Progress Report (Patreon)

Another good week!!!

With the holidays approaching, I feared I would have my 'Rose time' shortened, but the opposite is true! I have tunnel vision at this point. I wanna get this done!

Speaking of done, thus I finished the Prologue. It's completely edited, and apart from typos or small inconsistencies that I may have missed, I won't be coming back to it. It's at the stage (or close to it) as to when I submit the game to Hosted Games - and that's such a wonderful thought to have!

I ended up cutting a small scene that I added at the beginning of the week — it was based on very helpful feedback from a tester that, while I agreed with at the time, when I wrote it and added it... I realized it didn't quite fit. The thing about me being the author is that I have the whole story in my head and so I know what will happen in the future — and what will be later revealed.

The scene was nice, but it would ruin the impact of a future, more important scene. Sometimes, it's best to leave things unsaid and only sprinkle a little bit of foreshadowing so that when you get to the meat of the matter, the meat tastes better. I know this is incredibly vague, but I hope it makes sense! 😄

In any case, I trimmed around 2k words off the Prologue — tightened conversations, adjusted descriptions, removed unnecessary actions, etc. I think the prologue is more put together now! It stands at 111,980 words. I also... got emotional reading some of the parts

I always feel so silly, getting moved by my own writing, but I couldn't help it! 😄

Apart from that, I plunged right into Chapter One! I've been building the relationship page — which is... rough because there are so many variations. 😭 Take Hadrian and Alessa; you can be their friend, on bad terms, on very bad terms. You can also be romancing them — but within the romance, you can have kissed them or not. Killed Garrett or not. Taken their hand at the end of the book or not. And all those translate to a different text on the relationship page. Which is, hopefully, fun to play through... but a nightmare to code. 😭😭

Just to give you an idea, this is what the code for Hadrian's relationship text looks like in Book One. This is but a portion of it, too. There's a lot more text above:

I have also been updating the Summary — this is when you first open the game. I'll need you to pick some past choices like the color of your hair, what weapon you use, whether you kissed Alessa or not, etc, so that the variables make sense in the game. It's actually very fun to go back and narrate what happened in Book One. I'll use this summary in the finished game for people who don't have a save from the first or simply want to pick different choices without having to play through the entire first game. It'll also act as a reminder of what happened in Book One!

So while, again, it can be a bit of work, it's very much worth it. And important.

So, the goal for next week is to keep at it! Do the first edit and code Chapter One. Get those foundations settled deep in the ground so that I can finally start to build on them. 

I also finished writing the second part of this month's Q&A this week. And man... it's so much fun. 😋I know it may sound insincere, but it really is fun to sit down and think deeply about your questions. Some of them are things I haven't even thought about before!

We're closer and closer to the end of the year. I have a resolution for before the New Year, but I won't say it just in case I jink it. But, until then, we still have a few meetings in our future. Catch you again next Friday, traveler. 🌹

Bring something warm to drink and a pelt to cover from the rain. It has been falling incessantly — which matches the mood of the game. Tarragona is too plagued by a rainfall that refuses to abate.