DevLog Update (Patreon)

Hey all,

Ugh... it's been forever since I've done one of these and I can't begin to describe how guilty I feel about that despite continuing to work on the project. Here's my typical wall of text update of what's going on v0.20. Unlike most DevLog Updates, this one is pretty frustrating but I've never shied away from publicly admitting struggles because I respect transparency with the community. I dropped the typical categories here on where I'm at, why, and what the plan is moving forward. I dropped an extra category at the bottom that pretty much busts me out on what's been taking so long, too.

Patreon Status Update

So for some of you, the Patreon Overview tab shows a breakdown of the categories and where I am in the process of the next update. I'm going to ask that you sorta ignore that right now because it's really hard to gauge where I am. I anticipate once the big picture of what's going on is finalized, I can better gauge the actual percentage of completion. When I'm not really sure where things are, it's really hard to actually quantify that into a percentage. This will likely start to jump before too long but mostly after the actual outline section is completed. So I'm basically just warning you that things are still moving forward, I'm just not reporting them in that section for now. 

Outline

So right now, the outline for this current update is a little more complex than most updates. I think comparatively, I can best present this as similar to the strategy that I used in the last 2 updates when I split Chapter 9 into two parts. Because of the requirements to summarize the writing complexity of Chapter 9 and pulling together a lot of the seeds that were planted earlier in the story, that section of the story required a lot more planning than previous updates which were much more open and stream of consciousness. Early updates for the game were much more cathartic for me as I worked through my own feelings on stuff whereas these last few updates have been more technical.

Chapter 10 is similar but for different reasons. I don't expect Chapter 10 to be as long as Chapter 9 was but I am working on all of the Chapter 10 together as one outline. Chapter 10 should complete the game but will likely be split into two updates (v20 and v21). So essentially, the planning process here is almost as involved as Chapter 9 was in that I want to tie things up. However, the curve ball for this chapter is that I anticipate that v.20 is going to be a shorter update but have more player choices or player agency involved than what we've seen in the past few updates. If this is the case, it will likely have a  lot more images than previous updates and this is going to take time. So whereas, the majority of Chapter 9 work was writing--the majority of Chapter 10 work could be visual. I guess I could compare the choices here to what we saw during the Strip Poker section or the Truth or Dare where we had a few more options to play out certain sections.

The good news is that while v0.20 may take a little longer because of planning, but v.21 shouldn't be as bad because I'll already have the outline portion done for that one based on the current work. 

Writing

So the writing is going slow right now but it's going. For anyone that's ever talked with me on voice chat (or the poor dev team that talks to me on a daily basis), I've always really struggled with concentration issues. This has been an ongoing thing throughout my entire life and really isn't anything new in terms of game development. However, as someone who has never done any of this before, approaching the ending of a project like this is fucking terrifying and sometimes that's provided even more of a significant writer's block. That being said, this is typically a double-edged sword in that my hyperactive ass will then turn around and pump out an insane amount of stuff in one night when I hit that sweet spot. 

Without going into many personal details, like many of us, I've been severely impacted by lifestyle changes over the past year. This game continues to be an oasis away from the insanity of real life sometimes and I appreciate that. I'm proud to say that next week, some personal living changes will occur that will likely allow me to return to a slightly more normal schedule and get a little more creative privacy like I had before. This will also likely mean that I can return to a more active role on Discord, start Q &A's again on voice chat, and there has been mild interest in me actually streaming some development content on there so stay tuned for that if you're into that kinda stuff. I really wanna step things up in the coming months because my private side of things has been so fucked over the past year that it really pulled me away from the community and I feel like I've been playing catch-up. I miss interacting with the fans like I used to. 

CGs

So earlier I stated that I'm (and this could change) expect that this update will be shorter in length but heavier on images. For example, in one scene, I have some conversation choices with one of the routes in that conversation leading to around 60 pics by itself. Of course, I made this a lot harder than it had to be. I know there are a small number of people who can't stand the number of images that I use and I've seen similar criticisms of other slow burn games. One person may see me use 5 images to convey one certain transition whereas they thought I should have only used 2 and thus saved myself considerable time over the course of development and then been able to produce updates much quicker. This is probably something that none of us will ever agree on as different people may want more or less images to convey a certain action. As this game has progressed, it has become increasingly more cinematic and used increasingly more images. I'm ok with that and I find myself feeling that this helps to make the characters come alive more. Unfortunately, for those who are against this practice, that is not likely going to change so expect to have more images moving forward as well as when I go back and redo the entire game--we'll likely add hundreds if not thousands of images. 

Ok, So What's the Friggen Holdup?

So those who follow me on Twitter got a slight preview to this section. Basically, as the game has continued to develop, I try and learn new things. Part of this has resulted in some updates taking longer rather than me actually getting better at it. Reason is that I'm constantly trying to improve. I think the amount of time that people sink into the development of these characters and the characters themselves deserve my best. So I just really wanna do that justice. So rather than just do the same thing every time and slowly learn to pump out updates faster, I'm constantly trying to add new dynamics, images, techniques, etc into the mix. So my Twitter post used an image of Ashley from the last update where I spent some time researching animation more. The goal here was to try and take this next update to the next level by making these characters actually move. Here's the post if you wanna check it out. 

So you can see a couple of things going on here. 1) Yay, Ash moves and his eye roll sorta gives us a taste of how he would actually dramatically sigh. 2) Problem:  it's still very very robotic--which almost seems hollow. So herein lies the problem: the movement should add personality but we can't really get personality from something that appears mechanical. It sorta just cancels out to me. So I kept working on this and to be honest, I just got pissed and frustrated because I couldn't keep improving this thing. I really wanted to include animations in this next chapter but it's not gonna happen. Rendering animations takes days if not weeks for some (Assembly of the fire animation by Lazy Jayke took around 9 months alone). And at this point in the story, I'm not able to dedicate full time work to the project to actually pull this off. So rather than try to half-ass include it, I've sorta scrapped the idea and I'm just gonna keep doing what I'm doing. It was a rough lesson and there's some shame here involved in not being able to do this. That being said, long-term, I haven't given up because I may work on this stuff for Version 2 of the game where I have significantly less writing and planning to do with some parts. It's kinda embarrassing when you have a goal for something like this and you have to publicly say it's just not going to happen. But I'd rather finish the story and ensure we all get closure than burn out spending my time trying to add something like this. 

Conclusion

So that's where we are right now. I'm moving forward. I got around 90 images completed so far and one scene is pretty well done. I'm still planning other scenes including detailed scenes for both this update and the final update so stay tuned. If you dont follow me on Twitter, you should check that out because sometimes I'll just post quick stuff that I'm working on over there. You can also check out the Discord and come say hey, I actually respond to messages a lot faster on there than I do on here because of the messaging system. 

Also, I plan to return to doing selfies in April because it's been too long so if you have any ideas or wanna drop some stuff about those below, go for it. I have a few or I may jump back and continue one of the previous sets that was left open before (I'm honestly leaning toward the Ashley photoshoot right now). 

Love you guys and thanks for the support.

-Aaryn