Lock & Key Progress Update - May 2024 (Patreon)

Hello again, Magical Friends! Gosh, has it really been an entire month already? I don’t know about you, but May passed in a blur. What a strange time of year.

Over the last month, our team unfortunately suffered some deeply unfortunate events on personal and familial levels. As such, progress has slowed down somewhat in order to allow time for everyone to recover. Élan has always been amazing when it comes to supporting its team members and promoting a healthy work/life balance, and we know that caring for each other is more important than anything else.

That doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting on our hands, of course! Game design has a lot of moving parts, so some of those parts can very much continue to move even now. As such, I’d like to talk a bit about one part of dev that I’ve often struggled with the most: editing.

Are you familiar with the phrase “Kill your darlings?” For those unaware, the phrase is often used in writing to denote instances where some parts of a creation that you may love have to be sacrificed for the sake of a more cohesive overall story. Despite the key differences between writing for visual novels and writing traditional prose, this principle holds just as true for VNs. Sometimes it’s a few good lines, sometimes it’s entire scenes, and sometimes it’s even entire subplots/story beats. It’s always a bit painful to cut out stuff you might love, but a good editor is able to see past individual moments to get a sense of the story as a whole and make the hard choices when it comes to story structure.

It’s not just about cutting, of course; editors suggest expansion, rewording/reworking, alternate paths, and so much more. A really great editor can even help you realize things about your characters that you might not have realized yourself. I’ve been lucky enough to have a fantastic editor for LAK and have learned so much about the writing process and structuring a world thanks to her guidance. With the right synergy between a writer and an editor, killing your darlings can even lead to the creation of reworks that are far more precious than the original. Even if it’s tough emotionally, the end result will leave you feeling fulfilled in a way that makes the toughness worth it.

The original version of Lock and Key might not have been as different from the final product as the original version of Heart of the Woods, but it was definitely a lot rougher around the edges. Editing is about sanding down those edges to create a leaner, meaner, and totally kickass game. It takes practice, patience, and constant collaboration, but it can be just as rewarding as writing the first draft when all is said and done. There’s not a doubt in my mind that you’ll be able to experience Lock and Key at its absolute best thanks to that collaborative process. Things are better when we work together!

p.s. here are some mockups created by Theo!

I’ll see you all again soon.

Much love (as always),

Rachel