Development Blog - Jan 21st, 2020 (Patreon)

Hello y'all! Here's a quick status update on the January build so far. As mentioned in the last dev blog, I am now focusing on developing Owen's route, picking up where we left off on Day 10. I'm currently making a few small retcons on that day to polish up a few things.

Retcon 1: I am adding in 2 artworks for when you first meet up with Samuel and Owen on Day 10, respectively. These artworks are intended to hint at the nature and power of Owen's wish, as well as foreshadow a few upcoming story elements.

Retcon 2: I'm rewriting the scene containing the phone call with Morse. Or at least just tweaking it to remove the joke about making Oleander Lorelei strip. It was originally supposed to lead to a visual gag where Jinny tricks Oleander into wearing something ridiculous to be "hip and cool" with the kids. In hindsight, this joke would disrupt the story mood I'm aiming for, so I'm removing it. Sorry!

Retcon 3???: I might be renaming Owen's wish. "Leila" is a little lame and lacks the depth and symbolism that the other wishes' names had. TBH I kinda just picked "Leila" cuz it sounded like "Lorelei." Currently have no alternatives or plans for this yet, but it's something sitting on the backburner. 

Owen's route seems to be the one full of retcons and rewrites, which I apologize for. His story is much more complicated than Sissel's route, with so many family backstories and secrets that sometimes I have trouble keeping everything in order. Hopefully this will be the last of the retcons and we can keep moving forward cleanly from here!

Art Progress:

As mentioned in the last dev blog, I felt that Owen's new sprites in 0.6.9 were off-model and spent some time redrawing them! I've made the lineart thinner and more consistent with his other sprites so it's less distracting during transitions. Here's the improved versions!

I am also adding 4 illustrated scenes in this next update! 2 of the artworks are already complete, with the 3rd and 4th artworks 80% finished.

I am also redesigning the sprites for Oleander, (Owen's father.)  Some of you may remember his previous sprites looking like this:

I'm currently redesigning his appearance to match my current art style a little more, as well as give him more defined facial features. Here's the concept sketches I have so far:

Writing Progress:

Originally I had 20 pages finished at this point in time. But then I went back and reread everything, and about 10 of those pages are complete garbage so I'm going back to rewrite them. That's basically a writer's job summed up: rewrite shit over and over again until it's fairly decent. I'm unsure how long this upcoming update will be, but I'm hoping to cover a significant amount of plot. 

I hope you guys enjoyed the "exploration" mechanic used in Sissel's route in update 0.6.9. It's a very useful visual novel mechanic and allows y'all to make some choices and also lets me pack in a lot of story in a short time frame in-game. You guys can probably expect more of this in the future!

At the moment, I'm estimating the release date of the new update to be either the last week of January or the first week of February. I'm a little shaky on the dates since I'm struggling to keep up with deadlines on my Capstone project at school as well. Please bear with me while I keep working on Repeat's development! ;;w;;/

Let me know if y'all got any questions, and thank you for the continued support! <3