Dev Update #47 (Patreon)

During development of these visual novels, there are a TON of decisions I have to make. When to reveal key story events, what to reveal about certain characters and when, what the scene setting will be, what clothing to use, the music, etc. Hundreds of little decisions per release is what this amounts to. I realized that I did not think all this through with a large project like this. Decision fatigue is real, folks. Some of the best advice I've received is to limit the decisions you have to make each day. TBaK development has not been a model for that advice.

This brings me to what has changed in development. Two big things. Let's get to the fun one first, (as the other one is probably just interesting to you productivity hackers). To Be A King has no end in sight. For several months, this freaked me the fuck out. I was ready to be done and just let Valentina nuke Caudium's enemies, (given the horrible invasion of sovereign Ukraine with hospitals being bombed and nuclear weapon sabre rattling from a despot, that seems like less of a joke than it did three months ago). However, I've decided to just delve into the character stories for all the characters I've created and see what comes out. I still know what the ultimate ending will be, but how we get there will be an adventure. Having a story already going does save me a lot of work over a new game, even if the whole alternate ancient history setting isn't most people's cup of tea. To Be A King was always going to be a learning project, and I'll just continue that learning with it instead of moving on to a new game soon. To Be A King will continue to have major events, but I've no longer set a cap on the episodes. We will get to the end when I'm ready, one way or another.

In the meantime, you'll get to learn more about all the characters in Caudium and the surrounding kingdoms, including people you have yet to meet. There will be a bit more history revealed, including about The General himself. This crazy big universe is going to need some sort of character bible by the time I'm done, I fear. But it is what it is. It certainly will leave you guessing as to who are your allies, and who might be working behind the scenes against your goals. Oh, and Chapter 7 will begin to shed some light on certain relationships that might be a bit fractured. We might even visit new lands, though I'm not ready to commit to that given the time involved in doing a lot of new environments. However, I did just purchase $300 in new assets from CGTrader for a specific area and time period, so…

The second thing I'm doing is limiting my decisions and options for each release. I've spent a bit of extra time in the evenings, and will continue to for the foreseeable future, in picking out clothing that suits each character, getting expression presets done for them, setting up pose presets, as well as something a bit more complex that I'm going to reveal in a future video. Basically a character library for each character, with characters shown more frequently having a bit more in their library. All of this is meant to make the bulk of visual novel development, apart from script writing, a lot easier on me. I'm treating the script development a bit more like an actual film or TV show with notes not just on the environment and time of day, but the character's clothing, moods, etc. The presets will help with me not spending so much time finding the right pose or expression and tweaking it (especially for characters, *cough* Kaylan *cough*, who don't fit the standard Daz character dimensions). Once I get the presets for the lewd poses, I can really rejoice. And the notes in the script will make scene setup a matter of dropping assets into the pre-done environments, and rolling along with pose, expression, and camera changes.

This won't lead to the situation in certain visual novels where you see the same 5 poses for most scenes along with maybe a dozen different expressions for all the characters. I'll have variety, and I'll occasionally need to tweak things anyway. But it is time to benefit from all the hours I've put in before in finding the right expressions and poses to suit a character. I can already tell you that the characters who have more of these presets available are much quicker to setup. I really don't enjoy 6+ months between releases, even when these are large releases. It's too much time for folks to forget the story or even that the game exists. Not doing this full time or even always getting in 20 hours per week in of development makes it tough, but I'm doing what I can while avoiding the dreaded burnout.

See you all in the next dev update. Patrons will have plenty of new polls and some previews regularly coming in over the next few weeks (the above image isn't a preview, per-se…).