the respective artists. It's early days yet and things may still change, but if all goes well, we should have our regular set of monthly features (idolverse versions of the Arcadia squad), a tarot card art feature, as well as artwork of the next character from A Murder of Gods, namely F!Ariel, the perpetually exhausted loremaster. I hope you'll look forward to it!

And that about wraps it up for this week's devlog. As always, thank you for supporting the development of A Mage Reborn!