DevLog Time! (Patreon)

Yo,

Heya, folks. So I wanted to get this out of the the weekend but I ended up working each day until I was tired and figured I'd make even less sense than I normally do if I tried to explain where things are.

So let's start off Monday with a little progress update plus some other stuff.

Revamp v0.10 Progress:

So before we get into the usual writing, I wanted to first talk about outlining. As per the usual Revamp plan of attack, I started out v0.010 (henceforth called update 10 for short) work with trying to outline stuff. Update 10 will start Chapter 5 of the Revamp so I went through ALL of Chapter 5 to jot down some notes and sorta organize things. That normally takes a couple days to sort through the original code but as anticipated, organizing the code is gradually getting easier since the original project started to get more linear around the last chapter. Thus, organizing Chapter 5 only took me about one day this time. That means I have the outline done for both Revamp update 10 AND Revamp update 11.

That being said, this is also the part of the story where the chapters started to get longer. Thus far,  I've been splitting Revamp chapter updates into 2 parts. Chapter 5 will follow the same recipe but it's possible that future updates may end up going into more parts just because of the chapter lengths.

So anyway: Chapter 5 is planned to span updates 10 and 11.

Personal Note and Some Self-Awareness:

I will say before I get into the specifics that update 9 beat me up. I was going at a pretty good clip plus then had to factor in busy holidays-- which I didn't want to cause delays.  Once the update was finished and I was uploading it, I then realized how little time had actually passed. I thought I was pushing 3 months but it had only been 2 months to complete the biggest update that we've seen in the Revamp. Looking back, I think I overdid it a bit so I'm going to recharge while working on this next update and do some self-care and take a few more breaks. Don't worry-- I can recharge and work at the same time so it shouldn't slow things down. That last update was intense and was just a ton of work (multiple routes like the poker game were really challenging for my attention span) whereas this one I'm going back to the usual pace. Gotta guard against burnout :)

Writing:

Looking through the outline, I was pretty intimidated by Chapter 5 but after a few days in, it may not be as hard as I thought-- we'll see. Chapter 5 starts out with a dark monologue that, upon rereading, pretty much echoes all the shit that Chapter 4 ended with-- so I'm gonna take a closer look at that and maybe make some changes to the opening monologue.

That being said, I have the first and second scene already copied in and they're pretty good. I'm still working out how that will translate into completion percentages but things are moving forward. The writing for this chapter is better to start with overall, so hopefully that will continue to translate into faster progress. Right now I'm pretty much doing one scene at a time: writing first then CGs unless I just really feel compelled to work on something else.

CGs:

Pics are going good so far. I have around 80 completed for update 10, some of which were pretty stubborn and slow to complete. I mentioned somewhere else that one of my concerns after viewing the Chapter 5 outline was that I saw a lot of places where I could get complacent so I want to continue to be aware of that (hence the self-care stated above).  There's also some new scenes like swim practice (yay for more Mikhail screentime) in this update that could be pretty lengthy and graphic intense-- I'm not sure yet but it will probably involve me having more meltdowns about bubbles-- I gotta get to that part in the story and so far I've been going through in a linear fashion. That being said, I'll share some images soon. I've been having some fun with lighting and some abstract stuff that I'll share for the opening monologue. This update also  has some of the early Tai Chi sequences in it that have been expanded a bit with a lot more interaction between Zack and Braden while it's happening-- more on that later.

Merch on Sale!!:

So if you haven't seen it yet, I dropped a post about the first wave of merch  (I'm calling it "gear" because I like being different) that officially dropped at the beginning of this month here.  Since then, some of you have snagged some stuff and I hope you're happy with it so far. If you have any other requests or ideas for stuff, be sure to let me know. Sometimes working on designs like that can be good practice and it's a break from the usual coding and development. Fun stuff like that keeps me going.

That being said, I'm still learning how the Gear shop works and recently got an email from Redbubble because I was curious how to put my shit on sale. Apparently, they do it at scheduled times on their own.

So...

The primary reason I'm bring this up again is to tell you to  save your money and wait :p

The official Straight!? Gear Shop will be on sale January 22- 28th with everything 25% off. That can save you a bundle so wait until then to buy anything if you're interested. No sense in paying extra.