Writing Process (Patreon)

Greetings! Writing continues, and though I don't have any major milestones to report, I did want to let you know I'm still at work, and also share a few things with you. This post is mostly tl;dr, and there's nothing particularly important here, but you may find it interesting if you've ever wondered about the writing process and how I've tried to improve it.

Art (and the Computer Build)

Before I get to the writing stuff, a little update on the last art project. As mentioned last time, working on Emily's hair convinced me of the need to build a new computer. 3D rendering requires a *lot* of horsepower if you want them to get finished in a reasonable amount of time. I try to go for quality over quantity of images, so final render times aren't a huge concern - you put them on while you sleep, and if they take 8-11 hours, that's fine. For me, the problem with slow renders is in creating/composing the images in the first place. I do a huge number of renders as part of creating every final image; testing out different lighting, camera angles, poses,  etc. It's the same when designing a new character, testing out a new look for them, or - in the most recent project - creating a hairstyle. Since I have to wait for the render to get done before I know what to change next, slow renders mean lots of wasted development time. And there was a lot of it in that Emily hair project.

Well, I'm happy to say that I finally managed to place an order for the last PC component I was waiting on, the CPU. When complete, this machine should render over 4 times faster than my current one, which will make working on the art much more efficient. Because of that, I've put all art projects on hold until it's complete.

Emily's hair is one such project. I thought I was done, but a patron helpfully pointed out something I could do to improve it. It doesn't involve a lot of actual work, but I will have to make a lot of renders to see how things look when tweaking this or that, so it would be better to wait until the new system is done.

The next project will be making hair for "mystery girl." The Emily project was just to get some experience with Blender's hair system, but this one will be needed for 0.10. Mystery Girl's hair looks bad, IMO, and her portraits in Daz don't look that great either, so I'll be redoing her portraits in Blender. She'll be the first character in the game with Blender portraits; you'll be seeing a lot of her, so I want her to make a good impression! Here's an early look at the idea board for Mystery Girl's hair project:

I'm looking forward to making her portraits, actually, since this will be my first experience really working with facial expressions in Blender (something I'll be doing a lot of when I switch to it entirely.)

Anyway, the CPU should be in a little later this week, then (assuming nothing is DOA) it'll take a couple of days to build and set up, then I'll be in business! I hope to have some images to share not too long after that :)

Building a computer now is really rough. First it was GPUs, then it was CPUs, and now there's some new dumb cryptocurrency that uses hard drives, so those are starting to disappear. Finding components was a huge distraction; you always had to have one ear listening for your phone, just in case there's a notification something came in stock and you have to act immediately (and believe me, you have to be quick if you want it at MSRP.) Just in case you're in the same boat, I put a write-up in the Discord sharing some things I learned. I hope you find it helpful! Sadly, as bad as GPU availability/prices are in the US, it looks like Europeans have it even worse.  :(  Hang in there, friends!

Writing

Onto the writing! I've been doing a lot of it, and while I don't have any milestones to share, I did want to take the opportunity to talk a little about the process. I mentioned last time that I've been experimenting with Scrivener and its scriptwriting capability. This project has been through a bunch of different writing software. I'd never really been sure why; I'd use one for a bit, but it would always seem inadequate in some way, so I'd look for another. One would be good at one thing, and another would be good at another; switching around would often be counterproductive, as ideas were spread out among a bunch of different places. 

I'm sure part of this search for the perfect writing tool was a subtle form of procrastination, but I really have been grasping around for the right workflow; something that made it easy to brainstorm and take notes, and would make it easy to find them later, but that would also get out of the way when I didn't need the reams and reams of stuff I'd written staring at me.

To give an illustration, for a scene I was recently writing, I have a 6,800-word sheet of notes. It's part brainstorming, part working out details, and part dealing with questions that come up in the course of writing it. While writing all this out was helpful in thinking through the scene's issues, this document is almost wholly useless as a reference. What was that idea I had a few days ago on how to deal with this problem? I forget, time to trawl through those 7,000 words to find it. Oh, here it is! But wait, didn't I come up with another, better way? I'm pretty sure I did. It's bound to be in here somewhere...

I've come to think a big part of my workflow problem is that the writing and the writing about the writing are in two (or three) different places. Writing the actual scene took place in RPG Maker, while brainstorming and notes were written elsewhere. Scrivener is a bit of software used mostly by novelists; it's designed to hold not only your writing, but also your research, notes, etc. This isn't the first time I've used it; this project actually started out on Scrivener, but I didn't use very many of its features, and it wasn't that great on Windows at the time, so I gradually drifted to other  software after switching from Mac to Windows.

Even back in the beginning, though, I didn't do the actual writing in Scrivener because I didn't know how. The biggest constraint I face on writing for this game is making sure chunks of dialogue and prose fit neatly into the game's text box. It can be pretty difficult to say everything you want to say in an engaging way without going over the limits. So, if a tool can't mimic that constraint, I can't use it to write the dialogue and such.

Writing for the game isn’t exactly like writing prose; most of it will be dialogue, which will need to capture who’s speaking, but there will also be sections of prose, as well as stage direction, describing the movement of characters and such you’ll later need to program in. This isn’t a new problem; it’s actually pretty similar to scriptwriting. 

Now, I knew Scrivener had scriptwriting templates, and I thought it would be possible to set it up to mimic the game's text boxes, but it seemed complicated, and I'd mostly moved away from Scrivener by the time this idea occurred to me. Recently I decided to give it another shot, spurred mostly by the fact that the new version of Scrivener finally came out for Windows, and it wasn't nearly as difficult as I'd feared. 

I’ve been using it for two or three weeks at this point, and it seems to solve many of the problems I described (and several I didn’t!) You can break a writing task down into as many “sheets” as you require, and each sheet carries its own set of notes, which exist independently of the dialogue or whatever you're writing. This is useful because it can be a sort of scratch pad for the problems you're dealing with on that sheet, which you won't want to see elsewhere because they aren't really relevant. And if you need to go back and figure out what you were doing with a passage, all the notes (and only those notes) are right there.

Sheets are also nice because they allow you to quickly switch between writing different parts of a scene. For instance, if I'm writing a scene between Alex and Ana, I might know that I want them to talk about aardvarks at some point. I might know how I want that part to go ("No, they aren't platypuses! Gosh, didn't they teach you anything?") but not necessarily what leads up to it or exactly where it goes from there. Sheets make it easy to write those parts separately - so if you're feeling inspired you can write the aardvark part now -  and quickly rearrange them if needed.

You can also represent the sheets in different ways. For example, you can make them into index cards, on which you can write a brief synopsis of what that sheet/passage is all about. This is useful because it gives you a quick high-level view of your scene, and makes it easy rearrange them on the fly.

There's also another feature I didn't know about, but which I really like - snapshots. Frequently in the course of writing I'll come up with a version of a conversation I sorta like, but I'd still like to try something different to see if it works better. I don't want to lose what I've already written, but I want to try something else. It's pretty awkward to do this while writing in RPG Maker. If you've inspected the project's code, you'll see all sorts of examples of this - there are alternate versions of many conversations hidden inside false conditionals (so that it's still there in the code, but the game will never display it.) Not only is this kinda clunky, it's also hard to reason about since it interrupts the flow. Well, Scrivener lets you save the state of a sheet as a "snapshot." You can then change whatever you want, see what you like and what you don't, and easily switch back and forth between different versions of the same conversation. I've just started using this, but I really like it.

Anyway, Scrivener has a bunch of other features I'm still learning about. I didn't use them before because I mostly just stored notes there, but now that I'm doing the actual writing in Scrivener, I'm finding them quite useful. The end result will (hopefully!) be faster and better writing.

Well, that's all I have for now. I don't have much specific to report, but I thought you might find it interesting to see some of the process behind the writing, and how I've been trying to improve it over time. Hopefully next time I'll have some art to share with you from the new machine. Thank you for your support!