2021-05-27 News
I know it's been a hot minute since we dropped some news. So let me take some time now to bring you up to speed.
It's been a busy couple of weeks to be certain. And the work I've been doing wasn't really anything streamable. What have I been working on? Well I'm glad you asked.
Asset Pipeline
I've been putting in quite a bit of time these last few weeks ironing out all the kinks in the asset development process. There has been quite a bit of trial and error still, but now things seems to be worked out. I was doing a lot of testing across software platforms and it was easier to just have all the software up and bounce back and forth between them to see how changes reflected. So because I was running three different pieces of software at once and two were generally rendering at the same time, streaming was infeasible.
But now that I've got a tentative processes flowing I can stream some of this work going forward since I shouldn't need to run everything simultaneously as I now have an idea of what to expect when moving between them.
Story Structure
It was past time I started looking at the whole story and where we were going. To this point I've been writing the story a chapter at a time with a general idea of where we're going. However, now that we've picked up the pace and I'm writing multiple scenes week it was time to iron everything out flat.
It took a few days, but I finally have the rest of the game generally mapped out. To ease development process this required a little bit of restructuring of the story. Now don't worry, we didn't lose anything. But some of the previous chapters are being broken up into smaller chapters and within those smaller chapters some scenes are getting added content.
To keep the story flowing smoothly and avoid having to write too many alternate scenes and branching paths, I've begun to minimize some of the cross over story arcs and prune up a few of the over hanging branches. This will reduce redundancy and also free up the players to skip some characters entirely if they choose. As it was previously laid out, there were some scenes that needed to fire off in sequence and had to be completed to open up other characters stories.
This is no longer the case as I want players to be able to freely pick and choose which characters they want to engage with. This required a bit more compartmentalization of each character's story and free me up from trying to track and develop ways to get information to the character that may be buried in a scene they'll never play because they don't want to interact with a specific love interest.
Characters will of course show up in each other's stories and complications will ensue. It's just that the individual plots no longer require you to play a different character's chapter before you can advance in your current love interest's story.
Chapter Map
I've also completely laid out the story lines for each love interest in rough draft. Once more for ease and speed of development, I've decided to break up the story for each love interest into a traditional three act story. Each act will consist of five or six chapters while each chapter will consist of five or six scenes with a minimum of 2,500 words.
For a long time I've been saying, I know where the story is going but am still working out how it gets there. Well, that's done. I've now worked out how we get there. That does mean the chapters will be smaller. But they'll also be faster to write and faster to render.
And so each love interest in the game will get around 75 total scenes in the game from start to finish.
I also plan to add additional Doctor Amana chapters between the Acts for each character.
Oh yeah, speaking of characters...
Final Casting Complete
I have finally hit the limit on possible love interests in the game. Not that we can't always use more, it's just that I have covered a lot of ground with the characters I have and the sheer diversity is enough to keep me satisfied.
In total it looks like we're going to have 13 Possible Love Interests. None are exclusive and many of them are connected or have internal relationships of their own. So while the individual plots of these characters have been separated, there is still a lot of cross over happening to pull all the stories together.
With a lot of that worked out now I plan to continue with the streaming either tomorrow or Monday, time permitting. I've got another play test ready in the hopper and it's just waiting on music and a final code sweep and it should be ready for upload. So tomorrow may end up going into that. We'll see.
In any case, we'll talk soon.
Salute!
