DevLog Update

Hey all,

Gonna jump right into this one for the sake of time but I wanted to check in.

Background

For those that haven't been on Twitter or the Discord channels/voice chat, v0.19 has always been my nemesis even long before we ever got to this point in the story. From the inception of the story, the events in this update are one of the few things that never really changed. I'd originally set the game outline up with benchmarks; checkpoints throughout the story that needed to be hit and then I would just freestyle and fill in the rest. I like writing that way and it feels more cathartic. 

But this motherfucker-- this update is all technical to me. I've viewed it as an update that requires skill to pull off and needs to weave together many of the loose threads that have been dropped along the path to this point. That's tough for an amateur and over the years its grown into this leviathan as it slowly drew closer. This is my Doomsday; my Thanos, folks. 

There's just a lot going on in this update so expect the progress to be slow on this one. I don't like that anymore than you do; mostly because I want to get this update done because it's fucking hard. I truly feel that the development requirements after this update are significantly easier; I just gotta get through this monster and I don't want to fuck it up. The writing requirements for this one are just formidable, daunting, and intimidating to me. Meanwhile, I have Blayke providing reassurance and reminding me that I should be having fun while doing this so pray for his ass for real because he's a saint. It's a balance for me here and this is the hardest point in the game to maintain that balance.

Writing

So I'm going to avoid spoilers in these logs like I always have but expect me to be a bit more cryptic in this than I usually am. I'm going to compare this update a lot with the last update in terms of the process and to give you an idea on the length here. v018 was 6 scenes of content in the original outline and our detailed notes spanned 9 full pages before the actual writing started. Once written and coded into the game, that translated into around 1.5 to 2 hours of gameplay depending on your reading speed. In comparison, the current update is outlined at about 10 scenes (probably 9.5 actually) and is over 12 pages of outline right now before writing (and some parts aren't fully outlined yet). So it's going to be bigger and longer than the last one was.

In reality, I would like to break this update down to make it more concentrated and smaller but there's really no place to do that. For those that have been around for a little while, let's go back to the beach update for context. The pacing of that update was good. The beach section was fun, then very serious, then romantic, then very bro, then we went back to the romance of the pool, and finally the fire. It was a rollercoaster. If I had broken that update up, we would have lost that momentum--the only people that would have seen that momentum were the new readers or people who randomly decided to start over again. We have the same dilemma here with v019.

I will also say that not all scenes will be visible during your first playthrough. So in reality, this update may have about the same playthrough time as v018 did but if you replay, you could see the extra scenes that you missed the first time around. Critics may suggest that we could split the update into two updates and release the splits independently but that won't work either based on the content here (no spoilers) so we don't have a choice.

So current writing status is that I have 3 scenes drafted right now out of the 10. At this point, I'm writing some of the easier scenes first and then jumping to the harder ones in an effort to try and reduce the number of things I'm simultaneously focusing on and make this less daunting. Some of these scenes are somewhat short, though, too. So even that progress is somewhat misleading.

 CGs

So initially, I was hoping that the CGs for this update would go a bit faster than the last update. There is a lot of conversations that take place and less "action shots" in this part of the story. For example, v017 had the beach with the frisbee scene, seagulls, things like that. That particular update required several shots to make the action sequences seem a bit more interactive and keep with our cinematic theme. Similarly, v018 had the shower takedown (which is still one of my favorite things ever) and several new types of conversations like the coffee shop and the sauna. With this new update, I was hoping to be able to use some previous shots from the last 2 updates. We saw this during the early parts of the game where I was able to reuse several dorm room conversations over and over and that speeds up the dev time significantly (which is another reason why early updates in the game were faster to pump out than the newer ones are--when you add new areas to the game, it increases development time).

That being said, with the addition of the scene described in the first part of this post, I ended up doing an extra 75 images that I originally hadn't planned on. So somehow, I always find a way to make things longer. To make it worse, the new scene had some action sequences in it similar to the beach shots so I've spent about 2 weeks on this scene itself so that slowed me down a bit. However, I like the scene a lot and I think the majority of you will appreciate the addition of it and it really teases more towards the ending of this episode as well as more things to come in the last couple updates left in the game. So imo, it was worth the time.

So where I'm at right now is that there are over 180 images done that span 3 scenes so far. Visually, I think they look good and there's some fun shots in there that I'd love to share but there's sooooo many spoilers in them.

It's still too early to tell with the other scenes yet on how many images I may be able to reuse and allow me to speed up the dev time a bit but stay tuned. Right now, my computer hasn't stopped rendering images for about 3 weeks but I'm going to have to shift back over to writing again now so that could slow down.

What to Expect in v019

I'll be brief in this section. v019 will end Chapter 9 of the story so expect some simultaneous closure and setup like we normally get at the end of a chapter. This is another update where a lot happens and many of the previous changes and events were just transitions; but we should be expecting that as we move towards the end. The character arcs will continue to build and intersect in this one--some of which I'm really excited to show off. I expect this update to be another one of those where you just have to take some time afterwards to marinate on everything that happens and how it changes things moving forward.

Gonna shut up now and get back to work. 

<3