Game Update #11 (Patreon)

July is here, which means it's time for the latest status update!

I rounded out last month by releasing into early access the 2nd part of Day Two. If you're at Sophomore level or above, I hope you've had a chance to play!

This last game release took far longer than I would have preferred but also helped clarify what is reasonable for me to accomplish without going into total burnout. I'm entering into July with renewed confidence, energy, and creativity, and I'm very excited to put that into the game.

Let's see where we're at:

Script

The writing for the long-teased Day Two evening hangout with Matt & Leo is underway! This is a sequence I've had in mind since the very beginning, although it's been reshaped by the story written since then.

This portion is also one of the first real tests of implementing the "choices matter" gameplay element. The permutations needed to account for earlier choices will only increase as the game develops. 

For example, for this sequence I need to write 9 different openings to account for where Connor spent his afternoon, and then 2 different introductions for Leo to account for whether or not you've met him before. 

A big help for planning all of this is, as always, the flow charts. This is the final chart for this section of the game:

This sequence is mostly linear, but things get complicated when I throw in choices and reactivity to those choices. This doesn't affect just writing, of course. The art and especially the coding are heavily impacted every time I choose to make a new variation.

Art

I'd say that this next update is 1/2 narrative and 1/2 art, perhaps even closer to a 1/3 for story and 2/3 for CGs. This is in sharp contrast to the most recent updates, which had far more writing work needed than art creation. This is due to player choice not just affecting the way the story plays out, but also which CGs appear for each choice made.

You can see this clearer in the third and fourth rows of the flowchart above.
The shape of each row is identical, and in fact much of the writing is the exact same. However, there needs to be entirely different art for each sequence to account for a choice that the player makes. There are also some CGs that have multiple versions based on even more choices!

As you can imagine, creating/rendering/editing a single CG takes longer than writing and will essentially set the limit for how quickly I can complete this update. But I've made the very ambitious vow to make sure choices matter as you play, so I'm happy to do it. Especially since all these variations just means more art of more hot guys that I get to make ;)

Coding

As above, the coding is also tricky when it comes to displaying choices like this. There is a lot of "if this flag was triggered, this scene appears," which is basic enough. But actually organizing that in the code itself can lead to errors.

An example of this is the part on Day Two that involves whether you promised to hang out with Matt. I figured out only recently that some scenes based on that aren't triggering properly, which is something I need to fix as part of this next release.

This Matt & Leo scene is relatively linear and will be a good time to refine some of the organization needed to keep things triggering properly. It will also serve as the first time I need to display different versions of the same image that don't all unlock at the same time. I think I've figured out how to present this in the gallery, but we'll see how it turns out!

Looking Ahead

With Matt & Leo's scene under creation, I'm thinking ahead to the following sequence, the Frat Party. With six main characters included in that sequence, the choice reactivity really starts to spiral outward. 

How I plan this out will help shape the plan for each subsequent week spent in game. The guiding idea has always been that you can choose where to go, but you can't be in two places at once and events are happening simultaneously.

But how do I keep structure to all of this? My solution (for now!) is using anchor points, scenes that are always set to happen that the various other sequences can link to. The flowchart for the Frat Party isn't really created yet, but you can see the beginnings of this here:

The top part represents the follow-up to how Connor enters the party; did he come with Marco, stay after hanging out with Owen, come on his own...? There are then some choices on what Connor can do upon entering.

The second section with no outline yet is when the anchoring comes into play. You can see headings for each of the 6 characters, and then floating out in space are two boxes. Once filled in, each of those characters will have their own flowchart of events for that portion of the night, and then all characters will link to one of those two anchors. This means that the party itself remains manageably structured, but each smaller subsection of the evening plays out differently.

I'll have more to say on this in future updates, so just know I've got all of this in mind! The ultimate goal is to provide reactivity but not in such a way that it's untenable to create. How I do this is subject to revision as I go.

I think that's all I have to say this go around :) Thank you for your continuing support. I think this will be a very exciting month for the game, and I can't wait to share more of it with you!