The Development of Day 11

Pictured Above: Xevvy about to commence writing on Saturday.
Pictured Below: Xevvy still writing on Tuesday with no end in sight.

So, how about that Day 11, huh?! It's uhh... it's a thing! A thing that... I'm... working on!

Day 11 was planned out in comprehensive detail long before I actually sat down to write it. It originally came together sometime during February where we stole one of it's scenes (Band Practice!) to fill a gap on Day 10 instead. This left a big window open, a window I wanted to fill with a camping trip. The team wasn't quite as hot on that idea as I was, but between us, we were not able to come up with anything else that lit my writing fuse, so to speak. And thus, it became an overnight camping trip by default. The day was intended to feature a 'revisited' scene from the same spot on Diego's route, not like what we did on Day 9 with the nightmare sequence. Then we would transition into the camping scene bringing several of the morning's characters along with us. We had the flow of events planned out in detail for the camping trip, but let's not drift into spoiler territory here.

Our usual development routine when it comes to the writing is that we will plan our content during the week, aiming to have everything in place for the actual writing work to commence on the Saturday. The way things usually are... or I suppose were, is that I would usually have a first pass version of the day completed on Saturday. The first pass version is one that usually never sees the light of day. I then go on and polish things up, making improvements and getting everything working as it should in the engine. That usually occurs on the Sunday morning, resulting in the second pass version which I then release to the rest of the team. They then run through, offering suggestions and improvements, pointing out problems and culling the worst of my dad jokes like a pair of embarrassed children. Those changes then result in a third pass version which generally sees one last run through and a smaller swathe of changes before it's considered final. On a good weekend, We will have at least reached our third pass by the end of Sunday.

So, let's talk about Day 11, shall we? 

Writing began about midday on Saturday as it usually does. I only stopped around 5am Sunday morning, just before I posted that Progress Report - a fascinating window into my mental state after such a long run of writing. The first pass was maybe 75% complete, despite the extended period of time I'd been working on it. Not so bad though, right? 

Wrong. So, I woke up at a fairly usual time on Sunday despite the very late finish and picked up where I left off, finally finishing the first pass in early afternoon. Now, a day in Sileo weighs in between 700 and 800 lines in the editor on average with some outliers. The first pass of Day 11 was 1350. This already made it the longest day in the game. So I then got to work on the second pass, starting with the engine work before progressing onto the writing towards the end of the night.

I had Monday off, so I got back to work once I woke... between the start I had made the night before and the way the morning was going, things were looking extremely dire. You see, a normal second pass would have me slowly crunching through, improving sentence structures, adding minor details etc. And I knew that something was seriously wrong...

...because I had rewritten everything I had passed so far. At best, one or two lines for every hundred remained mostly unchanged. But by Monday night, I was rapidly approaching the halfway point and the rewritten content was, at least to my eyes, absolutely top notch. With that level of quality maintained over such a long, unique day, Day 11 would quite easily be the finest thing we had ever done...

...you know the drill by this point though. Because then, progress hit a wall when I attempted to rewrite one particular section. It was potentially the most crucial section in the entire day, a block of dialogue that provides key exposition which will be extremely important in the coming days. The first (second) attempt took hours upon hours to assemble... I had piles of unused lines in the editor as I was copying in bits and pieces and writing in more again... it was a mess, not unlike one of those notes left by serial killers constructed from magazine cutouts and glue... It was far too much all at once. It was far too heavy in an otherwise light hearted day. It was so excessively complex! And so so dark that it seemed to suck all the light from the scenes around it. I purged the entire thing and began new. This version focused much more intently on the lighter aspects, with the darker parts deliberately kept vague. It was notably shorter and considerably less disruptive to the flow of the sequence without missing any of the crucial points. But even then, it still somehow felt like too much... as though it were out of place... by that point, it was rapidly approaching 4am. I had work in only a few hours. I had to stop.

And so, welcome to Tuesday! Let's take inventory. I only have evenings until next weekend, a weekend which is earmarked for Day 12 which incidentally we haven't started the detailed planning for yet on account of all my time still going into Day 11. I would be lucky to be 50% of the way into the second pass right now and not only is my progress barred by this particular difficult sequence, but there is also a scene later on that I know needs to be done completely differently and while I have some idea on how I will approach it, whether or not I can stick the landing might be another thing entirely.

So I suppose it would be fair to say Day 11's development has been a complete shit show. And worst of all? I know with complete confidence that my standards are at least partly to blame. Once upon a time, good enough was good enough. Not anymore. And I suppose that's a good thing. And it's not like you're going to be missing out on any actual content... because it's currently 1705 lines. Which makes it almost as long as the longest day in the game, plus another day on top!

This better wind up being the best thing ever, else I might turn to drink...