Progress Report - July 3, 2023 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

Another week, another Progress Report. And boy do I have a good report for you all this week - along with two storyboards attached for you to download and peruse at your convenience!

Let's get straight to it, shall we?

Overbreed

I've gotten the Overbreed Episode 1 storyboard up to where Sequence C begins. All that's left now to storyboard is the post-Sequence-C section that closes out the episode.

However, since that is going to be disjointed, due to Sequence C not being storyboarded, I have decided I will post the whopping 31-minute contiguous storyboard I have so far. You can watch the whole thing here, or you can download it as an attachment.

Again, the pacing of storyboards tends to overshoot. The final pacing will be largely determined by the vocal performance, with a minor influence being the animations themselves. Assuming a 10% overshoot, meaning the final video equivalent to this storyboard has 90% runtime, that'd put the video at just a hair under 28 minutes. Sequence C, as I've said, is about 12 minutes so far, which puts us at 40 minutes. And of course, Sequence C isn't finished, nor is the closing sequence of the video.

So honestly, I feel like my earlier projections of being on the early side of 45 minutes may be a bit early. I still think it'll fall squarely in the 45-to-60 minute range, but now I feel like it'd be closer to the midway point, right around the 50-minute mark.

Of course, we won't know until the video is done and dusted, will we?

Life is Strange Minivid

I also managed to not only come up with a new Life is Strange minivid (recall the exhibitionism idea grew into a full project... oops), but I even managed to get it fully storyboarded!

I decided to just take the easy way out, and give some popular fan-service. Chapter 3 has the infamous "Chloe dares Max to kiss Chloe" scene, where Chloe pulls away from Max's adorably desperate attempt to kiss her. The premise of this minivid is simple: "what if Chloe didn't pull away?"

It's not an original idea, and I won't lie when I say I am not happy about the choice. I find fan-service like this to be pretty creatively bankrupt, low-hanging fruit that the developers basically just straight-up threw at us.

But I couldn't come up with an idea that didn't spiral out of control. I now have four different ideas that could each turn into 10+ minute videos, all of which were originally attempts to make a sub-5-minute video. So I eventually decided that my creativity was the problem, and I removed it from the equation.

And here we are, with a completed storyboard that managed to clock in at 6 minutes on the dot. With that same 90% runtime, that means I expect the video to come in around 5.5 minutes, which is a little on the long side of what I aim for with Minivids.

Much like the Overbreed storyboard, I am making this one available for watching as well. And, like the Overbreed storyboard, it is also attached as a download, for those who prefer that.

Given that it has a full narrative component like the Gaige minivid, as opposed to starting in medias res like all the other minivids, I actually think that's a really nice compromise, though.

Recall that the Gaige "minivid" was 8 minutes long, which is longer than some of my "full" videos - Radio Silence was only 6 minutes, and Liziverse was 7:45, after all. So in a lot of ways, this minivid is a bit of a return to form.

As a final note on this, while I am not happy with the unoriginal premise, that doesn't mean I am unhappy with the actual content itself. I actually think it'll be a pretty fun video. There's definitely a lot more that I could explore with the characters - and I fully intend to - but I think this is a fun little microcosm of writing the characters.

Hopefully, you all will agree with me and will find the final video fun. I don't know when it'll be ready. I'm going to try to aim for end of July / start of August, but I do have things going on around that time so... we'll see. More of that at the bottom of the post.

Epilogue

As for Epilogue, I managed to get a fair bit of work done, but it's mostly all under the hood.

I mentioned last week that I was running into space issues with the menu system for Epilogue's editor. I pondered a few solutions, none of which I was excited about, and they were all circling around the "proper" solution that I was really not looking forward to, which was completely rewriting the menu system.

Well, I completely rewrote the menu system.

Visually there isn't much to see, which was kind of the point. Behind the hood though, I managed to cut out 300 full lines of code in the new implementation, reducing the editor's codebase from 63KB to 54KB.

And more importantly, the menu system is far more systemic now. The previous version, I had to manually place every element by hand, and all of the sub-menus were all explicitly programmed, with the menu logic being implemented over and over again for each menu.

As you can imagine, that was absolutely not a scalable system. The new system is written explicitly with these sub-menus in mind, and automatically placing everything. Now, if I want to change any menu logic - such as adding the scrolling, which still needs to be done - I can just make the changes on the underlying menu system, and all of the actual menus get them for free.

Before, I would have had to make all those changes to each menu by hand.

I also managed to solve a problem that the previous menu system was having. Notice how the menus keep going to the right? That's how submenus open, they open up and off to the right. However, how much each submenu goes off to the right is a fixed value.

So what happens when a menu item is longer than that fixed value? Well, the submenu opens up on top of the other menu, and it just becomes a cluttered unreadable mess.

While trying to figure out how to solve this problem, I came up with a galaxy-brain solution: when you select an item in a menu, just hide everything in that menu above the item. That way, the submenu has nothing it can collide with.

And since this is implemented with the new menu system, that means all of the menus automatically get that new solution. I don't have to implement it for each menu by hand.

Thank God.

I did make a little bit of progress on the game itself, but most of that progress was stunted by the fact I needed to do all of this work to actually allow the new progress to be installed.

Specifically, I built the sequence where - if Chloe and Max end up getting held at gunpoint - Max tries to rewind time, only to discover she can't. As I mentioned last week, this sequence requires me adding the Notification action, which meant I had to fix the menu space issue.

However, while building that sequence, I also had the idea of rather than just making this whole exchange automatically play out (as I had originally intended), to instead make it interactive.

Something I've seen story-telling games do is be dishonest with the player, telling them they can do something when in actuality they can't. And I think the best example of it I've seen has been in dontnod's latest effort, Tell Me Why.

Like with their Life is Strange games previously, Tell Me Why has a supernatural power that you can activate throughout the game with a key press. And like Life is Strange, there are times where the game explicitly prompts you to hold down the button to use that power.

However, there are a few moments in Tell Me Why where you are prompted to use your power, and it doesn't work. And your character is just as surprised by it as you the player. It's a beautiful mechanism, where the game steps away from being a prescient narrator and instead is operating from the same perspective as the player - so far, you've been able to use your power without issue, and so you expect to be able to continue doing so. And the game suggests the same.

I absolutely love it, and I think it'd be a great mechanism to implement for exploring Max's inability to manipulate time in Epilogue like she can in Life is Strange.

And, of course, that requires special implementation, which also required this menu system overhaul.

So yeah. I haven't actually implemented either of these two new features yet. But I've laid down the groundwork to get it done. So next week, hopefully!

Family Health & Schedule Update

And then finally, just a quick update on things outside my control.

Last week, I noted how my mum is having health concerns. Last I had heard at the time was that my mum needed to have a heart bypass surgery "soon", but the details of that hadn't been hashed out.

Since then, I have heard that apparently they're not jumping straight to surgery, but are doing more tests first. Her next test is on July 20, and my dad can manage to get her to that without needing me to come over.

So, unless plans change, I should be free to continue working on things until at least July 20. Once that test comes and goes though, we're back in the dark. Again, as I learn more, you'll learn more.

Which is a bit awkward, because my friends and I have plans for the first week of August. But, with that July 20 appointment, the days to figure out a schedule, and the potential of needing to spend a few weeks with my folks while she recovers from surgery (assuming they still do that), then I might not be able to make those plans.

Or, more pressingly, the schedule might fall in such a way that I spend time with my folks and then just immediately go over to those plans with my friends, which could mean I'd be unable to work for even longer.

I just don't know. At this point, I'm just taking everything day by day.

Until you hear otherwise from me, assume that everything is operating as usual. If something comes up and I need to spend time away, I'll let you all know.

That's all for now. Was a very productive week! I am very pleased with everything that's been done so far.

Until next week, everyone!