[Episode Deneb] Progress Update XII

Greetings,

this week came with more progress than I initially expected to. So that's a good thing I guess. This time I'll talk about a bit of the current state of the scripting and about the flow of some scenes, more music and a few other things.

Scripting and flow of scenes

The first half of the episode is completely written, rendered and mostly scripted. Just a few minor tasks like setting time is missing. To most complex scenes of the second half and some between scenes are also rendered and scripted.

However, after play-testing the first half I'm a bit unsure of the flow of the scenes. The dialogue and renders are fine. There is just some time-skipping going on to give the impression that some time is passed and Selene and MC hang around a lot. I'm not happy with the current visualization of the time-skipping and need to think of a better or more interesting way to show it. At the moment it just feels not right. I'll think of a way to fix it.

Some more thoughts about the current flow of the update. The update starts very slowly with dialogue heavy scenes, especially the one's about the technical stuff in the class-room. However, I tried to shorten them as much as possible and write them in a way to contribute to the story of the game and to focus on the developing 'companionship' between Selene and MC. I fear a bit I could lose some people who might find that a bit boring.

However, if you play through I'm fairly certain the later scenes in the update will make up for the slower beginning.

Music

I finished 3 more tracks. One with a sleepy / dreamy theme for scenes at night and for scenes in the sleeping capsule. An ambient background techno track for the club scene before the track for the actual scene is unlocked. And one more track that was supposed for the gym scenes with an uplifting / happy / euphoric theme in the drum'n'bass genre. However, I feel like the current version is to uplifting for a background track / score of a scene and think it could be to distracting. I will probably take the first part of this track and rework it into a score that is more suited as a background track when I have the time to do so.

The tracks can be listened to in the Patreon discord channel.

Various Stuff

I added a key-bind to hide the UI elements with the middle mouse button just like in renpy.

I created a little tool that helps me test and debug scenes faster. I can easily jump to any notated scene now without any hackery. Thanks to osanaiko for giving me the idea for that

Upcoming week

Next weak will probably a bit slower on progress again as I've to take on quite a few private life matters again.

Current status

~ 500 rendered and edited images

- 2 animations (1 lewd)

~ 50% of scripting done

- 6 (maybe 7) tracks